I worked for a property management company about ten years back or so. They were behind the times — very behind the times. They did have a computer system that tracked payments being made — though they had to be manually entered — and on certain days, the system would print out a physical list of late charges.

They managed hundreds of Homeowners Associations. This late charge printout was huge. The way they handled it was they split it into three parts and dedicated three people to work on it for a few days.

It was insane. I did the tedious data entry on it for a few months and decided that it had to be fixed.

Since I couldn’t replace the software, of course, I decided to use the tools I had. Instead of physically printing the report, I exported it to an Excel document and then made a simple script that cut it down to a usable file. I then added in several calculations to sort out the amount of the fees based on the file. Then, I made a macro that copied the data from the Excel file into the billing software. I did this on my own free time.

I took a three-person multi-day job and cut it down to about an hour using tools we all had access to. It would have been instant, but the macro literally had to simulate keypresses for copy-paste into the ancient system — no import options.

For the first month, I did it both ways, and every difference between the human results and the system results were mistakes the humans made. It found dozens of mistakes that would have gone out to the HOA members, and likely that was just the norm. The machine did it better. I even added on a bit that sorted out addresses so the letters could be printed with the late fee information.

I was fired not long after. My manager claimed it was because I was not a team player or some such crap — that I wasn’t fitting in. My friends there said the gossip was pretty much that she felt I was a threat to her job. And the fact that I was the only male in the department and the only one who couldn’t speak Spanish fluently didn’t help. (It was in Miami.)

It left me pretty bitter for a while. On the bright side, teaching myself how to do it made me pretty good with Excel, which has helped me in most of my jobs since then. I just tend to keep my shortcuts to myself now.

We had a boss who was really obnoxious. She didn’t know anything about the full scope of tasks our department had to do. That isn’t unusual and wasn’t even necessary, but she refused to listen to those who did know what and how we did it, and she further refused to enlist any one of us if changes were discussed that would impact our work. You can imagine that this sometimes had disastrous results. She also liked to make promises we couldn’t keep, either because of protocol or because they weren’t possible at all, and she always sided with complaints and asked us to comply with everyone without ever looking at the case at hand.

Our department did the user assessment and software management for another company. We also built pools and project drives for different departments of that company on their servers so people in development could use them to work together and store their data.

Among [Boss]’s glorious achievements was taking away our admin permissions, making our jobs impossible, because she got it in her head that we could just ask if we needed them for our jobs — which was for nearly every single request. She then had to fold when she realised that now her two employees from user assessment had to sit next to us and enter their admin passwords about fifty to sixty times a day; of course, our accounts were no longer admin accounts, and thus, the system asked for an admin login with every request to install a software or access the windows directory to implement a new pool drive or for any step of building the drive.

We then got admin accounts for the Windows directory only, so we couldn’t use any scripts in the Windows active directory and just build a list for user access to restricted folders or drives and let it run through. No, we had to enter every single user and build every single folder or pool drive by hand.

Then, [Boss] complained that the company we bought out was able to do this job with just five people, and we couldn’t fulfill all orders with eight.

This is just to show you how ridiculous she was.

I was the fastest one to create those new drives within the structure, so all of those requests went to me. I didn’t have an IT background, but I came from a multi-project call center and was used to a fast-paced environment and quick thinking. My colleagues were fine with that arrangement as it left them to fight with the rest of the requests.

[Boss] hated me. We were the only two women in the whole department, and whatever I said she would immediately deny. I clearly felt she saw me as her direct competition, despite my having no ambition to get into management.

I could spend the rest of my day writing down all the absolutely outrageous instances where she blundered our work and behaved as stupidly as possible just to spite me. The last straw on a long line of ridiculous demands that finally made me look for another job and quit was this one.

I got a request from [Employee] for a new shared drive.

To get a shared drive, the request form had to be filled completely since we needed everything to create that drive. We literally couldn’t do it if even one field were missing.

We needed:

• The name for the pool drive.
• At least one owner who would then be able to access and grant access to it. It should be two ideally, but we needed at least one.
• A list of users or user groups who should get access.
• The department that was responsible for the drive and all other departments who needed access, so we’d know which server it had to be on, since not all servers were accessible to all departments.
• The cost location who would pay for the storage space reserved for the pool drive.
• The size they needed for their project.

The request had none of that, and [Employee] was not authorised to request a drive anyway.

I sent them the form and the instructions on how to request the drive. All they had to do was fill out the form, send it to their department head, and have him email it to me. Alternatively, the department head could fill out the form and send it back to [Employee], and if they then forwarded this email back to me — with the department head clearly stating that they approved the request — that would be fine, too.

Easy enough, no?

Obviously, no.

This simple request started a war with [Employee], who tried to make me build them that drive on our servers without giving me any of the needed information.

After some back and forth, they complained to [Boss], who then gave me the written order to build that virtual drive.

Okay, then.

The drive came out like this:

• Name: Drive_unknown_1.
• Owner: [Boss].

She didn’t have any access to the system whatsoever and couldn’t do s***.

• Cost Location: [our department].
• Server: [our server], which no one else could access due to data protection laws.
• Space: 1 bit.
• User: None.

Then, I sent them the link. Just before sending it, I had the rather genius idea to CC [Employee]’s boss.

And then, I sat back and watched the whole situation explode.

[Employee]’s boss first called me directly and asked what the h*** this was supposed to be. It turned out, he had sent the whole, correct form to his new secretary, [Employee]. She was supposed to look it through so she would know how to prepare such forms for him in the future and then send it to us to have us build the drive. She obviously didn’t do that. None of my requests for the correct data and forms was ever read. She just replied, “Build us a drive,” assuming that the boss had already sent everything despite the very clear instructions in his email.

[Employee]’s boss then forwarded those instructions to me. I created what he wanted in a few minutes and sent him the correct links.

But that’s not the end. This guy was a big boss at our client’s engineering department. He had me send him all the email contact and all the emails from [Boss], including the order to just build a drive without any of the necessary information to actually do so. He had the full credentials and was privileged to this, so I sent it all over.

This guy then got into his company car, drove out to our office, and demanded a meeting with [Boss]’s boss and the head of IT to discuss this. As I later learned, [Boss] tried to blame me, but that didn’t fly; I had covered my bases too well. 

[Boss] never tried a stunt like this again, but things didn’t get any better. I immediately started to look for something else and quit about a month later.

Last I heard, the company still does this, but now they have a backlog of one month. [Boss] has still not been fired. And I have no idea why. None of my former colleagues is still working under her. Only one is still at the company. New hires don’t stay longer than a few weeks tops under her. 

But I have changed jobs twice more and am finally in a good place — good pay, reasonable workload, and fair bosses.

A situation has come up at work where audio plugs are being broken off in the front audio port for desktops (for valid reasons not relevant to the story), and we don’t have needle-nose pliers that are thin enough to extract the wayward plugs from the ports.

I decide to order some from [Big Online Store].

I find a good option: a set of three of them in different configurations (normal, thin, and forceps-like) for a good deal. I place the order, and I’m told it will arrive the next day. Easy-peasy. No problem.

I receive the item the next day and verify the label on the box: a set of three needle-nose pliers.

I open the box… and find a ten-inch plumber’s wrench.

I check the order again, and I check the label on the box. Yep, they both say, “Set of 3 Needle-Nose Pliers.” With a big sigh, I reach out to [Store]. They say they’re sorry and they’ll send a replacement, next-day, no charge. The world is back on track.

The replacement package arrives the next day. I verify the package. “Set of 3 Needle-Nose Pliers.”

I open it to find…

…a Ten-Inch… Plumber’s… Wrench.

They didn’t just send me the wrong item. THEY SENT ME THE SAME WRONG ITEM, packaged the same way. Seeing it in that package, it looks like a ten-inch middle finger aimed at me.

I’m not proud of what happens next. I go full Entitled Jerk.

I contact the online agent with the title “STOP SENDING ME PLUMBER’S WRENCHES!” I choose the online agent because I know yelling might come into it, but every response is practically dripping with disdain and displeasure.

The poor agent offers a $5 credit, and I figure that is the most I am going to get. I apologize for my attitude, but I’m pretty sure I am her worst “call” for the night, and I’m not proud of that.

Two days later, I pick a different supplier and get the pliers I need. But I will never forget how I felt when I opened the second package and saw that wrench.

It doesn’t take much to turn a loyal customer into a jerk.

I worked in Africa as an operations manager for a large global security company from 2009 to 2014.

The country I was working in had been through a long civil war and was very underdeveloped — think no paved roads, and people living a very traditional African lifestyle. At the time, I’d been working there on a rotation of ten weeks in the country and two weeks at home for about four years.

I’d flown to and from work so often that I had the journey down to the bare-minimum travel time, and it worked out as the cheapest option for the company because travel days were paid from when I left home. The shorter my journey was, the cheaper it worked out for the company.

Someone in the head office looked at cutting down on travel costs, probably to make themselves look good and get promoted. As a result, I got an email after a week at home saying they had changed my normal flight, which was at 5:00 pm on Sunday from my nearest UK airport, via Amsterdam, then on to Nairobi, Kenya, connecting with a 9:00 am flight to [Country] on Monday morning. The change was from a 5:00 pm departure to a 5:00 am departure the same day, using the same route and saving about £80.

To clarify, the 9:00 am flight from Nairobi was the first flight to [Country] because the destination airport was the only surfaced runway in the country. It had no runway lights or radar, so all flights had to be in daylight.

I agreed to the flight time change, but they had to move it to Monday so I wouldn’t lose a day at home. They agreed because they still saved £80 on the ticket — no skin off their nose.

Once I got the flight confirmation, I contacted the travel desk asking for hotel and taxi bookings. When they asked why I needed these, I explained that a 5:00 am departure required a check-in at 3:00 am, so I needed a hotel at the airport on Sunday night because no trains were running to get me the three hours to the airport from home at that time of the morning.

The flights they booked would get me into Nairobi at 7:00 pm — after dark — so I’d need a hotel there and a taxi each way to and from the hotel to get me onto the 9:00 am flight on Tuesday — the same flight I would have been on if I’d left at 5:00 pm but a day later.

A couple of days went by, and I got a phone call from the company travel desk telling me the travel plan was confirmed. I was on the 5:00 am flight with a hotel reservation at my UK airport the night before and a hotel in Nairobi after landing, and the taxi would collect me in Nairobi and drop me at the airport for my final connection.

I asked about the cost savings and they said it was £80. I then asked about the hotels and taxis. They replied, “Oh, they don’t come out of our budget; that’s the operations budget, so you’re fine.”

I was happy. I was arriving back at work a day later, still paid the same amount, with a night out in Nairobi to sweeten the deal.

My boss, on the other hand, went nuts! Nobody had told him about the changes. My deputy flew out on the plane I flew in on, meaning I didn’t get a handover of the work that was going on. On top of that, the cost of hotels, taxis, and an extra day’s pay had all come out of my boss’s operational budget.

I think the total amount added was almost £1,000, but hey, they saved £80 on the flight cost!

A lot of colleges have alarm boxes/phone boxes in less crowded areas of campus, particularly areas with cell signal gaps. At one point at my college, one of those alarm boxes was busted.

Unsurprisingly, there was a sign on it that read: “Phone broken.”

Right below that, someone had scrawled on said sign: “Keep running.”