I work at a small-town grocery store stocking shelves, bagging customers’ groceries, and carrying them out to the customer’s car.

One of our frequent customers, an elderly man, has come in to shop. I bag his groceries and bring them out to his car, which he has backed into his parking space.

He thanks me and drives away. I go back into the store, bag another customer’s groceries, and carry them out to her car. She happens to have parked right next to the elderly man’s space, which is now empty.

As I wait for her to create space in her back seat, I notice out of the corner of my eye that the elderly man is backing into that now empty space again… right where I am standing. There is no time for me to move. I end up jumping into the air right when the back of his car smacks me right on my hip. Fortunately, I don’t fall and the groceries in my arms are safe. My whole body just got shoved over a bit while I was in the air.

The elderly customer gets out of his car and says, “I forgot something!” and walks back into the store.

Apparently, he didn’t realize he had just hit me with his car.

I was sending out a weekly email to my entire section at work to let them know about the result of various sales and such over the past week. While I did proofread the email, I managed to miss a couple of small errors — think using “than” instead of “then” accidentally.

About five minutes after the email went out, one of our newest employees sent a “Reply All” with around half a dozen screenshots of my initial email attached, each one marked up like he was a school teacher. However, while he did note the two actual errors I’d made, the rest were not actual errors but instead things like correcting “a hand” as “an hand”.

A couple of others sent out “Reply Alls” of their own in response, basically calling out that the “corrections” he’d made weren’t actually corrections. He responded with an all-caps reply, “YES, THEY ARE!”, and finally, our section head stepped in and told everyone to not treat group emails like a chat room.

That same new employee ended up doing the same thing on a few more section-wide emails over the next week. He never did it on direct emails between him and one or two other people, only on the “big” emails where he could “Reply All” to show off his “corrections” to a lot of people at once. And, as with my initial email, most or even all of the corrections he would send would be not actual issues or even flat-out wrong.

The section head took the new employee aside to talk to him about that being inappropriate, but his response was basically to throw a tantrum, audible even outside the section head’s office, about how the emails were “unreadable” and needed to be fixed.

A few of us started sending out two emails when we needed to send something to the entire section — one to the section as a whole, and one to this guy specifically — so if he did do his “correction” bit, it’d only spam us rather than everyone. This worked for a few days, but then he “got wise” to it and started adding the entire section to his replies.

The section head talked to him again, and in response, he forwarded his next set of “corrections” to the entire company. That, apparently, was the final straw, as by the next Monday, he was no longer employed with the company.

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At Christmas 2020, one of our sons gifted my wife and me a monthly subscription from a fancy coffee roaster business near his home in Toronto. According to the card he gave us at Christmas, it was a six-month subscription for two bags of their specialty roasted coffees per month, with the first delivery in time for Christmas.

Like many businesses in 2020, this coffee roaster had to pivot to incorporate and/or ramp up more online sales for the Christmas season. Based on what happened to us, it seems they had some challenges dealing with the volume of orders for these subscriptions.

The first hint that this was not going as planned was a delay in the first delivery. Christmas came and went, but there was no initial delivery until New Year’s Eve day when a box showed up on our doorstep with not two but twelve bags of coffee: two different flavours, with six bags of each.

We contacted our son to let him know the gift had finally arrived, but not exactly as he had described it. He apologized, and we all wrote it off as an error when placing the order on their webpage. No worries, we said, we got what was intended, just all at once.

Fast forward to the third week of January. Another box from the coffee roaster company showed up, but there were only two bags of coffee this time. There was one of each flavour — the same two flavours as had arrived in the initial box of twelve. We mentioned the shipment to our son and he said he’d look into his emails about the order and sort out what had happened.

February rolled around, and… another box arrived. We got the same two bags of the same flavour coffee. We found that two bags a month matched our caffeine consumption, so we had only made a modest dent in the first box of twelve. As you might imagine, our pantry was slowly being overrun with coffee. Again, our son was surprised that they were still shipping more bags, but at that point, he basically told us not to worry about it and that if they billed him for the extra bags, he would take care of it.

So… lather, rinse, and repeat through March, April, May, and June. Each month, a nice little box of the same two flavours of coffee arrived. By now, the “bottomless coffee subscription” was a running joke within the family as we waited to see how long it would take for them to figure out the mistake, stop sending the coffee, and contact my son. But they never did.

We certainly enjoyed the coffee, but we confessed that we were getting tired of the same flavours and resorted to giving some bags to other family members as well as our son when he came by for a visit. At that point, we figured the original monthly subscription was done and that was it. But no.

On a Sunday in the middle of July, I was out packing the car with my wife in preparation for our departure on a two-week vacation. A small car rolled up to the curb in front of our house and a young woman on delivery stepped out and walked up the driveway with — you guessed it — another box of the coffees we had been enjoying for the last six-plus months. I thanked her, and we wished each other a nice day and tossed the box in the house before locking up and leaving.

To our muted relief, that was the final delivery. A total of twenty-six bags of coffee for the price of twelve was a good deal for us, and our son never heard a peep from the coffee roasters.

I hope that for Christmas 2021, they improved their internal controls and had better-trained staff picking orders!

I go to a university that focuses on art, including fields like visual effects/special effects, game design, concept design, and animation. Two of my roommates are also game design majors and thus attended a forty-eight-hour game jam at my school, which basically means they and a group of however-many-people they wanted had to make a game following a theme within forty-eight hours. 

Usually, for the game jam they participated in, all concepts, characters, and everything from modeling to coding to even a video trailer that is used as “grading” criteria is done within said forty-eight hours after the announcement of the theme. 

However, this year, due to makeup classes that fell during the game jam, the school delayed it by a week but still announced the theme. This meant that all teams had up to a week to at least think of a concept that fit the theme; as long as no assets were previously made, it technically wasn’t against the rules.

My two roommates were in a team of fourteen people and had already grouped up together and taken over a classroom when a different group asked to use some computers in the classroom at the back. They reluctantly agreed, mostly since there were still free computers.

Along came this girl who started asking nosy questions. When they questioned her, she claimed that she was a game jam official and was thus looking around at the games. This was later proven a lie, as she was mostly looking at the concepts and trying to pick and choose a group to participate in the game jam with. This was very short notice, as my roommate, the overall team leader, had compiled the fourteen-person group at least a few weeks in advance.

The nosy girl made her first mistake by trying to kiss up to a guy that she thought was the lead, ignoring my roommate who kept answering her questions as the actual team lead. 

By the time she figured it out, my roommate had already rejected her, as they already had a solid team and my roommate also could not figure out what in tarnation her major was; her answers fluctuated from animator to a user-interface designer. Later, we found out her major was special effects — bearing a passing resemblance to animation but nothing like user interface.

Eventually, this girl (who managed to bother almost everyone else participating in the game jam) joined the group that was in the same room as my roommates, which turned out to be a fairly obnoxious group, as they would do loud cartoon voices without caring about the other people who were working. 

Even worse, at one point, when a professor walked through, they blatantly lied that my roommates’ group had had “weeks of preparation”. (One week. They had one week, with no models done beforehand or even more than the concept discussed and finalized.) The professor attempted to be a diplomat by telling them that while my roommate’s group had better gameplay, but the obnoxious team had better art.

Eventually, the final day rolled around, and the girl walked up to my roommate’s group and commented on how similar their game was to another group’s and how she sometimes forgot it was a different game. 

Not only were the games not similar except for both having the same word in their title and having animals as protagonists, but this was incredibly rude to do, considering she essentially insinuated that their hours of work didn’t matter due to the games “being similar”.

Nobody reacted. This tactful, diplomatic, and absolutely not at all petty girl proceeded to say it louder, and then had the audacity to go, “Oh, oops, I shouldn’t have said that.” Sure.

Eventually, the game jam finished, and all of the groups were tallied up. Not only did the obnoxious group’s game not fit the theme at all, but my roommate’s team won Best Art. (What was that about their art being better, professor?)

What got me about this whole situation was how extremely quickly this girl burned several possible future professional bridges in less than a single weekend. My roommates are pretty well-connected, and a lot of their friends who also participated in the jam complained about this girl. Even I preemptively blocked this girl without participating in the jam or having met her.

Back in 1997, we were developing a web application for the government. We were on the verge of missing the deadline, so we were in constant “war mode” and working nights and weekends.

[New Hire] joined the team. Right on his first day, he posted on the wall a development methodology we should all follow. It was not in his job description to rearrange our work.

The same day, our manager called an ad-hoc meeting for everyone on the team to attend. Everybody was there except for [New Hire].

When we got back from the meeting, we all had an email from [New Hire] saying that he did not participate in ad-hoc meetings and that meetings had to be scheduled twenty-four hours in advance.

Not ten minutes later, he was terminated and security had to escort him out of the building while he was screaming that we were losing a valuable resource.

We met the deadline in the end.