It’s a rainy Tuesday in December, and as such, the golf club bar is completely deserted and has been for a while.

In between bouts of chatting and chilling out, my coworker, our manager, and I have been doing various administrative and cleaning tasks around the place. Currently, we are just finishing with cleaning the lines to the beer taps.

As the keg is reconnected and we begin to pull fresh beer through the newly clean pipes, I notice that a fixing on the tap is loose and begin to tighten it up.

Anyone who has ever tightened anything with a threaded bolt has likely heard the helpful phrase “righty-tighty, lefty-loosey,” which lets you know which way to turn the thing depending on what you want to achieve.

Unfortunately, this particular fixing is reverse-threaded. I twist it a quarter turn to the right, which is enough to completely undo the fixing, and the top of the tap falls off.

The section that falls off contains the valve that stops the beer from flowing unless the tap is opened. This becomes apparent when a geyser of lager sprays forth from the remaining section of the tap, covering me, the ceiling, the bar, and the floor in amber goodness.

I yell for my colleague to first pass me several jugs and then to run upstairs and disconnect the keg while I catch the fountain in the jugs I’ve been given.

Eventually, the keg is disconnected and the torrent subsides. So, I’m standing there, shirt transparent with beer, with more of it puddling around my feet and all over the bar, when our first golfers for several hours enter.

“So, the beer’s off, then?” one of them asks.

Happily, my sense of humour hasn’t completely deserted me, and I’m able to chuckle in response, before the manager comes back into the room to relieve me to go home and change my clothes.

When I return, the tap has been reassembled and a sticker has been applied to the main section, just above the offending fixing, reading:

“Caution: unscrews to the right!”

During my high school sophomore year, I worked at a large chain pharmacy store through a couple of the major holidays and the dreaded 13¢ coupon days.

I hated the 13¢ coupon days. The store is right next door to an assisted living building for folks over fifty-five that are still well enough to live on their own but sometimes need help. These folks lived for the 13¢ coupon days. They came in droves and snatched up as much as they could for every 13¢ coupon that was in the weekly flyer.

The 13¢ coupons were usually for smaller, knickknack-type things, something you normally wouldn’t want to spend money on, but these people gobbled up the items. We had pencils, large erasers, travel items — such as hand lotion — that kind of thing. Within the first day, we would easily be out of a lot of these items, and the old people would just rant and scream at us for not having more and then demand rain checks to be made.

The manager would have to explain to them that the coupons do not get rain checks and that all items on the coupons are first-come, first-serve. So many angry, blue-haired old ladies. It sucked.

I work in a coffee shop. A few days ago, someone put in a [Delivery App] order for a toasted white chocolate cream Frappuccino with heavy cream and no toasted white mocha, no sprinkles, no whipped cream, light ice, decaf, with a banana, and double-blended.

We couldn’t make it. My manager had to call and figure out what they were trying to order because if we did make it, it would just be blended milk with a little bit of ice.

I caught an elderly customer who fell down at my register. The line behind him was huffing and puffing with impatience while his wife, another customer, and I got him situated on the wife’s walker seat.

People were complaining that I was taking too long helping him. It was really a sad thing to witness, and it made me so angry that people would be so callous to an old man.

I work for a software company headquartered on the west coast of the US. The company acquired a smaller company and merged my business unit with the acquisition. The acquired company was located in the South, and the owner and founder was an ex-Navy good-old-boy with a tough, no-nonsense demeanor. He was put in charge of the merged business unit as a VP, but he continued to try to run it as though he were still a big fish in a small Southern pond.

At one meeting that he flew out for, he proceeded to tell us that his local second-in-command was a man he hired because he bought a used car from him and liked his style, and he used that as an illustration of how people don’t always conform to their stereotypes. Then, he proceeded to inform several people in the meeting that he was happy about how they didn’t conform to their ethnic stereotypes.

This apparently filtered up to Human Resources, and shortly thereafter, HR dragged all of the VPs leading business units into diversity awareness training. 

Our new VP learned a lesson from the training, but we were not sure he learned the right one. Soon afterward, he flew out for another meeting with us. He let us all know that he had heard that there had been some problems in our group about people being made to feel unwelcome. Well, he wasn’t going to stand for that, so he made point of telling us all that if there was any discrimination going on, we could skip going to HR and come directly to his assistant, who would bring it to him, and he would personally deal with it.

I don’t think anyone ever took him up on that offer. I know I was definitely glad when my function got moved out from under that business unit.