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.

The company I work at recently hired an intern through a recruitment agency. He’s been doing great, although he has had a number of IT issues. These issues prompted one of my colleagues who had been at the company for a while to tell those of us who weren’t there at the time about another time the company used a recruitment agency to hire an intern.

It started out normally enough. Human Resources provided the agency with the details of the job, and the agency told HR to expect [Intern #1], providing them with his details so our IT guys could get everything set up for him and his induction could go smoothly. The morning he was supposed to start, however, he called in to say he wouldn’t be able to start until the next day. The next morning, he called in to say he was feeling unwell and wouldn’t be able to come in that day, either. The morning after that, he had to spend the whole day at the hospital because of a medical emergency involving a family member. And so it continued, with each morning bringing a new reason that [Intern #1] couldn’t start his new job that day.

After a couple of weeks of this, HR got fed up with his excuses, told him his services were no longer required, and asked the recruitment agency for someone else. Cue [Intern #2], who was a better choice than [Intern #1] simply because she actually showed up for her induction. Unfortunately, that’s all she did. Two hours after arriving at the office, it was discovered that she didn’t have a permit to work in the UK. She was asked to leave, and HR went back to the agency to try again.

This time, the agency offered the role to [Intern #3], but they warned HR that she wouldn’t be able to make or answer phone calls. This wasn’t a vital part of the role, so HR decided that this was acceptable, assuming that the reason she couldn’t use the phone was that she was deaf. Instead, it turned out that she couldn’t speak a single word of English, and while phone use wasn’t vital, communication with other team members was. A colleague who spoke her language had to explain to her why she couldn’t do the job.

Fortunately, the troubles ended there, as [Intern #4] turned out to be perfect for the role, although he did spend his first couple of weeks in the job using the login details and email account that had been set up for [Intern #2].

I used to work for a now-defunct bookstore, and this is a story describing Inventory Nights from h***. The bookstore always hired an outside company to do the Inventory. Managers would stay all night and even bought the equivalent of a pizza party to feed the poor Inventory Workers who would stay all night to do their work.

Inventory took place starting at 5:00 pm and ran until 6:00 am — thirteen-hour shifts! Even with an hour of unpaid lunch break, that’s pretty miserable. Insult to injury? From 5:00 pm until 11:00 pm, the STORE WAS OPEN TO CUSTOMERS! The store should have closed early, and for whatever reason, it wasn’t.

So, you’ve got:

1) customers meandering around in the store, pulling books off shelves that were in the middle of being scanned;

2) customers wandering off with stacks of books that may or may not have been scanned into the system yet;

3) cranky customers snarling at the poor Inventory Workers who are “in the way”;

4) customers obliviously tripping over or kicking the Inventory Workers sitting on the hard floor and scanning books on the very bottom shelf;

5) Retail Workers doing the do-si-do with Inventory Workers, who have to creep behind the already cramped registers to scan books that are on hold;

6) announcements every fifteen minutes, for six hours, asking customers to “Please forgive the inconvenience: our store is going through Inventory right now,” which got old really fast to have to listen to;

7) absolutely no sane way to clean up the store before closing.

The entire evening was a kind of slow-motion scene of chaos. Can we put the cartloads of go-backs away? Nope! Not until the Inventory Workers have scanned them. Oops! Somebody found a pile of books hidden behind a chair. Better find a place for those to be scanned. Hey, has anybody scanned this cart of go-backs from the registers yet? No? I’d better leave this pile somewhere else for it to be scanned because the go-back cart is overloaded. Some Inventory Worker is currently scanning the shelf where these scanned go-backs need to go, so now we have to wait for the Inventory Worker to pass the spot where this is usually shelved so we don’t mess up the scanning.

I know it’s not the Inventory Workers’ fault that they got dragged in to do work at the same time as the Retail Workers. In fact, they had the grace to be apologetic to the Retail Workers as they tried to huddle in the smallest space they can physically curl into to avoid bumping butts with us.

Our Inventory numbers weren’t great, but what could we do? You can’t constantly shuffle the inventory while it is being inventoried.

I worked for that company for five years, and every inventory shift was basically the same song and dance.