It’s two years after I arrived in the USA, and I am fourteen or fifteen years old — a sophomore in high school — so I’m still trying to adapt myself to the new country. One of the issues that I’m facing is understanding places and locations. There’s no such thing as navigation apps yet, only maps you have to print and carry with you everywhere, and I have no cellphone yet.

My high school has a program called Career Development Day, which is for students to go to the location designated by the school and to shadow employees there so the students can write a report of what they’ve learned about specific careers.

I didn’t go to this school for my freshman grade, so I don’t know what Career Development is. However, I am a very shy kid, being new in the USA and all, so I don’t ask too many questions and just go along with it. When I receive my roster for the year, I receive the address for my Career Development location for the year, as well. I enter the address into MapQuest and print it out, and I don’t realize I’ve transposed two of the numbers.

On the first day of my Career Development Day of the year, as expected, I go to the wrong address, which is a USPS warehouse. When I go into the facility, I am so confused and so are the rest of the staff there. I don’t see any other students and my teacher isn’t there, either. I try to explain with my sort of broken English that I’m here for Career Development Day and show the logo of my school on my uniform, and I’m extremely nervous. I think they understand what I’m trying to say because the next minute, I am put to work. It’s super easy, just sorting mail, very mundane work.

Career Development Day is supposed to last half a day, from 9:00 am to 12:30 pm, and then we go home. I start at 8:00 am and sheepishly tell the staff that my school dismissal time is 2:30 pm. They are really nice, buy me lunch and drinks, and tell me that I am a good helper. Also, they write a letter talking about what I have done the entire time I’ve been there and give it to me so I can show it to my teacher.

The next day, I am called to see the Career Development teacher. Turns out, I was marked absent for the first day since I didn’t show up, and nobody called the school to find out where I was. The funny thing is, the school didn’t contact my parents to find out where I was, either. I show the teacher the letter I received from the USPS staff and, after reading it, my teacher laughs until tears come out of her eyes. I am very embarrassed, but at least the teacher understands, forgives me, and removes my absence. She also points out that I was at the wrong address and prints me the real directions.

Several years back, a user complained to me that they had a “jumping T” on their new overpriced $5,000 notebook. As they described it, when they were typing, whenever they would type a T, it would appear at a random point in the document each time.

After not being able to get to the bottom of the issue over the phone, I went over to their office to observe them replicating the issue.

They were typing and all appeared normal, and then, when they went to type T, they violently twisted and slammed their left hand down, also clicking on the trackpad. There was nothing wrong with the T; they were simply clicking the trackpad and the T was then being inserted wherever the cursor was.

The user did not accept that explanation and was very insistent that I replace the internal keyboard. I politely refused but offered them an external keyboard that was identical to the internal one. They declined. The user also used an external mouse, so I offered to simply disable the trackpad and showed them how to toggle it on and off. They also declined that.

Every time that user saw me for the next few months, they would ask me if I was going to fix their T and I would explain to them that we had already identified the cause and would again offer them an external keyboard, which they would refuse.

Back when I worked at an electronics store, I had a customer who had an extended warranty expire literally two days from the day he brought his VCR in for repair. I was working on getting an override from corporate because his VCR warranty expired on Thanksgiving Day, and you know how busy we are the two days after.

He got upset because it was taking so long, and he threw the VCR at me, causing thirteen stitches on my scalp.

Ironically, the override happened shortly afterward, and he lost it again when I told him we couldn’t repair a unit damaged by customer abuse.

The police were called. The guy was arrested and I went to hospital.

He got six weeks in jail, was instructed to attend anger management, and was court-ordered not to step into a [Store] in our county for an infinite period of time.

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I am a twenty-two-year-old woman who has always been unnaturally tall. I am currently 6’9” (2.05m), and when I was twelve I was 6’3” (1.95m)! Life is hard enough for a teenage girl, but in my case, it was worse because I was bullied for my height, and the teachers at my school (a middle-class all-girls grammar school) were generally never very good at dealing with issues like this.

As an example, when I was thirteen, my mother, unable to find shoes that fit me, had to buy boy’s shoes. Someone in my school found out about it and started calling me “Boyshoes”. This in turn led to the rumour that I was born male (I wasn’t), and of course, all the girls in my school had to see for themselves if this was true by touching my breasts (to “see if they were real”) and putting their hands up my skirt (to “see if I had a penis”). When my mother complained to the school, they said there was very little they could do. I guess they meant there was very little they were willing to do. My mother claimed that this was sexual harassment, but the school disagreed, saying it couldn’t be sexual harassment as it was an all-girls school and the perpetrators were girls. My mother went to a solicitor, who wrote to the school, and they finally did something.

On another occasion, my mother had been having trouble finding a uniform to fit me. I was tall, but I wasn’t skinny like some tall girls; I was curvy and heavyset, and buying a uniform sized for a girl my age was out of the question. She tried uniforms for seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds — I wasn’t even fourteen at this point — and although they did fit, the skirts were far too short.

The school’s uniform policy stated that the hem of the skirt should not come too far above the knee. This was measured by kneeling on the floor and measuring from hem to floor — the distance should not have been more than about two inches. In my case, it was closer to seven inches, and when I stood up, the skirt was well above my knee because my legs were so long! At this point, my mother gave up; the skirt fit, the jacket fit, and she’d found blouses that fit, so she was just going to send me to school, shorter skirt or not.

It wasn’t long before I got a detention for a “non-regulation uniform” and was told to come in the next day with a regulation-length skirt. The following day, I got another detention for “non-regulation uniform and failing to rectify this issue in a timely manner”. I also got a letter sent home with me, warning my mother that I would potentially be suspended if I turned up to school in non-regulation uniform again.

My mother was livid! She stormed up to the school and demanded to see the principal. She waved the letter in his face and demanded to know why the school was “picking on me”. The principal was uninterested and made some excuse about how “the school’s uniform policy is for everyone’s benefit”. My mother told the principal that the school’s official uniform supplier didn’t make uniforms for girls of my height and build, and that if I wasn’t left alone, she’d be taking further legal action.

The school never bothered me about my “non-regulation” uniform again.

I work for a large multinational company that provides software worldwide. As a result, documentation, embedded help screens, and the like are required to be available in dozens of languages.

While my team is multi-lingual, we can’t cover all supported languages within the team, and we’re not really supposed to. That’s why there is a dedicated translation team to support all software teams in this endeavor.

We dutifully sent off the text to be translated, and our department was charged for the use of the translation team as agreed. We waited and waited. We were getting up to the release date and no translation files had been provided. We escalated further and further up the management chain and finally got our files.

Those of us that could read other languages quickly checked the files we could understand, and then all the files were loaded into the software and shipped out.

And then, a sales rep from a country for which none of us spoke the language reached out. He found that the translation files for his language were horribly mangled. One screenshot he sent us had translated the name of the operating system to “Microscope [local name for a pane of glass],” instead of treating it as a proper noun.

Turns out the manager of that department did not retain the proper staff to cover all the languages required, didn’t want to pay the fee to hire an external temp, was sick of his management pressuring him to deliver on things they were being paid for, and had just tossed the text into a really cheap translation program without telling anyone.  

He ceased to be the manager of that department. Fortunately, the client who contacted the sales rep thought the whole thing was hilarious and did not cancel his purchase order.