Back when I was in university, twenty years ago, the college I attended had a student laundrette in the basement of one of the buildings. There were prominent notices stating that the laundrette was monitored by CCTV, and indeed a campus urban legend that the porters sold tapes of couples who got rather too close there on weekends.

This didn’t stop one enterprising young man who blew through his student loan in record time and found himself out of money a few weeks into his first term. He hit upon the brilliant idea of using what little funds he had left to buy a crowbar and then going down one evening to force the coin boxes on the machines.

This played out precisely how you’d expect: he was spotted almost immediately, and one of the porters locked the one access door of the laundrette while another called the police. When the criminal less-than-mastermind tried to leave, he found the door locked against him, and before he could resort to more drastic action, the police arrived to let him out and take him somewhere nice and quiet for the night.

He was, of course, expelled for his actions, and for the rest of the term, the main beneficiary of the bungled robbery was a nearby private laundrette that was more than happy to take students’ washing while the college laundrette was closed for repairs.

I’m the submitter of this story and I thought some folks might enjoy a couple more examples of how lazy this librarian was.

He didn’t like fiction or religious books and would do anything to avoid adding them unless forced. He only liked to add books on subjects he enjoyed, even if they didn’t circulate well. He especially hated romance novels. I kept telling him that, as a public library, we can’t just stock what we like and it has to be well-rounded, but he wouldn’t listen. I complained to the manager at the time and she tried to say that he doesn’t have as much control over the collection as he claims.

Patrons would complain about how we weren’t adding a lot of new fiction — only what headquarters would send, nothing extra like other libraries do — and especially how we didn’t have any new romance novels. I’d tell them to tell the librarian as I wasn’t in charge of purchasing, but he’d pretend to not get these requests, even if he was standing next to me as they complained and begged for new fiction books. His excuse was always, “Well, they didn’t tell ME!”

Finally, I went behind his back and contacted someone I knew at HQ who was an expert in romance novels and which ones to buy, especially when we got multiple requests for ones that had main characters that weren’t white. She sent five bags of romance novels to our branch.

The librarian intercepted these bags and stuck them in what we came to call “the closet of no return.” It’s where he’d stick anything he didn’t want to put out until it was in there so long he could secretly discard it — mostly donations, even if the item was brand new and in demand.

The manager at the time finally started catching onto what he was doing. When he didn’t add the romance novels, despite being asked about it repeatedly, she waited until he was on vacation. Then, she grabbed all the bags and we all worked together to get them into the computers and on the shelves before he returned. When he saw all those brand new romances where there had just been a few tattered ones before, his face became white and tight with barely-suppressed rage. But he couldn’t say anything.

After that manager retired and we got the one he became BFFs with, he got worse with his laziness. He and the manager would stay all day in the office together with the door shut, doing no real work. Neither would come out except for bathroom breaks and lunch until the manager’s husband came to pick her up.

One time when the manager wasn’t there and he was in charge, he tried to force me to throw out a woman with a service dog. I kept telling him that, since he was in charge, he needed to go up and ask her, “What is your dog trained to do?” as that’s all you’re legally allowed to ask. He refused, so I went to do it, reported that it was a service dog and that we couldn’t throw her out just because he didn’t like dogs. Later, the manager told me I should’ve thrown her out, anyway, “because he told you to.”

He would give his work to the library assistant without telling her what it was he wanted her to do, i.e. handing her a list of books checked out to repair that were massively overdue by several months and just saying, “Look for these.” Instead of looking on the repair shelf to see if they were there, she was looking on the shelves. I was the one who had to inform her what the list was for, and I ended up being yelled at by my supervisor at the time for “telling someone higher up than you what to do,” though she calmed down when I told her what had really happened.

He also didn’t want to evaluate books for possible discard. At the time, I wasn’t allowed to discard a book, even if it was sopping wet and growing mold. I had to check it out to repair, write a note as to what was wrong, and hand it to him. Books that had split down the middle, pages falling out, torn-out pages, etc. — he would just check them back in and stick them on the shelf without even looking at them because he didn’t want to be bothered. I finally had to start getting tricky with him. I’d take the falling-out pages and rubberband them to the outside of the book, put the checkout slips into the split spine in such a way that they curled and tucked behind where the pages were supposed to be attached to the spine, etc. It was the only way I could get him to take the two seconds it would take to just discard the darn things.

As the lead adult librarian, he was supposed to arrange for programs for adults. For a while, he would just bring in the same old guitar player all the time until patrons started to complain. The guy wasn’t that good of a singer and it was boring having the same program over and over again. So, he finally started doing other programs, except he wouldn’t advertise them properly such as having them put into the website calendar, making fliers on time, etc. Each program he did he just advertised less and less until he was basically not advertising them at all. Then, because he had several programs in a row fail due to his lack of work, he claimed that “No adults want programming” and used his laziness as an excuse to stop having adult programs. Even when people begged him to do something, his excuse was, “No one ever shows up for them.” He never would admit it was his fault for not advertising them. 

Again, we all would’ve loved to see him get fired because his laziness made work harder on the rest of us, from having to pick up his slack to patrons complaining to us because of choices he made. But the manager at that time before his transfer was, like I said, his BFF, and again, our union sucks. They pretty much are only about raising our dues so they can give themselves raises and not about protecting workers. Going to Human Resources wouldn’t get any results, either, so we just had to put up with it until he was transferred.

Related:
Hold Onto Those Books, And Your Job

I got automatically entered into a contest at work and ended up winning a fancy programmable thermostat that wouldn’t interface with my house’s older heating system, so I had no use for it. I tried asking around at work, but nobody wanted it.

I knew that the local home improvement store sold these exact systems, and the one I’d been given was still shrink-wrapped, exactly like they came on the shelves, so I decided to take a chance. I went into the store and told the employee at the customer service desk that I had received this as a gift with no receipt and I wasn’t sure where it had been purchased. I knew it was a long shot but was there anything they could do for me?

The employee checked a few things on her computer, consulted with her manager, and a few minutes later, I handed over the thermostat in exchange for a gift card loaded with its full retail price in store credit. 

Not sure if any policies were broken or bent, but apparently, being polite really will get you everywhere sometimes!

We have just opened for the day and the first person to walk in is a man with his young daughter. He has a thick accent and English is not his first language, so when he comes up to the desk to ask a question, it’s difficult to understand what he’s asking.

I’m eventually able to tell that he’s asking where the children’s side is. I point him in the right direction and he and his daughter are on their way. A minute or so later, I see him leave but not with the little girl. My coworker notices it, too, and before I can say something, she gets up and calls out to the guy.

He’s on his way to work but came here first to drop off his daughter for the day! We tell him that he cannot leave her here because we are not a daycare. He just keeps on saying he has to get to work.

Eventually, we are able to get him to understand that we cannot watch his daughter and he goes back to get her and leaves. Now, this would not be the first time a parent left their very young child on the kid’s side thinking we would watch them, but they at least always stayed in the building. This one just took the cake.

A long, long time ago, in a city not far away I had a terrible summer job. Right after high school, my friend and I were looking for practically anything to make money, and his older brother told us about a job he’d once had working for this guy washing windows.

This guy owns what appears to be a semi-legitimate business; he has a full shop/garage where he stores cleaning products, big fancy tubs that use sonic waves to wash blinds in, and a new work truck. He’s also a hardcore penny pincher and buys the cheapest, crappiest insurance he can on the truck.

Initially, when we got hired on, he would meet us at the shop at 7:00 am, give us the work orders, and ride out with us for on-the-job training. After a couple of weeks, he would just leave the work orders in his office and then leave us to our own devices.

We weren’t lazy. We got paid hourly around $9 an hour, but we commissioned based on the number of individual windows we cleaned in a day, and windows that required a ladder paid an extra $0.50 each, so if we knocked out three or four jobs in one day, we could take home $14 or $15 an hour.

We were both eighteen, and for whatever reason, the boss didn’t bother to ask or check our hiring paperwork to confirm this. After a month or so, he found out how old we were. It turned out that the insurance on his truck had a clause that anyone driving had to be at least twenty-five years old with a clean driving record or his monthly payment would triple. So, he made it very, very clear to us that we were not to drive the truck, and if he found out we were doing it anyway, he’d fire us and dock any bonus/commission pay from our final checks.

I need to drive home the fact that he was so g**d** delusional that he never paid attention to anything. One day, we came into the shop and saw a stack of about fifteen jobs; however, he didn’t schedule anyone else — he never actually scheduled himself because he expected the shop to just run itself — except for the two of us that day.

He liked to micromanage but simultaneously never picked up his phone if we called him. So, despite calling him numerous times to let him know we couldn’t do anything, we ended up just sitting in the shop and listening to the radio for most of the day.

About five hours later, he called one of us to ask how things were going, how many jobs we’d finished, and if we needed help to get any completed. We explained that we’d been sitting in the shop all day waiting for him to come in so we could get started. At this point, he went f****** ballistic and started just tearing us up one side and down the other about wasting his time and money and blah, blah, blah. “Why didn’t you call me!?” “Who else is there?!” “Has anyone finished any of the jobs?!”

That was our last day there, but we threatened to report him if he didn’t pay us for the time we’d sat in the shop that day, so we still got paid almost a full day’s wages. From what I heard, within a year or so, his shop folded.