My wife works as a corporate travel agent in the United States, and she deals with people from various industries and companies. Most of the customer companies have travel managers who help make sure their company policies are followed, help their employees with tasks, etc… 

We both work from home, and my last trip to the break room, aka the kitchen, she was complaining to me about one travel manager being a right pain and lazy.

I come up to get more coffee and she says she just got an email from the lazy travel manager. She reads it out to me.

“I am in need of help getting a receipt for one of my employees for a trip they took last week. I tried calling the [Large Chain] and ran into a language barrier. Would you please contact the London, England [Large Chain] and ask for them? When I called I could not understand anything they said.”

In college, I was friends with someone who did articles for our campus newsletter, and at one point, they asked me if I wanted to try and do a piece. I made one entitled “The Gay Agenda,” which was basically listing of the different lists and “agendas” that I dealt with in my day-to-day life, from a shopping list, to a club meeting schedule, to my New Year’s resolutions. It was intended as a humorous piece to highlight the similarities between straight and gay students.

It was rather sad just how many people got completely furious over it; many of them obviously never read past the title. Some people accused me of trying to “trick” them into thinking they were gay, and others called me homophobic for daring to imply that homosexual people — such as myself — had an agenda. The backlash ended up getting the post removed from the newsletter’s website, but I’d still see people ranting about it or referencing it from time to time before I graduated.

So, it seems like it did unite people, just not the way I’d hoped.

While I was working at a grocery store, I was asked if we had any pasta in the shape of Ms, the letter associated with the wildly popular local college football team.

I responded, “I’m sorry, all we have are Ws.”

She walked away sadly.

I work in the nursery section of our local hardware store where we sell plants and everything you need to take care of them. I have worked there for four years and was a regular customer before that. Our store has a ninety-day return policy where you can have cash back with a receipt, store credit without. However, many people in our small town have personal charge accounts and returns can be credited to those accounts.

At the end of the day, just before closing, the employee who works at customer service runs all the non-defective returns and go-backs to their respective departments. She brings me one such, a five-pound cardboard box of fertilizer, and I take it from her and go to place it on the shelf where it belongs.

That’s when I notice something odd and begin to look it over a little closer. The packaging is in immaculate condition, especially considering it’s basically a cardboard cereal box, but the color is different from what’s on our shelf. While I recognize the color and didn’t question it before, I suddenly realize the box color changed about five years ago, before I started working there. The price sticker — which we don’t put on them anymore because we now have shelf tags — reads our SKU but shows a price of $4.99. Current retail is $8.99. So, I check the manufacture date and can barely make out the impression of numbers from fifteen years ago. Fertilizer is recommended to be used within two years of its manufacture date, and we sell so much of this product that we hardly ever have a box sit in stock for more than four months, even in the dead of winter, before being rotated through and sold.

I take it back up to customer service to share this gem with them and show them all the little details. I say, “So, basically, we just paid a guy $4 to store a box of fertilizer for fifteen years.”

The employee who processed the return is mortified. I laugh it off. After all, management would have done the return even if they had noticed the discrepancies.

I just can’t get over how good of a condition the box was in after all that time!

I work in the legal department of a huge furniture store. Among other things, we sell separate pieces of leather furniture: footstools, chairs, and sofas. They are displayed in a group, but each piece has a tag on it specifying that these items are individual, not a group, and are sold individually. Another tag specifies that due to the nature of cowhide, there will be occasional, very slight color variations. There is also a large sign on the footstool with the same information. 

One of the matters that came across my desk recently was a lawsuit in which a customer claimed that she was misled into believing her leather furniture was a set. She was suing for half a million dollars in damages, claiming “intentional infliction of mental distress” because her black footstool was an ever so slightly different shade from the chair that was supposed to match it.