It was 2014, and I had just lost my job. I was in the process of looking for a new one, but didn’t have much money saved to pay bills in the meantime, so I asked my father if I could borrow $1200 just to get me through to the next month, and I would pay him back as soon as I started working again.

He sent the money, I paid my bills, and got a new job shortly after. As soon as I had the money to pay him back, I used my bank’s online bill pay option to send him a check. I sent him a text and told him it was on the way, and just assumed that was the end of it.

Well, a week went by, and he hadn’t gotten it. I thought maybe it took a few days for the bank to actually process the bill pay option because I hadn’t used it before. I asked him to just wait a few more days and see if it came.

Several days later, it still hadn’t gotten there, so I called the bank and asked them, and they told me I could stop payment on it for free, so I did. Then I just wrote a personal check and mailed it. I just assumed something went wrong with the online bill pay.

About two months later, I got a check in the mail from a medical facility in the state my father lives in for $1200.

I called and asked them about it, and they told me, on a recorded line, that it was an overpayment on an account my father had with them, and it was a legitimate check and was mine to keep.

At that point, I didn’t associate it with the bill pay thing I had tried to do a couple of months before. I did call my father to ask about his accounts with this place because there was no reason they should have my address to send me an overpayment if he had actually made one. He had no idea what was going on because he hadn’t used that facility in a few years.

I looked up the place on Google, and finally it dawned on me what had happened.

My father’s address was on ‘Saddlewood Drive’ at that point in time. But when I typed it into Bill Pay, my phone autocorrected it to ‘Sandalwood,’ and it just happened to be the same numerical address, and because my father’s name was listed as the payee, they erroneously attempted to apply it to his account.

So that’s where my check had gone.

I tried to call them again and explain what happened, and the lady on the phone was extremely rude to me. She told me, “I’ve already talked to you about this. I don’t know why you’re calling again. We sent you what we owed you. This account is settled, and we will not be talking about it again.” Again, this is a recorded line. I asked if she was sure they owed me this money. She practically shouted, “YES!” And I just smiled and hung up the phone.

I deposited the check into my bank that day. They didn’t try to call me back until about six weeks later. I had been wondering how long it would take. The person who called me was a different lady, and she called to tell me that a mistake had been made and that I owed them $1200.

I told her she was misinformed and that she should go back and listen to the recorded calls that I had made to their office, and gave her the dates. I had been reassured multiple times that the money was mine and that I was in the clear to cash that check. And then I hung up.

I haven’t heard a single thing about it since then.

Years back, I used to work on the melt deck at a foundry in the area. It was a union job, so everyone had their own roles to do. I was in melting, and one of our jobs was to melt the iron for another department to pour into the molds.

Every so often, we would trip a breaker on one of the furnaces and had to call an electrician to come up to the melt deck to fix it. The panels for the furnaces opened up, and the electricians would just flip a switch, and it’d be fixed. The problem was that sometimes it would take over twenty minutes for an electrician to show up and fix it.

Waiting a few minutes wasn’t much of a big deal, but when it would be over thirty minutes, it would start cutting into our pay since we got paid based on tonnage melted, and when we couldn’t melt iron… no money.

Eventually, our ATF (Assistant to the Foreman) got sick of it and would open the panel and flip the switch himself so we could keep going.

The electricians found out what we were doing and had a meltdown (no pun intended), and told us we weren’t allowed to do that and not to touch anything electrical if we weren’t an electrician.

Some words were had, and we agreed, only for the electricians to go right back to taking forever to respond to our calls. Everyone on the melt deck decided that ANYTHING electrical was out of our pay grade.

We then proceeded to call electricians up to the melt deck to plug in and unplug our phone chargers, stating, “It’s electrical, I can’t touch it”. Of course, we wouldn’t tell them that over the radio, just that we need an electrician on the melt deck for an electrical issue.

They didn’t find it as funny as we did, and eventually we all agreed to stop calling them for our phones, and their response time significantly improved.

A few years ago, there was a terrible fire in a high-rise in London that killed close to eighty people. I was brought in as a management consultant to help coordinate various public sector agencies to deal with the families of the deceased and people who had been made homeless, lost their possessions, etc., in an expedited manner.

When the time came to pay the bill, the public body that hired me was late. It happens, but as a small business owner, I can’t afford for clients to be late. I tried to engage with the public body to get payment, but was stonewalled. So, I applied the legally required late penalty charges.

A senior manager at this body went BALLISTIC. Refused to pay, called me every name under the sun. I stood my ground until the manager said, “I’ve told everyone [e.g., other potential clients] how horrible you are to use a national tragedy to try and extort money from us”.

I didn’t want my reputation to suffer, but I wasn’t going to back down. I told her it was (a) the law, (b) in the contract she signed, and (c) I had tried to get payment several times to avoid these charges. So I immediately made a freedom of information request for a copy of all those communications. This manager then backs down and claims she never said anything to anyone and paid the bill (with penalties).

But did say she would not be using our services again.

I told her that I wouldn’t want to work with someone who, in fact, DID use a national tragedy to try and get out of paying her bills, but if she changed her behaviour and improved her financial systems, I might consider telling peers in my industry not to run a mile if she calls them.

I heard this story third-hand, so I don’t have all the details, but you’ll get the gist.

We were at the peak of Winter Storm Fern. For those outside the USA, this storm was bad enough to send half the country into lockdown for a day, and many people were without power for several days afterwards, so make of that what you will. I was spending the storm warm and safe in my parents’ house when my father, a manager at a grocery store, got a call from a fellow manager.

Whenever that store is closed for the day, somebody always drives down to make sure everything is in order. Because of the snow, only one person – we’ll call her Kiera – was able to drive down, and only because her husband had a pick-up truck and snow tires, and they live right down the road.

When Kiera got to the store, somebody was outside trying to get in. Kiera tried to tell the man that they were closed, but he insisted that he just needed one thing, that it was an emergency, etc. Of course, Kiera knew better than to let him inside, but he was absolutely insistent that he had to buy this one thing right now. He wasn’t actively aggressive, but that could have been because Kiera’s husband came out of the truck when he saw what was happening.

Soon enough, the police were called, and the hopeful (read: crazy) customer was hauled away for trespassing and resisting arrest, because of course he did that too. Kiera was shaken up but otherwise fine, and nothing in the store was stolen or broken.

Now I’m sure you’re all wondering, what was this one emergency thing that the guy just couldn’t live without for one day? Medication? Diapers for his infant child, perhaps?

It was a light bulb, my friends. The man needed a singular light bulb.

I work at a Home Depot, we have a preset range of music stations to listen to – it’s commonly left on the 80s or 80s/90s mix station, but one of our managers loves country music, but most of the staff either hate the genre with a passion, and the ones who like country hate that station in particular due to the very short playlist and most of the songs being awful.

Every time someone complains about the station being switched to country, said manager tries to figure out how to make us beg to get back to country by trying to find a music station even more disagreeable to us.

First time (before I was hired), he switched to the Spanish station; most of the staff didn’t mind, but they got so many virulent racist comments from customers that they switched.

Second time, he switched to 2000s-2010s music, aside from that one earworm song, nobody minded, then he switched to the 70s station.

The 70s were basically the favorite due to their very large playlist and variety (soft rock, disco, folk, GOOD country music, and pop), which frustrated him even more, as apparently, he hates disco as much as we hated the country station.

Then I came in, and was confused by a warbling aria… apparently, we have an opera station?

We had a channel for opera music. I’m not sure who was more confused, the customers or us. I actually like opera, and even my coworkers who didn’t care for opera tolerated it because at this point we all knew what was going on and decided to wear him out.

Eventually, he gave up and left the music on the 80s channel.