About ten years ago, I was a starting manager at a popular fast food location on a Saturday and had to close for the night. I had some issues with an employee during the closing shift, but that’s not for today. When I was finished with all my duties, I tried to set the inner alarm one hour later at 3:15, but after a minute, it went off. So, I had to turn it off and answer the call from the security company, and I had to direct them to my supervisor for the secret question. This went on three times, and then it was escalated to the restaurant manager. He called me to let me know to not set the alarm for the inner area, as I locked the door and the alarm would be set for the outer area in about 30 minutes by the cleaning crew. 

Around 3:30, I wanted to go to my bike to head home. That’s when I noticed a car with a running engine, standing in the dark next to my bike. Because it’s considered a security risk — due to a possible robbery — it was procedure to stay inside and call the local police. They were on site with three cars within five minutes. They had one regular police van, a car with a spotlight and a camera, and a car with a dog handler. The officer on the phone asked me to stay inside and turn on the drive-thru microphone so the police on site could contact me without me getting in danger, and to stay away from the windows, so I did. 

On the cameras in the management office — in the inner alarm area — I saw an officer talk to somebody in the car, and after a while, a guy came out. The dog handler took his dog and let it search the car and the area around it. After a while, the officer came to the drive-thru microphone and began to speak to me. The guy was a businessman, and he was using our free WiFi to watch p*rn at night because the WiFi at the hotel was paid. 

Within a month, all restaurants had a feature installed that closed down the free WiFi an hour after their scheduled closing times.

I’m currently on maternity leave, two or three months before I’m due back to work, and I realise that I still have a lot of vacation days left over. I ask a colleague who I should talk to about scheduling my vacations — there have been some personnel changes while I was gone — and she tells me to talk to [Superior #1]. She also tells me that technically, all vacation times had to be planned by last November — I was already on maternity then and it’s now June — which nobody told me about. No big deal since we don’t have any trips planned; I figure I’ll just talk to [Superior #1] and get some time off scheduled when nobody else is on vacation. Whatever works. 

I email [Superior #1], asking if I can come see her about when to schedule my time off. She emails me back saying, of course, I can come to the office about that. 

I make an appointment, take my baby with me, ride through half the city, and go to the office. 

When I arrive there, [Superior #1] greets me warmly, and then proceeds to tell me that while she can show me the schedule of who is going away when, I really need to talk to [Superior #2] about when I want to take my time off. 

I just stand there, flabbergasted, with my baby in a carrier, wondering why exactly she couldn’t have told me from the start that she wasn’t the person to talk to about that issue.

At our game store, we used to have a policy that customers could try out any game in the store. It really helped cut down on returns. This meant, however, that we would get a few customers who would abuse this policy.

One man would come in almost daily and spend hours playing games, rarely purchasing anything.

When this happened, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion had come out. The man was coming in daily and spent literally hours standing in one spot and playing the game. 

I would inform him every half hour or so that he needed to take a break and could not just play games all day. He would save, walk away for a minute, and jump right back to it when I started working on something else.

After a few days of this, I was tired of him.

The next time he came in, he played Oblivion for a solid five hours. I didn’t bother him once. When he finally took his leave of the game and I was sure he was gone, I loaded up his game and dumped almost a week’s worth of progress in one part of the map. Then, I sent his character across the map to the woods and left his character naked and alone. Finally, I deleted every save file except this one, and shut the game off.

The next time the man came in, he asked to play Oblivion. I gladly obliged, put the game in, and walked away. I can still remember him sputtering and frantically trying to search for a way to get his progress back.

When he demanded to know what had happened, I politely told him that this was a store game and everyone had access to the save files. If he wanted to be able to play without the risk of someone else having access to it, he would probably want to actually buy the game.

He was practically in tears when he left, but he did finally buy the game and take it home.

I am on a layover in Atlanta on my way home to Washington DC. 

My connecting flight won’t be boarding for another six hours. 

I look at the departures and see that another flight on the same airline has a flight in an hour to one of the other DC airports. I am flying solo and only have a carry-on, nothing checked.

I decide to go to the service desk to see if I can switch flights. I am willing to take “no” as a possible answer since I already have the other flight booked.

As I step up to the service desk queue, I hear a woman yelling at the attendant. Apparently, there was a delay on the woman’s previous flight and they missed the connecting flight. Because the delay was caused by an airport issue on the originating side, the delay wasn’t caused by that airline and the only thing they can do is reschedule the flight, which isn’t going to be until the next day mid-morning. The woman is going ballistic, but there is literally nothing the attendant can do other than reschedule.

After at least ten minutes of this, the women reschedules and leaves in a huff, along with the phone number of the airline’s customer service. 

I calmly walk up and greet the attendant with a friendly, “Hello,” and ask how she is doing. She looks a bit confused but says she has had better days. I ask about possibly switching the flight, and she says, “That flight is usually pretty filled since it is a commuter flight.” I tell her thanks for checking, and I hope she has a good rest of her shift.

As I am walking away, she says, “Hold on… Let me see your tickets.” I give them to her and she starts typing away. 

Two minutes later, I have a new boarding pass for the earlier flight, a seat by the wing with much more legroom because it is also the emergency row, and no one sitting next to me. 

It just proves that a polite smile and a show of true compassion will get you a long way.

I came into work today to hear my coworker, the office supervisor, in a high-volume discussion with a patient in another language. I don’t speak any other languages besides English, but I could tell the patient was agitated and my coworker was trying to neutralize it.

I let her handle that and helped other patients before my shift officially started. Later, she revealed the reason. Apparently, the patient was having an ultrasound with our chief sonographer. The patient was coughing on the sonographer, so they asked the patient to cover their mouth. The patient got offended by that and left the room in the middle of the scan. The patient commented things such as, “She shouldn’t be in the industry if she can’t take sick patients.”

My coworker tells me that in their culture coughing is open. They aren’t told to cover their mouths.

All three– the patient, sonographer, and coworker — are the same nationality.