I’ve worked in an office-type job for a few years now. I mostly handle assistant admin tasks, although I sometimes also work on “field jobs”.

My supervisor, and partner, ended up retiring a bit early due to health reasons, and they hired a new person to fill that vacancy. The new guy did pretty well. They had a decent understanding of the field, and whatever they didn’t know outright, they picked up fairly quickly when instructed. Their only issue was personal space.

I am color-blind. No, I don’t see everything as grey, but I have difficulties separating certain colors from each other. It’s the one thing I bring up during those “tell an interesting fact about yourself” talks, and so the new hire knew this. However, it was still very personal, and it made me feel vulnerable.

A week or so after the new hire started, I stepped out of the office for a quick personal call. When I came back, I realized something was wrong with my computer. Obviously, I could see that something was going on, but I had major trouble reading what was on the screen.

At this point, my new coworker started laughing. It turned out that they had thought to “prank” me for forgetting to lock out my computer. How? By changing the colours of my interface to something I couldn’t recognize — not just changing the wallpaper or something, but by literally pointing out my disability and making me unable to do my job.

I couldn’t handle it. I started crying and basically had a panic attack. The next I remember, I was in a manager’s office, probably after trying to explain what happened. I don’t remember much else besides that they told me to go home and call them once I felt better.

When I got back, the new hire was nowhere to be seen. We might not have the ADA, but we have some officials that take care of people with disabilities.

This story reminds me of the time I had an escalated customer when I was a customer service representative. The customer was getting angrier and angrier because I was following policy.

A bird had gotten into the building, and it swooped by a supervisor. They were apparently scared of birds and screamed.

I was close enough that my customer heard it and immediately calmed down!

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We had a lady who used to go into the clearance (end of line) area of our craft department, where all sales are final and items could not be returned/refunded (unless faulty), and load up a basket of random-seeming items.

Then she’d come to the counter wanting the cashier staff to tell her whether or not EVERY SINGLE ITEM was a “good deal.”

Not only was she wasting everyone’s time, many items required other specific items to use (e.g. fancy cutting blades that only fit specific models of brand-name cutters) but trying to explain that or even asking if she had [insert specific requirement here] was like talking to a brick wall.

Unethical management allowed it because it was still up to the customer to choose what to spend their money on and the non-returnable items were sold, and the lady rarely made a fuss about not being able to return the junk.

Then the lady got a backup person who would come in with her sometimes to harass us about not accepting a return on whatever junk the lady had bought. What had been a long but eventually financially beneficial transaction then included lots of angry shouting from the accompanying person, threats of legal action, harassment of staff and most importantly disruption to other customers.

Finally, we were told the lady was not permitted to buy any clearance items at all.

Eventually, she stopped coming into our store.

This story reminds me of when I broke my leg. After I broke it, I hobbled along for three weeks thinking it was a bad sprain, but then I saw a physiotherapist who sent me to get an X-ray. I got the X-ray, and then I sat in the waiting room and waited and waited… but no results.

After a long time, I went to the reception. Apparently, they thought they’d already sent me on my way. To apologise for this, they gave me a ticket to the cinema — strange but nice.

They sent me to the ICU. There, I saw a little girl — five or six years old — with her mother. She was crying and holding her arm. I decided to try to cheer her up by giving her my ticket after asking her mother if it was okay.

She did stop crying, and she seemed a bit excited about picking a movie. But sadly, Paw Patrol was no longer in the cinema, so she was sad again.

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The board game café and pub I used to work at taught me many things, and one of those was to never mix business with pleasure without some strong guarantees.

The place’s owner had only me, his sister, and two close friends on call, with various flaky part-timers going through revolving doors for various reasons. Somehow, despite being placed fairly in the way of nightlife, and advertised in English, too, this was more than enough.

Then, one day, [Owner]’s sister found herself a girlfriend. Said girlfriend was at first merely invited to hang out at the cafè, but soon enough, she had started to invite friends over… and let them eat and drink for free.

The tales of [Sister]’s generosity soon spread to the extended friend circles, increasing the number of people occupying tables and eating or drinking for free little by little.

Things came to a head when, one Saturday night, the number of [Sister]’s friends and “acquaintances” was enough to occupy all but two seats, and the overall bill, by all accounts, should have been around 1,100€, instead of 0€. This was made worse by the fact that the people got hostile with patrons who did intend to pay to stay there and that [Sister] had forced me and a poor b*****d expecting an easy job to rush around to all the tables while being treated like dirt for not conjuring food out of our behinds.

The next week, the owner saw the expense ledger and demanded an explanation. Let’s just say it’s lucky he didn’t try to bite his sister’s head off.

As soon as [Sister] told her girlfriend that she was going to charge her for food and drink, she got ghosted.