In an effort to boost morale, my workplace decided to host a competition around Christmas. They set up a section on each floor (most each business group was together on one floor) to decorate with a Christmas scene and declared that each floor would be competing with each other. The upper executive would judge who had the best Christmas decorations. There was no prize, just clout.

Of the six floors, five jumped into the idea immediately. They had a great time working together, or when someone had the idea of playfully stealing the tinsel from another floor, against each other. One had a crime scene set up where Grandma had been run over by a reindeer. Another had a diorama of the Home Alone house. A third made a Christmas tree of tin cans and other goods they’d be donating afterward.

Floor Four did not participate. The executives sent out emails and tried to encourage them, but no such luck. Finally, floor four was chastised as being fuddy-duddies bringing down the fun and ignored.

Then came the day of the judging. The executive laughed over Grandma, oohed over the lovely Christmas lights of the fireplace scene, and spent far too long looking for all of the details of Home Alone.

They got to Floor Four and found that someone had simply placed a large piece of paper on the ground. It showed a graph of the average current flexitime banked up by employees in each of the business groups. 

For those unfamiliar, flexitime is the extra hours that someone has worked over their contracted hours, which they are supposed to be able to then spend another day by going home early or even taking the day off.

I should be clear; when I say “a piece of paper” I actually mean two A3s (11.7 by 16.5 inches) stuck together. The only graph line that went even above halfway on the first A3 was Floor Four, which was a full 900% higher than the next highest.

We’re still unsure who printed the paper, but the fuddy-duddies — too overworked and overcapacity to have any fun at all — had made their point.

I am a stagehand for a small theater. We have a chamber music performance today — basically a small group of musicians playing Christmas carols while the emcee invites the audience to sing along. Most of the patrons are parents with gaggles of young children.

Normally, our customers are pretty easy to manage, but tensions are running high today as there are numerous ticketing issues.

It turns out that many people bought their tickets from an unverified third party which takes their money and then books the seats on our website. If the seats they paid for are unavailable, the site books them in different seats or just takes their money and doesn’t book any tickets.

Another issue is that there are two shows: one at 11:00 am and one at 1:00 pm. Several people who bought tickets for the 11:00 am show either mix up their times or decide to come to the 1:00 pm show instead without telling us, and because it is within two hours of the show time, our ticket scanners do not detect that they are at the wrong performance.

This leads to a ton of confusion on the part of our ushers and customers.

Typically, people are very patient in these cases — this is not the first time the third-party sites have scammed our patrons, though we’ve never had this many instances in one show — but for some reason, everyone who needs to be reseated has an attitude.

One of the customers calls my manager a c***, uncaring for the hundreds of children around him. We end up having to open the balcony to reseat people and tell them it’s our “premium seating,” but some people still aren’t satisfied.

We end up having to delay the forty-five-minute show by nearly fifteen minutes because the house manager won’t let us start until she’s accommodated these customers, and since the schedule is so tight, the show can’t go longer than forty-five minutes, so they need to cut the performance short.

Moral of the story: buy your tickets through the appropriate websites, and don’t throw a hissy fit when you show up to the wrong performance.

Related:
I’ve Got A Ticket To Deride, Part 2
I’ve Got A Ticket To Deride

I was working at a popular vacation spot on the East Coast. A bride booked her wedding at our location years in advance, and everything went smoothly until everyone arrived and she realized her fatal mistake.

She wanted her ceremony on the beach at sunset, with the sun setting over the water.

She lost her cool when she was informed that we could not accommodate her. The sun would be setting over the land, not the water. Why? Because she was on the East Coast, and the sun sets in the West.

She had planned this for years, all the while missing that one key fact. No amount of tantrums, money thrown, or demands could change the way the planet rotated.

And because this little fact didn’t come out until the literal day of the wedding, we couldn’t even dig up the supplies to at least give her custom background photographs of a sunset over the water. 

I have no idea how the marriage is going now, but the staff still tells the story of the bride who demanded that we literally move heaven and earth for her.

Today’s story comes from the world of education, where teachers are burned out, overworked, and underpaid. Due to an influx in federal funding due to [global health crisis] stimulus money, our district decided to put that money to good use. Did they give much-needed raises? Hire more aides? Update our sixty-year-old building? No, even better! They hired several educational consultants to “coach” us on how to do our jobs. This alone was very insulting to most teachers, many of whom had been teaching for longer than some of the consultants had been alive.

Thankfully, many of the new consultants don’t really impact our day-to-day work, but there is one who is particularly difficult. (I’ll call her the Panther for reasons known only to me and a couple of colleagues, but it’s a nickname she comes by honestly.) The Panther continually adds to our workload, insults teachers with snide remarks, and talks down to the staff. At one point, it got so unbearable that the most experienced teacher in our department simply got up from a meeting, told the principal to get a sub, and drove away.

One of the biggest issues has been a sharp spike in unneeded meetings as consultants work to justify their contracts. We meet to discuss data, testing, plan units, or do everyone’s favorite: team-building activities. However, all is finally looking up. As every teacher knows, we are nearing the most wonderful time of year, Christmas break. We will get two glorious weeks of not being harassed by students or administrators. Enter the Panther.

We received an email at the end of last week from our consultant telling us we needed to have a meeting over Christmas break to plan unit four. She told us we could pick the day and time and then send her the Zoom link and she would join to lead it. Needless to say, the department was very unhappy. We had all already planned the unit anyway, but the Panther said she needed to be involved in any planning and insisted the meeting was necessary.

Finally, my department head had had enough. She planned the meeting as instructed and sent us all the link for the Zoom session. The meeting was planned for 11:00 pm on December 24th. We all instantly accepted the meeting time and confirmed that we would attend.

For some reason, the Panther wasn’t happy with the meeting time. She pushed back, griped to an assistant principal (who backed us), and tried to get us to change it, but she got the same answer everywhere: you told them to schedule a meeting, so either attend or cancel.

She canceled.

It’s close to Christmas and a lady and her mother bring her kids in the store to the toy section. They sit the kids down, pull a few toys off of the shelves, and they walked around the kids making a big fuss as they take photos of the kids opening the toy boxes.

Multiple staff members including myself intervene, with the ladies getting very angry and confrontational, to the point that they were eventually forced the leave and banned from the store!