I work for a medium-sized haulage company as a driver, and also as an extra hand in the warehouse — I’m qualified to drive fork lift trucks — whenever I need to make some extra cash.

Our warehouse only has two permanent staff: the warehouse manager who is a hard-working, highly capable man in his 30s, and the permanent forklift driver, who is a deeply unhealthy man in his late 50s with serious work ethic issues and almost non-existent people skills, who’s pretty much coasting until retirement at this point.

The forklift driver is almost invariably in a bad mood, always hungover, and generally just an a**e to everyone who sets foot in the yard, often going as far as insulting individuals or their parentage, etc. However, if you confront him about his behaviour — he’s not a large man, and forty years of heavy smoking hasn’t done him any favours — he will back down permanently against you as an individual and be considerably more polite with you from then on.

Truckers aren’t exactly a passive lot, so unsurprisingly, the majority of our own staff have had words with him at one time or another, so with our own staff he’s not too bad anymore. That being said, people from third parties pretty much always get grief off of him for pointless things like parking in the wrong bit of the yard when it’s completely empty, etc.

It was just past seven pm and we were pretty much done for the day when a van appeared to drop off the last pallet of the day, parking slightly off to the side. We do have marked bays for unloading vehicles, but we generally make no effort to enforce this until we get more than one vehicle in the yard. However, the forklift driver shouted, “Can you not see the bay? Did your mum not teach you to read, you stupid, dumb c***?”

In a shocking twist, the van driver had an issue with this comment, and emerged from his van to reveal he was well clear of six-and-a-half feet tall and had a build not all that far from a rhino on steroids. He calmly said, “Do you want to f****** say that again?”

Knowing at this point how deeply screwed he was, the forklift driver frantically tried to backpedal as the van driver walked up to him, calmly applied the forklifts handbrake, and then gripped the forklift driver with both hands and lifted and pinned him to the roof of the forklift. He then hissed something into the guy’s ear, and the forklift driver frantically bleated out a string of apologies. The van driver dropped him back into his seat and turned to the warehouse manager and me, who had gathered nearby to try and intervene if things really kicked off.

The van driver calmly asked, “Bay 1?” My manager confirmed this and we unloaded his pallet. Once he’d left, we asked the forklift driver if he was okay and whether he wanted the police called. He declined the police and just opted to go home.

I didn’t hear what the van driver said to him, and he’s never discussed it since, but it shook him up so much he was nice to everyone for about six weeks afterwards.  

I don’t condone violence as a way of getting your point across, but this guy’s been threatened by so many people at this point that I’m amazed he hasn’t learned to keep his mouth shut yet.

I was in the supermarket yesterday and saw something so crazy that if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed that someone would be that horrible!

I was waiting in line to pay for my shopping when I saw an older lady following an employee, berating him, as there were no shopping trolleys nearby. It was obviously his job was to collect them from the car park — it was raining really hard so I guess he was waiting a few minutes — and she was actually pulling on his uniform shirt to try and get his undivided attention.

She stopped shouting all of a sudden, turned around, and found a shopping trolley behind her. It was not quite empty — it had a newborn baby in a capsule in the main compartment of the trolley — but the mother’s back was turned. She took the baby out of the trolley, dumped the capsule in the middle of the aisle, and then took the shopping trolley off with her.

I was standing there gobsmacked, but so stunned it took a minute to realise what had actually happened. The mother had turned around to get something and was talking with another employee. She turned back and just about freaked out when she couldn’t place her hand on her trolley! By this time, there were now three employees chasing the older woman down the aisle — including a huge security officer — and she was screaming, “No! It’s mine! I found it!”

The mother calmed down a bit, picked her baby up out of the capsule, and stood there like a deer in the headlights. Honestly… Was it that important to have a trolley that she had to oust a tiny baby out of it?

The kicker was that after being escorted out of the store by the security officer, the lady was carrying only a loaf of bread. Did she really need a trolley for a loaf of bread?! The hardest thing I found to comprehend was that another woman had taken out the baby with no thought for the baby itself, leaving it in the main thoroughfare where anyone could have hit the capsule, and she honestly didn’t think she’d done anything wrong!

A friend owned two adult shops in the same town. One was in a high-end section of town and was set up as a boutique geared towards couples. The other wasn’t in the best part of town and was more of a smut shop. Depending on demand, he would move stock between the stores.

One day, he decided to move some stock from the high-end to the low-end shop. When he got out of his car when he arrived, a bunch of guys stepped out of the shadows, shoved him down, grabbed his bag, and ran away.

The cops later caught up with the guys who apparently thought they were stealing a laptop, but instead found themselves with a large bag full of adult toys!

When I was still in middle school, my mother worked as a principal for an elementary school. When she was employed there, the school used a bus company called “The Little Britches Buses” for the kindergartners to pick them up and drop them off from school, as well as to take them on field trips.

One day, due to a scheduling error the buses ended up running very late, so, as the principal, my mother had to send out an email notifying all the kindergarten teachers of this occurrence. The computer in my mother’s office was a pretty old model, and some of the keys were a bit sticky, especially the R key.  

She was kind of in a rush to get those emails out, so she didn’t notice her mistake until it was too late, and ended up sending an email that read:

“The Little B****es Buses are going to be late today.”

Thankfully, all the teachers either understood her mistake or were laughing too hard for her to get in any trouble.

In my mid-twenties I left my hometown — a medium-sized city — to do a four-year university program in a small town an hour and a half away. As is now the norm, my program required high-speed Internet, so I investigated what was available. There weren’t many options for a reasonable price, and I ended up opting for [Unknown Company], which contracted out installation to [Slightly Better Known — but more expensive — Company].

The afternoon before the full day I had to set aside for installation, I had cell phone trouble and wasn’t able to use my phone for a few hours. When I got back the ability to check my messages, I had one from [Unknown Company] “reminding” me — they’d never told me — that I needed to pick up a modem from their office prior to installation. They had already closed for the day when I got the message, so the next morning I was at their office five minutes before they opened, at the exact start of the potential installation window. Unfortunately, the only person working there didn’t show up until twenty minutes after they opened, and by the time I got back to my apartment, the tech had already come and gone. Apparently, they installed my Internet, just without attaching the modem. I tried the modem. It failed. I called the company. They couldn’t find my system. They told me to book off the next day to have a tech come by. I waited around for ten hours and no one showed. I called them. They booked off the next day. I again waited around for ten hours and no one showed.

I showed up at their office again and told the employee there that I was sitting in that d*** waiting room until I got Internet service. I was near tears, frustrated, home sick, and lacking the only connection I had with family and friends — my cell was crap. The employee made calls, but because [Slightly Better Known Company] was the one doing the installation, [Unknown Company] “couldn’t do anything.” Finally she told me that I had been booked for another service day and I gave up. My building superintendent agreed to let the tech in if they showed because I needed to actually go to classes. He mentioned then that he had looked at the splitter that the tech had installed and thought that it looked like it was backwards, but, “What do I know? I know nothing about technology.”

The next day a tech actually called me saying he was on his way, and actually showed up at the door. He took one look at the splitter, turned it around, and the problem was fixed. They did end up giving me a month of free Internet… but I still switched companies as soon as I could afford it.

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When The Internet Is Internot