I work for the IT department of a rather big company as a first-level tech. My job is to answer the internal IT-Desk helpline, open a ticket, make a first assessment of the caller’s problem, if possible, solve it if it is minor, and forward it to the right expert if it isn’t.

I answer a call with my usual greeting, which clearly states that the caller has reached the IT help desk, but I am interrupted before I even get to it.

Caller: *Loud and upset* “You need to come here right now! There’s a rat in my drawer!”

Me: “Pardon me? There’s what?”

Caller: “A rat! There’s a rat in my drawer!”

Me: “I think you’ve got the wrong number; this is the IT helpdesk! You want maintenance. Let me get you—”

Caller: *Interrupting again* “No! I need help! This is the helpdesk! There is a rat in my drawer! Now come and help me, you lazy f***!”

Me: “And what am I supposed to do with your rat? Does it need software updates? You want a new casing for it or maybe a mousepad to make it cosy in your drawer? I can’t help you, madam! Call maintenance!”

The caller falls into expletives, yelling ugly derogatives at me before I can even try to give her the number for maintenance.

I don’t have to stay on the phone with abusive idiots who don’t understand that IT doesn’t have to play nice here, so I just disconnect the call and block her number for thirty minutes so she can’t immediately hassle a colleague. I am now lost as to what to put into the ticket I have to write for every call for documentation. Finally, I just put, “Caller tried to report a rat in her drawer. Directed her to maintenance.”

Every employee has a personalized caller ID that automatically attaches their tickets to their individual call in the system, auto-filling their names and positions as well. I don’t write in about the swear words and derogatives in detail as I think she was just scared of the rat, but I flag her as getting abusive anyway and hit the button to save the recording of the call which would otherwise be deleted as soon as I closed the call.

The next day, I get called into my boss’s office. Inside is a smug-looking woman leering at me, one of the department heads, and my boss.

Boss: “Well, we’re here to clear up an accusation against you. Mrs. [Caller] here insists you’ve cursed at her, belittled her, and refused to help her with a simple issue. Can you clear that up for us? I would have looked up your logs, but [Department Head] insisted on talking through that issue.”

Me: “Well, I insist on listening to that call right now; I saved it to the ticket just in case. Before that, we’re not talking about anything.”

I see Mrs. [Caller]’s face go pale, and she opens her mouth, but before she can say anything, my boss, who must have pulled the ticket with her name already, hits play, and the call recording blasts from his speakers.

After the whole fiasco plays, everyone is silent until my boss turns to the woman and says sweetly:

Boss: “So, what was it you wanted from us for your rat? The hardware or the software update?”

The department head is red as a tomato. Between clenched teeth, he apologises and shoos the woman out of the room. My boss is grinning from ear to ear.

Boss: “Sorry for that scene. I would not have allowed this to happen to anyone else, but I know you can take it. That moron, [Department Head], is just newly promoted and already trying to push his weight in a really inappropriate way. His whole department nowadays behaves as if they’re everyone’s bosses, and they need a little pushback. And I needed a witness.”

I assured him it was all okay and agreed to go on and put in a complaint against both with Human Resources along with my boss. The next time I got that woman on the line — this time for an actual IT issue — she was very meek and subdued.

HR listened to the call, and I know she got a warning not to treat colleagues that way.

During the next meeting with my boss, he dropped that the department head was demoted again. He hadn’t even lasted a month.

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I was talking to my boss one day, and I used the word “brackish”.

Boss: “Look, I’m a shorts-wearin’, McDonald’s-eatin’, regular guy. Talk normal. We don’t need them $25 words around here.”

I work the front desk for an office building in Hawaii. Our building uses RFID (radio frequency identification) badges for things like gates, parking, and most doors throughout our six floors. Today, one of the company higher-ups found that her keycard was not working, so I canceled it for her and transferred all of her authorized access to a new card which we handed to her. She came back only twenty seconds later.

Higher-Up: “This still doesn’t work! I need a working badge.”

Me: “Huh, odd, it’s brand new. Can I s—”

Higher-Up: “I need to get to my office so I can clock in! You are going to make me late!”

Me: “So sorry about that, but can I see—”

Higher-Up: “A company executive shouldn’t be having these kinds of issues! We paid good money for these systems and we expect everyone to know how to use them.”

Me: “Understandable, ma’am. Can I please see—”

Higher-Up: “Hurry up! I have to get upstairs.”

Me: “I understand, but I need to see—”

Higher-Up: “Can you issue me a temporary badge, then?”

Me: “No, I need—”

Higher-Up: “What do you mean, no?!”

A vendor had approached the desk and had been standing behind her for a moment at this point. The conversation had grown to where he had taken his headphones off to listen in.

Me: “I can’t issue temporary badges unt—”

Higher-Up: “This is unacc—”

Vendor: “Ho, Auntie, try shut up and listen to what she has for say to you!”

She was stunned into silence.

Me: “May I please see your badge?”

Vendor: “Unreal da attitude, so entitle you.”

While the exec started a conversation with the vendor, I turned the keycard over in my hands. She had placed it in a pink bedazzled sleeve of some sort and as I examined it I saw a marking that verified that my assumption of what the issue was was correct.

Me: “Ma’am this is an RFID-blocking sleeve.”

Higher-Up: “Excuse me?”

Me: “This thing, the case? This is an RFID-blocking sleeve. Your keycard and our readers use RFID to operate. You can’t use this case.”

The vendor rolled his eyes behind her.

Higher-Up: “Oh… I…”

Me: “Yeah, these are good for things like credit cards — they’ll prevent your information from being stolen — but not for your access key.”

I dropped the badge back onto our desk and she took it slowly, pulling it out of the sleeve before scurrying off without another word.

The vendor and I watched as she sheepishly went to the elevator, scanned successfully, swore softly, glanced back at us, and then entered the carriage.

Vendor: “Unreal, that kine.”

I am a young woman in engineering. As a result, my opinion doesn’t carry much weight despite being the most experienced. Additionally, I am often blamed for my coworkers’ screw-ups as I am supposed to be mother-henning them with no actual authority.

Despite trying my best to explain backwards compatibility to a coworker several times, he still thinks he knows best. As a result, several functions a client was using become defunct, and their code breaks which, obviously, annoys them. After a bit of pulling teeth (and having [Client] back me up), I get my coworker to agree to put those functions back in so it is backwards compatible and we are not creating issues for them. 

It is also worth noting that my manager is just kind of a waste of space. She wastes hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a week being argumentative and dooms-daying every little decision despite not knowing what the heck is going on. It isn’t a technical knowledge transfer issue. It just goes one ear and out the other in favor of acting like the sky is falling if she doesn’t step in.

Manager: “What version are we on? Is the version going to change?”

Me: “We are on version [number] and it will be changed once we fix [client-found bug].”

Manager: “And are there any changes we need to make? I know [Client] had an issue that needs to be resolved.”

Me: *Biting my tongue* “Well, we need to add back a few depreciated functions for [Client] so their code doesn’t break. [Coworker] suggested we put them all in one section to organize them better.”

Manager: “So, have we thought through how this will affect our clients? We don’t want to break their code.”

Me: *Gobsmacked* “You mean besides giving them back functionality that they were using and making them happy?”

At this point, I just let her rant herself silly about the pros and cons. At last, [Coworker] finally agreed to fix it and it was fixed within the hour, after a week of banging my head against that wall.

I am leaving in three weeks, so it will be interesting to see what happens down the line when I am not there to stop them from doing something too fatalistic or act as the scapegoat.

About twenty years ago, I was working freelance, helping several small local businesses with their bookkeeping and data input. I was used to working in the owners’ houses on old equipment or even taking work home to deal with.

One of my clients knew of a small business whose owner had just decided to computerise their accounts system and had employed a worker who claimed to be an expert in computers and accounts, but said worker had abruptly left them after only a couple of weeks, and it was suggested I might like to take over. As it only involved a few hours each week, it fit well with my other commitments, so I went to meet the business owner.

They showed me their rather old computer, running Windows 3.1, set up in their dining room, and asked me whether that was okay with me, as their previous employee had insisted they needed an office to work in and a state-of-the-art new computer for them to use, which the business could not afford.

As soon as I moved the mouse, I realised there was a slight problem; the cursor hardly moved. I just turned the mouse upside down, removed the retaining ring, tipped the ball out, and scraped a thick layer of gunk off the rollers inside. When I put it back together, it worked perfectly. The look on the owner’s face was great — to see the “load of rubbish” made to work so easily confirmed their poor opinion of the previous employee’s expertise in computers. The computer didn’t need to go online, so the fact that it used an outdated version of Windows did not matter, and it turned out they had made a mess of setting up the accounts, too!

I worked one morning a week for that business for fifteen years until the owner decided to retire.