Me: “IT help line; this is [My Name].”

High-Maintenance User: “Hi, [My Name]. Remember when you did all that work on my computer yesterday? Well, I can’t log in this morning! Did you do something to the network last night?”

IT “doing something to the network last night” is the primary cause of all problems, according to this user.

Me: “Noooo…”

I am already going to unlock the account.

Me: “Let’s get you unlocked here.”

High-Maintenance User: *Frantic typing* “It still won’t let me log in! Did you do something? Let’s just reset my password!”

During this whole time, he is not letting me answer. But if he wants to reset his password, no skin off my nose.

Me: “Okay… the new password is [new password with numbers and letters].”

High-Maintenance User: *Increasingly frantic* “It’s still not working! It’s not… Oh, wait. I had the Number-Lock key off. That’s why I couldn’t log in, to begin with!”

Another satisfied customer… for now.

My first proper job after leaving school is in a tiny sales company, consisting of the boss, his wife, two salesmen, and one admin: me. The job market is terrible, so I am fortunate to be employed — or so I thought.

There are no proper rules; the boss makes things up as he goes along, so we are constantly doing things “wrong.” Basically, we do things the way they were done yesterday, but he’ll have changed his mind overnight. And he never makes mistakes; he always insists he is right and has some convoluted, complicated reasoning for anything he does. I am seventeen and have no idea of the way a company is “supposed” to work, so I mostly just do whatever the boss says.

There is one single rule that we are NOT to break under any circumstances: every phone call has to be answered within three rings — no excuses, no exceptions. We should never, ever leave a phone ringing.

One day, I get a call from a customer who is expecting a refund and hasn’t received it and wants to speak to the boss. I put the call through. Ten minutes later, he comes out.

Boss: “If she calls again, I don’t want to speak to her.”

She calls the next day.

Customer: “I still haven’t gotten my refund. Can I speak to [Boss] again, please?”

Me: “He isn’t available right now.”

Customer: “He has been promising me a refund for the past two weeks and he keeps making excuses. Could you please have him call me back?”

I give him the message. He rolls his eyes and throws it in the bin.

The next day she calls again, demanding to be put through to him. When I say he isn’t available, she hangs up and rings again ten minutes later. I say he still isn’t available, and she says she will call all day until he speaks to her. True to her word, she calls every ten minutes, getting angrier and angrier. He refuses to take any of the calls; I am just to say he isn’t available.

Finally, after about two hours, she refuses to hang up.

Customer: “I know he’s there; now put him on the phone.”

I ask him what to do, and he says to just hang up on her.  

She rings back immediately, absolutely furious, shouting at me and demanding to speak to him, and I am trying desperately not to cry. I put her on hold and beg him to take the call, and he refuses. He says to hang up again. I do, and I tell him she was really angry and shouting, and she will probably call back.

Boss: “Just answer, and if it’s her, hang up.”

I stare at the phone, crying and terrified, and of course, it rings again. After three rings, the boss yells:

Boss: “Answer that phone!”

I grab it and she immediately starts screaming.

Customer: “DON’T HANG UP! DON’T YOU DARE HANG UP! I WANT TO SPEAK TO [BOSS] RIGHT NOW!”

I have no idea how to handle this. I do the only thing I can think of: I pretend I can’t hear her. Over her screaming, I just say:

Me: “Hello, [Company]. Hello? Hello?”

And then I hang up.

By this point, I am shaking and feel sick. When the phone rings again, I answer, and of course, it is her, and she is (rightly) furious. I just put the call straight through to the boss and go to the bathroom and sit on the floor, having a panic attack.

When I go back to my desk, my boss comes out of his office and glares at me.

Boss: “Don’t ever do that again.”

And he slammed his door.

I lasted another two months in that job, literally afraid to go to work every day but needing the money. The last day I was there, the boss walked in and told us the company was going bankrupt, we weren’t going to be paid, and to go home.

I am working as a trainer in an establishment in Saudi Arabia. My colleagues and I have devised a series of training courses and tests which, over a period of three years, we are to ensure that all our trainees pass, no matter what.

We will leave aside the question about the ethics of making sure everyone passes, whether or not they are actually competent to fill the position for which they are ostensibly being trained.

As an end product of this, we are then to record the overall results of these training courses in a folder by means of checkboxes where we are to enter ticks in the appropriate fields. And on final completion of all our forms, we then pass them on to our superiors in the establishment, who then stamp them as “approved.”

The years progress, and we manage to achieve our aim of getting our trainees through the training courses as required. We submit the forms and wait for feedback.

All are returned as “rejected”. We are told we have failed as trainers, and we will not receive the credit for having achieved our aim.

We go ballistic, as you’d expect. We demand to be told WHY the forms have all been rejected.

We are led into the office of the superior who issued the rejections where we have this meeting together with his boss. They look at the forms with faces that look as though they are inspecting sour milk for the presence of insect life. The superior gives us a verdict.

Superior: “Unacceptable. The ticks have not been placed neatly enough in the boxes.”

It turns out that some of the ticks had been allowed to stray a millimetre or two outside the boxes assigned for them. For such an outrageous breach of regulations and protocol, we all have been deemed to have failed our task, and the three years are all for nothing.

Naturally, our ire is incensed, and we raise the matter with our line management at our firm who contracted us out. Colourful language is employed, as would be expected. The question is escalated.

In the end, the director of the entire management structure was sent in, complete with his entire team of support staff, to the establishment to which we were assigned. A top-level meeting was held with the trainers, together with the gentlemen whose job it had been to approve our training reports.

The verdict was that the Saudi nationals who were trying to get away without paying the consulting firm for their work were instructed sternly not to turn this business into a “pissing contest.” The decision to mark the reports as non-compliant was overturned, and we were offered official congratulations from the REAL movers and shakers of the establishment for having achieved our aims of having trained the team to the required standard.

We’ve got a new member of our team: a girl who is fresh out of high school. Nerdy and cheerful, she’s rapidly become a popular member of the workplace. She’s asked us when all our birthdays are and volunteered to personally bake birthday cakes for everyone.

It’s at the end of the day on Friday. Everyone is packing up and preparing to go home. [New Girl] goes up to a coworker of ours.

New Girl: “Hi, [Coworker]. Your birthday is on Monday. What type of birthday cake would you like?”

Coworker: “What do you have?”

New Girl: “I can make any type of cake: the usuals like red velvet or chocolate, or more exotic flavours like Pandan or orange. If you don’t like cake, I can make a jelly cake, or bake bread or pies.”

Coworker: *Leers* “Ooh, pies. Can I have a creampie?”

All of us swivel our heads and stare at him with “WTF?!” looks plastered on our faces. We expected him to be slapped, but [New Girl] just continues on.

New Girl: *Writing on a notepad* “Yeah, I can give you a cream pie. You like them?”

Coworker: *Leers even more* “Yup, I just love popping cherries and creampies.”

Again, she doesn’t slap him. In fact, her expression doesn’t even move anywhere near disgust. With dawning horror, we now realise just how innocent and naive she is.

New Girl: “Okay. Popping cherries. Never tried that before but that can be arranged.”

She snaps her notebook shut, waves us all goodbye, and walks out the front door. As soon as she leaves, we all start shouting at [Coworker].

Me: “What the f*** were you thinking? She’s seventeen!”

Manager: “Don’t corrupt the new girl! That innocence must be preserved!”

Coworker #2: “You sick, perverted a**hole! You’d better get your mind out of the gutter right now!”

Cleaner: “She’s young enough to be your daughter! Heck, she’s younger than my granddaughter!”

We spend almost an hour screaming at our coworker, but he is adamant that there is no teenager alive that would have missed all the connotations.

On Monday:

New Girl: *Holding out a pie box* “Happy birthday, [Coworker]! Here’s your popped cherry cream pie. I hope you enjoy it!”

Yeah, she was just that innocent.

None of us could find the heart in us to ruin her innocence. We voted, and in the end, [Cleaner], a kindly old woman, sat her down and gave her The Talk about men and young women. [New Girl] lost all her cheerfulness and absolutely distrusted men after that, [Coworker] especially.

The workplace was never the same again.

I work in a department that creates graphics and presentations for the rest of the firm. We have regulars that routinely use our services, but we’re available to anyone in the company.

I’m alone in the center overnight two days before Christmas when I get a call from an unfamiliar employee asking if we can edit a PDF. It’s not an uncommon request; sometimes documents are converted to PDF for sharing or printing, only for a typo or alignment problem to be discovered at the last minute.

Me: “Sure, that’s most likely not a problem.”

Employee: “Great!” 

The employee emails me the file.

I open the file and stare at it, aghast. It’s a note from this employee’s doctor. Evidently, a long-scheduled plane trip over the holidays had been imperiled by a serious injury a few weeks back; the note states that the employee is cleared to fly.

The instructions are to add the word “not” into the note so that it would appear to read that the employee was not cleared to fly.

I’m ready to refuse this outright when I hear the internalized voice of my boss. Like most “cost centers,” our department doesn’t have a lot of cachet within the company, and recent complaints involving a few of us trying to enforce certain standards that not all of the senior officers care about have led to firm instructions from our boss not to refuse anything our requesters ask for.

Basically, our option to say, “No, we don’t do that,” has been taken away, leaving me wondering how best to handle this employee’s request to help them scam their airline without violating departmental directive.

I call the employee back.

Me: *Politely* “I’m sorry, but I do not feel I can ethically handle your request.”

The employee persists.

Employee: “It’s just inserting a word! I simply want to get my plane tickets refunded now that I’ve decided not to take the trip.”

After going back and forth a while, I finally have to say outright that I’m not comfortable falsifying medical documents on the employee’s behalf.

The employee tells me they understand and hangs up, only to call back to say they’re going to try to do it themselves, and asking if I can tell them how to do that.

I’m thinking about PDF-tampering permutations of the old “feed someone a fish” adage as I take another look at the document. It’s an image, not a text-based PDF, so modifying it isn’t as simple as clicking “Edit” and typing in “not.” I tell the employee that the change is not something they can do themselves; they accept this and hang up. I then document everything for my boss, wondering what the response will be.

After the holidays, I hear back from my boss. My refusal to do the job was supported, not because the request was unethical but because it was personal and not business-related.