At my job, we work off of Excel reports sent to us by third parties via email. I’ve just received a report that doesn’t look like anything this third party has ever sent in the past, so I reply to their email to get some clarification about it. I’ve hit “REPLY” to this email to make sure that there’s context for them, but not “REPLY ALL” as not everyone included on the email needs to be involved in the conversation.

Me: “Hi. After reviewing the report, this doesn’t look like the reports we normally receive from you. Can you advise and provide some clarification?”

Employee: “What report?”

I attach the report they provided.

Me: “This is the report you sent us.”

Employee: “Who sent this?”

I had to resist the urge to respond with, “I AM HITTING REPLY TO YOUR EMAIL, YOU TURD MCNUGGET. YOU SENT THIS!” They eventually figured it out, but not before I ripped out a few chunks of hair at their stupidity.

When everything starts going wrong with the health crisis and all the idiots are panic-buying everything their greedy little hands can get hold of, the rest of us have issues getting the essentials just to last the month.

I have been buying in bulk for a while before this happens, so luckily, we have some general supplies to last us, but even those are starting to disappear and I am getting worried.

With four of us in the family, certain essentials such as toilet paper are running out.

I ask at work if anyone knows of anywhere that still has some.

Coworker: “I bought loads a few weeks ago, still have over a hundred at home. Maybe try [Discount Place]?”

Me: “Yeah, I checked. They ran out.”

Coworker: “Oh, unlucky. It was really cheap at the time, too.”

I hoped he would share his; I would happily have paid. He knew I had small children and I knew it was just him and his wife at home.

But no, even with some of the other guys giving him a hard time about stockpiling — and many other things as well — his attitude was “tough luck, as long as I’m okay.”

I did manage to find some in the end and we managed to get through the worst of the shortages.

Months later, the same coworker messaged me. It turns out they only recently STARTED to use the rolls he bought. As soon as they did, his wife refused to use them at all because they were the hard single-ply you used to get in schools.

He tried and tried to sell them to me, first because of how I was “his friend,” then because of how much he “knew I was struggling,” and then because my kids “wouldn’t care if it was a bit thin.”

I thanked him for the offer, but I had things sorted. In fact, I had the OPPOSITE problem; I had to buy such luxury paper that I couldn’t even fit it in my holder. And I told him that no, I wasn’t going to swap, but he should try [Shop] as I’d gotten a great deal.

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I am a press information officer for a large city. When you work in the front lines of government service, you deal with who I call the “regular whiners,” who are constantly complaining.

They show up at EVERY Municipal Council meeting and complain to the Council, invariably going over their allotted time. They denounce the Mayor (whoever the incumbent is), the Council (whoever they are), and the whole boiling setup.

I get the spillover calls, and the most frequent caller is this one woman. She gets forwarded to me by the mayor’s office every four weeks to complain about… something, but it is invariably something I can do nothing about.

One of our museums is holding a major evening event, long-planned, long-advertised. Five hours before the event, she calls to complain.

Caller: “This event will mess up traffic in my neighborhood! Please move the whole thing to another date.”

I am stunned by this bizarre request.

Me: “For that, you should complain to the museum’s leadership.”

Caller: “Do you have their phone number?”

Me: “No, I don’t, actually, and given how busy they are, I don’t think they’re answering the phone today. Why don’t you send them an email?”

Caller: “I don’t have a computer.”

Me: “Well, why don’t you just head over to the library two blocks from your home and use theirs?”

Caller: “I’m disabled in the fingers. I prefer to call.”

Me: “So that would prevent you from writing them a note and walking that over?”

At this point, I just want my pals at the museum to laugh their heads off at the situation.

Caller: “I told you, I’m disabled in the fingers!”

Me: “But you could still walk over there and complain.”

Caller: “It’s too far to walk!”

Me: “Well, then I’m out of ideas, Mrs. [Caller]. I don’t know what to say or how to help you.”

Caller: *Angry* “That’s what my Council Member’s aide said when I called them a few minutes ago! Nobody wants to help me!”

“Maybe that’s because you’re an annoying whiner,” I think, “and nobody wants to talk to you.”

Me: “I’m sorry I can’t help you, Mrs. [Caller].”

She hangs up. I wait for fifteen seconds and call the mayor’s office.

Me: “Folks, for the past twenty years, you have been transferring Mrs. [Caller] to me. I can’t help her with her problems. Send her anywhere, send her to the New York Aquarium, to Grant’s Tomb, but please, not to me.”

They understood, got the point, and I never heard from her again.

Years ago, my office was a large, outside corner one I shared with two other engineers. As jobs shifted, the other two ended up moving out to other areas to work, leaving me alone in the big corner office. I still only used the one corner of the office, but we moved in an extra table to use for team meetings. An office with a good view sounds nice, but frankly, it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer, and there was a leak in the glass that let in rain when it hit the one side of the building.

One day, my manager stopped in my office and told me I had to move to another empty office down the hall by Friday morning. This was on a Wednesday afternoon. Why? A “high-level executive” had noticed that a mere engineer had a corner office and claimed it for her own. This was despite there being a freeze on moving people around at the time, which I pointed out. But being it was an executive versus me, a mere engineer, I was being moved.

So, I rushed to box everything up, arranged for my furniture to be moved — extra expense as it was last minute — arranged for my network and phone access to be moved, and did the actual move by 9:00 am on Friday. No sign of the executive. Nor by Monday. Nor the next week. Nor the week after that. Moves like this are very disruptive, especially when rushed like I had been. I didn’t mind the new office but was just annoyed by the rush and non-necessity of it.

Finally, in the middle of the third week after my rush move, she moved in. Why the delay? After claiming the office, she decided to take a vacation, hadn’t arranged to have her stuff moved before she left, and then wasn’t in a hurry to move in after she got back. Argh!

The best part was that she left the company a couple of months after that and the office has stood empty for years now.

For many years, I’ve worked in IT for the headquarters of a major craft retailer in the US. The company has recently switched to a new Incident Tracking system. The system is used to log problems, escalate them to the right people, and, most controversial for us, track the time it takes to resolve a given issue. They make a big deal out of how this will allow us to be compliant to an industry standard known as ISIL.

Where the problem comes in is that the standards for what is called the “Service Level Agreement” or “SLA” are set by our notoriously broken help desk. As a result, they tell us that the more severe the problem is, the faster it needs to be resolved, which sounds good on paper… except…

They arbitrarily decide on a length of time that is acceptable for each SLA and punish broken SLAs. As a result of highly questionable resolution times, this results in most of IT failing to meet the set SLAs, which are sometimes as little as an hour for a major issue with no known cause.

Needless to say, there are a lot of unhappy people who are complaining a lot, and morale — which was already low for a number of other reasons — is falling again. Management decides that the real issue is that we just don’t understand the new software and how to use it. If we did, we would understand how to address these SLAs. So, they hire an ISIL expert consultant to come and give us a number of MANDATORY training classes.

These classes are spread over several days, and the trainer is actually quite good, but at the end of the session I attend — which is also attended by the VP who insisted on this software — he asks if there are any SPECIFIC issues he can help us understand.

Oh, boy.

Hands shoot up all over. Naturally, the questions are all on Service Level Agreements and the time limits on them.

The trainer nods agreeably and explains. 

Trainer: “Well, you see, an ‘INCIDENT’ is always the final category. Anything that you haven’t diagnosed should be entered as a ‘PROBLEM.’ The ‘Problem’ category is what all calls should initially come in as. SLAs only come into play as an ‘Incident,’ and the SLAs should be easy to keep track of.”

Please note that this is EXACTLY the opposite of what we have been told. There is silence in the room. People keep glancing at the VP whose baby this is and at the Help Desk Manager who devised all the training and SLAs for us. Finally, one of the bolder analysts raises her hand.

Analyst: “So, what you’re telling us is that SLAs should not be set for anything that is initially coming into the queue, and should only be set when we’ve determined what the issue is?”

Trainer: “Exactly!”

Analyst: “Because right now, we are given SLAs for every problem that gets opened.”

Trainer: *Looking a bit shocked* “Well, that’s just stupid. How can you possibly know how long it’s going to take to fix before you troubleshoot it?

Analyst: “EXACTLY!”

She shot a look over to the VP and the manager, who were looking a little uncomfortable.

The next day, we came in and saw an email that all further ISIL training classes were suspended, and that we were expected to use the Incident Tracking System the way we had initially been told. The VP then tried to spin it, “We didn’t need those classes; after all, we’re not an ISIL shop.”

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