I manage to end up with two different accounts with the district council for council tax — an annual charge made by the local council to pay for things like garbage collection and such — for about eighteen months due to an error when recording my change of address with the council. One account includes my middle name and one doesn’t.

I am initially unaware of this and am only made aware when I receive a letter stating that I owe some amount under £150 for council tax at a property I no longer live in.

I ring the council to try and sort this out. As far as I know, I am up to date and have made all payments.

After getting through to the correct team, we spend about two hours going over the payments and charges on the account for the period I lived in the property in question.

Rep: “I can see that there are some admin charges relating to letters on the account, but I can’t talk to you about them. I can only talk about monthly payments and charges.”

Me: “Fine, let’s go through those, then, and work this all out.”

Two hours later, including it being explained to me about the second account…

Rep: “Once you got so deep into arrears, we did an electoral roll search and found that you’d been paying us under this other account since [date], so the charges from that point were zeroed.”

Me: “So, we’re in agreement that I haven’t missed any payments, you’ve billed me appropriately for where I was living and when I lived there, and there’s still [amount] outstanding? I don’t understand.”

Rep: “Yep, we’ve billed you [amount #1] between [date #1] and [date #2] for [address #1] and [amount #2] between [date #3] and [date #4] for [address #2]. You’ve paid [amount #3], leaving this balance outstanding.”

Me: “But we’ve just agreed that I haven’t missed any payments, so how can there be a balance? I think we need to talk about these admin fees, as that’s the only thing we’ve not covered.”

Rep: “I cannot discuss those with you.”

Me: “Then put me through to someone who can.”

I am then connected to one of the managers and thankfully don’t have to explain the situation again as often happens.

Manager: “So, we’re talking about admin fees on your account from when you lived at [address #1]. Okay, I can see that we charged you £75 because we sent a letter demanding payment to [address #1] on [date].”

Me: “We’ve already established that I wasn’t living there on [date] and was paying at [address #2].”

Manager: “Yep, that’s right. So we’ll take that charge off. This other admin fee was for a letter we sent demanding payment on [later date].”

Me: “I still wasn’t living there on [later date], so that one can come off, too.”

Manager: “Yep, okay. That’s fair. Well, taking those off takes your outstanding balance to… Oh, we owe you [amount]. How would you like to receive this?”

I am a new hire as a network engineer. I am working on configuring a replacement switch with another new engineer and our superior. My laptop is connected to the switch and, due to a disability to my right arm, I have my laptop in lefthanded mode.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Cisco operating system, it is a command-line interface only system, highlighting text automatically copies it and right-clicking pastes text into the command prompt. Unfortunately, with my mouse buttons swapped, left-clicking is not the paste action.

My superior goes to check our work, but when he forgets that my mouse buttons are swapped and several times pastes a bunch of text into the command prompt. This either results in a bunch of error messages or possibly overwrites configurations with incorrect ones. After a few accidental left-clicks, he’s getting noticeably frustrated.

Superior: “God d*** it! Are you trolling me more something?”

Me: “No! I swear, I’m not a troll; I’m just left-handed!”

I worked in an office. It had just come to lunchtime and I was starving. I opened the fridge but there was nothing in there. I mean nothing! The refrigerator hadn’t been that empty since they rolled it off the delivery truck. The shelves were wiped off and there wasn’t even a leftover ketchup packet inside.

We had two refrigerators, so I checked the other one because I figured that maybe I had forgotten which one I put my lunch in. Nope. That one was completely empty, too! 

Apparently, someone decided to clean the fridge without alerting anyone; in doing so, they threw out everyone’s lunches — stuff with people’s names on it, fast food with dated receipts from that day taped to the bag, even people’s Tupperware and lunch bags from home! It was all gone. 

The garbage cans were freshly replaced, with new bags and everything. The dumpster had been fed people’s personal property.

My outraged yelling of, “WHO THE F*** THREW OUT EVERYTHING IN HERE?!” got other people’s attention. 

There were a lot of gasps, a lot of swearing, and then we had a mob descending upon the manager’s office like a swarm of locusts, basically yelling out complaints at him. He was confused at first, and then he just stared, dumbfounded, as the more comprehensive story came out.

We had employees with medical reasons for needing to eat at a certain time. We had employees who had their medications in the bags and Tupperware with their food!

The manager basically ran past the mob to stare into the refrigerators in horror and then made phone calls. He basically ended up using the company card to get food delivered, as that was priority for the people who could be hospitalized if they didn’t eat.

He did some sleuthing and that’s how he found out that someone at the right level of incompetence got it into their head to clean both refrigerators of everything ever, not just the stuff in the back that grew fur.

There was an uproar that resulted in some very unhappy higher-ups facing a horde of employees who were just short of demanding torches and pitchforks. There was a lot of running around in a panic at first, but basically, the company decided with respectable haste to reimburse the cost of lost medication, and they soon established rules about cleaning the refrigerators. 

Why this wasn’t already in effect, I’ll never know.

The person responsible? Unnamed officially, but quietly let go shortly after the incident.

I was living in the same building as my landlady. Her husband passed away while I was living there, and five years later, a certain organization is still sending him mail every four months offering a large discount — in bold letters on the envelope — when he renews his subscription. I try to intercept these as much as possible, which isn’t too bad because my landlady has become an invalid and most nurses and assistants coming in to tend to her don’t recognize the name and leave it in the hallway.  

As she is put to bed fairly early and is unable to get up, I’ve made a habit of checking in with her in the evening before going to bed to see if she needs anything. If she happens to receive a letter addressed to her deceased husband, I’m sure to hear her life story and how unhappy it was all over again, so intercepting the mail isn’t totally selfless. 

Each time I intercept the letter, I return it, marked “deceased”. After five years, I have had enough of it and, frustrated, I cross out the address and write, “Moved – new address – [Famous Local Cemetery] – plot to be asked for”.

The letters have finally stopped.

I sometimes wonder if they finally got the message or if the cemetery is receiving junk mail now.

This story is part of our Best Of August 2020 roundup!

Read the next Best Of August 2020 story!

Read the Best Of August 2020 roundup!

I work for a distributor of high-end video equipment, or at least that’s what we were doing before the current health crisis; now it seems the entire industry has pivoted to web-presenters and streaming equipment. At least, that’s what the customers have done. The manufacturers are struggling to keep up, leading to too many conversations like this.

Reseller: “Look, I just don’t understand; you never had issues like this in the past.”

Me: “I know, sir, but unfortunately, with the change in demand, we’ve been having issues keeping up with the supplies.”

Reseller: “So how does that affect me? Shouldn’t you have stock?”

Me: “We should, sir, but… let me put it this way. Right now, the manufacturer of this product can process about 500 per week. We have been averaging orders of over 800 a week since the quarantines started.”

Reseller: *Pauses* “Oh… do you have any ETAs?”

Me: “Looking at when your order was entered, we’re currently estimating two to four weeks.”

Reseller: “I just don’t get why this takes so long.”

Me: “I suppose it’s because the manufacturers didn’t plan on a global quarantine situation six months before it happened?”