I was traveling from Pennsylvania to California on a well-known American airline. My 4:00 pm flight was delayed half an hour. When the half-hour passed, we were told it had been delayed another hour. Almost an hour after that announcement, we were told the flight had been postponed for six more hours. As it turns out, the crew had not turned up for the previous flight.

I was going to miss my connecting flight in Detroit and, as such, I would not be back to work as planned. I went to the desk attendant along with several other passengers.

Desk Attendant: “Yes?”

Me: “Hi. I won’t make my connection with the delay, so—”

Desk Attendant: “You can take the delayed flight into Detroit, and they can give you a room for the night. They have a 7:00 am flight tomorrow morning. I can switch you now or you can do it when you get there.”

If you’re doing the math on this… I arrived at the airport at 2:00 pm for my 4:00 pm flight. It was bumped to 4:30 pm. Then to 5:30 pm. Then to 11:30 pm. So, I would take a two-hour flight, arriving at 1:30 am. Then, I would have to be back at the airport at 5:00 am for my flight at 7:00 am.

Me: “Is there not a flight from here tomorrow? I don’t—”

Desk Attendant: *Heavy sigh* “Ma’am. Your flight has not been canceled; it is only delayed. Once you get to Detroit, they can comp a hotel room and rebook you on the next flight out in the morning.”

Me: “I don’t see how Detroit should have to pay for my room when it wasn’t their flight that got delayed.”

Desk Attendant: “Gimme your ID.”

I handed over my California driver’s license. [Desk Attendant] took her time looking it over and back at me. She slapped the ID on the desk and furiously typed on her computer.

Desk Attendant: “You have a single-occupancy room at [Hotel]. They have a shuttle, but you have to call for pick-up. Your flight has been changed to 5:00 am tomorrow. Anything else?”

Me: “No. Thank you for your help, [Desk Attendant].”

Desk Attendant: *In a fake-happy tone* “You have a lovely day, and thank you for choosing [Airline].”

The hotel was pretty nice, but being home would have been better. I emailed the airline’s customer service about the desk attendant’s behavior but only received a generic apology email as a response.

I work in a distribution warehouse, and my team’s jobs include assigning and bringing printed tickets to the right group(s), coordinating issues between sales and the warehouse, figuring out who to bump issues from the warehouse back to, etc. Basically, we’re the middlemen handling everything going back and forth between the warehouse and the rest of the company. For the most part, my supervisor lets us do our jobs properly, as he’s always got his own tasks, questions to answer, emails to respond to, etc. It’s refreshing, actually. He does have a very odd form of micro-managing, though. 

Whenever HE gets caught up, he starts getting grabby. A group email just came in? He has to instantly answer it without gathering information. A ticket gets opened? He has to instantly do it. There’s kickback from the shipping department? He has to jump up to go grab it. It doesn’t matter that there are four other people on the team doing our jobs and that nothing sits around for more than one or two minutes; he snatches up anything the instant it’s open.

In all honesty, this wouldn’t be a bad thing, except that [Supervisor] then turns around and starts making unintentionally (I think) snide comments about “doing our job for us” and/or how we “need to go faster”. He’s always saying it in a “joking” tone, but it’s a little too consistent for comfort.

After a few weeks of this, where he is doing it all through the day instead of once or twice a week, and our responses are falling on deaf ears, we finally schedule a meeting with the supervisor and someone from Human Resources to air our grievances and get things sorted.

A lot of this is condensed from multiple people voicing the same issue and removing company-specific jargon, so I’ll just refer to “us” for the most part.

Us: “It’s not that we’re unappreciative of help when we get busy; we definitely are. But when you start jumping in when we’re not busy, it takes away what work we do have.”

Supervisor: “Well, if you’re not busy, you should be getting to it.”

Us: “We are getting to it, but if six tickets open within a minute or two, and each one takes two or three minutes to get through, then we’ll get to tickets five and six when we finish one through four.”

Supervisor: “So, why is it taking so long?!”

Us: “It honestly isn’t. We all do the tasks at basically the same speed you do.”

Supervisor: “Then why am I always the one running around doing everything?”

Coworker #1: “With all due respect, you’re not. [My Name], [Coworker #2], and I are constantly going back and forth with the pickers and shippers. The only reason [Coworker #3] isn’t is that she’s still recovering from foot surgery.”

Supervisor: “All right, then someone please explain to me why there’s always something left undone!”

Us: “Because there’s always something new coming in?”

Me: “Are we supposed to always stop something we’re in the middle of, just because something new opens up?”

Supervisor: “Of course not!”

Us: “Then give us time to do our work! You can’t complain if a five-minute process isn’t done in thirty seconds.”

HR Guy: “No one’s complaining that you guys aren’t doing your job fast enough.”

At this point, I’m upset because it’s been going on a while and [Supervisor] still isn’t getting it, so I just gesture directly at him while looking [HR Guy] in the eye. Admittedly, it might not be the most diplomatic way to do it, but it is better than the litany of curses building in my brain.

Supervisor: “Oh, I do not.”

Coworker #3: “You literally said to me, ‘If I have to keep doing you guys’ work because you’re so slow, it makes me wonder if we need you all,’ while I had a stack of ten completed tickets on my desk because I’d been going so fast I hadn’t had time to put them away.”

Coworker #2: “And you said to all of us just yesterday, ‘Why do you guys take so long? I can do this in half the time.’ Meanwhile, it’s not half the time, but still, three-quarters of the problems from our group lately have been from the things you did, because you’re rushing through and not double-checking things the way you tell us to do all the time.”

Me: “And on top of that, on Friday, you were asking why something ‘wasn’t done right’ when I had just opened it and hadn’t worked it, never mind marked it complete yet.”

[Supervisor] sat back a bit, his face a little white and kind of staring off into space. I honestly don’t know if he was embarrassed about getting called out in front of HR by a united front, or if he honestly didn’t realize how passive-aggressive — and sometimes just regular-aggressive — he was being.

[HR Guy], who had mostly been letting us talk everything out and just making sure nobody got too heated, made a quick round with us to make sure everyone had gotten out everything that needed saying and then asked for some one-on-one time with [Supervisor].

[Supervisor] later came to us and apologized. He said he’s just “got a thing” where, if something needs to be done, he has to jump on it, but he admitted that it wasn’t fair to just assume we weren’t doing the work.

So far, it’s been a couple of weeks, and he hasn’t slipped back into his snatchy behavior… yet!

I was a project manager, and my not-so-bright boss dumped a do-nothing and know-nothing employee onto my team. Why, I have no clue, but despite my objections, I was stuck with him. He had no idea what our project was even about, but I tried to find something important for him to do — like documenting our processes and procedures — that wouldn’t cause our project to fail. But he failed at that simple task, too. 

Then came annual evaluations for all members of my team. After writing them, I met with my boss for review and approval. My recommendation, complete with a list of all the screw-ups and mistakes this jerk had made, was to put him on probation for ninety days, and if he didn’t improve, he was to be let go. And he would receive no raise that year.  

Instead of my boss accepting my recommendation for this guy, he told me to promote him to a Senior Analyst position! I could not justify that, and I told my boss so.

Boss: “Do it, or you might be reporting to that guy.”

I got the drift and somehow managed to write a half-decent reason for promoting this guy.

But, I did two things: along with my promotion request, I sent all communications explaining to my boss why I didn’t want to promote him and his responses to “do it”. And in the minutia of the request for promotion, I wrote, “[Employee] is being promoted only because I was told to do it. He is not worthy of this promotion.” My boss never saw or read the negative comments; he just signed off on it, and this guy was promoted.

Thankfully, our project was over in a couple of months and my staff was reassigned, as was I, to other projects. [Employee] was assigned to a different project manager that reported to a different boss. His new project manager quickly learned just how bad this employee was and read his employee file, including the “review” I had written.  

The project manager and his boss came to talk to me about it, and I told them the entire story, complete with copies of the emails between my boss and me, where I constantly wrote and provided examples that this employee was incompetent and did not deserve a promotion, and the responses telling me to “do it”.

Then, the three of us went to the Vice President of the division and explained what happened. [Employee] and my boss were asked to resign or be fired. They resigned.

Good riddance.

I’m an estate lawyer. There’s a type of decedent that every estate lawyer runs into: an old man is absolutely loaded, has no wife or kids, has several nieces and nephews, and dies without a will. His money is squirreled away into a thousand little small accounts across the country.

At least in the case that landed in my lap, the niblings (gender-neutral term for nieces and nephews) were willing to split everything equally, and that helped a lot.

There was no centralized list of what he actually owned, so we were stuck doing all sorts of research to figure it out. The documents came in dribs and drabs. 

I filed for an extension for time to file, and over the course of about two and a half years, we put his estate to rights.

They planned to sell his house, but they decided to remodel first. It’s a good thing they decided to remodel because when they tore up the carpet, they found more money, including bond and stock certificates, hidden under the carpet.

They decided to look into this more closely and found money hidden under the insulation in the attic, behind the bathroom mirror, and even hidden inside the walls behind a blank socket plate.

The clients reported to me that it was like a demented Easter egg hunt, and it made them paranoid that the others were taking the money out without reporting it. They wound up hunting in groups no smaller than three, and they each tallied the money and certificates individually.

All in all, most of the certificates were already accounted for, as the companies had electronic records, but the cash added another million to the estate.

In July, I was diagnosed with alopecia, and as a result of the condition, I have no hair on my head — no eyebrows, no eyelashes, etc. The condition took hold so fast that trying to hide it was useless. It doesn’t bother me all that much because I can’t see it unless I am looking in a mirror.

A group of hobby-related friends and I are getting together for a close-to-Christmas dinner and a blind gift exchange. We haven’t seen each other all that much due to the health crisis.

One set of guys always arrives late. Today was no exception. The one dude doesn’t do social media and hasn’t seen me in person in over six months. He notices my bald head, and rubbing his hand over his own head of hair, he asks me:

Dude: “Is that from November?”

I pause for a moment before I reply.

Me: “No-Shave November?”

I think he’s still confused.