I’m answering the phone at the print shop where I work.

Me: “[Location] Printing, how can I help you?”

Caller: “Hi. I’m trying to get a couple of small signs made — just simple text and, I dunno, the size of a piece of paper?”

Me: “Sure! You can—”

Caller: “HOOOOONK!”

Me: “—can, uh, email us a design at—”

Caller: “Yeah, that won’t be necessary. Can I just describe it? We really gotta hurry this process up. I’ll accept all liability of whatever if you just do the bare minimum to make it okay.”

Me: “Uh, let me ask my sup—”

Caller: “HOOOOONK!”

Me: “—my supervisor about that. Can you describe what you’d like?”

Caller: “Big bold letters. Bright background. Text that says, ‘Do not test airhorns indoors.’ That’s a— HOOOONK!”

A customer orders a batch of custom invites from us. She signs off on the final design and comes back later to pick them up.

Customer: “There are things misspelled on these!”

Me: “You signed off on them, ma’am.”

Customer: “You must have changed them without my knowing! Get me a manager!”

My manager ended up giving the customer her invites for free and taking the price out of my pay.

I’m glad I was able to walk out of that job at the time.

When I worked in a print shop, I was the only person in the office. I often had people treat me like a therapist, and of course, I was trapped.

This woman came in to have a bunch of scraps of paper copied — torn notebook pages, scratch paper, ripped sticky notes, things like that. As I was copying everything and meticulously spreading them out to her liking, she started telling me why she needed these copies.

I wish I could remember it all, but she told me a convoluted story about how the young new pastor at her church was sweet on a married woman, caused a divorce, and then was flaunting his new bride.

Apparently, this customer was the organist and she knew something secret about the affair, and someone was trying to keep her quiet by stealing her organ music in hopes that she would leave. She had apparently confronted several people, but no one would listen to her, and she was laughed out of the church.

She later went to the pastor’s home and punched him in the face. The reason she needed all these notes was to use as “evidence” in her trial that she was actually the victim.

Folks. She talked to me for four hours. Four. And no, I never got her name.

CONTENT WARNING: Severe Injury To A Child

This happened years ago when I was a nurse. I was tasked to design the T-shirts for a work event and have them printed and produced for our next conference. I secured a local printer to produce the shirts, and when they were completed, I went to the printers to pick them up.

When I got there and produced my invoice, they needed to prepare and wrap them, which would take a few minutes, and I waited in the lobby. While I was waiting, a woman and her son (around five) came in for her order for a family reunion. She barely paid attention to the staff, and when told to wait, she got on her phone, pretty much ignoring her son, who was running all around the lobby, screaming at the top of his lungs. He then decided to run behind the counter toward the back where the printing machines were. The counter clerk tried to get the woman’s attention, but she just ignored the clerk and continued talking on her phone.

The clerk did successfully get the kid to go back into the lobby, but she was called to the back to pick up my package. The kid took this as his chance to shoot behind the counter and went running into the back. I thought one of the staff would catch him, but they were swamped with orders and just didn’t see him run past. But the time someone spotted him, it was too late.

There was a loud, high-pitched scream and crying, and then there was a loud commotion and it appeared that everyone was screaming… except for the kid’s mother, who was still on her phone, oblivious to the chaos coming from the back.

That’s when another staff member came out carrying the crying kid and holding a bloody towel around his hand and screaming to the receptionist to call 911. Only then did the woman turn around to see her son. She then screamed at the staff member:

Woman: “WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY SON?!”

Employee: “Somehow, the kid got to the back, ran up to one of the working machines, and stuck his hand in between the hot blades, and it sliced off one of his fingers!”

The woman started screaming at the staff member and the counter clerk, berating them and threatening to sue them, while still ignoring her son. He was still in the arms of the staff member, who was trying to stop the bleeding. That’s when I went up and assessed the situation, got something to slow down to bleeding, and tried to save the mostly severed finger.

As the ambulance pulled up, the woman was actually STILL ON THE PHONE, telling whomever she talking to what had happened to her son, and she STILL hadn’t checked on or even touched her son. The staff member transferred the boy to the EMTs, and they put him in the ambulance and took him to the hospital.

The woman actually waited and demanded her package before she even attempted to follow the ambulance to the hospital.

A month later, when I went back to the printers for another order of tees, I had to ask if they ever heard what happened to the little boy. He did lose his finger and his mother was charged with neglect due to the testimony of the staff of the shop and video evidence. I didn’t find out much more than that, but I do hope that the woman did not regain custody of that poor kid.

I create designs for a print shop and have a very frustrating boss. Here are a few examples of how she manages our department.

I was tasked with creating a sign to mark the Employees Only area of our shop. I made a simple design with a red circle with a line through it next to the words, “Employees Only.” My boss made me change it to a text-only design because:

Boss: “The circle with the red line through it is hostile. It’s like we’re saying our clients aren’t welcome here. You should make the sign more welcoming. I went to college for this. I got my degree on this matter.”

It’s true my degree isn’t in Marketing; it’s in Business… but so is hers! I also feel it’s ridiculous, as the red circle with a line through it is a universally recognized symbol, and I feel that maybe, just maybe, the people who don’t read signs would recognize the symbol and stop before entering. Regardless, her version must have been “welcoming” as people did keep barging through the back door.

In a different case, I was tasked with designing a business card for a client. I came up with a design that met all of the specifications and showed it to my boss for final approval. She suggested one change, which I implemented immediately, and then she approved it without further comment. The job was sent to the printers. Before it was shipped out two days later, I happened to pass by the printer area and see it. The graphic I chose had been completely removed, leaving the card as just plain text. I asked the boss about this.

Boss: “The graphic made it hard to read the text.”

I disagreed — I wear glasses and had taken my glasses off to proofread the business card and could read everything just fine — but since she’s the boss, if she wants no graphic, then there’s no graphic. This client had no strong feelings about that particular design choice. I just couldn’t understand why my manager wouldn’t tell me when we were going through the approval process so I could correct it. I can’t understand why she felt the need to go behind my back to remove the graphic herself without even telling me at any point in time!

Speaking of “hard to see,” she claimed that a lot; I know for a fact, though, that my vision is worse than hers. I would look at the things she would nitpick over, claiming that the position of words and graphics were “hard to read.” I never had the problem reading what she said was impossible to read. If anything, it boiled down to stylistic differences. I preferred one strong graphic to interact with the text. She preferred repeating the same graphic in a tile pattern, which resulted in a series of smaller graphics and a lot of white space. I also felt that I was her least favorite designer, as she perpetually commented on my use of fonts — which were always on the list of approved fonts for any given job — while she never commented on my coworkers’ designs. One such coworker went as far as to use a bubble letter font with googly eyes — not requested by the client — and the boss said nothing and didn’t go behind that coworker’s back to change anything.

But through it all, I just swallowed my thoughts with, “I’m being paid regardless and she’s the boss.” However, the most recent incident caused me to post here. 

I worked for half a day on a new job: a series of advertising fliers for a local client. I had a pile of photos the client wanted to use, and this client had spoken to me about which images were the best of the bunch. I worked hard, laying out everything with the approved colors and fonts. I kept everything to no more than three graphics per flyer so that they would all be large enough to see at a distance. Most flyers only have a single client-given photo; a few have two. My boss approved my designs.

The next day, I went through our shared folder looking for an unrelated assignment when I noticed the “recently edited” date on my flyer project was only a couple hours ago. I opened it and, sure enough, my boss had again gone behind my back, except this time, she had absolutely and completely and totally butchered everything. She crammed upward of six graphics on a single flyer, choosing the busiest graphics and putting frames around each image, so each image would be all the smaller when printed. The frames even had the original creators’ watermarks on them, so she just took images from the Internet! She ignored the client’s preferred photos, and she associated photos together on the same flyers that were supposed to be on different flyers. She also butchered a couple of the layouts, resulting in one flyer with the images literally stacked on top of each other like a deck of cards and a different flyer cut in half, size-wise. She didn’t even make a copy of all the work I had done initially. She overwrote everything, leaving behind nothing but her versions with her edits. This meant I had to take another half-day remaking the flyers up to the client’s actual specifications.

The thing is, if she wanted edits, she could have simply not approved my initial designs and given me feedback on what to change. She didn’t have to lie about approving things and then go behind my back to butcher everything.