In 2017, my sister and I were out for brunch and had a lovely time at an upscale rooftop restaurant in the heart of our city. Y’know, the kind with a full setting, cloth napkins, and white tablecloths. The kind where a pancake entrée has the word “melange” and mimosas are $16.

We had a great time even though the service was a little rushed. We get it; Saturday brunch means a lot of tables with a speedy turnover. My sister was a waitress all through college, and we even joked about her applying for the weekend shifts since she’d make great tips.

When it came time to settle the check, we noticed that we had been charged for two coffees, which we didn’t order nor received. While handing the bill back, I ask that they be taken off.

Waiter: “Well, you got coffee.”

Me: “I’m sorry, we actually didn’t. See?”

I showed him the pristine, empty coffee cups.

Waiter: “No, there are two coffee cups on the table.”

Me: “There are coffee cups on every table.”

At this point, he kind of huffed and rolled his eyes.

Waiter: “I don’t have the authority to remove anything from the bill.”

Before I could ask for someone who did, he smirked and said:

Waiter: “The manager on duty just went on break. You’ll have to wait thirty minutes for her to come back. But I’ll be asking you to wait at the host stand since we need the table.”

My sister and I looked at each other and we both got the same idea.

Sister: “Well, okay. I guess if we’re being charged for coffee, I’d like a refill.”

Me: “Oh, for me, too. And can you bring cream and sugar?”

It was at this moment that the waiter knew he’d f***ed up. We spent another twenty minutes sipping coffee and keeping him from turning the table. We asked for refills once, and I asked if they had any raw sugar packets.

By the end of it, he was pointedly ignoring us. We kind of giggled about it, and I made a very dramatic show of flourishing my card, putting it in the booklet, and setting it upright. My sister even tried to flag him down, but he refused to look in our direction.

We finished and hung around until he came back with his manager. He was smirking again. Big lips, that guy. I have to say, that facial expression stayed with me.

Waiter: *Sickly sweet* “Okay, you two, we have a seating time limit to allow our other guests the opportunity to eat with us. Will that be all today?”

Me: “Well, we’ve been waiting for you to take our check. I was trying to get your attention earlier, but you must have been busy.”

I offered him my card and the booklet, and I’d never seen a human turn red so quickly. He muttered that he’d be right back and marched off to run it. While we were waiting, the manager asked us about our experience. We said we both had a great time and we’d be back, and we relayed what happened. At least we ended up enjoying the coffee.

We paid, left a decent tip, and skedaddled. But it felt good knowing he probably cost himself a ticket’s worth of tips over $9 in coffee.

I am a technician, and I travel to various stores to work on their point-of-sales machines. This means I’m often behind their counters.

I’m working at a store when a lady comes up to the counter with her items.

Lady: “I’m ready to check out.”

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I don’t work here. I’m just here to fix this machine.”

Lady: “Oh! I’m so sorry!”

Me: “It’s no problem, ma’am. I get that all the time.”

We joke about it for a moment, and then she has a brilliant idea.

Lady: “Oh! You should get a shirt that says, ‘I don’t work here, lady!’”

Related:
I Do Work Here, Does Not Work Here
I Don’t Work Here, Does Not Work Here, Part 46
I Don’t Work Here, Does Not Work Here, Part 45
I Don’t Work Here, Does Not Work Here, Part 44
I Don’t Work Here, Does Not Work Here, Part 43

I have one of those technician jobs where I go all over and work on point-of-sale machines. I often get mistaken for someone that works at the store because I’m behind the counter. Normally, people are understanding, but not at this store.

When I arrived at this store, I was greeted by the manager and owner of the store because they had been having issues with a barcode reader. The problem was that there was nothing I was really able to do about it. We had been having this issue for months, and as techs, we were not given any way to fix it.

I had the manager and owner threatening to get me fired because I “didn’t want to do my job”. (They didn’t like me already because of something that my coworker told them months earlier when I was still in training.) I was pretty frustrated just minutes after walking into the store.

I spent about four hours in this store doing everything to try and fix this issue. This store had a big island in the middle of it with a cashier on either end, and I was working in the middle of them. I had people come up to me almost the entire time I was there trying to get me to ring them up. I would just tell them I didn’t work there and they’d have to go to the other people, and I would point to the cashiers.

As I was about to wrap up for the day, I noticed six police officers come into the store and start talking to the manager. I didn’t catch the whole conversation, but I did hear the cop ask:

Cop: “Are you sure that everyone behind the counter is supposed to be there?”

Manager: “Yeah, those are my two clerks, and he’s the tech trying to fix the problem.”

They were there for about fifteen minutes and never said anything to me.

To sum it up, I went to fix a broken machine, got my job threatened, and had people walk up to me every five or so minutes, and one of them called the cops because someone was behind the counter that didn’t work there.

I worked in Africa as an operations manager for a large global security company from 2009 to 2014.

The country I was working in had been through a long civil war and was very underdeveloped — think no paved roads, and people living a very traditional African lifestyle. At the time, I’d been working there on a rotation of ten weeks in the country and two weeks at home for about four years.

I’d flown to and from work so often that I had the journey down to the bare-minimum travel time, and it worked out as the cheapest option for the company because travel days were paid from when I left home. The shorter my journey was, the cheaper it worked out for the company.

Someone in the head office looked at cutting down on travel costs, probably to make themselves look good and get promoted. As a result, I got an email after a week at home saying they had changed my normal flight, which was at 5:00 pm on Sunday from my nearest UK airport, via Amsterdam, then on to Nairobi, Kenya, connecting with a 9:00 am flight to [Country] on Monday morning. The change was from a 5:00 pm departure to a 5:00 am departure the same day, using the same route and saving about £80.

To clarify, the 9:00 am flight from Nairobi was the first flight to [Country] because the destination airport was the only surfaced runway in the country. It had no runway lights or radar, so all flights had to be in daylight.

I agreed to the flight time change, but they had to move it to Monday so I wouldn’t lose a day at home. They agreed because they still saved £80 on the ticket — no skin off their nose.

Once I got the flight confirmation, I contacted the travel desk asking for hotel and taxi bookings. When they asked why I needed these, I explained that a 5:00 am departure required a check-in at 3:00 am, so I needed a hotel at the airport on Sunday night because no trains were running to get me the three hours to the airport from home at that time of the morning.

The flights they booked would get me into Nairobi at 7:00 pm — after dark — so I’d need a hotel there and a taxi each way to and from the hotel to get me onto the 9:00 am flight on Tuesday — the same flight I would have been on if I’d left at 5:00 pm but a day later.

A couple of days went by, and I got a phone call from the company travel desk telling me the travel plan was confirmed. I was on the 5:00 am flight with a hotel reservation at my UK airport the night before and a hotel in Nairobi after landing, and the taxi would collect me in Nairobi and drop me at the airport for my final connection.

I asked about the cost savings and they said it was £80. I then asked about the hotels and taxis. They replied, “Oh, they don’t come out of our budget; that’s the operations budget, so you’re fine.”

I was happy. I was arriving back at work a day later, still paid the same amount, with a night out in Nairobi to sweeten the deal.

My boss, on the other hand, went nuts! Nobody had told him about the changes. My deputy flew out on the plane I flew in on, meaning I didn’t get a handover of the work that was going on. On top of that, the cost of hotels, taxis, and an extra day’s pay had all come out of my boss’s operational budget.

I think the total amount added was almost £1,000, but hey, they saved £80 on the flight cost!

The house next door to me has been converted into luxury apartments, all of which are let via a popular lodging rental app. It’s a large, three-story Georgian house.

Access is via a key code on the door, which often causes problems for people who have not bothered to read their confirmation emails and assume that a human being will be there to greet them! On more than a few occasions, I’ve had to explain this to bewildered tourists. They are usually very polite. On one occasion, I even gave a weary traveler — just off the plane from South Africa — a hotspot so he could retrieve the code from the app.

Yesterday evening, I was leaving my house, and the second I got out the door, I was verbally accosted by a woman standing outside the house next door, with what I assume was her husband. She was in her mid-fifties, I’d say.

Before I even closed my door:

Woman: “Finally!”

Me: *Looking surprised* “Sorry?”

Woman: “We’ve been waiting here for over an hour!”

That was a lie, as they hadn’t been there when I’d come home only thirty minutes earlier.

Woman: “I’ve been ringing the doorbell and nobody’s answering!”

Me: *Trying to be polite* “Oh. Are you trying to get into the [Rental]?”

Woman: “Well, obviously! I need you to let me in immediately. This is not good enough!”

Me: “Eh, I can’t do that; you need to enter the code on the keypad.”

Woman: “What code? I don’t have time for that. Just let me in!”

Me: “I don’t have anything to do with the [Rental]; I just live next door to it. You need to enter the code on the keypad.”

Woman: “What nonsense! You’re just being lazy.”

The husband blurted out the woman’s name, and she acknowledged his existence for the first time but quickly shushed him.

Me: *Losing my patience* “Look, lady, I don’t work for the [Rental]. There is nobody there to let you in. You need to get the code they sent you and enter it on the keypad. Bye-bye.”

Then, I started to walk away quickly as I saw my bus approaching. The last thing I heard was:

Woman: “Get back here, young man! I pay your wages! I’ll have you fired for this!”

As I was regaling my friends with this tale in the pub, I wondered whether the couple would still be standing there hours later, but when I got home, they were nowhere to be seen.

I guess I should expect a write-up from my (nonexistent) manager in the morning!