About fifteen years ago, I worked in a large hospital for kids in the maintenance department. Our manager was a major b****. No one on our team liked her, and we outwardly showed no respect for her after her constant harassment of us in the two years she worked there.

She would call us on the maintenance radios and be rude or tell the guys they were being incompetent. It was beyond micromanagement but also rude on top of it. She expected the maintenance guys to come to do work at her house for free, or she would tell some of the hospital vendors she would guarantee the hospital contract if they did work at her house for cheap. She used to brag about this to me. [Manager] and I were the only women in our department of about twenty-five people.

I was a mouthy twenty-something-year-old and didn’t care for her attitude, and I would regularly say, “Yeah, sure, whatever,” when she asked me to do things. I would do what she asked because it was my job, but I would make a noncommittal remark like that.

One time, [Manager] asked me to come to her house and help her pull down dead trees in her backyard since she was having a pool installed. I said no, mainly cause I wouldn’t do it for someone I liked let alone her, and pretty soon after that, she started treating me even worse than she did before and trying to get me in trouble. For example, she CCed her buddy in Human Resources on emails to me asking for the status of projects that I was working on and wanted my replies in writing.

Fast forward six months. I was five months pregnant with my first baby, and I was chatting in the office with one of the maintenance guys. [Manager] asked me to do something — I don’t remember what.

Me: “Yeah. Whatever, sure. I’ll do that in a few minutes.”

And I turned back around to talk to my coworker. [Manager] was standing behind me, and I heard her whisper:

Manager: “I wish I could slap the s*** out of you.”

I could see that my coworker heard her say it, too, and I made no comment, but I was shocked. I acted like I didn’t hear her. She left the office a minute later to do something.

I got up and walked down the hall to the employee health department because my heart was racing, and I was fuming, pissed, and five months pregnant. The employee nurse had me lie down for a bit, took my vitals, and wrote up a formal report. An hour later, she sent me back to my desk as okay to continue working.

When I logged back in, I saw an email from [Manager], with Human Resources CC’d, asking where I had been for the last hour as she’d called the office phone a bunch of times and I had abandoned my desk.

I emailed her back.

Me: “I apologize for being away from my desk. When you said you ‘wished you could slap the s*** out of me,’ I was so upset that I had to be calmed down and have my and my baby’s vitals checked at Employee Health. They were concerned about my hostile working environment and wanted me to stay there for the full hour.”

I made sure I BCC’d her buddy in HR and ALL of HR, her boss, and his boss to make sure everyone saw it.

I was summoned to HR about thirty minutes later. I knew [Manager] hadn’t seen my reply yet; this was the early 2000s and her computer was down in the office near me. They had me go home for the day and put me on admin leave for three extra days.

I came back to the office to see that [Manager]’s desk had been emptied out, and we never saw her again.

Those guys in maintenance threw me the best baby shower ever three months later.

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I work as a QA (Quality Assurance) at a factory that processed potatoes. When something goes wrong in the factory that’s directly tied to quality, such as bad coloring or defects, I as a QA lead have to write a report. These reports are very detailed and extremely time-consuming. When something goes wrong that isn’t directly tied to quality but affects it, such as a machine breaking or foreign material getting in the machines, the lead in charge of the machines is supposed to write the report.

Somehow, all of the reports end up being written by me even though I have my own time-consuming job to do. I have been fighting to not do others’ reports for months, and my boss has told me to remind other leads when a report is needed.

One day, I’m doing my reports plus my data analysis duties, and I hear over the radio that a refrigerator unit has gone out and all the product is coming out as boiled mush instead of frozen, so I call refrigeration.

Me: “You need to do a report on this. I’ll send out an email counting how many pallets of product we lost.”

I send the email and continue on with my day.

Two weeks later, my boss calls me into her office.

Boss: “Why didn’t you write a report on the incident with [refrigerator unit]?”

Me: “You told me to remind the other leads to do it and not write their reports.”

Boss: “If you have time to send an email, you have time to write a report.”

Then, she makes me sign a write-up for failure to do my duties (which I do placidly because she has written up everyone else in my department and has been looking for something to write me up for, so I decide to let her have it and get it out of the way).

A couple of months later, the exact same thing happens. All I do is tell refrigeration over the radio to write a report. I do nothing else, knowing that refrigeration won’t write it. Because there is no report or helpful emails, the product is almost shipped out two months later, but it is caught by one of my QAs, who mentions the incident to [Boss].

[Boss] calls me to her office.

Boss: “This incident is going to cost the company millions in storage fees for the time it was already stored, disposal fees, lost product, and a fine from [Retail Chain] for not meeting our contract. Why didn’t you email me about this?”

Me: “I didn’t have the time, but I did tell refrigeration to write a report.”

She couldn’t write me up for it because I had emails from her telling me how to handle these situations.

I’m not actually tech support at work but de facto support because I can plug a USB in on the first try (okay, I’m lying; no one can do that) and because I know enough to get myself into trouble and some fancy Google search terms to get myself out of trouble.

I don’t actually have a budget for IT equipment, but I can pretty much buy what I need (and occasionally want) if I have reasonable justification for it. I just need the owner of the company to sign off on it, and to be fair, he rarely says no because he knows I do things at as small a cost as possible.

Every day, I need to print just over a hundred pages on a printer at the other end of the office (only a handful of meters away), but as the printer has a maximum of a hundred-fifty pages, I need to check that it’s got paper each time. The young lady who works right next to the printer tells me to just ask her to check the paper level.

Asking her to check the paper level each day gets boring, so I rename the printer “Kraken”. Now, instead of asking her to check the paper level, I can ask her to “ready the Kraken”. (We’re weird and it makes us smile.)

The owner overhears one day as I yell, “Ready the Kraken!” He has a good sense of humour and sends me an email.

Owner: “I don’t remember signing off on a Kraken. Please can you send me the initial outlay, running costs, and justification for a Kraken? Please also remember to submit the VAT receipt for a Kraken.”

I get a ticket from an employee.

Employee: “My hard drive is almost full. Can you help?”

Me: “Okay. What have you been doing lately on the PC that is taking up so much space? For example, have you been downloading a lot of files lately? When did you last clear your cache?”

And so on.

I remote in, go into the browser, and clear the cache, but [Employee] is still uncomfortable with the free space on their drive. I clear the %temp% folder. [Employee] is still uncomfortable with the remaining free space.

Concerned something might be wrong, I start running a security scan on [Employee]’s PC. For a while, the filenames being shown are all similar. They go like file1.txt, file2.txt, and I think it stops at around file5000.txt. I then check the files, and yup, they take up a lot of space.

Me: “Why do you have 5,000 copies of the same file?”

Employee: “I was trying to back it up.”

Apparently, keeping 5,000 copies of the same file was a good way to do so, and they didn’t get the meaning of “have multiple copies of your data”.

Trying not to laugh over the call, I simply told the employee that they could upload the file to the network drive. [Employee] then uploaded the file to the drive and deleted the 4,999 copies of the same file.

Now, they were comfortable with the free space on their drive. I ended the call and closed the ticket, and hopefully, they won’t make the same mistake again.

I work as a cashier in a large chain grocery store. We sell ice, located in a large freezer near the front of the store next to the registers.

It’s slowing down in the store and I have some return items at my till that need to go back. We can either bring the items to customer service so they can return them to the shelves, or we can go return them directly. The item I have is located in a nearby aisle, so I decide to return it directly.

Our large ice cooler is located at the end of this aisle. As we have been having a heat wave lately, our ice is sold out again today.

As I turn up the aisle and pass the ice cooler, I hear a woman close the cooler door and comment out loud, “Oh, there’s no more ice!” I continue walking and return the item to the shelf. As I turn around, the woman is standing directly behind me, blocking my way out of the aisle, and glaring daggers directly into my eyes.

Customer: “Did you just ignore me?!”

Me: “Pardon? Did you need help with something?”

Customer: “Did you. Ignore. Me?”

Me: “No, not intentionally? I was returning an item to the shelf. I’m sorry you had the impression I was ignoring yo—”

Customer: “There’s no more ice in the cooler.”

Me: “Yes, we are all sold out of ice.”

Silence. She looks at me blankly and does not say anything else for seconds, seemingly unhappy with my answer.

Me: “We don’t have any more ice. We are sold out.”

Customer: “Well, where am I supposed to get my ice from?!”

Me: “You could try [Gas Station] across the street; they usually have some.”

More silence. She’s still glaring at me.

Customer: “I came here to buy ice.”

Me: “We do not have any ice in stock at this time.”

She waves her hand at me and turns to leave.

Customer: “Don’t be so rude!”

I really didn’t think I sounded rude, and I was genuinely confused when she came up to me asking if I ignored her. She didn’t address me directly at all before she confronted me — no “Hey” or “Excuse me” to get my attention. Although I did hear her say, “Oh, there’s no more ice!”, it sounded more like an observation out loud rather than asking an employee if there was more somewhere else.