I am an office manager with a tax preparation company. This is my first year managing, but I’ve worked for the company for a while.

Our office has a massive fridge. The first thing I noticed when opening it was that it was completely full of containers full of rotting food, to the point that containers spilled out when opening the fridge.

We had a second, smaller fridge, and a “drink cooler”-type fridge sitting on a desk that were each similarly full.

The work is highly seasonal. People also often work only one year and do not come back. I posited that most of this food belonged to long-departed employees.

I really wish I was exaggerating in order to tell a tale, but I am not. The smell when any of the fridges were opened was indescribable. It caused my ear wax to dribble out my ears, my eyes to water, and my nose to abruptly plug itself in snot.

I decided that, on my last day for the tax season (April 30th), I would clean out the fridge. Throughout the year, I reminded everyone that the apocalypse was coming and to get their food containers out of the fridge. I told them that I would be throwing out any food container left in any of the three fridges at the end of the year without checking if the food was good or bad, and that I would be thoroughly cleaning the fridges. That next year, I would be instituting a strict dating policy to prevent this from happening again 

I wanted to institute the policy this year and clean the fridge right away, but the district manager told me that I should clean the fridge out first and that the tax pros should have a year’s warning. Foolish me, I assumed that this was tacit approval of my plan.

April 30th came, and with it came my revenge. I threw out everything in those fridges. I unplugged them from the walls, scrubbed them out with soap and water, and then followed up with disinfectant just to be safe. I replaced the air filters and water filters in the fridges and hooked everything back up.

I also took pictures of everything I threw out, just to cover my a**. Unbeknownst to me, this would bite me in the a**, instead.

See, it turned out that something like three-quarters of those containers belonged to one particular long-running tax pro. He’d been with the company for forty years, had an EA (Enrolled Agent certification), and was our most experienced guy.

And he was pissed about losing all of his containers. Some of it was “vintage” or “antique” and some of it was made of glass — all of it was apparently somehow expensive. He demanded reimbursement from our company or he would walk.

My carefully documented pictures proved that we’d had his containers and that we had destroyed them. 

My company decided to reimburse him and chose me as a scapegoat. They fired me.

I start a job in a little Greek Restaurant early in high school. When I get hired I spend the first two days cleaning everything the owner and son are too lazy to clean. I’m talking about years’ worth of old grease in the deep fryer’s interior, mold in the fridges, stains in the bathrooms, etc.; all just very gross.

It’s coming to the end of the second day:

Me: “So, how does payday work here? Is it weekly, bi-weekly, what?”

Owner: “You are on training; if we like the job you do we will hire you with pay.”

Me: *Confused.* “So you’re saying that you’re not going to pay me for cleaning years’ worth of mold, grease, and bathroom stains?”

Owner: “No, you will be paid for work once your training is done.”

Me: “Oh! Okay. F*** this, I quit.”

Yes, very illegal, and yes I should have done something about it, but I was sixteen and didn’t know how to. I did bad mouth them to everyone at school though, who constituted a significant percentage of the dining populace in our small town, so I know I canceled a few big bookings that otherwise would have been held there.

I am asleep, but my husband wakes me up by farting loudly as he comes into the bedroom. I stir slightly, so he reassures me.

Husband: “I’m just looking for my phone.”

Me: *Half-asleep* “What, are you using echolocation to find it?”

He laughed, took his phone, and left.

The strip mall that I work in has a back alley, which is there so that stores can take trash to the dumpster without going through their front door. It’s not an area intended for customers, since there’s nothing back there except for garbage. There’s nothing stopping customers from going back there, but the area is intended just for store use.

This strip mall has an after-school tutoring business and a karate studio, among several other businesses.

One day, I go to take my store’s trash to the dumpster, and there is a pile of human feces in the dirt near the dumpster. Since this isn’t my store’s problem, it’s not in customer view, I don’t have biohazard clean-up tools, and poop biodegrades anyway, I make the decision not to pick it up. It appears that every other store in the strip mall makes the same decision because the flower bed feces stayed there for a few days.

One day, I’m taking out the trash, and a customer with a child tries to get my attention.

Customer: “Hey! Why is this still here?”

Me: “Don’t worry; it’ll wash away. It’s going to rain tonight.”

Customer: “This has been here for four days, and no one has picked it up.”

Me: “None of us have the biohazard tools to clean it up. It’s safest to leave it here. Dogs poop here all the time.”

Customer: “This isn’t dog poop! This is human poop! My child pooped here almost a week ago, and no one cleaned it up!”

I made up some excuse about how long I was allowed to leave my store, turned around, and left her. I’m too much of a coward to confront someone who isn’t even my customer and who is crazy enough to blame someone else for her son’s poop.

After hearing so many stories about teachers and other authority figures who won’t let students use the bathroom in school, I wanted to tell this story about my first day of third grade, back in the early 1990s. My teacher was laying out the ground rules and expectations for the year.

Teacher: “And if any of you need to use the bathroom, raise your hand. I’ll call on you, you tell me what’s going on, and I’ll excuse you. But! If it’s an emergency, just go. Yell that you have an emergency on the way to the bathroom. If anyone tries to stop you in the hallway, just say that it’s an emergency and go to the bathroom. I’ll help you deal with it after.”

She sighed deeply and continued.

Teacher: “I say this because, in my first year of teaching, my class was working on an assignment. I told anyone who had a question about it to line up at my desk and I’d help. One little girl, a very sweet girl who never caused any trouble and always wanted to do the right thing, got at the end of the long line. She waited and waited while I helped the students in front of her. When it was her turn, she started to tell me that she didn’t feel well, and threw up all over me. So, if it’s an emergency… just go!”