It was my first week taking calls for a job I had recently started. I was doing tech support for a scientific instrumentation company. I picked up the phone, and a guy asked for help with one of the super basic instruments I supported. Even though I was new, I felt confident that I could help him. But then…

Caller: “Is there a man I can speak to?”

There actually weren’t any guys around at that moment.

Me: “No, sir.”

Caller: “How long do I have to wait?”

I put him on hold and grabbed one of my male colleagues, interrupting him from whatever task he was working on. He helped the guy and confirmed that the customer was a sexist idiot.

Somehow, my boss’s boss heard about it, and she fired [Caller] as a customer.

Client: “I don’t remember the answer to my security questions.”

Me: “That’s fine. You can just type whatever you want into the answer boxes three times, and then it will email you a password change request.”

Client: “You want me to type what?”

Me: “Just gibberish. It doesn’t matter; I just want you to get past the security questions.”

Client: “Okay. How do you spell ‘gibberish’? I want to make sure I put it in right.”

Many years ago, I was working in IT at a Silicon Valley tech company with about 10,000 employees, about 3,000 of whom were at headquarters and had to move to the new campus. This was the most exciting event for the company, and everybody had been offered tours of the new campus, there was cubicle furniture set up for people to review, there was communication, excitement was built, division meetings were attended, and of course, boxes and labels were delivered to the appropriate places.

We were moving the users in weekend-size bunches. On Friday, the users were to pack up their cubicles with the provided boxes, and on Friday night at quitting time, we started working through the areas that were moving to “bag and tag” the computers. All the cables and accessories would go in a Ziploc bag stretch-wrapped to the monitor. Anything that was loose or hanging was stretch-wrapped tightly to its component. Everything got a label of the right color with the employee’s name and new cube number on it. Then, we called in on the radio and they put a dot on a map of the building indicating that the cube was “done.”

The place looked like a war zone with piles of boxes and wrapped computers, as well as dust and garbage. 

We walked into one cube where everything was still neatly in place. The bookshelves were filled with books, the computer was booted up and logged in, nothing was in a box, and there was a gentleman working away. He was some sort of graphic designer, and he had a large-screen Mac (this was 1990). This was at 8:00 pm on Friday night.  

When we told him that he was supposed to be all packed up since movers were coming at midnight and we needed to bag and tag his equipment, he responded in a flustered tone:

Employee: “NOBODY TOLD ME THIS WAS GOING TO HAPPEN!”

I worked for a university IT department as a student worker for a little over four years. We had a sister department, the media center, which loaned out laptops, projectors, and other technology to professors as needed.

In my fourth year of employment, in 2005, I was on a first-name basis with nearly all the employees of the university, including the head of the media center.

[Media Center Head] was the queen of her kingdom and had quite a few obnoxious rules in place, but the most important was an iron-clad employee ID policy for checking out laptops. Under normal circumstances, I completely agree with this policy; however, this wasn’t a normal circumstance.

We got a call from [Media Center Head] at 4:40 on a Friday. (We closed at 5:00.) A laptop she was trying to loan out to a very important professor wasn’t able to log into the network, and she requested that we come to look at it. Sure thing.

I made the ten-minute walk across campus from our office to the media center with my tool kit. When I got there, I saw the professor and [Media Center Head] and asked to see the laptop.

Media Center Head: “Wait, [My Name], you need your name badge. Where is it?”

My mind flashed to my name badge, clipped to my jacket, hanging on a coat rack in the IT office.

Me: “Ah, it’s on my jacket, [Media Center Head]. I forgot to grab it rushing over here.”

I chuckled a bit.

Media Center Head: *Deadpan* “[My Name], you can’t work on this until you go get your badge.”

Me: “[Media Center Head], I thought this was an emergency. Do you need me to fix this right now?”

Media Center Head: “Yes, of course, but we still need to always follow policy.”

Me: “Fair enough. Policy is incredibly important. I’ll go get my name badge.”

I left the office and trekked the ten minutes back to my office. Then, I picked up the phone and called her.

Me: “Hey, [Media Center Head], just letting you know that because it’s 5:20 and policy states that student workers can’t work after hours, I’ll have to come back Monday. Have a great weekend!”

She fumed at me for a few minutes until I essentially hung up on her.

It was my fault that I had forgotten my badge, but policy is very important, and it was [Media Center Head]’s prerogative to decide that the badge policy was too important for her to overlook my mistake. And it was mine to overlook the “student workers cannot be paid overtime” rule.

[Media Center Head] was not in the office when I went to work on it Monday morning, but the laptop was fixed within forty-five business minutes of her reporting the problem to our office, which is relatively fast.

My phone isn’t working (no dial tone), and my Internet isn’t working, either. I call the phone company from my grandma’s house down the street.

Me: “Hi, my phone is down and there’s no dial tone.”

Tech Support Rep: “Are you calling from your phone right now?”

I didn’t even know what to say to that.