I worked for a water company for twenty-five years and was one of their most productive repair crews — that is until the new manager started.

We had a monthly rota where you were on call for one week out of every four for emergency repairs out of hours.

On the day in question, I started work at 7:30 am on a Friday and finished work at 3:15 am on Saturday, so it was a pretty long shift. I got to work Tuesday morning, and [New Manager] called me into the office.

New Manager: “According to your vehicle tracker, you left the yard at 3:12 am but logged it as 3:15 am. That is an attempt to defraud the company!”

As you can imagine, I was absolutely fuming at this level of bulls***.

Me: “At the time, I was covered in mud and sweat, and I just wanted to get home after completing a monster shift for the company. Are you genuinely making a s***storm over three minutes?”

New Manager: “I’m making you aware that you could be fired for it.”

Cue malicious compliance.

Me: “If we’re going to be this petty, you can take me off the emergency contact list for extra coverage. And I won’t be starting twenty minutes early each day, either; I’ll now be clocking in at exactly 7:30 am, and I shall be heading out at exactly 5:30 pm, no deviation whatsoever. And you can explain to your bosses why productivity is down and you are struggling to get coverage for emergencies. We’ll then see how important your three minutes are when they are costing the company money.”

Little did I realise at the time that the guy’s job was bonus-related and linked to our productivity, which tanked after that because most of the other gangs followed my lead.

Three weeks went by with an absolute s***-show of customer service complaints about their work not being carried out in a timely manner. My productivity dropped from seven jobs per day down to four.

[New Manager] was called in by his bosses to try and explain what the f*** was going on. He tried to spin some BS story that I’d turned all the guys against him for no reason and that this was the result.

Little did he know that I’d actually trained his boss when he first started with the company fifteen years before. He’d wanted to come out and find out what we did and experience how hard the job was, and he’d surprised me by working a full month on the repair crews before going back to the office.

Anyhow, the boss called me in to find out what was really going on, so I explained how [New Manager] had used the tracker to monitor what time I’d left the yard and that I’d guesstimated my finish time and overestimated by three minutes because I was absolutely knackered after working a shift from Hell on call.

[New Manager] was let go for misuse of the tracking system as it was only supposed to be used for emergencies and not monitoring. We also had our on-call system reviewed to cut the hours we had to work.

I’m a nineteen-year-old manager of a local deli. This place is neat because the original owner was a loveable d**k who didn’t take s*** from the customers. This translates into how we treat people to this day. Anyone who has worked in the hood will understand you can’t show weakness as a business.

One night, I get a call ten minutes before we close. A lady tells me how much she loves our food and explains that she’s on her way to the airport. She has a huge order. I figure she wants to stock up for her house out of state.

Me: “Where are you coming from?”

Lady: “I’m in [Town thirty minutes away].”

Me: “We have a location next to the airport that’s open until 10:00, but our location closes in ten minutes.”

Lady: “Please wait for me and do my order anyway! Please! My food must come from the original location!”

Yep, I was rude. I said, “Nope,” hung up, and continued to close.

She arrived just as I was counting the money. She banged on the glass, and I just gave her a “We are closed” motion with my hand waving under my chin. Then, I ignored her.

She eventually left, presumably to catch her flight. 

I wouldn’t open that door if someone’s life depended on it when money’s out and it’s dark and I’m alone.

The woman later wrote a phenomenal complaint; she even accused me of being racist and the whole nine yards. She’d been eating there for sixty years, blah, blah, blah.

The owner set up a meeting with me, and I explained my side. We agreed that I was right since my main job is getting everyone clocked out by 8:30. But the way I’d handled it was not great. I agreed with that, too. 

They demoted me to server, so I quit. I started a new job in fine dining an hour later and celebrated with lunch at the place where I’d just quit. 

I ate there a few times a year over the years and was never charged.

That lady did me a favor, but getting a kid fired cause you couldn’t take my simple solution off the bat and don’t understand the word “no”?

I once had a job at Harvard. (Yes, that Harvard.) I replaced a guy who was legally blind but refused to admit he couldn’t read a screen. He had “screen enlargement” software which he’d used to blow up text until the entire screen showed one letter, and he’d proceed to spend several minutes trying to figure out what letter it was. As you can imagine, especially for commands which would usually be several hundred characters each, this made computer programming very slow.

They were used to giving him a task to do — always “produce mailing labels to these specifications” — and it taking a week before they got results. They gave me a task, and I had results in an hour.

Me: “I’m sorry this took me so long. It took me a while to figure out the printer.”

Without even looking at my work, the boss ripped me a new one.

Boss: “You couldn’t possibly have results in an hour! I know for a fact that it should take at least a week. Go back and do it right this time.”

I took the labels back to my desk, put them on a shelf, read novels for a week, and brought the labels back to the boss. He looked at them and announced that they were perfect.

Boss: “Now you see what taking your time to do it right can do?”

So, when an employer gives me a task with a stated timeframe that is ridiculously long, I get it done and then don’t give them results until about when they are expecting results; if I do otherwise, I know they will reject my work.

The store where I work is open seven days a week, and our hours are usually from 7:00 am to 6:00 pm or 7:00 am to 8:00 pm depending on the season. Our only exceptions are holidays — Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year — when we close at 3:00 pm.

Although we have our holiday hours posted many days before the holiday season starts, I still get these conversations every season.

On Thanksgiving:

A customer walks in the door very quickly at 2:50 pm.

Customer #1: “You’re still open, right?”

Me: “Yes, we are, but we will be closing in ten minutes.”

Customer #1: “Ten minutes?! Why are you closing so early? There’s still daylight!”

Me: “We close early on holidays, and today is Thanksgiving.”

Customer #1: “So, I guess you’re going to tell me to hurry up and get out, then?”

Me: “No, we will not, because you still have eight minutes to shop. Feel free to walk around and shop. We will be here to answer questions, but we will start taking drawers at three.”

On Christmas:

Me: “Good afternoon! Are we finding everything all right?”

Customer #2: “Yes, we are, thank you!”

Me: “Perfect! If you have any questions, just let us know, and just to make you aware, we are closing at three today.”

Customer #2: “What?! Why? Don’t you close at six?!”

Me: “Yes, we usually do, but today is Christmas, so we’re closing early.”

Customer #2: “But why?”

This one will always be a favourite of mine. Our store has a big space out front that we call our foyer, which connects to another department, so the actual building of our store has three big black sliding doors, but there are an extra set of garage doors in front of each sliding door. At closing, we close the two garage doors on the side, leaving the middle open. Once all customers in the store leave, the middle door goes halfway down.

I am currently watching the front while our cashier counts the last register at 3:10.

A customer quickly runs under the half-shut door and into another department.

I contact my manager over the radio.

Me: “Hey, [Manager], someone just ran into the foyer.”

Manager: “Wonderful. Where’d they go?”

Me: “They’re looking at trees.”

Manager: “All right, I’ll go tell them we’re closed.”

I watch the customer looking around while my manager walks outside.

Manager: “Hi, sir, can I help you?”

Customer #3: “Yeah, I was just looking for a nice lemon tree.”

Manager: “That I can help you with, but I must let you know that you won’t be able to purchase today or put it on hold.”

Customer #3: “What?! Why not? Aren’t you a business? You’re open!”

Manager: “Actually, we’re not open. We closed at three, and I don’t have an open register to check you out.”

Customer #3: “Fine, then. I’ll leave and you won’t get any of my money.”

Manager: “And that’s fine with me. You can come back any time tomorrow from seven to six.”

As my manager walks back in, the customer leaves the way he came, ducking under the garage door. After he leaves, my manager goes and closes the door fully. 

Manager: “Happy New Year to us!”

I work in a tech company. Usually, we have a software deployment every other Thursday. The team usually has a long meeting — two or three hours — on Friday after deployment. However, we usually have some minor issues after deployment, and I have to do a lot of monitoring and fixing, so I usually ask the team to push the meeting to Monday so we can stabilise the system first.

A few weeks ago in the meeting, they pointed out how I was always postponing the meetings, and we never had them on their set date, which is Friday.

Me: “Usually, the system isn’t stable on Fridays and I have to fix it.”

Team: “No, we must stick to the schedule!”

Me: “Okay.”

After two weeks, I attended the meeting at its scheduled time on Friday. It went on for like three hours. When we came out, there were hundreds of emails and tickets from the client; the servers had been down for hours right at peak usage time. Our clients were PISSED; they had lost tens of thousands of dollars during that time.

The thing is, it was already the end of my workday, so my boss had to pay me a hefty amount for working on weekends and twice the days in leave as a replacement.