I work in transportation logistics. Most of my drivers are awesome. Sure, we might butt heads sometimes, but most of them are salt of the earth and amazing people.

But then… I have a few that I would like to say are “special.” Either the rules do not apply to them, or the idea of reality only applies to them when it suits them.

ONE of these drivers (I have about five of them), whom I will call Bob (Bob is not his real name), makes me want to ram my head into walls, in hopes that I find the stud in the wall. I am absolutely convinced that Bob does not think for himself. He just acts, and if something happens, it’s never his fault.

The other day Bob called me in a frantic panic. He is upset and starts immediately blaming me (the manager) for the reason for his panic. Here is what transpired:

Bob: *Screaming at the top of his lungs on the phone.* “[Manager]! This is YOUR FAULT! YOU MESSED UP HUGE THIS TIME!”

Me: “Okay… what did I supposedly do?”

Bob: “Well, see, I was at the receiver, and I got out of the truck. And I saw that the passenger side tire had a HUGE nail in it. So, I pulled the nail out, and now the tire is losing air, and it’s now almost flat! I put the nail back in, and now it isn’t leaking air… but you can see what YOU did here! The tire is FLAT!”

Me: “Okay… I have multiple questions here. First: you said you pulled a nail out of a tire, and it immediately went flat?”

Bob: *Scoffs.* “NO! It’s been losing air for a while now. That nail has been in the tire for two weeks. But when I pulled the nail out, it lost more and more air, making it flat. I stopped the leak by putting the nail back in the tire.”

Me: “So… let me get this straight. You have been driving on a bad tire and have known that your tire is almost flat for a few weeks now. You haven’t notified the team or me about this. Furthermore, you saw a nail in the tire this morning and pulled the nail out of the tire, releasing what little air is left, but put it back in.”

Bob: “YES!”

Me: *Trying to not to pop a blood vessel or head desk myself into a stupor.* “Let me put this in another perspective for you. For over two weeks, you have failed to do a proper pre-trip and write up a bad tire. You have driven on the bad tire, knowing it was bad, so if you had ever been pulled over by the DOT, you would have received a ticket. I am re-emphasizing this point, Bob; you saw a nail in the tire and pulled the nail out of the tire, and are acting shocked that pulling a foreign object out of a tire would lead to air leaking out. This is the LAST time I am giving you an out to correct your statement… I am being very generous here.”

Bob: *Pauses for like a minute as the brain processes.* “Well… I guess… that’s… one way to look at it. But… I didn’t do anything wrong!”

I will be honest; I should have left it at this and moved on. But I am a logical person. One must go to two, two to three, and so on. So… I couldn’t let this go. I was hypnotized by the sheer stupidity of this entire situation. So, I had to keep going… and hindsight being what it is… I wish I hadn’t because of what Bob said next:

Me: “Okay, Bob… I must ask this another way because I feel that you think that this isn’t your fault, and you are going to blow it off. But I also feel that you need to learn a lesson here as well. Let me give you an example here. Say this same situation occurred on your personal car. Would you have driven on a bad tire and pulled the nail out?”

Bob: “What do you think I am… Stupid!? I wouldn’t do that to my car in any way. I wouldn’t do that to anyone’s vehicle.”

Me: “Then why did you do it to the company truck!?”

Bob: “That’s different… and it isn’t my fault!”

At this point, I had to end the call and go walk around the building. Bob and I are going to have a LONG talk when he gets back to the office…

I work in the transportation industry. The driver involved in this story was driving for an account paid for by the local city government, which requires us to pick up passengers within a scheduled window. This driver had already called the office several times that day, seemingly just to waste our time, so I was already annoyed by him. In the evening, it was just me in the office, and some of his times hadn’t come through on our end, so I had to call him to get them.

Me: “I just need the pick-up times from [Passenger X] and [Passenger Y] this afternoon.”

Driver: “Okay, let me think … Yes, okay; [Passenger X] was picked up at 2:35, and then [Passenger Y] was at 2:10.”

Me: “…So, you picked up [Passenger Y] first?”

Driver: “No! I picked up [Passenger X], then [Passenger Y], and then dropped off [Passenger X], then [Passenger Y].”

Me: “…Okay, maybe I misheard something then. I have 2:35 for [Passenger X], and 2:10 for [Passenger Y].”

Driver: *Sounding exasperated.* “Yes!”

Me: “…Okay, that’s not possible, though.”

Driver: *Getting loud.* “Yes, it is!”

We argued back and forth for several minutes as I tried to explain to him why the numbers he gave me couldn’t have happened in the order he was insisting they happened in. Normally, I might have just accepted the numbers and put them in the correct order, but if I did that, it meant he was very early to passenger y, and he would be fined for it. I was getting frustrated that I was wasting my time arguing with him for his benefit when I had other things I needed to get to, and eventually shouted:

Me: “[Driver], are you driving a god-d*** time machine?! Because otherwise the linear progression of time makes it impossible for you to have picked up [Passenger X] at 2:35, FOLLOWED by [Passenger Y] at 2:10.”

Driver: “No, I did! Because… oh… Oh, no… I’m sorry, that was [Passenger W]. I… I picked up [Passenger Y] at 2:45.”

Me: *Actively banging my head against my desk.* “That makes more sense. Thank you.”

Driver: “Yeah … sorry, I didn’t mean to yell at you.”

Me: “Uh-huh.”

It was the single stupidest conversation I’ve ever had with a driver, but it did teach him not to jump straight to arguing with our call takers.

I work in a nice hotel in a very old and touristy city in the south of Spain. Our building, along with all the others in the city centre, has been here for hundreds (and in some cases, over a thousand) of years. The streets are narrow, the floor uneven, and the atmosphere charming.

I’ve checked in some American guests earlier today. They were dropped off using our hotel’s shuttle bikes, but these are only used for airport pick up and drop offs. 

They’ve just got back from their first afternoon sightseeing, visiting the town centre and the immediate area. They already look tired and dishevelled. They walk up to me at the front desk.

Guests: “So you guys just… walk places? Like, on purpose?”

I had to hold back from giving a sarcastic answer!

I work in a restaurant on the beach of an island that’s very popular with tourists. The island is about an hour’s ferry ride from the mainland. I am serving a table on the patio and they’re finishing up.

Customer: “Hey, what’s the quickest way to drive back to the bridge from here?”

Me: “What bridge?”

Customer: “The bridge to the island. We should be heading back soon as we need to get the rental car back and traffic here was a nightmare.”

Me: “There isn’t a bridge.”

Customer: “Yes there is! We drove over it!”

Me: “There’s a ferry. The only way you could have got your car over here is on the ferry.”

Customer: “No, we drove on the bridge! But the traffic was awful! At one point we didn’t move for almost an hour!”

Me: “…That was the ferry.”

How did they mistake getting on to a ferry with being on a traffic jam?!

I work at a hotel near a major airport, so we have an airport shuttle to take our guests back and forth. Our shuttle runs 24/7 but we only have one shuttle due to a staff shortage. Currently, it runs on a half-hour schedule, so it leaves the hotel on the top and bottom of the hour and picks up at the airport on the 15 & 45.

The only way to be fair to our guests and keep the schedule accurate is to leave the hotel right on the dot and we only wait a few minutes IF you called down ahead of time to let us know you were running late.

Because the shuttle only fits so many people, we tell our guests at check-in to sign up for a time slot so we can ensure we don’t end up with twenty people showing up for a shuttle that only fits twelve.

Most of us at the desk explain to the guests that they need to be in the lobby five minutes before the time they signed up for as the shuttle leaves right on time and does not wait.

A guest who signed up for a 7 AM shuttle comes down at 7:03 AM.

Me: “I’m sorry, sir, but the shuttle has departed, and you will need to wait for the next available shuttle.”

Guest: “Reserve me another shuttle immediately!”

Me: “Sir, we’ve signed you up for the next shuttle at 7:30 AM.”

Guest: “I want to reserve a shuttle right now! I had already reserved myself a shuttle for 7 AM.!”

Me: “Sir, you are signed up for the next available shuttle.”

This just gets me another insistence that he had RESERVED the shuttle. I realize that he is under the impression that he is oh-so-special and the shuttle was leaving at 7 AM for him specifically rather than leaving at 7 AM for our guests in general.

I try to explain to him that no, he did not reserve a shuttle specifically for himself that was guaranteed to take him when he needed it, but rather he just put his name down to let us know how many people to expect for the already scheduled departure. Of course, he’s super special and important so he keeps reiterating that he had reserved a shuttle and therefore we need to get another shuttle for him immediately.

Me: “Sir, we have one driver so there’s no way to get another shuttle going right now for you.”

This is met with… you guessed it… “bUt I rEsErVeD iT.”

Me: “No, sir, you did not reserve the shuttle. You said you’d be here for the 7 AM shuttle and then you were late, and it left. Your wife came down five minutes later so even if you had bothered to let us know you were going to be late we wouldn’t have been able to wait that long for the entire party to be ready.”

I will say, the one good thing he had going for his behavior was that he never invoked his status (highest status at our hotel outside of lifetime or owner status) but he did ask for the manager’s card and I’m sure we’ll get a bad review out of it.