I work at a twenty-four-hour pharmacy, working the drive-thru. A person comes through our outer lane so I get on the phone to speak with them.

Me: “Good afternoon! Thank you for choosing [Pharmacy]; are you picking up or dropping off?”

Patient: “Picking up!”

Me: “Great! Can I get the name and date of birth?”

The patient gives me their information. I put that information in and get no results; this is not uncommon.

Me: “Okay can you spell that for me?”

The patient pauses and then does so.

Me: “Okay, I’m not seeing anything ready for you.”

Patient: “I JUST CALLED AND YOU SAID YOU HAD IT!”

Me: “Well, let me check our system.”

This isn’t uncommon, as people will sometimes call the wrong store. I check our computers — nothing.

Me: “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but I’m not seeing you in our system.”

Patient: “IT’S [DRUG]! YOU ALL SAID YOU HAD IT!”

She’s shouting so loud the entire pharmacy can hear her from outside.

Me: “Ma’am, I’m not seeing you in our system; we have not received anything at any of our stores…”

Patient: “WHATEVER! JUST TRANSFER IT TO THE STORE AT [SHOPPING CENTER]!”

Me: *Pause* “Ma’am, we don’t have a store at [Shopping Center].”

Patient: “What?”

Me: “[Shopping Center] has a [Competitor #1] and a [Competitor #2].”

Patient: “Then where am I right now?”

Me: “[Pharmacy].”

Patient: “Oh. I’m at the wrong store, then.”

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When customers pay online for their groceries, they are given an estimated total, our system adds roughly $15 to $20 extra onto that total because of items priced by weight, and the customer is charged the new amount. For example, if they’re given an estimated $100 total, they will be charged $120. Then, when we’re done shopping, we will pull from the amount charged and the difference will be refunded back to their card. If their total was $105, we will take that out of the $120 and they will get $15 back on their card. It usually takes three to five business days for the money to go back onto the card, but we will tell customers five to seven business days just to be safe.

The Friday before Memorial Day, we have a customer who paid online for her grocery order. We pull the amount we need and the process for the refund begins. On Memorial Day — Monday — she calls us.

Customer: “Where’s my money? I placed my order on Friday and the money still hasn’t shown back in my bank account!”

Me: “It usually takes five to seven business days for the money to appear in your account, depending on how fast your bank works.”

Customer: “I’ve never had it take this long before! I need that money!”

Me: “I understand, but it’s also a holiday weekend. The banks aren’t even open today.”

Customer: “I don’t care! It shouldn’t take more than three days! It’s never taken this long before!”

Me: “Business days, ma’am.”

Customer: “Huh?”

Me: “Business days: Mondays through Fridays. But again, because of the holiday, it might take a little longer than normal. If the money isn’t in your account by next Monday, I would call your bank.”

Customer: “So you haven’t even started my refund yet?”

Me: “We released the difference on our end on Friday; your bank just has to approve it. It should take five to seven business days.”

This seemed to satisfy the customer. She never called us back, so I’m assuming the money showed up in her account a few days later. Is there a better way to charge customers for online grocery orders? Probably, but I don’t know anything about IT or programming, so I don’t know how to make it better.

I have had small dizzy spells throughout the day. Thinking I am just tired, I push through them.

Me: “Here is your change, sir, your order should be…”

Things get fuzzy and dark around the edges.

Me: “…out… short—”

I pass out. I am out for a few minutes and knock over the cup holder and divider for the cash registers, and I have a large lump on my head from falling. I come to with my coworkers standing over me filling out orders.

Customer: “What a lazy lout! Sleeping on the job! I hope you fire her for holding everything up with her laziness!”

Coworker: “That’s my sister! She just collapsed and hit her head!”

Customer: “Don’t you cover for her! Lazy b****!”

I am in high school, working at a local bagel store on weekends. Every morning is practically packed out the door with customers waiting in line for breakfast sandwiches and coffee. 

On this particular morning, I am the only cashier for a line of over twenty people, while all of my coworkers are busy making orders. 

A girl from one of my classes gets to the register. I notice that something seems off about her while she walks.

Friend: “So, how’s your history paper coming along?”

Me: “All right, I guess. I finished it a few days ago. You?”

Friend: “I just stayed up forty-eight hours straight finishing it.”

Me: “Wow, that’s—”

I get cut off mid-sentence when the girl collapses to the floor, hitting her head on the way down. I hop over the counter to help her. I call for help from the crowd, but the only people to come assist are my coworkers. I turn to the line of customers.

Me: “Somebody call 911!”

Twenty pairs of blank stares look back at me.

Me: “Lots of you have cell phones! Please! Somebody call for a paramedic!”

Customer #1: “I placed my order for some food; aren’t you guys going to finish it?”

Me: “Unless some of you come to help this poor girl instead, none of us can do our jobs!”

Customer #2: “I don’t have all day! Get back to work!”

Me: “Has anyone called 911 yet?”

Customer #3: “I have hungry kids at home! Hurry up!”

Taking this as a sign that 911 has still yet to be called, I pick up the store phone to call 911 myself. My coworkers manage to revive her, but she’s still in serious condition. By now, the crowd is starting to get unruly, and they focus on me.

Random Customer: “Great! Now he’s on the phone! Kids are so disrespectful these days!”

911: “911, what’s your emergency?”

Me: “I’m at [Store] and a teenage girl passed out and hit her head!”

Another Random Customer: “YOU JUST LOST A CUSTOMER! THIS IS RIDICULOUS!”

Me: “There’s a mob of angry customers forming, so please hurry!”

911: “Did they cause her injury?”

Me: “No! She just passed out from lack of sleep!”

911: “Are you in any danger?”

Yet Another Customer: “F*** YOU! I’M LEAVING!”

Me: “I’m not sure… They’re just violently hungry!”

911: “Sadly, I understand the situation all too well. Stay calm until paramedics and police arrive. Just to be safe, extra officers have been dispatched.”

She stayed on the phone with me and gave my coworkers and me instructions on how to help the girl out until paramedics arrived. By the time the police arrived, most of the customers in line had left out of frustration. The girl was taken to the hospital; she ended up being just fine, though.

I would have lost my faith in humanity that day, except that my manager immediately transferred me to a different store that wasn’t nearly as crowded on weekends, promising me that I’d have a better experience. The store was newer, the location was better, and the customers and I quickly got to know each other on a first-name basis. Thanks to them, I realized the whole ordeal was just an isolated incident.

This takes place during what is supposed to be my last semester of college. I’m majoring in finance, and all business majors are required to take a capstone course before graduation. In this class, we basically do nothing but group work, and we are stuck with the same group for the entire semester.

I wind up in a group that has a marketing major, an international business major, and an independent studies major; she made her own major using business classes and classes from another degree program but still had to take the capstone class. The two girls in my group are who I mostly talk about because the one guy in the group does seem to sympathize with me but never does anything about how the girls are treating me.

The first few assignments aren’t that big, and we make it through all right. Then, we get to the first big project. The assignment is to take a well-known tech company and find a way to improve it. The first step is to look at the financials for this company as well as three competitors. Since I’m the finance major, we decide that I should do the financials for the tech company while each of my teammates does the financials for one of the competitors.

To properly do the financials, you must first go the SEC website, find the 10-K doc for your company, and copy the Balance Sheet, the Income Statement, and the Cash Flows statement into an Excel doc. My accounting professors all drilled into me that part of this process includes finding all the totals on these statements ourselves and not just copy/pasting them into Excel. Once you have these statements in Excel, you must then calculate about thirty different ratios using the data you pulled from the SEC site. Most of the ratios are straight-forward, but the last two or three give me some trouble. All in all, this whole process takes me about two hours to complete.

The day this assignment is due, we meet an hour before class starts to compile everything together and so I can look over their ratios. I quickly notice something is off with all of their documents. Instead of manually calculating all the ratios, they just Googled the current ratios for their company. “It’ll be fine; just check and make sure the ratios are fine,” they tell me.

“I can’t check them; there’s no math for me to check!” I explain.

“Then do the math,” they say.

Yes, they want me to do about six hours’ worth of work in forty-five minutes. I instead compare their numbers to mine, fix anything that looks really wrong to me, and let it be. They are livid when our professor gives us back a poor grade, saying 90% of our ratios were wrong and we didn’t show the math most of the time. Turns out, all but two of my ratios were correct.

Things get worse for me a few weeks later. The class meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have a small assignment I think is due on a Thursday but is really due on a Tuesday. I find out an hour before class that I have my dates wrong. Luckily, I have the assignment half-done, so I quickly finish it up so I have something to turn in. My teammates do not like that, and this is the point when two of them decide I am a bad group mate.

I am taking a full course load that semester, and my teammates don’t like that I insist on going to my other classes, specifically my English class. I have put off taking my last 200-level English class, and the school actually has an attendance policy for 100- and 200-level classes. I am only allowed three unexcused absences a semester, and we use a clicker system to take attendance.

“We all skip our other classes to get this done, you should, too,” they reason. They even purposefully schedule meetings with our professor during my English class so they can make a case that I am not doing anything to help with the project.

As the time for our big presentation grows closer, we spend most of our spare time in the library. This is when I learn that I am the only stress-eater in a group of stress-starvers. If I insist on taking a thirty-minute meal break, they throw a fit. If I bring snacks, they say I am too distracting. If I bring headphones so I can listen to some soft music while I work, they say I need to contribute more to the group. When I say I need to leave by eleven so I can actually get some sleep, they whine and say I need to stay and help with the work. When I say I need to study for a quiz for another class, they say this is the only class that matters. There is no pleasing these people, so I stop trying.

In our presentation, we’re supposed to use an Adobe product — not PowerPoint — for our slides. Now, one of my other classes is also doing group presentations with this same program, so I am the only one on my team who is familiar with the program. As such, I volunteer to handle the slides. My groupmates aren’t quite ready when I ask for their parts, so I change my password on the site to something generic — I’m already using my college email address — and give them the login info so they can update the presentation on their own time. The night before the presentation, I check the slides, make a few adjustments, and go to bed.

The next day, I’m pulling up the slides on my laptop and to my horror, one of the girls has gone in and totally changed everything. There isn’t time to fix it, unfortunately. No surprise, we get a bad grade on the presentation. But when they have the gall to say I was the one in charge of the slides and making sure everything looked nice, I am furious. I go to our professor after the fact and tell him I cannot work with them any longer. He won’t put me in another group, but he does say I can do the work by myself.

I ended up dropping the class. I signed up to take my capstone class online that summer and begged the school to still let me walk at graduation. They said I could. Unfortunately, my grades in my other classes suffered that semester, and I only passed two of my classes. I did walk at graduation, but I had to retake most of my classes online that fall.

After I dropped the class, I was over at a friend’s dorm. Her dorm was more like a suite with one common area and three bedrooms with two or three beds in each room. Turns out, one of my groupmates was one of my friend’s suitemates, and my friend said she was a horrible suitemate. 

By far, this was the worst group project I ever had.