One of the most frustrating things about the warehouse work I used to do was the complete disconnect between the sales staff and the warehouse. Sales staff would promise the moon and stars to customers to secure a sale, with little to no consideration for what it would do to the warehouse staff, the worst promise being that we would wait for a customer to come back and pick up goods.

After a few months of these ridiculous promises, I finally went to management and said that if sales staff expected us to stay past close to assist a customer, then we would be billing that time as overtime.

Management downright refused, as the company couldn’t “afford” overtime.

A few days after that conversation, I was on the sales floor unpacking a new range of rugs when a salesperson approached me with this woman who immediately had the “I want to speak to your manager” vibe.

I could tell already from this lady’s smug smirk that she had worn down the salesperson and made them promise her something that would be against policy.

Sales Associate: “Hey, [My Name], this lady has bought a few rugs from out the back. Can she come to pick them up later?”

Me: “Sure, you can pick them up between now and 5:00 pm.”

Customer: *Smugly* “Your salesperson has already said I can come back at 7:30 pm and pick them up.”

Me: “Well, miss, I’ll be here until 5:00 pm. After that, the warehouse is closed for the evening. If you’d like, I can always help you tomorrow morning—”

Customer: “I’ll be here at 7:30, and you’d better be here, or I’m calling the manager and f****** complaining.”

I just gave her a shrug and went back to my work.

Customer: “Oh, and make sure you clean the rugs before I pick them up. I’m going to be inspecting them, and they’d better be f****** spotless.”

She then turned on her heel and walked off. The salesperson walked away, assuming all was good. There was no way I was waiting two and a half hours for such a condescending, crabby woman.

I grabbed my trolley and made my way back to the warehouse, passing the clearance area.

As I was walking, I noticed a lady’s purse sitting amongst a stack of cushions. I walked over and picked it up to take it to the counter, and I had a gut feeling. Could it be? I opened the purse and found a driver’s license; it was the customer’s license and purse!

I chuckled to myself as I walked back to the warehouse, made my way into the warehouse office, and took extra care to safely secure her purse inside our safe.

I then started my closing-up process, and as a little extra slice of pettiness, I typed in the all-purpose alarm code and reset the alarm system code so only I could unlock the warehouse when I showed up for my shift the next morning.

Apparently, this lady showed up at 7:30 pm only to find the gates locked, everything pitch black, and no rugs.

She filed a complaint and wanted a full refund — not for the clearance prices she paid but for the FULL PRICE of the rugs.

When I was questioned about this, I provided my manager with the emails from the general manager stating that they wouldn’t pay employees to work any overtime.

They also questioned me about the change of alarm system code, and I just said that we had a potential security issue, and with this lady’s expensive purse being left in the store, I figured it’d be best resolved the following morning and kept in a safe and secure spot.

When the customer did show up to pick her rugs up, I also helpfully pointed out that it was illegal for her to be driving without a license.

She shot me the most amazing death glare I’ve ever seen.

I come from a trucker family, so I understand many of the difficulties of being on the road for the long haul. What I don’t understand is someone who spends over a hundred hours a week on the road having no idea where they are.

At work one day, our warehouse received a call from a delivery driver who was having issues finding our location. We were located in a small complex of fewer than fifteen warehouses off of I-70 in Colorado. We were located between the city of Aurora and the town of Watkins, which isn’t exactly known for having much in the way of buildings. Between GPS and basic directions that all truck drivers receive with their loads, the driver on the phone should not have had an issue finding our general location.

I was asked to jump on the phone call after two people unsuccessfully tried to direct this driver.

Me: “Hey there. Can you give me your current location?”

Driver: “Uh, yeah. I’m on I-70 West. Can’t seem to find you guys.”

Me: “Can I have the nearest mile marker?”

Driver: “No idea.”

Me: “Exit?”

Driver: “Nope. Got nothing.”

Me: “Well, what do you see around you?”

Driver: “I passed by a dinky town a few minutes ago. There’s a bunch of trailers on my left that I’m passing now.”

Me: “Oh! I know exactly where you are. Okay, you’re going to drive past those mobile homes and go under an underpass. You’ll go about four miles, I think, before you come to [Exit] for [Street #1]. At the end of the ramp, take a right and follow that to the next light. You’ll take a right at that light onto [Street #1]. Follow that past the [Company #1] sign. You’ll cross a set of railroad tracks and then turn left at [Street #2]. You’ll see [Company #2] there on your left. Go down to the next warehouse, and that’s us. You’ll want to go to the stop sign and make a left. The truck entrance is near the other end of the building. You’ll pull into the parking lot and go around the building for unloading.”

Driver: “Right. Should be there in a few minutes, then. Thanks.”

Me: “No problem.”

Twenty minutes later, the phone rang again, and I was called to the desk to deal with a very irate truck driver.

Driver: “I followed your directions, and now I’m on my way to the airport! You gave me bad directions! You wasted my time, and now I’m behind schedule!”

Me: “You got off too soon and went onto E-470, which is a toll road. You need to turn around and follow my directions.”

From there, I gave him step-by-step directions like you would your senile grandmother who should have given up driving a decade ago. He argued with me almost every step of the way, especially getting back onto the toll road to go east again and when he realized he was passing the warehouse. I explained to him that he had to pass the warehouse to get to the frontage road on which we were located. He became very angry when he saw signs for companies I hadn’t mentioned before, which I was no longer having him pass because I had him coming in from a different road instead of the highway.

All told, I spent over an hour giving this trucker directions to a group of warehouses that were basically in the middle of nowhere, with clear directions on how to exit the highway. I gave him exit numbers, street names, which turns to take, and landmarks to look for. It really wasn’t a difficult place to get to. It certainly wasn’t like trying to navigate in Denver or another large city. You had only so many options to get to us.

I got a stern talking-to because I was now behind on my own work and because the truck driver was unsatisfied with my assistance. I told my boss that he could waste an hour of his time giving directions to someone who shouldn’t be driving an 80,000-pound-plus vehicle.

One of our dimmest bulbs on the forklift rotation brilliantly put a shipment of glass olive oil bottles, wrapped on a broken pallet, on the fourth shelf up — about thirty feet in the air. How he got it up there without it collapsing, I don’t know. But when someone else went to take it down… Have you ever heard 360 glass bottles smashing?

The sound was incredible. It went on for a cartoonish amount of time. People didn’t even move for a second, just transfixed. But when we did, everyone came running. We got the driver out, shaken but safe, and then we found mops, rags, cat litter, and squeegees.

We designated “oily” for the people working in the crash zone and “outside” for the runners, so we wouldn’t track olive oil everywhere, and found clean shoes for them.

That is the biggest workplace catastrophe I have ever seen, and also the biggest come-together moment.

I’ve been lucky to mostly work with great people through most of my jobs. Every now and then, however, a real piece of work slips in. This jolly fellow was actually quite pleasant to hang around with off the clock; ON the clock, however, it seemed like everything else on planet Earth was a priority besides what he was actually being paid to do.

It came to a head one day when our manager was out and, being most senior, I was technically in charge of the four resident goons despite not having an official title. It should be noted that we didn’t have individual stations; we had one desk that had the [Shipping Company #1] machine, another desk that had the [Shipping Company #2] machine, and two long benches where we stacked, scanned, and boxed orders.

Me: “Hey, [Coworker], are you gonna get those [Shipping Company #1] boxes done?”

Coworker: “Yeah, I’m on it. Don’t worry.”

Me: “Yeah, starting to worry. You’ve had those two things on the desk for fifteen minutes now. I’ve done literally twenty [Shipping Company #2] orders in that time.”

Coworker: “I’m getting to it!”

Me: “It should not have taken more than five minutes. What—”

At this point, I’d come around the desk. He had some joke-of-the-day site up, full-screened, a Word document with “script” in the title showing in the taskbar, and neither our software nor the [Shipping Company #1] software even open.

Me: “Dude, we’ve got work to do!”

Coworker: “It doesn’t matter. They’re not gonna be here for what, four hours? That’s plenty of time!”

Me: “Yeah, and in those four hours, we’re gonna get about a hundred other orders, with no way of knowing how many for each carrier. We can’t just put it off to the last minute expecting things to be slow all day.”

Coworker: “Whatever. I’m going to the bathroom. I’ll do it when I get back.”

And with that, he just walked off. I finished the [Shipping Company #1] he left behind, and the rest of us continued on. And on. And on.

Fully half an hour later, with all of us wondering what had happened, [Coworker] strolled back in.

Me: “Dude, where have you been?”

Coworker: “It don’t matter.”

Me: “Uh, it does matter when you’re on the clock.”

Coworker: “IT. DON’T. MATTER. Don’t you care about what I’m doing. It don’t matter if I’m in the kitchen making coffee or if I decide to go off to the bathroom and play with myself!”

The other two guys made assorted disgusting noises, and I locked eyes with him. My tone goes ice cold and staccato when I’m angry, which I’m told is accompanied by a “Kubrick Stare.”

Me: “First off, don’t ever say that, around any of us, again. Second, yes, it does matter. I am sick and tired of having to rush at the end of the day to finish the stuff you leave behind.”

Coworker: “Bull! When do you do that?”

Me: “EVERY. DAY.”

Coworker #2: “Pretty much.”

Coworker #3: “Yeah, we got a whole pile right now, man. Stop b****ing and get it worked down!”

Did he, in fact, start doing his job? NOPE. He “needed to cool down,” so he took a walk around the entire corporate center parking lot for ANOTHER half-hour, and when he got back, he was still almost physically shaking with anger and saying he was gonna have it out with the manager when he got back. I had already left a voicemail and email with said manager by that point, and yes, there were cameras to prove that he was gone from the warehouse for an hour straight. The manager “wasn’t allowed to tell me” that they docked him an hour’s pay for those stunts.

I’d give him the benefit of the doubt for being a fresh-faced kid with no life experience, but he was a decade older than me and ex-military! Not long afterward, he found another job and put in his two-week notice; they “let him” just leave.

Related:
And Nothing Of Value Was Lost

My first job out of high school was working at a book distribution warehouse. This was back in the early 2000s, when Amazon was still a relatively small company and brick-and-mortar bookstores were still the main place to buy books.

At the beginning of December, we were all told that it was mandatory for everyone to work one Saturday; the warehouse was typically closed on Saturdays. I started at 6:00 am on a Saturday morning with the rest of my department. At 10:00 am, my department was done with all our stuff, so we were all sent over to work in another department, who’d started at 8:00.

By noon, people who’d started at 10:00 were being sent home because they had run out of work. My department was told to stay even though we’d originally been told we’d be there for a six-hour shift, and people who’d been there for much fewer than six hours were already going home. Most of us had not bothered packing lunches, and per company rules, we were not allowed to leave the property during work hours — not that there was anywhere that we would have actually been able to get to, get food, and get back before lunch was over — so we were stuck getting whatever cheap junk we could from the vending machines.

At 2:00, we were told to keep going. At 4:00, we were told to keep going. At 5:00, they brought in some really cheap, low-end pizza for us from who knows where. It wasn’t good, but by that point, those departments that were still there were so tired and hungry that we didn’t care. Finally, at 7:30 at night, after we’d been there for thirteen hours, we were told we could go home, which we happily did.

And to top everything off, the next week, those of us who’d had to work that extra-long shift were all sent home after half an hour of work several times to ensure that none of us would get overtime.