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…

My job requires a lot of international travel. A silver lining to this is that we can collect personal airmiles from all the business-expensed flights, so they can add up pretty quickly.

One of my senior coworkers, who has been saving her air miles for a while, comes into work one day excited, with a special letter and card from the airline we most frequently use.

Coworker: “I’m now a member of the Mile High Club!”

Me: “Uh… what?”

Coworker: “I got a million miles saved up! That puts me in their special club! Look!”

Me: “[Coworker], you’re trying to tell me that you’ve saved up a large number of miles with [Airline], right? Nothing else?”

Coworker: “Yes! Why, what are you talking about?”

Me: “Do you know what the Mile High Club is?”

Coworker: “Yes, it’s the club you join when you’ve saved a high number of miles with the airline! I hear people talking about it all the time, and I’m finally a member!”

Me: “Okay, let me explain something…”

After I told her what the Mile High Club really was (which has a much lower barrier to entry), she was very grateful that I was the first person in the office she had told that morning!

This story happened a number of years ago, so the actual conversation is an approximation of what was said. 

I went into a pizza place, which was part of a group of businesses, restaurants, etc., owned by the same family. When I went in, there was an adult man standing at the counter ordering, and a girl, maybe twelve years old, standing a little further back. I assumed the girl and the man at the counter were together, so when the staff member (who I later learned was the owner) called me over, I stepped up and started to order.

Girl: *Tentatively.* “Uh, I was next…?”

Me: “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry! I thought you were with him.” *Gesturing at the other customer.* “Please, go ahead.”

I stepped back from the counter and motioned her to go ahead, and the owner got a sneering look on his face.

Owner: “Don’t worry about her, she can wait. What do you want?”

Me: “Um, no. She’s already been waiting; it’s her turn now. I can wait a few minutes.”

Girl: “Can I get a large pepperoni, please?”

Owner: *Sighs like it’s a massive inconvenience to serve a customer.* “Fine. But you should really let adults go first; you don’t need pizza that badly.”

The girl pays as he’s saying this, and he disappears into the back before either of us can say anything in return. While we’re waiting for him to come back, the other customer leaves with his pizza, and the girl’s mother comes in. The girl tells her what happened.

Me: *To the mother.* “I really am sorry. She was standing quietly towards the back, and I genuinely thought she’d already ordered. The staff member was not particularly kind about it, though.”

Mother: “Thank you for standing up for her. I’m going to have a word with him when he gets back.”

The owner returns with the girl’s pizza, still sneering, and kind of shoves it across the counter at her.

Owner: “Here’s your pizza. Next time, you let adults go first and wait until I call you.”

Mother: “There won’t be a next time if this is how you treat my child when I’m not here. She was waiting her turn politely, this guy—” *Gesturing to me.* “—just made a mistake and he apologised for it. You don’t tell my kid to wait longer just because you care more about adults!”

The owner and mother argue for a bit, and I exchange uncomfortable looks with the girl. Eventually, they leave, and the owner tells me my pizza is ready even though I didn’t get as far as paying for it. I hand him the money, and he offers to give me a can of drink for free to “make up for them” with a nasty tone of voice, clearly implying the girl and her mother were the problem.

Me: “No thanks, I don’t want anything free from someone who talks like that to kids. She did nothing wrong, and you were cruel to her for no reason. I’m paying for this pizza now because it’s already ready, but I’m also going to call your boss to ask if it’s store policy to make kids wait longer and argue with their parents over it.”

Owner: “Ha! Good luck, I am the owner, so there’s no one you can complain to.”

Me: “In that case, you just lost three customers, myself, and those two, and I will be letting everyone I know in this area how you treat people.”

I wish there were some satisfying ending to this where the pizza place went out of business because everyone banded together, but there isn’t. A handful of people I know said they don’t go there anymore, and the pizza place certainly looks a bit emptier than it used to, but when your family owns half of the businesses in the area, I guess they can bail you out as much as you need, no matter how rude you are to kids.

I work in a government office (city education). A coworker who has been brought on as a contractor to upgrade our tech comes over to me in the office. We’ve built up a semi-informal repartee in the office.

Coworker: “So, you know those leaving drinks you were going to organize for me next month?”

Me: “Yeah?”

Coworker: “Cancel them. They’ve just offered me a permanent position.”

Me: “Oh, awesome! How come?”

Coworker: “Last week, one of the guys being replaced by the system upgrade was told he was being let go, and he had until the end of the day to put his things in order. I have no idea why that database administrator was given free rein like that after being told he was fired… but he either deleted or added slurs to the records of about five hundred children in the city database and then sabotaged the backups.”

Me: “The h***?! And it’s your job to fix it?”

Coworker: “Yeah, to fix it and to detail the damage for the criminal case they’ll be bringing against him, but hey, job security for me!”

Me: “I get it’s gonna take a while, but how is fixing the damage going to be a permanent position?”

Coworker: “They want someone around who’s trained to fix future embarrassing emergencies. I mean, if you saw some of the things he renamed some of those kids… well… I’d hire me too!”

There’s a woman who just started working with us and couldn’t get logged in.

Me: “You have your password? You have your [2fa App] running on your phone?” *The proprietary two-factor-authentication software.*

New Hire: “Yes.”

Me: “Okay, put in your username and password, then put in the code on [2fa App].”

New Hire: “I didn’t get it typed in fast enough; it changed.”

Me: “That’s okay, just delete it and wait until just after it cycles, then type the next one in.”

New Hire: “I still can’t get it in fast enough.”

So, I watch her. She follows my directions, and I figure out what her issue is.

Thirty seconds isn’t long enough for her to type in the six-digit code from [2fa App].

I’m at a total loss here… and I don’t have any suggestions for this problem. I tell her I can’t help her, and I explain the issue to the floor supervisor.

Me: “Boss, I’m not trying to be ageist here, but… she can’t seem to type in the six-digit code off [2fa App] fast enough to get logged in.”

Floor Supervisor: “Oh, that happens all the time. Just tell her to wait until just after it clicks over. A new code is generated every thirty seconds.”

Me: “Yeah, she can’t seem to type fast enough from it resetting.”

Floor Supervisor: “It’s six digits long.”

Me: “Yeah, and she can’t make it through all six digits fast enough.”

Floor Supervisor: “So… why are you telling me?”

Me: “Because… It’s not my problem anymore now that I’ve told you?”