My boyfriend and I are relaxing at home on a Sunday afternoon and decide to order some lunch for delivery. We agree on a “freaky fast” sub sandwich franchise we haven’t eaten from in a while. 

The last time we ordered from there was about two years ago, and it was a big mess with the order going through, us waiting almost two hours, then driving down there to find them closed. There were employees in the building, cleaning or something, and they said they weren’t accepting orders. No one had called to tell us that – they just let our order sit there in their system for an eternity, without canceling it or anything. 

We figure, two years later… it should be fine by now, right?

We place our order in the app and settle in to watch television while we wait.

An hour goes by with no food and no updates on the app, so my boyfriend calls the restaurant. 

Boyfriend: “Hi, there. I placed an order on the app an hour ago, and I was just wanting to check on that, please.”

We can hear the employees giggling and goofing off in the background, as the very “I don’t care” attitude of the employee who answers the phone oozes forth:

Lazy Employee: “Uh… I don’t know. What was the name?”

Boyfriend: “James Jones.”

Lazy Employee: “Uh… guys, do we have an order for a James Jones? Oh, uh, yeah, here it is. We’ll make that for you and send it right now. Bye.”

Boyfriend: *To me.* “Yeah, they totally forgot about our order or something.”

Me: “Wow, and they didn’t exactly sound busy, from all the giggling.”

Half an hour later, the doorbell rings. The delivery guy is wearing dirty sweatpants, a baggy, stained non-uniform T-shirt, and Crocs. I mean… dress how you want, I guess, but it looked extremely unprofessional for a franchise chain delivery person. Whatever, we finally got our food.

We settle in with our bags of food in front of the television, happy to finally have our lunch.

I had ordered my sandwich toasted, so I grab the one that feels warm and unwrap it. I’m surprised to find it covered in oil, hot peppers, and other toppings that aren’t even close to the sandwich I ordered. (I ordered a basic turkey, ham, and provolone with lettuce and mayo, and requested no tomato).

Me: *Handing the sandwich to Boyfriend.* “Is this yours? Looks like they toasted the wrong one.”

Boyfriend *Inspecting the sandwich.* “It looks… kind of like mine. Except it’s missing all of the different meats that are supposed to be on there. This is just salami and hot peppers, it looks like.”

Me: “Geez… well, the other one must be mine, then. I’m annoyed that it’s not toasted, but whatever.”

I take the other sandwich and unwrap it. It’s nothing but roast beef and tomatoes.

Me: “They got mine completely wrong, too.”

Boyfriend: “Geez, what the actual heck?”

He calls the restaurant again.

Boyfriend: “Yeah, hi. I just had my order delivered and it is… completely wrong in every way.”

Lazy Employee: “Okay.”

Boyfriend explains the multitude of errors to the employee, even though it doesn’t seem like the employee cares one bit.

Lazy Employee: “Okay, we’ll remake it and send it back out. Bye.” 

An entire hour goes by, and we’ve pretty much accepted the reality that we’re not actually getting our food. My boyfriend had given in and eaten his incorrect sandwich because he was too hungry to wait any longer.  

I hate roast beef and tomatoes, so I refused to eat the one that was sent to me. The longer time ticked by, the hangrier I got. We hadn’t done our weekly grocery shop yet, so the only food we really had in the house was rice and cereal, and I needed protein. Otherwise, I would have just eaten something else rather than stake my entire being on this one sandwich.

I’m just about to walk outside and hop in the car to drive down to the restaurant and stand there until they remake the food in front of my eyes… when the doorbell rings.

Our window is open, and the same sweatpants delivery guy is there. My hunger and annoyance take over and I loudly and snarkily say:

Me: “Wow, it’s been another entire hour! That was ‘freaky fast’!”

My boyfriend thinks it best that he answers the door, due to my mood that has plummeted to the depths of B*tchyville, due to waiting two and a half hours for a freaking sandwich.

I open the bag, and they actually got the darn order correct this time, thank the gods.

Me: “I’m sure this thing is covered in petty employee spit, but I don’t give a s*** at this point.”

I happily devour my sandwich, my mood improving with every bite, and we enjoyed the rest of our Sunday. 

I did check the reviews online, and this location has tons of negative feedback about long delivery times, poor communication, and incorrect orders. Yeah, we’re never ordering from there, again.

Related:
Sub-Standard Sub-Service, Part 9
Sub-Standard Sub-Service, Part 8
Sub-Standard Sub-Service, Part 7
Sub-Standard Sub-Service, Part 6
Sub-Standard Sub-Service, Part 5

Back in the late 1980s, when gold prices were soaring, my sister worked as a field geologist for a gold mining company that was exploring old gold mines. With the rising price of gold, and advancing extraction techniques, mines that had been abandoned because they were “played out” could actually be reopened profitably.

To determine whether or not it was worth reopening the mine, the company would get a series of core samples, which involved derricks similar to oil drilling rigs.

One of my sister’s coworkers was climbing up to the top of a rig holding a stainless-steel wrench (yes, it was a safety violation, not using both hands for the ladder).

Just as he got to the top, he missed the rung with his ladder hand, so he tossed the wrench up to the platform to grab a rung with the wrench hand. Proving that Murphy never sleeps, the wrench flew unerringly into the open bore hole.

Because the wrench was nonferrous, they couldn’t use magnets to get it out, and because it was hardened stainless steel, they couldn’t just drill through it, so they had to “fish” for it.

Three days of fishing later, they finally managed to remove the wrench. The foreman looked at the man who caused all this trouble and said, “You’re fired!”

The now former employee looked at his boss and said, “Then I won’t need this anymore,” and dropped the wrench right back down the bore hole.

My greatest ‘never interrupt an enemy while they’re making a mistake’ moment happened once at an old job.

Three of my coworkers acted like princesses: haughty, above certain tasks, dumping little bits of work on me, etc. They would badger and harass me into picking up their slack since I was the youngest member on the team, because they had some perceived seniority, even though being at the job longer was all they had as far as power. 

Well, the boss had a non-work-related accident where he broke his leg and had to have it in a cast. The day eventually came when the cast was to come off, so he was leaving the business for an hour or so. 

He called a staff huddle just before leaving. He instructed the other three employees not to take their lunches at the same time. They needed to stagger them, so the store wasn’t left with only one employee (me) for that time. To absolutely no one’s surprise, about fifteen minutes after he left, that’s exactly what they all did, leaving me to run the place solo. They just told me to handle everything, since I was SUCH a big girl now with my training and flounced out the door in a group.

Admittedly, I HAD been trained on their jobs, but the boss had given me a separate assignment. Let’s say I was to straighten and organize section A, while they had to run registers, sweep the floor, and put away go-backs. 

I can’t leave the registers unattended for over an hour, can I? Especially when a customer comes in and needs assistance. It would be SO rude and unprofessional to just make a customer sit on their thumbs waiting for someone else to ring them up… in an hour or so.

I felt an evil smile cross my face. I’m not even sure what their single brain cell was doing other than bouncing between them, but there were security cameras that recorded audio. So, their decision to leave wasn’t exactly going to be a secret. 

They showed up fifteen minutes before he was set to come back, and then got busily to work, chatting and laughing with one another.

So, the boss comes back, and I just happen to be the one to greet him in the back of the store, as I hadn’t gotten my lunch yet.

Boss: “Hey [My Name], I’m back. How did everything go?”

Me: “Well, thankfully it was fine, but I had to stop organizing Section A several times to assist a customer and ring them up.”

Boss: *Stopping dead* “Wait, why did you have to…”

Me: “Oh, about fifteen minutes after you left, they all went on lunch together. I was left completely alone.”

The boss turned very slowly to look at me.

Me: “They told me they were leaving next to the camera by the front door, if you want to check.”

Boss: “I think I’ll do just that.”

Just a little bit later, all three were called into the boss’s office at the same time. A bit after that, they all gathered up their things and left. The schedule had to be juggled a bit until they could be replaced, but it was worth it.

I have no idea what they thought was going to happen: it was obvious that the cat was not only going to get out of the bag but was going to come flying out on a motorcycle backed by pyrotechnics.

Years ago, I worked in phone support, and my company got bought by another, larger company.

At the first company, I was the tech lead for a product, so I spent copious amounts of time with customers, making sure their very expensive systems worked right. Many of those customers had direct access to me personally, and I would respond to their needs.

For reasons I can’t recall, the new company made me a front-line tech on the low-end product line. In retrospect, this was a really dumb idea, but at the time, I recall it making sense.

I treated these low-end (as in the products were a fraction of the cost) customers the same way I treated anybody else. If I need to stay on the phone with you all day, we’d do that.

I get called in by my new manager, “It looks like your call times are really high, like off the charts really high.” It turns out that nobody had ever told me that you were supposed to finish calls within like fifteen minutes, lots of my calls went on for an hour or more. I had very few calls closed within fifteen minutes.

“How many open cases do I have?” Zero.

“How many of my cases have been reopened after I closed them?” Also zero.

“Who has the highest feedback score in the group?” That’d be me.

This one I had gamed, there was a deal where whoever got the most customer positive emails/letters to the boss would be “Tech support rep of the quarter” so I closed every call with “If I’ve done a good job today and fixed your issue why not drop a note to my boss…” and most people would. The previous tech support rep of the quarter had like three customers’ emails in a quarter; I had like ninety. It’s amazing what people will do for you if you just ask.

Anyway, I basically told him to shove his call times up his a**. If he didn’t like it, he could explain to the big customers I supported directly why I’d been let go and see what they thought about it.

Amazingly, I kept my job, although in a few months I was allowed (encouraged really) to transfer into a position with the training org. I still did support on the side for like five more years until the products I’d supported had gone end of support. I’ve been in that job for eighteen years now…

I work for the company that hosts touring Broadway shows and musicals as they make their way to Chicago, and as such myself and my coworkers get to see the shows, usually around opening week or press nights. 

‘Beetlejuice: The Musical’ has made its way to Chicago for one week only, and while I go opening night, I unfortunately miss this gem, which was relayed to me by my coworkers who went the following night.

Sometime after the start of Act Two, a character is supposed to sing a tango number, but her lavalier mic (microphone worn by the actors) doesn’t work for the duration of the song.

Rather than stop the show to troubleshoot, a stagehand dances his way on stage during the choreography and gives her a handheld mic.

Which doesn’t work either. 

So, they bring her another mic.

Which ALSO doesn’t work.

The number concludes without her audible singing, and following that is an emotional ballad by the lead of the show, and as she kneels on stage, ready to begin, suddenly over the “god mic” (the microphone used to make announcements in the theatre) a voice booms out saying:

God: “IT DIDN’T WORK THE WHOLE F****** TIME, NOW IT F****** WORKS?!”

The crowd erupts into cheers and laughter, and the lead actress sits there on stage, stunned for a solid fifteen seconds before the performance resumes as normal.