A new food stall has opened in the cafeteria opposite my office. I go there one day to grab my lunch. (I’ve removed the description of the food as it would be too easy to identify the company.)

The server who takes my order is a woman in her forties or fifties. 

Me: “I’ll have a [main] and a [side], please.”

Server: “The [side] will take fifteen minutes to cook. Are you okay with waiting?”

Me: “Yes, sure.”

I’ve ordered this before at different outlets, so I know how long it takes. I am planning to eat the main first while waiting for the side. 

I take a seat at a table. I usually eat a late lunch, so it’s after 2:00 pm, and there are no other customers — only the other staff going around busing the tables or sweeping the floor. My table faces the stall, and I can see them preparing the food and putting it onto the stove. I sit there and wait… and wait… and wait. 

After almost ten minutes, another customer comes in and places an order. The other server prepares his food, and he receives it within five minutes. 

I go back up to the stall. 

Me: “May I know if my order is ready? I’ve been waiting for some time.”

Server: “We’re going to start cooking it now.”

Me: “But… I’ve been here for fifteen minutes already!”

Server: “We were waiting for the [side] to be done cooking.”

I stared at her, nonplussed. I could see the stove from where I’ve been sitting, and there’s definitely more than one burner, so it isn’t as though they have to cook one dish at a time. In fact, the other customer’s order was made on the second burner. If they were able to prepare his order, why not mine?

Me: “Couldn’t I have the [main] first while you cook the [side]?”

The server stares at me as though she hadn’t thought of it.

Server: “Oh! Why didn’t you say so?”

Me: “You mean I have to tell you that you’re able to cook more than one dish at a time?”

I admit that I was so flabbergasted that I said the first thing that came to mind. She gawks at me as though it never occurred to her in a million years that she could cook [main] first while waiting for [side] to be prepared. 

Server: “Here’s your [side]. Please wait; your [main] will be ready in five to ten minutes.”

Of course, the [side] was too hot for me to eat right away. I had been waiting for twenty minutes now and was really hungry, but I still had to wait even longer for them to cook the [main]! I wanted to do a facepalm. 

I never went back there. I heard a lot of colleagues say that they were just too slow, and they hated buying from that stall as it wasted a lot of their lunch break. The stall closed down a few months later, unsurprisingly.

My cousin was on a film crew in Australia. Because so many of them were vegetarian, they requested that the hotel they took over serve only vegetarian food. He said the spread was amazing, with a variety of interesting and tasty dishes.

And every dish was topped with diced bacon!

What stuck with me about it was how impressed my cousin was with the care they put into the food. It was all done with love. This was last century; I bet every town in Australia large enough to have two dining options has good vegan food now.

I live in a rural area, and while I’ve never had my mailbox smashed, I did have a very lazy postal worker. I’m 99.9% positive she’d open our Netflix DVDs and watch them before we got them back when we first moved in. She’d bend people’s mailboxes back so she could more easily put in the mail from her car, but it would also let rain get in.

A few years ago, someone stole our mailbox. It was one of those plastic Rubbermaid ones,  and they pried it up and made off with it, leaving nails just sticking up from the base. For the new mailbox, we put rebar a good foot or so into the ground and whatever else my husband did. The end result was it gave the mailbox a nice recoil.

The postal worker tried bending back our mailbox, and it bounced right back — WHAMMO! — right into her car. She tried complaining, but our box was totally compliant with PO standards.

No more soaking wet mail.

I used to work at the front desk of a furniture store that was not the best. It was a single family-owned shop and not good for my mental health. In my defense, at the time of this interaction, I’d been working for like two and a half weeks straight without my days off because my manager, the owner’s wife, kept having random “emergencies” that would require me to be in since no one else in the history of the store could do anything. She’d usually show up eventually, but I’d still have to stay because she might decide to leave again.

Before anyone says anything about Washington State, while technically they weren’t required to give us two days off, they were required to pay overtime, give us meal breaks, etc., and the store did not. Honestly, if I’d been a little older and wiser, I could have had a lovely Labor & Industries settlement when I left, but that’s beside the point.

Anyway, at the time of this particular interaction, my brain was about two steps away from completely fried which is the only reason I can think of for why this was so hard.

We were running a tax-free sale, and one of the salesmen brought his customer up to the counter.

Salesman: “Hey, [My Name], this is [Customer], and here’s his order.”

He walked the customer and me through the invoice again so that the customer could hear what they were ordering one more time.

Salesman: “And I know we’ve got the sale going, but I didn’t include any of that on here.”

Me: “No worries. I’ll get it taken care of. Thanks.”

I sat down and put the invoice in.

Me: “Okay, your total is [a lot lower than it should be]. Um, hang on.”

I tried to do the math again, and it was still coming up wrong. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t figure it out. I realized later that I was getting the tax and subtracting that from his total, so rather than just giving him his total without adding tax, the total was [Total] minus [Tax], which was not correct. But again, my brain was not firing, and I couldn’t figure it out.

I’d done the math about five times, and my manager had actually decided to grace us with her presence that day, so she came up to the counter.

Manager: “Can I help?”

Me: “I can’t get his total right.”

Manager: “Let me take a look.”

She put everything into the calculator and came up with the correct numbers. The customer had included delivery and a couple of other things, so his total was a little higher than the price of the furniture but still less than it would have been with tax.

Manager: “Here’s your total: [correct total].”

Customer: *Only half-joking* “Oh, man. I liked her math a lot better.”

Manager: “Yeah, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. With this tax-free sale, your total is [total].”

She ended up giving him an extra 5% discount because I “didn’t know what I was doing”, and then I got a lecture about how I needed to pay attention because she couldn’t be giving out discounts to customers all the time. Never mind the fact that I’d been there for more than a year at that point, and I’d never had an issue like that; it was still my fault that she’d decided to give that customer a discount.

I had to suffer another six months after that interaction, but I finally was able to break free and I never went back.

About ten years ago, I worked as a merchandiser for a national soda company. One of the biggest problems we had would occur every holiday when stores had serious sales on soda, like getting four twelve-packs for ten bucks.

The problem is that there simply wasn’t enough room in the backroom to store enough product on a really busy holiday like the Fourth of July. Our sales representatives would order way more stuff than we ever had room for, and then it was up to me to Tetris it all into the space for us in the back.

The way it SHOULD have been done would be sending multiple orders on days like that as space became available, but of course, that would mean sending drivers to stores multiple times, which costs time and gas.

I had one store that had a really strict backroom manager with a no-exceptions policy of pallets never being stacked more than three high.

On this particular Fourth of July, we literally had twice as much product as what would fit. I called my boss.

Me: “You need to send a driver to buy back some of the excess load.”

Boss: “Stack the pallets as high as the forklift will allow you to.”

Me: “I just want to remind you that, at this location, I’m only allowed to stack pallets three high.”

Boss: “Figure it out.”

Cue malicious compliance.

I KNOW that the backroom manager will get lava-level mad when he sees this, but it’s the boss’s orders, so I am up to four high when the manager sees it and goes banshee apes*** on me.

Me: *Shrugging* “It’s my boss’s orders.”

I finish stacking — leaving one tower at FIVE pallets high — and then start walking out as my shift is now done.

Backroom Manager: “If you leave it like that, you can kiss your account with our store goodbye!”

I shrug again and leave.

I get a call from my boss thirty minutes later, around 8:00 pm.

Boss: “There’s a driver on the way to do buy-back. You need to go back to [Store] ASAP.”

Me: “My shift is done for the day. I have already returned the company truck and am on my way home to see some fireworks.”

Boss: “Turn around and go get it sorted!”

Me: “The only way I am going back is if I get double time for the entire day, plus a 10% raise.”

My entire day is about fourteen hours at this point.

Boss: *Yelling* “That’s never going to happen!”

Me: “Then me returning to [Store] is never going to happen. If you change your mind, you can send me an email, agreeing to my terms in writing.”

I had other side gigs at the time and wasn’t concerned at all about this job.

I got an email thirty minutes later from my boss’s boss agreeing to those terms. It was immediately followed by a phone call from him apologizing, telling me that I was needed, and saying that I needed to go back to the store ASAP.

My boss’s boss ALSO sent my boss, who was already at home, to help sort the mess out. Hearing him apologize to the backroom manager was gold.