My long-term boyfriend proposed to me and, of course, I was over the moon. It was all super romantic and sticky.

Work: “Well, we don’t think you can get a day off.”

Me: “Why? I’m asking six months in advance, and I need a day off. It’s for a wedding, and it’s mine.”

Work: “If you wanted days not previously specified, you must ask a year in advance. Why didn’t you?”

Me: “I didn’t know I was getting married!”

Work: “Why not?”

Me: “My fiance asked me in December, and I told you the day we were back from holidays. I don’t suppose he expected you to be this unreasonable?”

The wedding date was in August.

Work: “Well, next time you ‘want to get married’, tell the guy to tell us a year before.”

Me: “I quit.”

Three hours later, my manager came in and yelled so that everyone could hear: 

Manager: “Oh, no, girl, you don’t! Have what time you need! YOU STUPID FOOLS, IT’S HER WEDDING!”

I loved that manager. I took two weeks to meet the extended family, and it was no trouble.

Over fifteen years later, we’re married, sharing a mortgage, and raising a kid, who’s turning out very nice. This marriage is literally the best idea ever — literally, not figuratively.

CONTENT WARNING: Animal Injury (Results of a careless grooming job)
 

We had a horrific experience the first time we took our pup to a groomer in a pet store franchise. He’s admittedly a bit of a sensitive soul anyway and doesn’t travel well in cars, so when I collected him and he cried in the car home, I didn’t initially think anything of it, especially since they had admitted to slightly grazing one of his ears. (He’s a floppy-eared breed.)

We got home, and he immediately ran to his crate and would not come out. He even growled at us when we tried to coax him. That was not like my boy at all.

After we eventually persuaded him to come out, I looked him over, and he was covered in razor burn, grazes, and some actual cuts. The “graze” on his ear? An actual notch taken out of it. His privates were also grazed and bleeding. It took weeks for him to recover because he kept reopening the cuts.

I phoned and gave the store manager h*** over this and also reported them to their head office. After providing them photos, I was refunded the cost of the groom and offered vouchers for free cuts, but I told them that they were having a laugh if they thought I’d bring him back to them ever again.

A new store manager is going through staff scheduling with the floor managers. It’s his first time managing a store in a small town with just one high school where a lot of people know each other.

Store Manager: “Who is Milton? Why is he only ever scheduled to work the back?”

Checkout Manager: “Milton? Oh, you mean Milk. Yeah, he’s no good on checkout. We tried, but that didn’t work out.”

Store Manager: “Milk?”

Me: “Nickname.”

Store Manager: “Why is his nickname Milk?”

Me: “He got 2% on his final math test in high school, and since then, everyone’s called him Milk.”

Store Manager: “Okay, so no checkout. Got it.”

I work as a lecturer for an educational institution with branches all over the country. My branch is regarded as the finest in the whole organization, and this story is about the time I realized why.

Around five years after I started working there, the board of directors of our organization decided to gather all the lecturers at a conference hotel. The idea was to exchange experiences and generally have a nice time with our colleagues.

We were organized into groups based on subjects. All lecturers from different schools who taught the same subjects would be in the same groups. The day’s program would be decided by different groups: the program for [subject #1] lecturers would be set up by [City #1 School], the program for the [subject #2] lecturers would be set up by [City #2 School], etc.

My school happened to be responsible for setting up the program for my subject. We did some planning before the conference and decided that it would be a good idea to share experiences and resources and generally converse about how we went about doing our jobs. Our colleagues from the other cities thought so, too; we spent the day discussing all sorts of case studies and methods, generally learning a lot from each other.

During these talks, I realized the first reason why my branch is the best in the organization. We were discussing our methods when I showed one of my junior colleagues from another school some resources I had on my laptop. You know the sort of thing: PowerPoint presentations, written documents, spreadsheets, etc. She leaned in and studied my stuff eagerly, eventually muttering:

Colleague #1: “I don’t have anything like that.”

Me: “Well, they’re fairly easy to make, but the reason I have so much of this is that I’ve worked on it for five years.”

Colleague #1: “Well, I just started this fall, so I’ve only been working here for five months. It’s my first job, so…”

Me: “Do you want some of this?”

She looked at me, surprised.

Colleague #1: “Really?”

Me: “Uh… yeah? It’s not secret or anything.”

Colleague #1: “I can just… have it?”

Me: “Sure. What are you interested in?”

Colleague #1: “Well… all of it, but…”

Me: “Okay, I’ll set up a shared link for you. Hang on.”

I collected pretty much everything I had made for work over the past five years — PowerPoint presentations, syllabuses, and timetables; tests and evaluation criteria; collections of suitable literature complete with specific page numbers so they could easily be matched with subjects; lists of links to relevant web articles — a whole bunch of useful stuff.

Colleague #1: “Wow, this is great! This could save me a bunch of time. And it’s okay if I just reuse this?”

Me: “Sure, I don’t see why not.”

Colleague #1: “It’s just that we’re not really used to sharing resources like this. I’ve found some stuff online, but…”

Me: “Hold up. Hang on… You don’t share your ideas with the other lecturers? Why not?”

Colleague #1: “Well, it… Huh. I guess it just never really occurred to us.”

I looked around the table at the other people who taught the same subject as me. They seemed equally perplexed.

Me: “Do none of you share resources? Plans, timetables, lecture presentations, notes…?”

Colleague #2: “Hm… Not really, no…”

Colleague #3: “I guess we do sometimes… but no, we mostly just build our own stuff from the bottom up.”

Me: “Well, feel free to use my stuff. You can make changes, too, if you need to. There’s no copyright on this.”

Colleague #1: “This is awesome!”

It turned out that our branch had developed a culture for sharing information and discussing things freely while the other institutions had much less interaction between their lecturers. To me, the free exchange of ideas has always felt like a very natural thing (especially given that we are, you know, a freakin’ school), and my managers encourage it. My coworkers and I borrow stuff from each other all the time. Apparently, this wasn’t common practice everywhere in the organization.

After the conference, we heard that the other branches also seemed to have a completely different idea of what this kind of conference was about. One subject group decided to spend the day watching a stand-up comedian they had hired. A different group spent most of their time chatting and lunching. For them, this was a social event. The whole day was just spent hanging around in a hotel, socializing. In fairness, the people who attended did say that it was very nice, but it wasn’t exactly useful to their actual jobs.

I hear things are a bit better at the other branches now, some ten years later, but the board of directors still considers my workplace the “cherry on the cake”.

About a decade ago, I moved from one coast to the other for work. My cell phone provider didn’t have great coverage in my new location, so once my contract was up (after about two months), I switched providers.

All was well until about four months later when I got an email from my previous provider telling me I owed them almost $400. Confused, I called them up.

Representative: “I see here that you ordered a [Smartphone].”

Me: “What? No, I didn’t. My account is closed. It’s been closed for six months.”

Representative: “The item was ordered from your account and shipped to [City in my previous state].”

Me: *Annoyed and in disbelief* “Are you telling me that your company accepted an order from a closed account and shipped it to a state that your own records show I don’t live in anymore?”

There was a long pause.

Representative: “Okay, you don’t need to worry about this. We’ll take care of it.” *Click*

Sure enough, I never heard about it again.