Good Thing She’s A Teacher…
“A woman I used to work with at a UNIVERSITY got into an argument with me because she didn’t believe that the different races of HUMANS were, in fact, the same species.
Her final argument? ‘You’re wrong, it’s like whites and Native Americans are just like fish and dolphins. They’re both in the ocean, but not the same species. Now do you get it?’ Umm, no, not really. And, not at all coincidentally, this was the worst group of coworkers I have ever had.”
Don’t Know How This Works?
“Way back when I was a phone service advisor for a credit card company, this lady called in confused as heck about a piece of mail we had sent her.
‘I don’t understand why you sent me a bill, I paid for the TV at the store with my card.’
‘Yes, ma’am, now this is the bill for using your credit card.’
‘But…I used my credit card. Why would I have to pay again?’
This went on for about a good hour. This poor excuse for an adult believed that a credit card with just an all-access pass to buy anything you wanted for free. That was a devastating job.”
Not Exactly Mensa Card Members
Jan Schneckenhaus/Shutterstock
“While I was working in a textbooks warehouse, two employees, both white gangster trash, went on to argue, for an entire evening, about the exact, complete, and proper definition of the n-word.
After roughly four hours with no sign of the stalemate getting resolved, one of the higher ups came up to them and said, ‘Listen, we have a ton of dictionaries. Pick one up, take out the shrinkwrap, open it, look up the definition, and LEAVE US ALL ALONE FOR CHRISSAKE.'”
He Was Certain She Was Sneaking Around In Her Bare Feet
“While I was working at my old job, I went to get something off the printer and when I got back to my desk, the director came over to me and pulled me into his office for ‘a word.’
Him: ‘Jenny, you need to make sure you’re wearing shoes.’
Me: ‘I am wearing shoes.’
Him: ‘You weren’t when you walked to the printer.’
Me: ‘Uh…yes, I was.’
Him: ‘No you weren’t. I saw that you weren’t wearing shoes. Please make sure you’re wearing shoes in the office, it’s for health and safety.’
Me: ‘I was wearing shoes.’
Him: ‘No, you weren’t.’
Me: ‘YES, I WAS! I WAS WEARING SHOES!’
Him: ‘NO, YOU WEREN’T!’
Me: ‘Why wouldn’t I be wearing shoes? Why would I take my shoes off to go to the printer and then immediately put them on when I got back to my desk?’
Him: ‘Listen, just make sure you’re wearing shoes at all times.’
Baffling stuff.”
Deaf Chef
“A chef at the restaurant I work at wanted to try and tell me that the frozen rolls he heated up were just fine to put out on a table, even though they were still ice cold in the middle.
He yelled at me for questioning his ’25 years of cooking experience,’ to which I replied, ‘With 25 years of experience, you should be able to heat up some rolls properly.’ There’s just no fixing stupid…”
She’s Got A Case Of Moon Madness
“I was teaching a class at work and a girl was telling me I was dumb, that the moon was the back of the sun, hence why it’s dark.
She was dead serious and even told someone else in the class that she couldn’t believe my company would let me teach new people.
We all had a good laugh, then we fired her.”
Battle Of The Baggers
“A couple of my friends and I all worked at the same grocery store when we were in high school. One day, one of my friends, we’ll call him Sean, was bagging for me as I was checking out a customer.
This customer had a pretty big order, which isn’t a big issue until I scanned her cucumbers. I’ll never forget those cucumbers. Sean went to bag the cucumbers by laying them in the bag vertically, which 8/10 times punctures the bag, causing it to rip and all the groceries to fall out.
After the lady’s order was complete, I told him how to bag them horizontally, or at the very least at diagonally. Sean didn’t like this and we continued to argue about it until the next school day, where we got all of us who worked at the grocery store involved.
For the next few weeks, those who sided with the vertical bagging scheme or the horizontal bagging mechanism either argued or straight up ignored each other. We never came to an agreement, and still fight over it anytime it’s brought up.”
Gender Gap Girl
“A lady I worked with didn’t think there were a roughly equal number of women versus men in the world. I said that maybe its something like 52:48 or 53:47 favoring one gender over the other, but for the most part about 50-50. She was having none of that and we never reached an agreement. So absurd.”
Pop Culture Wars
-2.jpg){kind=link}
“In the past three weeks, I have gotten into two different hour-long arguments with a coworker over the merits of Channing Tatum and then Beyonce. I am a 26-year-old straight male, and he is a 40-year-old straight male.
I believe they are both talented and valuable to pop culture. He thinks they are both wastes of time and fame. We could have easily agreed to disagree, but we were both too stubborn and ended up annoying everyone in the cubicles near us.
I’m still bitter about the Beyonce one. Dude claimed she’s ‘only been around for five years,’ and that ‘she’d be nowhere without Jay-Z.’ It was quite stupid.”
A Perplexing Problem
“I once had an interview where I was asked a series of critical thinking/logic problems. One of them I like to use every now and then, and the interviewer said that he and his wife have been arguing about it for months. The problem is as follows:
You have a bat and a ball. The bat cost one dollar more than the ball. The total cost for the bat and the ball was $1.10. How much did the ball cost?
Simple. X+(X+1)=1.10 –> 2X=.10 –> X=.05. In other words, the ball cost five cents. So many people keep trying to convince me that the ball cost ten cents, when it’s blatantly not!”
“Yeah…I’m Just Gonna Finish This Tomorrow”
sunabesyou/Shutterstock
“I’m a high-school teacher and I once taught a very unwilling group of grade 9 students who displayed an alarming level of entitlement and apathy to most things going on in the world around them. I frequently had to have many conversations I thought I would never have.
My favorite was on the day of a unit test. One of the slackers wasn’t prepared at all because he hadn’t done any of the class work leading up to the test (it was open book). He spent the entire test period sitting there, staring at his page.
At the end of the period, he handed me a blank test. I asked him if he realized what handing me a blank test meant (I just wanted to establish that he knew he’d get a 0 so he didn’t flip out later).
He said, ‘Yeah, I’m just gonna finish this tomorrow in class.’
I chuckled because I thought he was joking. ‘You can’t finish it tomorrow.’
‘Why not?’
Surprised I had to say this, I continued, ‘Today was the test. The time to write the test was today. Tomorrow, we are moving on to something else, so you can’t write the test tomorrow. You’ve already seen the test today, so if you write it tomorrow, it’s no longer a test of your abilities, but a test of your ability to memorize and prepare answers.’
Extremely mad and disbelieving, he said, ‘Well, I want to write it tomorrow, I didn’t want to write it today!’ What?!”
Looney Lawyer
“While in the U.S., I was speaking to a U.S. lawyer, I had a 10-minute argument over whether the U.S. has an official national language (we do not).
I had to Google it to settle the dispute, but even then it took several minutes of me going, ‘No, you’re literally just wrong in this. I can’t explain the difference between an official language and a lingua franca any other way. You’re a lawyer, for Chrissake!’ to end things.”
That’s Showbiz, Baby
“I work for an entertainment company and the owner is a professional magician. That’s how he’s made his income for the past 10-15 years. He’s done everything from Vegas styles shows in casinos, to weddings and birthday parties.
One night, he was performing close up magic (think David Blaine or Criss Angel) at a bar. He saw this smoking hot blonde and introduced himself. He started off with the basic card tricks. After he got her interested, he did one of his biggest hits: turning $5 into $500.
She flipped her lid. For the rest of the night, she didn’t leave his side, flirting heavily and asking how he did the trick. He’s used to people asking, so he politely steered the conversation in a different direction.
After the gig, he was about to leave when she came up asking if he wants to go to her house and relax. Once they got there, things start getting hot fairly quickly. As soon as she’s almost naked, she stopped and asked him how he did the trick.
After telling her about 15 times that he wouldn’t tell her, she went ape wild. Screaming and flipping out like a toddler who has to have a candy bar. So he got up, dressed, and left.
About an hour or two later when he got home, his home phone rang. He picked it up and it’s her. He didn’t give her his number, but it isn’t hard to find since he used it as his booking number for events.
She was extremely apologetic and didn’t want him to think she was crazy. She let him know that she still very much wanted to hook up So he hopped back in his car and headed to her place. Once again, things get very hot very fast. Right before they’re about to do the deed, she stopped him and asked, ‘So, how did you do it?’
Once again, he declined. So she starts kissing him all over and about 45 seconds later asked again. She repeats this 3-4 more times. He bluntly told her he was down to hook up, but he would not tell her how the trick was done.
She flipped and went crazy on him. He grabbed what clothing he can and ditches for his car. When he got home, he had about eight messages from her in varying forms from ticked off to apologetic. A lot of us suspect that she literally just wanted the money.”
She Had To Stand Up For Her Daughter, But She Went Too Far
Ollyy/Shutterstock
“I work at a kids’ play space. One of my coworkers used to bring in her high school-aged daughter to help out on busy days, watching little ones and such. Well one particularly packed day, the daughter did something that another coworker (let’s call him TurdFace) didn’t like, so he said something mean to her.
She went crying to her mom and her mom exploded. She came at TurdFace screaming and cursing and being violent…in a building full of toddlers and babies. The mom was fired on the spot and the kicker is that no one knows what TurdFace said. It’s still a mystery a year later.
You’d think that’d be that, but nope. The mom started threatening our boss with everything from knifing him to burning the place down. She also left a bunch of absurd Yelp reviews saying our boss was abusive, that she bought illicit substances from him, and that he stole and cheated and everything she could think of. We had police protection when we opened and closed for two months, and my boss still carries a switchblade on him.”
In This Industry, People Can’t Slack Off
“There used to be a guy at my work who was a real sloth. For months, he made stupid mistakes that basically boiled down to a single root cause: he didn’t care. He didn’t care about what he was doing, he was there just to punch a clock.
Maybe that’s good enough if you just want to work at a Walmart or something, but we make structural steel and buildings. Like the office building you’re sitting in right now, or that bridge you drove over to get there. So you can imagine there needs to be a certain level of care and quality in what you do.
Anyway, I’d found some more of his mistakes (part of my job is to find issues before they become expensive problems) and showed the guy so we could fix them, and I tried to be real nice about it.
I tried not to make him feel stupid, but he gave me this huge attitude and told me not to check his work. I told him, ‘It’s my job and quality is everyone’s business here, we’re a small shop and our clients give us repeat business because we output quality parts.’
He’s almost 50 years old and hasn’t held a job longer than two years in his entire adult life. How am I the one who’s got to have this conversation with him? How has he made it this far? He spent the next two hours of the day trying to ‘bad mouth’ me to the other guys in the shop. Someone complained to the general manager, who promptly fired the guy.”
Mutually Exclusive Imbecile
“A few years ago, a coworker brought her boyfriend to happy hour and he tried to convince us that you couldn’t be both smart and good at your job.
I can’t exactly explain his logic, because it never made any sense. I definitely should have just dropped that conversation right from the start.”
The Babysitter Couldn’t Handle All His Sass
“I actually made a babysitter quit when I was three because I kept arguing with her. The phone call went something like this.
My mom got a call at work: ‘Hello?’
Babysitter: ‘Hi, [Mom]? I think tonight will be my last night babysitting your son.’
Mom: ‘Oh no! What has he done?’
Babysitter: ‘He won’t stop arguing with me. I just can’t deal with him anymore.’
Mom: ‘You’re the authority figure, my son has no reason to argue. Just tell him what to do.’
Babysitter: ‘I do, but he just keeps arguing with me!’
Mom: ‘…You’re arguing with my three-year-old? I mean… you’re literally arguing with a three-year-old?’
Babysitter: ‘…’
Mom: ‘…’
Babysitter: ‘I’m sorry, [Mom], tonight will be my last night babysitting your son.’
Mom: ‘Okay. I’m going back to work now.’ Click
My mom was flabbergasted.”
A Dee-lightful Dispute
“I did my undergraduate thesis in an incredibly competitive research lab. There was another student doing the same thing I was under one of the other postdocs. Let’s call her Dee.
Dee was a huge witch to me. Thankfully, we didn’t have to work together much, but when we did, she found every way she could to put me down, be condescending, and brag about how great she was.
Now that I’m looking back, it was probably jealousy; I was far more involved in the project I was working on, which meant way more hands-on time and ultimately more experience. At the time, I just thought my supervisor was a slave-driver while hers was way nicer, so I couldn’t fathom why she was being so mean all the time.
At the end of the year-long term, we had to present our findings in front of the lab, which was about a dozen professional researchers and techs. Now, normally in a presentation in an upper-level class, you might be able to throw up some half-thought-out reasoning for your rationale and some cutesy ‘maybe there’s a correlation here’ graphs, and get a pretty good mark for it.
So Dee got up in front of everybody and made one of those presentations: super flimsy justifications for the structure of her experiment, measures, etc., and she even used some super obscure method of analysis to make it look like there were statistically significant results from her experiment.
In another lab, that might have flown. But not here. These people were professionals and they expected real science. They politely listened throughout the whole cringe-inducing presentation, and then as soon as the Q&A opened up, my supervisor turned to Dee’s and asked, ‘So you’re teaching your students to lie about their data?’ and the whole room erupted into a massive argument.
It was the sweetest justice watching Dee get slammed by question after question from these people, almost as sweet as getting up for my own presentation 10 minutes later and knocking it out of the park (I went on to publish my findings). So satisfying.”
Jim Versus Bob
PixieMe/Shutterstock
“I work in the aerospace industry. We measure our parts down to a tenth (.0001). One day, I walked into our inspection area and my boss was arguing with this guy from the front. The guy from the front, let’s call him Bob, was yelling at my boss, we’ll call him Jim, about the measurement of our parts.
Bob was saying that we HAD to measure the parts with oil on them. Jim was telling him that it wasn’t possible. He kept telling Bob that when we use the micrometers, it’ll just push the oil out of the way, so we’d really only be measuring the part and not the oil as well.
It was all so silly to me, but they ended up yelling at each other. Bob slammed the door as he was walking out and in the end, got suspended for three days. A few days later, when they talked again, they realized how ridiculous it was and threw that idea out the window.”
That’s Exactly His Business
“My old roommate told me she didn’t want to tell her doctor she was allergic to anesthesia because it was ‘none of his business.’
I argued that it’s his job to know her medical history and not telling him could cost her her life. She just kept saying that she would tell him if it ever came up. She’s not an idiot normally and I have no idea why she thinks her medical history isn’t her doctor’s business.”