The customer is always right! Except when they are horribly wrong.
It Doesn’t Help When Co Workers Are Out To Get Everyone
Photographee.eu/Shutterstock
“Oh jeez. A guy had an interview with my company and my coworkers and I looked at his resume beforehand. We noticed that there were several spelling errors, including a spelling of ‘project’ as ‘roject.’
So the guy came in and I (along with a coworker) was interviewing him, asking technical questions and whatnot, though he wasn’t doing that well. The guy’s back was to my office wall and the wall was glass, so see-through, obviously.
In the middle of the interview, a coworker outside my office looked at me and slowly raised a piece of paper from his desk, facing it towards me. On it was a single word in capital letters: ‘ROJECT.’
I had to excuse myself to ‘get a drink of water’ when in reality I needed to catch my breath to prevent myself from cracking up.”
Broadway: Where Hilarity Meets Lunacy
“Now it’s whatever, but when I was just starting out in costuming, it was mostly the ridiculousness of some of the fittings I had to do. You try not to, but sometimes you have to giggle when you’re fitting some guy and talking very seriously about how much room he needs to be added to the crotch of his continental army issue knee breeches because he has a big schwag, or have to try with all your might to not snap at a skinny broadway actor who’s whining when you put her actual measurement down and not some weird vanity size she thinks she is.”
That’s The Best Gift Ever
“I was helping a man make a bear for his wife’s birthday and he wanted to record his voice to put inside of it. Let me preface this by saying this dude was a like 6’7″ black dude who was also a cop. This large man knelt down at the super tiny ‘sound station’ and said into the mic in his very deep voice, ‘You know you the hottest thang I ever seen in my life, right?’ I tried my hardest not to lose it. I set up the sound to download, turned around, and held myself together as best I could. I lost it as soon as he left.”
Pretty Close Or The Farthest Away?
Kues/Shutterstock
“I had a student miss 68 days of my class in a 90 day semester. The reason she missed was that my class was ‘too early’ in the morning. The school calls the house every day a kid is absent in any class and sends letters. Grades are available online at any time, and letters are sent home saying when kids are in danger of failing.
The child, shockingly, did not pass my class. She ended up with about a 40. A passing grade is a 70.
The mom called me after finals, saying that I should pass the kid because she was ‘pretty close’ to passing and that’s pretty good for missing that many days. She said that if she had come every day, she absolutely would have passed, so I needed to pass her because mommy wanted her to graduate on time. She would not stop arguing with me although there was no way at all I was going to pass the kid.
I’ve never had to restrain myself so much from cursing at someone or just flat out hanging the phone up on her.”
Someone Needs To Keep Their Cool
“I work for a performance venue that has a lot of guest artists come in, some of them being very well-known. No matter who it is, we’re expected to be absolutely professional around them. It’s a point of pride for me that I’m able to stay collected in front of some pretty famous people. But it’s really hard sometimes.
The one that stands out most is a year ago when we had an actress visiting who I was a huge fan of. Not exactly a celebrity, but someone anyone who has watched a decent amount of sci-fi TV would recognize. I was asked to basically be her assistant for the day. I had to fight the whole time to keep from completely fangirling out on her. She was also really sweet and awesome and basically just hung out with me when she wasn’t rehearsing.
When she left, she gave me big hug and a card thanking me for taking such good care of her. No joke, I considered having it framed. I definitely still have it somewhere.”
Bridezilla Couldn’t Handle The Slightest Inconvenience
Sidorenko Irina/Shutterstock
“I’m a wedding planner. We had an unexpected death in the family. Our 6-month-old nephew had passed away in his sleep. I knew the funeral was going to be the day of my client’s upcoming wedding. I gave her a call to explain the situation. She was clearly not paying attention to the call or the words I was speaking because I heard her laughing with friends in the background. I got irritated and told her I’d call her later.
I called back that night and again told her what had happened and that I’d be sending an assistant to cover for me so I could attend the funeral. She told me that I needed to send my assistant to the funeral and that I better be at her wedding. It took me a few seconds, but I calmly stated that I’d be sending her money back and that now no one would be covering for me. That’s the nicest way I’ve ever told someone off. I really wanted to slap her.
The bride definitely knew I was attending the funeral, she was just so rude. Groom was equally rude. They deserve each other.”
When Someone Can’t Defend Their Own Job
Luis Molinero/Shutterstock
“I was a pizza delivery driver who brought a manager to a management meeting. I wasn’t really supposed to be there, but I was well liked and helped them out a lot, so I got to stay.
They were talking about how they were having some problems with the drivers doing what they’re asked when one of the assistant managers said: ‘We need to remind them that they’re easily replaceable and that anyone can do their job.’ I think that was the most willpower I every summoned to remain quiet.”
They Blamed Her For Their Inability To Follow Simple Decisions
“I do some seasonal work as a character attendant at Disney. I love my job, every little bit is worth it to watch people’s faces light up when they see Mickey or Cinderella. But sometimes people can be straight up entitled and rude to cast members who aren’t in a ball gown. One day, I was working with Gaston, one of my favorite locations to work, when a group of about four or five college-aged girls comes up to get in line. Now, Gaston’s line isn’t like Cinderella’s or Ariel’s where it is constant throughout the day, he comes out for about five set times a day and we close off the line when there are enough guests so he can get out of the heat for a bit.
Now I recognized these girls; they had been by three times before trying to meet Gaston but each time they showed up ten minutes after his set started so the line was already closed. Each time I turned them away, I gave them the next set time and told them to be there early since the line fills up fast. So these five girls tromped over and beelined for the end of the line where I was standing. The line had already been closed for a while so I moved to block their path and explained for the fourth time that they needed to get there early. They stormed up to me and the girl at the front crossed her arms.
‘Oh, so are you going to tell us we can’t see him now, too?’
I sure was. ‘I’m sorry, but Gaston has to go check on the tavern here in a minute, he will be back at (insert time here) but I would recommend getting there early since the line fills up fast.’
I didn’t even manage to get through half of my spiel before they were stomping away, flipping me off and yelling as they went, ‘You freaking idiot! Go off yourself! You can shut your minimum wage mouth!’
The tirade went on and on as I just sat there and took the abuse with a smile, which only seemed to make them angrier.
It wasn’t the first time I’d been cursed out, but it made me the angriest because I’d explained to these girls no less than three other times to be here early, yet somehow it was my fault they couldn’t see Gaston. I seriously considered lecturing them, debating the pros and cons, but in the end, I decided I enjoyed my job too much to get fired that day. That was the only time my professionalism almost snapped. Even thinking about it makes me furious.”
IT Workers Will Always Have It The Worst
Photographee.eu/Shutterstock
“I work IT. Sometimes people have two separate issues that are 100 percent unrelated but they always SWEAR that the issues HAVE to be related because they happen at the same time.
I once had a lady who had a network and a printer issue at the same time. The printer refused to print in color, also her laptop was too far away from the router to get a strong connection.
She was trying to print a 30-page color handbook 10 times so that they could be passed out for a training course.
I demonstrated that her machine was having no issues printing as it printed 1 page in greyscale but refused to print 1 page in color even though the settings were accurate. I tried downloading the drivers, but her internet kept cutting out and making me lose the session for a few seconds at a time when we tried to download the driver.
I demonstrated that the two issues were 100 percent not related, but she kept stating that the internet was causing her color printing to fail to her coworkers in the office. She even covered the receiver with her hand and talked to her coworker about how the internet should have nothing to do with the printing in color.
I said, ‘It doesn’t,’ without thinking. She asked me to repeat myself. I apologized and said I was talking to a coworker about this issue and forgot to mute my mic…
I asked her to physically walk closer to the router and showed her that the printer still refused to print in color now that she had a strong signal. I showed her how they are completely unrelated.
I downloaded the new driver for her PC tested a color page and had her print her stupid large order.
At the very end, she said ‘So why would the internet have an effect on my ability to print in color but not black and white?'”
He Had No Right To Degrade Them In That Way
“When I was in college, I worked as a garbageman for three summers straight.
I have many stupid, sad, funny stories, and I also have one that would fit right here. During my first summer, there was a trash bin that we couldn’t move for some reason. Like, even us three dudes in our late teens/early twenties couldn’t move that thing. So, we followed the protocol and just ignored it. It’s not our responsibility to collect it if it’s unmovable.
After a few days, the man who the trash belonged to waited for us and asked us why we didn’t collect it. We took the time to explain the situation and he very calmly told us that he poured some concrete into his trash because people kept knocking it down. I’m not even joking, half of his trash was filled with concrete.
Flabbergasted, we basically told him that he had no right to do that (the trash bin belongs to the city), but when we told him that, he got angry and started yelling at us, saying that our attitude was ‘unacceptable’ and he called us ‘lowlifes’ and ‘pieces of trash.’ He then proceeded to take the bags out of his trash, threw them on the ground, and told us to pick it up.
As you can imagine, there was nothing we wanted more at this moment than to punch him in his stupid face and just leave him amongst his bags of trash. But we would have been in big trouble had we done that, so we obviously didn’t. And since it’s against the rules to leave trash on the ground, we picked it up, very carefully as he watched us with his smug smile, and stayed professional.
When we finished and went back to the truck, he told us, ‘Run off home, now.’
We replied, ‘Have a nice day sir’ and that was it. That was eight years ago and I’m still upset about it.”
Either The Worst Or The Best Meeting Ever
Photographee.eu/Shutterstock
“We have meetings on accident prevention every time a major accident in our company happens. Every time.
A couple of years ago, a man straining too hard on the toilet passed out and fell forward, leaving a large gash on his forehead and a concussion.
Imagine sitting around with eight other people, trying to have a serious discussion about how to prevent head injuries while taking a dump.”
He Had A Strange Pick For Favorite Fruit
“I teach English as a foreign language at a kindergarten in Japan. My students are 3-year-olds, so there’s a lot of me and other teachers having to pull the mad face and telling students not to do something, and then laughing about it later on in the day (the romantic dramas that three-year-olds are involved in is hilarious and would rival any romance novel). But one of them topped the cake and I had to fake a little coughing fit to distract from it.
I’ve assigned the students to draw and color their favorite fruits, meaning they understand what fruit is, which fruit they like, and then the physical dexterity and motor skills to draw and color said fruit. Color choices are ignored because, well, kids like weird color combinations. All of the students were drawing and coloring their little bananas, strawberries, and watermelons, and everything else they know and like.
But one student wasn’t. Instead, he drew him holding my hand with lots of smiles because, as I asked about it, I was his favorite teacher and he loved me. It was adorable and one of the sweetest things ever.
Unfortunately, it also wasn’t the assignment so I had to take it away and give him a new sheet of paper and go over the assignment with him. But I kept the picture because, well, it was the sweetest thing ever. And then he started chewing on my leg every time he saw me, so it’s gotten a little awkward as I’m not exactly sure what being little Hannibal Jr’s favorite teacher entails, but I’m betting there are fava beans and a nice Chianti in my future.”
People Can Be Really Cruel To Servers
Luis Molinero/Shutterstock
“I was working my first job as a server at a horrible Tex Mex chain that has since closed. I only lasted two months. One night, in particular, I had this family of six. The mother was just a horrible shrew of a woman. She was always demanding constant chips and tortillas, more queso, and more salsa even though they still had plenty on the table. She got snippy with me because I put ice in her husband’s Coke and insisted they had specified no ice (they hadn’t). I went in the back and cried. The other servers ran my food and one of them told the customer that I was new and trying my best, so maybe give me a break. The woman said some lame excuse about her daughter wanting to be a server so she just wants her to see how to do the job right. I finished out the table and got a bad tip. But I did make 100 dollars from a nearby table that had watched the whole show, so that was nice.”
Who Would Have Thought Electricians Had These Issues
“I’m an electrician and as you know, we usually go to private apartments to do some maintenance or something similar. There’s a lot of things that get to my mind, but the most interesting are some of them:
- I rang the bell to the place where I was supposed to work and a gorgeous Indian girl (aged 25-30) opened the door with nothing except some lingerie, and she tried to seduce me the whole time I was there. It’s pretty hard to keep your concentration when a distraction is just a centimeter from your face.
- Another time I couldn’t keep it ‘professional’ because the place I went to was literally a big pile of garbage and filth. I opened a socket and it was the biggest bug nest I ever have seen. Like, billions of cockroaches crawling from the socket to the walls. I then called my boss and basically said, ‘I’m out!’
- And last but not least, I was working in a bank. But not a casual little neighborhood bank, it was one of the biggest private banks in Geneva (BIG deal) and I was supposed to be monitored by a guard at all times. But when I was working on the security system of the vault, he left me. So I was alone in the vault, without any security (because I was putting in a new one), with millions in diamonds/gold/cash around me. The idea of getting a handful of diamonds and some gold then run away to somewhere without extradition was really hard to fight.”
He Opened His Mouth, But That’s Not Where The Sound Came From
“I used to work at a university and one day we had a staff Christmas party. The president acted all friendly and even rolled up his sleeves to serve ice cream to us peons.
He went up on stage to give an inspirational end of the year speech. And that’s when he ripped a massive fart. There was dead silence, but I couldn’t handle it and just burst out laughing. Everybody else followed suit and for a good two minutes, the entire room was dying from laughter.
I felt really bad because he recently had some kind of stomach surgery and probably couldn’t control it, but, wow, was it hilarious.”
Compassion Should Triumph Composure
“I worked for the prosecuting attorney and we were wrapping up a murder case. It wasn’t a particularly horrific, or even surprising, murder. One local dealer murdered another over a dispute of some kind. The deceased was ambushed outside his home and died in his driveway. Not a lot of people cared. As I said, he was a local dealer and what we called a frequent flyer in our courts.
Still, the murderer wanted a jury trial – as was his right. Part of my job was to take the victim impact statement from the victim’s mother. She was a small, thin woman with dyed strawberry blonde hair and wrinkles in her face from age and a lot of time in the sun. She looked a good 10 years older than she was on her best day. This was not her best day.
She and her husband came to my office for help writing their statements to be read by the judge at sentencing. Her husband choked up almost immediately and had to leave the room. The mother was having a difficult time putting her words down so I told her to just talk and I would type what she said.
She sat in a chair behind me and talked about her dead son for a good ten minutes. He was a funny boy. He liked to play jokes. He loved his Momma and always greeted her with a big hug. As she spoke, she held her arms slightly crossed over her heart and rocked back and forth as if she were rocking a baby to sleep. I thought she must be remembering what it was like to hold her baby boy (he was the oldest) and she was trying again to cradle him in her arms, where he was safe and loved.
I cried a lot at that job. But I didn’t cry then. I kept my fingers on that keyboard and I wrote exactly what she said. My heart broke for her in a way that it rarely broke for another parent of a murdered child. But I kept my composure and let her speak.”
Keeping Their Composure When No One Else Will
fizkes/Shutterstock
“The one time really lost my cool and yelled at my boss.
We had been working on a project that was going to change a lot about how we were going to be interacting with customers. The project was something I was really passionate about, spent a lot of time working on both at work and at home in my spare time.
My boss and I had a disagreement about an aspect of the program we were building. I was working on a team of about 10 people and we all got together and made a plan supporting why we wanted a certain feature, created mock-ups, solid reasoning for why the feature would be, the only person against this feature was the big boss and had provided no reasoning for his decision. Not having this feature would create tons of headaches for everyone involved.
We have a final meeting about the project, I present my case for having the feature added calmly and respectfully. At the end of the meeting, my boss just looks me dead in the eye and say ‘so, what you are saying is that I’m a moron then? By saying I’m wrong about this you are saying that I have no clue what I’m doing, right?’
I was blown away, I had been warned before not to disagree with him on anything because he takes it way too personally, but I had really been professional in presenting the idea, had a solid backup from the entire team, but because I presented the idea I was targeted.
I lost my temper at that time, not really yelling or anything but just questioning what he meant in a not so professional manner. Accused him of not being able to accept ideas that were not his own….this was not a good idea.
From that day forward the boss targeted me for any little infraction. I was once pulled into a meeting because I was crossing my arms in front of my chest during a different meeting, according to him, it was a defensive position showing I was not interested in the meeting (I was cold!). Another time, I left for the day because I was sick, I came back a few days later to find that he talked to all of my co-workers telling them ‘he wasn’t sick, he was just being dumb…it’s ok, admit it to me, you know he wasn’t sick and was just skipping out of work’
I was let go 6 months after the incident. I admit that I did not handle the situation correctly. I lost my temper and said things I should not have said in that meeting. But for an employee who had been with the company for a decent amount of time, whose last several reviews all stated ‘keep doing what you’re doing’ and ‘he is possibly the most valuable member of the team’, to have one incident destroy my career was heartbreaking.
This was close to 10 years ago but it still impacts on how I interact with people at work. A valuable life lesson for sure.”