I’ve just moved to a new neighborhood, and I’m walking into the local grocery store for the first time. As I’m passing the checkouts, I overhear:

Customer: “Well, the customer is always right, though, so can’t you just do it?”

Cashier: *Unbothered.* “No. Even if you weren’t deluded, the computer won’t let me authorize that.”

I think I’m going to like shopping here…

We have a boss in the office who gets by doing the bare minimum. Because he does technically complete all his tasks, he doesn’t get into trouble for it, but he won’t do the tasks well or lift a finger to help anyone.

This boss also went to a very expensive school, usually frequented by England’s most elite families.

I also have a coworker (I’ll call him John), who works in tech support. John is from the north of England, with an accent to match. [Boss] seems to think that makes John stupid, which annoys him every time he needs John’s assistance for anything technical. This means he finds ways to get back at him with snarky comments.

Boss: “John, what school did you go to?”

John: “The University of Sheffield.”

Boss: “What’s the matter? Couldn’t get into Oxbridge?”

John: “Why would I want to go there when I could stay local and still get a degree from a perfectly good university?”

Boss: “Well, I guess even the soft pencils need a uni for themselves too sometimes.”

John: “A soft… what?”

Boss: “You know… when someone isn’t exactly the sharpest pencil in the box.” *Stares pointedly.*

John: “Well, [Boss], a sharp pencil is a sign it ain’t ever done a bit of work.”

The boss never said another word to John after that. He was very annoyed when we all started using ‘sharp pencil’ as an insult, and looked at him when we did so.

I live within walking distance of my job. It is a few blocks and across a very busy highway. I’m usually able to make it to work despite the weather, but this time I just had to call out. My boss was not pleased.

Boss: “You can’t be serious! You’re basically across the street. Surely, you can walk.”

Me: “No chance, sorry. Normally I would, and you know that, but I’m fully snowed in.”

Boss: “You have to. No one else can make it.”

Me: “Uh, maybe close the store, then? It can’t be safe, especially with the roads iced over. Someone’s going to drive into the store again. A state of emergency was declared thanks to this blizzard; surely we can close.”

Boss: “Can’t, corporate said to stay open. Look, I know it’ll suck, but you have to come in tonight. You are able to walk; you’ve done it before. You HAVE to come in.”

Me: “I opened my front door, and the snow was up to my rib cage. That is a lot of snow. I would have to cross my apartment complex’s parking lot, walk six blocks, cross the highway, and clear the store’s parking lot, all of which is not shoveled and comes either to my waist or my chest, depending on the area. It is negative fifteen degrees outside, still snowing, and with a windchill of negative thirty. I can’t make it in and will be staying home for my own safety.”

Boss: “You might not have a job when this is over if you don’t come in tonight! We’ll sleep in the office if we have to; it’ll be fine.”

Me: *Pauses.* “That sucks and all, but I’m not willing to risk hypothermia for this job. I’m hanging up now. I hope you get home safely.”

I did still have a job, but I was written up. My boss did indeed wind up staying the night in her office, and fired a handful of people who refused to come in. I managed to get my write-up tossed, the firings were overturned, my boss was promoted to District Manager, and I began looking for a new job.

An old woman brings in an old photo.

Customer: “This is a picture of my husband and me and some friends on our front lawn during the summer of 1968.”

Me: “Wow, it’s a great photo. Were you looking at some restorative work?”

Customer: “No. I need you to rotate the photo so I can see behind us. See how my husband’s hand looks like it’s touching Sharon’s a**? He always says he wasn’t, but look at his face! You can tell that he is!”

Me: “Uh… ma’am. That’s impossible.”

Customer: “No, it’s not, because Sharon was a total hussy back in the day, and—”

Me: “—No, ma’am, I mean technically impossible. I can’t rotate the image.”

Customer: “Yes, you can! I saw you have all that AI stuff now, and you can do all sorts of things.”

Me: “Uh, yes, technology has advanced incredibly, I’ll give you that, but AI is just a… a guess, based on what’s already in the photo. It can’t reveal information that isn’t already there. It can only extrapolate on the information already present in the image.”

Customer: “So… you can’t do it?”

Me: “No, ma’am. If you can’t tell from the photo with absolute certainty that your husband is… uh…”

Customer: “Groping Sharon’s a**.”

Me: “…yes, that. If that’s not in the image already, then AI isn’t going to suddenly make it so.”

Customer: “Is there any computer thing that could?”

Me: “Only a time machine, ma’am.”

She sighs, leans forward, and then starts shouting into the ground.

Customer: “You hear that down there, you two?! I’m not giving up! I’m gonna wait until they invent a time machine and then I’ll be proven right, just you see!”

For background, my girlfriend (Jessica – not her real name) is a software test engineer at a computer science-related company. She has a lot of jobs there, but one of them involves the review of bugs in the application, which she sees in the form of a “ticket”.

When Jessica started working at this company, her manager, Bob, would force every new hire to attend meetings every day, going over the ticketing system in excruciating detail, even though all of the new hires stated that they had used them before and didn’t need another tutorial.

These tickets get sent to various people, test engineer managers, or developers, etc., and in order for them to be “closed,” the bug needs to be reproduced by the person who wants to close it, and a fix to prevent the bug needs to be added to the code of the product. 

Jessica is reviewing a ticket documenting a bug in the product, and she consults her manager; the ticket gets sent to her manager, who is tasked with reproducing it in order to develop a patch for said bug. Instead of this, her manager asks her to close the ticket herself as “he can’t reproduce the bug”.

This is clearly not how the ticket reporting works, as the whole point is that open tickets have not been fixed yet. Jessica would just close it since her manager Bob told her to, and she has only worked there for a few months. The only problem with this is that ticket reporting software requires a reason for closing the ticket to be documented, so people know who to talk to should issues occur. 

Since Jessica is new, people would expect her to make mistakes, and it wouldn’t be the end of the world if she incorrectly closed a ticket, but she wasn’t down to take the fall for something she had no control over. Since Jessica needs to add a reason for closing the ticket, and doesn’t want to go against the request of her manager, she writes back to him:

Jessica: “Sorry you can’t reproduce it. What should I do?”

Manager: “Go ahead and close the ticket. Can’t reproduce the bug.”

Jessica: “Sure. Since you mentioned in the tutorial on the ticketing software that all tickets require a reason for closing, I’ll close it and add as a reason ‘Bob can’t reproduce the bug, and I was advised by Bob to close it.'”

Her manager immediately replies, as he apparently just realized what the description of his job was, and tells her not to close the ticket and that he will work immediately to reproduce the issue so it can be documented.

 Since then, her manager has appropriately documented every ticket she sent, without any inane comments.