I was at my local grocery store, the one closest to my house, picking up a few things to stock my fridge and pantry since my teenager was about to start summer break. I had about twenty items in my cart. My store’s self-checkout doesn’t have an item limit, and they only had one regular register open, and that line already had four or five people waiting. 

For context, the credit/debit machines at each checkout, regular and self, display a customer service survey that stays on display until it switches to the pay screen when all items have been scanned, and the cashier (or customer) hits the “pay now” button. This is important to know.

I went to the self-checkout, scanned my first item, and put it in my bag. I scanned my second item and put it in the bag, and waited for the screen to acknowledge that I was ready to scan my next item.

In those two seconds, I noticed from my peripherals that the attendant had walked up to me. Normally, they just announce their presence and say to let them know if I need any help. She instead proceeded to move my cart out of the way so that she could reach the debit machine of the checkout that I was currently using. She went through the survey for me, giving the store 5/5 for all aspects! I was shocked, but managed to say something before she finished and walked away…

Me: “Uh, that’s not really me filling out the customer survey, is it?”

Attendant: “Well, it needs to be done! You have to do it before you’re finished scanning!”

Me: “I just got started! I hadn’t had a chance to do it myself yet!”

Attendant: *Submits the survey and starts to walk away.* “It’s fine! I’ll just leave you alone.”

She gives me a dismissive hand wave and turns her back to me, doing as promised and leaving me alone. She didn’t even give me a “thanks for shopping, have a nice day” when I finished, paid, and left.

I debated whether or not to report this to the store, but in the end, I did call and talk to a manager about forty-five minutes after I left. I told the manager what happened, and he asked me if I knew who the attendant was, which made me remember that her name tag was actually flipped around, showing the back of it, so no, I didn’t even have a name to give for the incident. The manager told me that they do actually use those surveys to make improvements.

Whether or not that’s true, the attendant still shouldn’t have pushed my cart out of the way in order to fill out a customer survey. It was pretty busy that day, causes me to wonder how many other surveys she filled out!

My GP (doctor) recommended I avoid all milk products for a few weeks. As a die-hard cheese lover, this was pretty tough, but I got used to it.

My office had laid out a buffet luncheon, and they had ordered several options that were safe for me to eat, but one box of food didn’t arrive, so there was less food to go around (they had ordered extra, but not like crazy amounts extra), and my choices were severely limited. One of my colleagues apparently had issues with this.

Colleague: “Is that all you’re having?”

Me: *With a decent-sized plate of veggies, sliced meats, and dry crackers.* “Yeah, they didn’t get much dairy-free delivered, but it’s okay, this is a pretty good lunch.”

Colleague: “But there are all those quiches and sandwiches…”

Me: “I can’t have them, they’ve got dairy in. I’m fine with this.”

Colleague: “Oh, well, you can at least have some cake after.”

Me: “No, all the cakes and cheesecakes have dairy. It’s fine.”

Colleague: “Well, I don’t think it’s very fair.”

She got up and wandered over to the buffet table, which had been pretty much picked clean, and I turned to talk to another colleague. I turned back to see Colleague just finish dumping a large spoonful of coleslaw on my plate.

Colleague: “That’s better!”

Me: “What the h***?”

Colleague: “It’s just veggies, it’s okay, it’s really nice!”

Me: “It has dairy in it!”

Colleague: “Oh, I’m sure it’s fine, it’s mostly veggies.”

I just stared at my plate of ruined food, then just glared at Colleague as I stood up and walked over to the rubbish bin, and kept eye contact as I silently dumped the entire plate. She sat there just shocked with her mouth open. My boss was at our table and had seen this whole thing unfold.

Me: “I can’t eat dairy; I can’t eat that coleslaw you just dumped on my plate, and now I can’t eat anything else because all the food is gone. [Boss], can I pop out and grab some lunch for myself?”

Boss: “Yeah, go ahead, take whatever time you need to get something decent. I’ll see you later. [Colleague], I’ll see you in my office after lunch. We need to have a chat.”

I don’t know exactly what was said, but when I got back to the office, Colleague was falling over herself apologising.

My replacement lunch, from a local vegan cafe, was delicious – and also reimbursed by my office, so it was free!

I’m expecting a guy coming in this morning for an interview for a cashier position. About ten minutes before the interview, he calls me.

Interviewee: “I want to reschedule.”

Me: “May I ask why?”

Interviewee: “I just woke up.”

Me: “Okay… and you think that’s a good enough reason to cancel an interview just ten minutes before it’s supposed to start?”

Interviewee: “I couldn’t wake up because I had a fight with my roommate the night before.”

Me: “Okay, let’s save some time, and I can ask you an interview question right now. If you got the job here and you were scheduled for a shift, would you call out, thinking that’s a good reason?”

Interviewee: “I mean… he started it!”

Me: “Good luck in your continued job search.” *Click.*

My employer was a medium-sized business (approx. fifty employees at the time), and I happened to live about 3/4 mile from our office.

Shortly after I started working there, they asked me if I would mind being listed as a contact for the burglar alarm since all of the facilities/admin people lived pretty far away. They said that any time the burglar alarm goes off, someone has to drive over to meet the police. Don’t ask me why, I don’t really understand the policy. At the time, I was a young, naive recent college grad and figured I would try to be helpful, and told them I didn’t mind.

Our internal company policy was that if you accidentally set the alarm off, you immediately call the people on the alarm company’s list, in order, so they know it’s a false alarm and they can tell the alarm company to ignore it.

At the outset, this worked pretty well. I’d get a few false alarm calls a year, but I’d always get an apologetic call from the employee who set the alarm off, so I would just tell the alarm company to ignore it.

Then the company started growing, and we started having more and more false alarms as we had new employees who would forget about the alarm, and then we started having employees who would ignore the policy and would just leave after setting the alarm off without notifying anybody.

After I got wise to this, I started telling the alarm company to ignore everything, even if I didn’t get a call, because we started getting charged false alarm fees, and I figured there was a 99% chance it was a false alarm. I figured we shouldn’t waste the time of the police or waste the company’s money paying false alarm fees.

I brought this up in a meeting with our COO, and they s*** a brick and insisted that we couldn’t ignore alarm events because what if someone really did break in and somebody was working late? They could be at risk.

So, I said, okay, staff need refresher training because they aren’t following the policy to notify me of false alarms, so we’re going to have a ton of police dispatches for false alarm events. COO minimizes the issue and insists the current policy is fine and no retraining is necessary.

Anytime I got an alarm call without someone notifying me of a false alarm, I followed the policy and had them send the police.

There were two or three false alarm calls where the police showed up, found nothing, and sent us a bill.

The very next call, I sent the police as the policy said, and right as they were pulling up, they saw a vehicle pulling out of the parking lot and chased it. The employee who got chased? Yeah, it was the CEO. In addition to getting chased, he ended up getting cited for speeding as well.

The next day, the COO tries to pin this on me like it’s somehow my fault, to which I reply, “I just followed the policy you gave me”. The next day, the entire company went through refresher training on alarm procedures, and I was taken off the alarm call list. I count it as a win.

Me: “Boss, did you write the sale sign for the apples today?”

Boss: “Yeah, why?”

Me: “You wrote ‘buy one, get 50% off’.”

Boss: “Yeah, we’re having a deal.”

Me: “So the apples are half price?”

Boss: “What? No, you buy one pack of apples, and you get another pack for 50% off.”

Me: “Then the sign should say ‘buy one, get one 50% off’.”

Boss: “I don’t see the difference.”

Me: “Trust me, there is one, and our customers will see it.”

Boss: “Aren’t you always complaining that our customers never read the signs anyway?”

Me: “They have selective vision. Only the signs inconvenient to them are invisible. The way this sign is written, they can legitimately demand to get all the apples at half price.”

Boss: “I’m too busy. I don’t have time to rewrite the sign.”

Me: “I’ll do it then.”

Boss: “No, I need you to finish your opening duties.”

Me: “So I can send every customer demanding half-price apples to you?”

Boss: “…”

Me: “…”

Boss: “Okay, fine, what way should I write the sign then?”

We got the right sign out. Of course, we still had some customers demanding 50% off of all their apples, but at least that was down to regular customer stupidity, and not my boss’s.