Tales From Work

[Charu]

What... what kind of 14-year-old would ask "Are you feminists?"

What the heck

[MixMasterLar]

Damn, there's some wacked crap in here lol. Hang on let's see if I can match it with two of my favorite customer stories.

* While working in dairy, rotation is really important. A common strategy is to let whatever is on the shelf sale before you restock the shelf. For a slow day this is pretty easy to do without getting caught with an empty space.

I once was trying to let maybe 5 or 6 gallons of milk sale out before restocking because the date was 1 day off. As silly as it may sound to some of you well-adjusted folks, if I where to mix them (even putting the new ones in the back) those 5 or 6 would never be touched and would literally sit there for two weeks before having to be pulled for being out of date. People have this weird idea that the milk is gonna taste like anything besides hormone-filled utter juices if it expires 13 days out instead of 12. Anyway I leave to check on cheese and come back to an empty shelf. I'm like, oh ok great, let's fill this sucker up.

So I do that.

Right as I finish, a gentleman who was shopping walked up to me but didn't say a word. In his cart where all the "old" gallons of milk. Without a word, a moment of pause, or any indication that this wasn't pre-meditated at all he pulled them from his cart and sat them on the floor. He then reached in the back corner and pulled one gallon out and placed it his cart next to his beer and calmly walked away as if it was routine.


12 or so days later I poured 5 or 6 gallons of milk down the sink and watched my department take the loss, which of course in addition to wasting food products made my employers pretty stingy about giving out yearly raises to workers who have alot of wasted food reported on their shift.

Basically people who do this sort of things can go shove their head in a cow's ass.

Working as the manager of Produce at this point. In the back, our Produce space was next to the restrooms. Made running in there to escape some of my co-workers really easy.

One time I went in there to use the restroom as slowly as possible before I had to clock out. My excuse was it was super slow and everything was done. My actual reasoning is that I hated my soul. Anyway, bathroom has one urinal and one actual stall with a toilet. I'm the kind of guy who rather use the stall regardless of the nature of my business, but it was taken today and I simply used the urinal. Not that big a deal.

While using it, I heard a grunt from the stall.

No bigger, don't make a deal of it. Some things a man has got to do for himself, feel me? Wish him luck in a little prayer and move on. And maybe make sure you pick up a Fiber One on the way home.

Another grunt. Drawn out. Gets a little higher in pitch as it finishes.

Uh huh. Maybe chillin' in here for the last two minutes before shift's end is not what's gonna happen today. I start washing my hands and use a little less soap then I would have.

But then I hear the sound of a man trying to move porcelain and I knew that something shittier then shit was afoot. I quickly left and waited outside, ducked in my workroom out of sight waiting for the man to leave. This doesn't take too long to happen.

I go in and brace myself as I walk into the stall. I look at the back of the toilet and steel myself to open the back and see what he ditched in there.

I knew what I would find

Hell, you know what I did find.

I opened it to find it anyway.

A very used cucumber.

"Yeah so this guy just left and ditched a, uh, used cucumber in the back of the pot. Yeah no I have to clock out you know how Jack and Kent feel about overtime for the department managers orders from up high you know? Yeah uh byyee boi holla back pce"

Hearing the clock churn out my card never sounded so good.

Originally Posted by shenjoku

when I used to work at Fry's grocery store back in high-school I found a playboy calendar still sealed in shrinkwrap in one of the shopping carts. It was out in the open lot late at night when I was just putting carts away like usual. I took it home and gave it to my older brother for his birthday XD

Best little bro ever.

Originally Posted by Charu

She takes it, smiles, and then walks off saying. "MmHMM, that's right, can't be losing money, nu-uh. I gots a family to feed."

Working in a job that requires working with the public will make you raciest in a heartbeat brohan.

I got some really bad welfare stories that hit these same notes.

Originally Posted by lofty rhino

On one occasion there was a woman with an Australlian accent who he kept referring to as English.
He mimicked her accent by using stereotypical British phrases.
She got aggravated and eventually just stopped responding.

When he finished ringing her up, he let her go with a "cheerio!"
Her face was pretty priceless.

My job, too, had to enact a "no accent" rule.

Originally Posted by Gundam-Dude

· Being heckled one night for about 10 minutes by a black dude that didn't believe my real first name was a generic "white" name as opposed to a Chinese/Asian one. He saw my name tag and absolutely refused to believe that was my actual name????????????

My name is Lar

I feel this pain.

Also so many people try to pronounce it as Leer it's enough to make me kick eggplants.

Originally Posted by DarknessXoXLight

They start asking us whether we're feminists, whether we're lesbians, why we work for such an awful company.

.....

Well, we're waiting! I kid we're cool

[TheThong]

I was on night shift, and the ambos brought in this lady who was refused by another hospital. She had called the ambos to bring her in because she said she was pregnant and wanted her baby to be checked.
This is a 50+ lady fyi. She's known to (frequent flyer) be delusional.
So anyway, she comes in. I ask her for a urine specimen, so I can do a pregnancy test for her. Surprise, not pregnant. She tells me she hasn't had sex in 20 years, and proceeds to tell me she is ' god's child ' and is 'the next Virgin mother'. Oh yeah. Although she could walk, she also decided to pee on the floor three x. This is between 2-4am in the morning.

Had another night shift where it was 3am. One of the mental health patients was singing '... In the jungle the mighty jungle ' on repeat for a good 10 mins. Across the room from him, a patient yells at him to stfu, and as he continues to sing, pt no 2 goes into his room and punches him. We had to call a ' code black ' and get security to separate the two.

Anyway, a good hour passes and patient #1 wakes up, and decides it's a good idea to go to patient #2's room, and punches him back. We call another code black, and end up having to move one patient to the opposite side of the department.

Lots of fun patients.

[Charu]

Originally Posted by TheThong

Had another night shift where it was 3am. One of the mental health patients was singing '... In the jungle the mighty jungle ' on repeat for a good 10 mins. Across the room from him, a patient yells at him to stfu, and as he continues to sing, pt no 2 goes into his room and punches him. We had to call a ' code black ' and get security to separate the two.

Anyway, a good hour passes and patient #1 wakes up, and decides it's a good idea to go to patient #2's room, and punches him back. We call another code black, and end up having to move one patient to the opposite side of the department.

Lots of fun patients.

Well, that's certainly one way to get some peace and quiet once and for all, lmao

[Gundam-Dude]

Workplace fuck up story time. A lot of these were mistakes made around the time I just started working at my current job at a print shop (with a couple slip ups happening just last year). Only including major/notable ones worth posting about that I can recall atm.

I still have MORE stories related to graphic design gigs, but that'll be saved for yet another post later.

· I once printed on the wrong side of 2-part carbonless paper because I wasn't paying attention when loading the printer with paper. 90 sets went straight into the recycling bin and my boss had to order a new ream of paper so I could re-print them.

· A customer came in with numbered tickets imposed in sequence on a multiple paged PDF. For whatever reason, I didn't realize this and somehow thought that they were duplicates, so I ended up printing page 1 out of 10 multiple times. The customer came back the next day to get them re-printed, free of charge.

· I once printed 300 adhesive labels without remembering to preflight the document before hand, causing transparent objects in the artwork to appear translucent. They all went straight into the recycling bin and I had to re-print them.

· A client supplied a 16-page booklet document, that was mostly white space without proper crop/trim marks, and I printed a quantity of 250 without realizing the registration/alignment was completely off as soon as I fed 1 set through the booklet maker (which is a machine that folds and saddle-stitches sheets of paper). The size of the booklets were supposed to be 5.5" x 8.5", but because the alignment was off, the only solution without re-printing was to face trim an extra 3/16" off the width. At the time our client comes in to pickup the booklet order, the guy busts out a ruler and goes full on OCD mode to check measurements, alignment, and even the fucking grain of paper on a couple of the booklets—now let me tell you that in 2 years of working at the print shop, this is the ONE and ONLY customer I've ever run into that has done this. At this point, I'm screaming in my head, "FUCK MY LIFE", but surprisingly the guy didn't start up a shit storm and just took the booklets and left—the wave of relief afterwards was unreal.

· I once printed 500 envelopes with the wrong mailing indicia. The envelopes were printed with an Addressed Admail indicia (now known as Personalized Mail by Canada Post as of 2016) instead of Lettermail. Because Canada Post has strict mailing requirements when creating a Statement of Mailing, we had no choice but to mail the pieces the way it was because they had already been stuffed and sealed, which cost both my workplace and client extra money. Addressed/Personalized Mail items have a minimum requirement of a 500 pieces, but if the quantity falls under, they have a minimum charge of $254.50+tax (price might have gone up since then). Only 300 or so envelopes were going to be sent out, so gg man gg.

· This one is a fairly long one, so I'm going to shorten it by doing some summarized greentext version below:
> Gets usual purchase order for labels from one of our major accounts.
> Proofs to customer and they approve it without issue.
> Outsources label to our supplier because we do that for larger quantity orders.
> Receive proofs of the artwork plates from our supplier. I skim through most of them like I usually do and approve all for production.
> About a week later, labels are delivered to customer.
> Customer calls back and says one of the labels they received is wrong even though they proofed and approved the correct version.
> Realize that I accidentally approved the wrong artwork on one of the plates. FUCK MY LIFE
> Have to get 1,000 labels re-printed at our cost because I fucked up hard.
> Boss gives me shit.
> Get the re-prints of the labels delivered to customer promptly.
> I make arrangements to pickup incorrect version of labels.
> Customer accidentally ends up returning the re-prints that were delivered to them.
> Boss gives me shit again.

· Another fairly long one, so I'm going to do the same as above block:
> Customer, in a huge rush, comes in around opening hours (8:30am) and needs spiral bound booklets done within the next hour or two because he was catching a flight at noon.
> Customer pulls out his Mac and takes his time trying to figure out how to copy files over to a USB stick. Mind you, he was an older gentlemen probably in his 50s.
> Supplied two PowerPoint documents that are both over 1GB in size. Each PowerPoint document takes a minimum of 15 minutes to open on my work PC because it was 100+ slides with a fuck load of images.
> Takes an additional 15 minutes per document to export slides to PDF for printing.
> Print, punch, and bind the job without any problems.
> Customer comes in around 10:00am to pick up job and accuses that we printed the wrong PowerPoint for one of the documents. He was furious at this point.
> I show him my monitor so he could see what PowerPoints he gave me.
> "I gave you the wrong PowerPoint. This is why I hate Macs, but you guys should've shown me what I gave you before printing." Basically, trying to pin the blame on us even though it was HIS fuck up.
> Supplies the correct version of PowerPoint and basically repeat earlier process of opening, exporting, and production.
> Customer comes back around 11:00am to pick up job. For whatever reason doesn't realize that he's paying for everything that was printed and done already. He thought we were going to correct HIS fuck up free of charge, when that's not how it works. I mean sure, if it was a fuck up on the print shop's part, then yeah we'd consider doing it free of charge. But that's not the case here.
> Guy is fuming, but sucks it up and pays for the order before storming out and saying that, "[he's] never coming back again."
> ?????????????????????????

· Not so much a fuck up story, but I once had a customer storm out the shop steaming at the ears and cussing at everyone because they just would not accept the fact their supplied document was not set up properly to be printed the way they wanted it. It was apparently too much of a hassle to either A) Pay us extra to fix it for them or B) Fix it themselves. Basically from what I can recall, this lady wanted to print out 50 sets of a 5.5" x 8.5" half-fold pamphlet/booklet that was saddle-stitched on regular 20lb bond paper in colour. She supplied a Word document and when I opened it up to take a look, basically it was setup in a tiny ass landscape wordart frame that was not to scale, and it was imposed on portrait letter sized (8.5" x 11") orientation. I calmly explain everything the best I could in layman's terms (because she clearly didn't understand), and she basically goes on this angry rant about how we "print people" don't know what we're talking about because she was able to print the document on her shitty inkjet printer blown up by around 300% to fit the paper size, even though it's the wrong orientation to begin with. First time I've had a customer scream, "FUCK YOU THIS IS A SHITTY AND UNPROFESSIONAL BUSINESS AND I'M NEVER COMING BACK HERE AGAIN", directly in my face.