It’s a Monday in corporate America. After a long, frustrating morning and a too-short lunch break, I’m waiting to board the elevator to take me back up to the cubicle farm that pays my rent. Waiting along with me are a man and what I assume to be his son, maybe three years old. The boy is very well behaved, even if a young child is not a common sight in this high-end office building. We all board the elevator and press the buttons for our respective floors.

The boy suddenly pipes up, apropos of nothing:

Boy: “You’re pretty.”

Me: *Polite, if a bit taken aback.* “Why, thank you.”

We reach my stop, and I start to exit. The boy starts to follow me.

Dad: “No, no son. It’s not our floor yet.”

Boy: “But she’s pretty!”

The elevator closed behind me, so I didn’t get to hear any more, but that was enough to put a smile back on my face as I moved on to the rest of my day.

I had a Nissan Maxima that I’d bought used. It had a slow steering wheel fluid leak, which would’ve cost $1,200 to fix, or just $2 a week to refill the fluid reservoir. I decided to get rid of it, because I’d moved within walking distance to work. I figured I couldn’t get it sold with the chronic leak. But then a coworker (known for telling tall tales) offered to buy it for $600. I agreed, with him paying me $100 a month. I mistakenly let him keep my license plates so that he could get them from Virginia to where he lived in Maryland.

He, of course, didn’t get new Maryland tags. He kept driving it with mine. He also drove it to his work site near the Navy Yard in DC, where he got a parking ticket. All of this was unknown to me until I got a summons for the unpaid ticket months later. I confronted him, and he agreed to pay it. He also said he’d get Maryland plates.

The next day, he gave me a check for the amount, but the check was from his fiancée’s account. I immediately cashed it at her bank (it was good), because the signature looked wonky, not at all in a woman’s handwriting.

By that time, he was late paying me $200 on the car itself. I then asked a mutual friend (the friend who actually got him the job at our company) what his Maryland address was. Then at lunch, I drove up and found the Maxima, with my plates still on it. I removed them and left him a note saying that I’d retrieved my plates.

I then cut off all contact with him. He worked in a different part of our office building, so avoiding him was easy. I also gave up getting the last of the purchase price. It was a small price to pay to not have to deal with him anymore.

I work on a large cruise ship. One of our crew members, whom I manage, doesn’t work in a passenger-facing position because they have zero patience for general stupidity. Sadly, he is sometimes approached by passengers with questions when he has to traverse the ship.

Coworker: “You need to talk to [Crew Member] about his conversation with a passenger later.”

Me: “Oh no… what did he do now?”

Coworker: “To be fair, the question was kinda stupid.”

Me: “What did he do?!”

Coworker: “A passenger asked him if we live on the ship, too.”

Me: “Okay, that’s one of the classic stupid questions on a cruise. What did he say?”

Coworker: “He just said ‘yes’.”

Me: “But… there’s more, isn’t there?”

Coworker: “So apparently, the passenger was pushing it, not believing we all lived aboard too, because the passenger said, ‘I been all over this d*** boat and I don’t see how there’s room for all y’all too!” So [Crew Member] told him we live inside the walls and are always watching. The passenger was very upset.”

Me: *Sigh.* “I wish we could walk through the walls, so that [Crew Member] never has to interact with another passenger ever again…”

I work at a company where I handle mid to high-level complaints to managers, PR, and legal.

My daily requirement is forty cases handled per day. There are some of my team colleagues who struggle with this, but I don’t, and I don’t feel lazy to stop at forty, so I have handled fifty-fifty-five basically every day for the past two years. There is no bonus (or even recognition) for this; I just did it because I felt a friendly obligation to the company.

Complaints can be a five-minute resolution, or a two-hour Zoom call with our New York lawyers; it’s a gamble, really.

Recently, I had a day where I felt a bit sick and at the same time, had bad luck of getting only very hard cases that required more time, so I had thirty-nine cases (one under the requirement).

I thought nothing of it, as my weekly average was way off the charts, fifty-plus as usual.

The very next day, I felt better and went back to my usual high numbers.

Come Monday, I had an “emergency 1-on-1” with my manager where I was informed that I had to attend a three-day workshop/seminar on how to best meet requirements, because I “underperformed last week.”

My jaw dropped, and I asked don’t they count the weekly, monthly, yearly numbers, to which I was told that the “daily requirement is forty, and this is standard practice, nothing we can do.”

Basically, it was a workshop for underperformers who had twenty to thirty out of forty cases daily.

It was nothing hard, but I did need to drive there for three days after work and listen to HR guys giving bad advice (as they never actually handled the cases in real life), and I had to talk about what I would do to improve my numbers and “reach the forty”, as they nonsense HR talk calls it.

This made me lose hours and hours of my free time, and I was livid.

After it was over, I had a long think, and I decided that I would do exactly that. I will “reach the forty,” and that’s it.

For the past few months, I go into work, I handle forty cases, my daily requirement, and then I do NOTHING for the rest of my shift.

I have had multiple 1-on-1’s with my manager during this time, and I am constantly asked: “Is something wrong?”, to which I naively reply “no, am in trouble, am I underperforming?” and then of course they say that I am 100% within daily requirements, and that way I shut the conversation down.

This is real life, so I can’t really say a clever comeback or something like that, but I do keep “playing the fool” that has no idea what is wrong now, but I find satisfaction in knowing that they got used to my overachieving and are now suffering for the lack of it.

Before Easter, they put up an internal ad for promoting another two managers, so my guess is that is the number of people they will now need to pay extra, just because they lost me as an overachiever, and they lost me for no reason other than their own stupidity.

During the height of COVID, everyone had to work from home. So, as the somewhat IT-guy, it was my privilege to facilitate everyone’s home office. Whenever someone was experiencing issues with anything tech-related, they called me.

If we ever had any incidents, management required everyone to call me so I could log and explain their downtime. A bit bureaucratic, but whatever.

One day, I got a call from a coworker whom I know pretty well and also known to be relatively tech-savvy. His wife was expecting soon, and she was already on leave, but still insisted on not sitting around. The call went a bit like this:

Coworker: *Loud vacuum noises in the background.* “Hi mate, my computer isn’t working right now.”

Me: “What’s going on? Does the screen light up? Are the lights on the computer blinking or on?”

Coworker: “No, they’re not on. As a matter of fact, nothing is really working. You see, my wife wanted to vacuum my home office and unplugged the PC.”

Me: “Ah… Can you plug it back in?”

Coworker: “Well, my pregnant wife said this is the only working socket, so no, I will not be able to plug it back in until she is done.”

At this point, I started to catch on that this was a hostage situation, and his wife was listening in on the call. I also realised he was calling just to log his downtime, not to actually report a problem.

Me: “Ah, I see now. How long do you think this ‘unscheduled maintenance’ might take?”

Coworker: “About fifteen more minutes.”

Me: “Very well.”

I marked his downtime as unexpected and incidental, and that was that. When your pregnant wife says it’s the only working socket, it’s best not to argue.