I was told by my EBS* this Spring that a distant third cousin who had just turned 50 had died suddenly. I was reminded that ‘someone from the family’ should put in an appearance, because he was very nice, but that it was too long of a drive for her ( Manhattan to Falls Church). The viewing was that night at 7pm. I told her I’d think about whether I could attend. My watch read 10:30AM.
I then moved Heaven & Earth to reschedule all my work, take the rest of the day off as a Personal day, get home & into a suit, and then get back on the road heading south before noon. I’m about 50 miles out when I decided to call her and tell her that the guilt trip worked & I was on my way.
“What? You’re going? Aren’t you going to drive me…?” :eek: :eek: :eek:
If she had balls, I’m sure she could have rolled her way on down there and arrived an hour ahead of me.
*Evil Bitch Sister
Mine compares to the ones already mentioned here, of course, in comparison, it is less severe than most.
I worked for a hotel and the manager was wonderful. She interviewed me and two days later called to offer me the job. I had never met the owner yet, but she was given the right to hire me, so she used it. I worked 40 hours for the first 3 weeks, doing good and learning quickly. I was rather proud - I re-organized the way we did nightly paperwork and was given a raise for my good work. After this came Easter - I worked 11pm on Saturday until 7am on Sunday. The girl coming in at 7 had never come in, so I was hanging around the desk at 10. The owner called me and asked me to stay until she got in town and I said sure. I thought she was at her house in town, apparently she was in Tennessee (sidenote: I’m in Ohio). About 9 that night she showed up and I went home. I said, “these things happen, so it’s not a huge deal, as long as it doesn’t happen often.”
I kept working there and was clocking about 50 hours a week, which I never complained about because I needed the money. My problem came in the summer. I was a full-time student at 20 hours, but summer quarter I dropped down to 12 credit hours, so I was right at full-time status and needed to do good in those classes. I was doing well, but work was rough. The manager who had hired me had just left, and the boy who had started working there a month before me took over as manager. I wrote all that to write this - we lost another worker and were down to two of us. I was alright with it, my boss asked me to work 7pm-7am all week (80 hours) and she would hire someone that week. I said “well, you’ve been good to me as far as work, so I’ll try to work this out and we’ll be okay”
The completely unreasonable part - the other guy was working the 12 hours a day I was off. On Thursday, he called me at 5pm, while I was sleeping, asking if I would come in early. I asked what was wrong and such, and he explained.
“I haven’t had a chance to eat dinner yet and I’m stuck behind the desk so if you would come in and work I could go eat before I go out with my friends tonight.”
Mine can’t hold a candle to some of these, but it still strikes me as totally unreasonable.
About a year ago, I went to a board game evening with my housemate, Bob*, and some other people, mostly people I knew from work. I met a guy there, Joe*, who had recently started working at the company, and who knew my housemate from some other social activities.
Joe mentioned that he was looking to do some furniture shopping, and had heard I had a large car. Could I help him out with that? I asked when he planned to do this and what furniture he wanted. I was a little uneasy at the imposition, but I figured that I could certainly take an hour of time and help out the new guy in town. It turns out he didn’t have anything picked out (he doesn’t drive), but just wanted to go around to various places and see what they might have. And there might be a table, and a couch, and some other stuff involved, so it would take multiple trips. I told him that I wasn’t wild about spending a whole afternoon on that, but if he could convince Bob to do so, Bob could borrow my car and go with him.
My father was dying of lung cancer. He was in the end stage, in a coma. Everyday the Hospice nurse would come and say he couldn’t last the night. I was out picking out a grave site for him. I stopped by work to give my boss an update and she told me I needed to come into work, because you just never know how long someone like that will linger. :rolleyes: Right, I’m supposed to leave my dying father’s bedside to come in and sit behind a desk and process paperwork. It didn’t happen.
I’m the family computer doctor for my technologically-unsavvy clan. A few months back, my mother asked me if I could go online and pick out a computer for her brother, a man with whom I was never close. He’d never had a computer before and was even less knowledgable about them than my mother (now that’s saying something). I said I would, thinking it would be easy enough to buy a standard Dell package for a n00b user. Then mother says, “If we have it delivered here, do you think you can drive to his house and set it up for him?” Oh, did I mention her brother lives in Montana? :rolleyes:
A coworker experienced a similar unreasonable request at one of my previous places of employment, except it was the Finance Director demanding she leave her dying mother’s bedside to come in and process the credit accounts so patients could get refund checks “because she was the only one who knew how to do it.” Because the girl was a single mother with three kids and unreliable child support from their fathers, she felt she had to come in and do it. Her mother died while she was at work.
I was furious for her, because I was the IT trainer/main support person and I knew the system inside and out. I could have run the damn credit accounts if that stupid bastard needed them so badly. I hope he lost all the rest of his hair from his square head.
matt, out of curiosity are those Canadian dollars you are quoting in that rant? Even so, I never realized translation was so pricey. Hopefully, if I ever have to translate anything official Babelfish will come through for me.
My sister one day got the idea to learn how to type on a keyboard. So, she got a friend of hers to lend her a 3 1/4 diskette with a program that would help her. (maybe 10 years ago)
She asked me to get the program to work. I tried to get the computer to read the disk. No go. It complained about some sector fault. So, going the extra mile, I ran a program to check and possibly repair the disk (Norton, IIRC). Again: no go.
So I told her she’d have to ask her friend to copy the program again on another diskette. She told me that was the only copy he had. And that I should “fix the program”.
I stared at her. :eek: And told her I couldn’t simply fix an executable file. (Well, maybe I could but I’d have to work a lot on it and, probably, have to charge her) And she went on a rant saying that I was studying computer sciences and that I should have had the expertise to correct such problems, etc. etc. I simply stopped listening right then and there. :rolleyes:
My God! This reminds me of a job offer I got when I was vaguely searching for a job out of college (I was only vaguely searching because I was planning to go to grad school, but on the chance that I didn’t get in anwhere I wanted to go, I was looking for a job at the same time). It was with a startup company that was doing audio fingerprinting, and was planning to expand to video fingerprinting with the intended business model of charging for verifying advertisement coverage. Apparently there was big money in automating the watching of TV to verify that companies actually get the ads they paid for aired.
I and several other guys in the CS department were contacted, and there was a series of interviews. The work sounded interesting, and the guy who was talking to us really sounded like he knew what he was talking about. We were all pretty jazzed about the whole thing.
And then the offer came. It was salaried at something ridiculous like $24K, and it was really just a summer internship, with the possibility of more if (unspecified future something). For reference, the average starting salary out of the college I went to was twice that, the CS department tended to be on the high side, and the three of us were in the upper quartile of students in that department. Apparently, there wasn’t big money in automating the watching of TV to verify advertisements.
I was working at a job I loved; trapping feral cats for vaccination and sterilization, socialization if possible and release in a monitored colony if not. I also cared for the cats available for adoption at the shelter run by the boss. I was the only paid employee for most of the time I worked there. We had hired a couple of people but in all but one case the boss or his girlfriend had run them off, and in that one case the guy “couldn’t work with a woman (me) telling him what to do”. We mainly worked with volunteers who came in to help clean and feed the cats in the shelter.
The main reason I was hired was for trapping, and I was good at it. We had lots of requests for trapping. However, the boss kept accepting more and more cats into the shelter. Some of these cats were ill and required medication. We had an epidemic of ringworm. All of the cats had to be taken in for sterilization. The volunteers were not allowed to work without my supervision.
I had worked for about 16 months without a single day off. I recently found one of my old time sheets - in two weeks I had logged 127 hours. I did not get paid overtime. I did not have any benefits. I finally gave notice saying that as my repeated requests for a day off had been ignored, I would have to leave. My father-in-law was ill and I needed to have some time off. I was promised every Friday off. I withdrew my notice, and that Friday “something came up” and I would have to work. I was working most days from at least 8am - usually 6 or 7 - to no earlier than 6 and often as late as 10 or 11.
One morning I came in to get some cats to go to the vet, and my boss calls me in with a handful of trapping requests and tells me that I “need to get more trapping done”. I asked him what he wanted me to stop doing in order to free up more time for trapping. He replied that I “just need to get up earlier in the morning”. This from a man who was never out of bed before noon.
That was the only job I have ever quit without notice. I told him to go straight to hell, dropped the shelter keys on the table, and walked out.
This is petty compared to most of what’s posted here, but it did scar me for life so I’ll share. When I was a child of 13, a seventh grader I believe, my dad got married again. His new wife was a widow and soon after their wedding her late husband’s father died. My dad hounded me to send my stepmother’s former mother in law a sympathy card for months, to the extent of bringing a card to me at my mom’s house and trying to physically force a pen in my hand and make me to sign it. I was very shy and embarrassed at the thought of contacting this woman whom I had met only once, being, you know, only a kid of 13 who could rightfully expect her parents to take care of this sort of thing. I do believe I prevailed but both my dad and stepmother still ask me to send cards to people. I either ignore them or tell them to fuck off.
My sister asked me and my now-husband to help her move. I was cool with that, as her then-husband (rendering tense here is just killing me, heh) was in Watertown, NY (Army). She met him at the apartment complex I was helping her move out of, because his father and brother lived there as well.
Turns out she wasn’t the only one moving that day. We were expected to not only move her, but also her FiL and BiL. FiL was nice enough but BiL had sexually harassed me at the wedding and my husband would dearly have loved to kick his ass. We moved all their shit from their top-floor apartment to their new apartment across town before I did a thing for my sister. My husband left because he was seeing red, but I was still young and nice so I stuck around to help my sister move the next town over. BiL decided to show up and give me more crap, at which point I made my sister take me home.
Then there was the time she called me up out of the blue (she only ever communicates to me to 1. Ask me for something, or 2. Brag about something, usually something entirely dumb): “I need you to watch the kids on Monday! (It was Saturday). Friends* are coming out and I need to take them to Disneyland!” She was pissed off when I said I couldn’t go because I had a doctor’s appointment. Which was true, but I was also tired of being tapped for childcare so she could fritter her money away, and waste my damn time. And she wasn’t making any money at all, but living off her BF at the time and that relationship was going down the tubes quickly. Also, she still owed (still does, but I know I’ll never see it) me $40 from the time we went to DLand before and she didn’t have enough money to get home. :rolleyes:
I am much more proactive now about telling relatives, esp. my sister, a loud, resounding “NO!”. Everyone else in the family I think learned this one too. I love my sister, but I can’t say I like her much.
*The “friends” were message board folks she had never met before. I’m all for Dopefests n’stuff, but asking me to watch my niece and nephew on short notice for something like that really cheesed me off.
Over the years, I’ve heard quite a few unreasonable requests, but the worst was when I was working for a state government agency. My boss brought a huge amount of routine paperwork to me when I was in the intensive care unit, the day after I’d had extensive surgery. He had to lie his way into the ICU by saying he was a relative.
He set several stacks of documents down on the floor beside my bed and cheerfully suggested that I might want to work on them “for fun” when I got the time.
