The most unreasonable request that's been made of you?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

I have a sister-in-law who’s the black sheep of the family. She’s in her late 40s currently, and has probably been more-or-less continuously abusing drugs and/or alcohol since her pre-teen years. Whenever she gets in trouble of any kind, her family members bail her out - sometimes literally. If one of her siblings doesn’t, then her parents do. At one point she was going to be evicted, and she went to her parents for money. They didn’t want to take her in, or pay for her back rent, so at one point my father-in-law was going to come speak with my husband and I to ask us to put her up in our basement. Unfinished basement. No bathroom/sink, no kitchen. External door is a non-sealed cellar door of the type that old farmhouses had. In a house we rent and couldn’t just add someone to the population of who lived there. My husband just warned me about his dad’s plans and I flew off the freaking handle. Besides the unsuitability of the location, she also had a history of stealing from her family members, and I didn’t trust her with any remote chance at access to our house. Turns out his dad backed off on the plan, presenting it first as a “joke” and then dropping it completely once we nixed it immediately. Then he had to get in some digs about how we “may as well give her a gun,” saying that since all of her siblings were standing firm on this, it was like we wanted her to kill herself. No, I wanted her to hit bottom but no one in that family lets her. Her parents ended up paying the money - guess they didn’t want her living in their (large, multi-bedroom) house or basement.

This second incident became more unreasonable in retrospect. A little over a year ago, a different sister-in-law (who lived upstairs from us at the time) came crying to my husband about how she had no one else to turn to, she couldn’t talk to anyone else in the family about this, but she was being evicted unless she paid back rent for 5 months :eek: plus court costs. My husband talked it over with me, and he told her that he’d loan her the back rent only, as that was significant enough and the court costs were going to be less than a quarter of that amount. She tried to get more from him but he refused. After many months went by and we’d only been repaid maybe 10% or less of the initial amount (when she should have been more like over 40% done considering what she’d promised she’d repay every pay period, and we also know she got a few grand from their parents for Christmas), he privately made comments to his other siblings about the loan, and found out that she’d gotten a significant chunk of money from all of them, and probably their parents too. So much for not being able to talk to anyone else. Oh yeah, she still owes us a lot of money.

62

Competent translation is fairly expensive, yes. What I charge is actually rather on the low end of the scale; the company I subcontract for charges I think $0.20-$0.22/word or thereabouts.

63

Great thread, and as so many before me have said, my story doesn’t compete with the real winners.

We have a teenage niece who is getting seriously religious in a bible-thumping sort of way. Last year her church youth group went to the Dominican Republic to spread the word of Christ through ministering unto the poor folks.

Her parents are very comfortable financially and could easily afford the airfare.

But, she contacted all her relatives to ask us to pay her way!

This was not her idea, I assume; the church did it that way. Trying to be charitable about it, I’m assuming they’ve got kids in the group whose parents can’t afford the trip, and rather than single those kids out, they have everyone “fundraise” to pay their way.

Okay, so although I am not pleased by this AT ALL (I’m very big on giving time and money to charitable causes, a lot cooler to missionary work), I can handle it.

But you know what? SHE DIDN’T EVEN WRITE A PERSONAL LETTER. It was a form letter from the church.

Even if the church told her to use the form letter, she and/or her parents should have had the manners to make sure she wrote a personal note to go with it.

Since they are relatives, we paid up and kept our mouths shut. But when my much younger son wanted $2, not $200 as she did, for his charity walk-a-thon, I made him write a personal letter asking.

64

The most recent example in my memory: My boss comes in an hour before I leave on Tuesday (the day before my day off) and gives me a bunch of stuff to do. I tell her I can’t get it all done and ask her which ones she needs before Thursday. I do the stuff and get ready to leave.

Suddenly it’s “I need this letter to get out right away. Stay and type it and get it ready and I’ll take it to the post office.” I do all that and don’t even get a ride home.

When I come back Thursday, the damn letter is sitting on her desk!

65

First, some background. Once upon a time, I was working as a data analyst for a market research firm. It was a great job for me at the time - I was a full-time student, it paid better than minimum wage, and I could essentially organize my own hours at least 80% of the time. Also, the corporate culture was very, very good.

When I’d been working there about a year, the manager of my department lost his ever-lovin’ mind. He decided, apropos of nothing, that he was leaving his wife of 25 years and their children to run away with a stripper he’d met at Starbucks and he was going to go be a pilot. He had never evinced any interest in piloting or airplanes before. So, giving 15 minutes notice, he quit and moved to Arizona to attend pilot school. The assistant manager stepped up.

Right about then, the firm got a truly giant project from one of our clients. A bank was doing significant rebranding and needed a survey of 15,000 customers spread over their demographic range. The damn project had 108 questions and up to 25 open-ended questions, which the data collection people were supposed to capture verbatim and the data analysis people (namely, me) were supposed to code out for analysis. That is a hellacious amount of labor. This project was supposed to last for 3 months.

Two months in, with the firm still not having hired anyone to replace the former manager (not that his replacement was doing a bad job, but we were a person short - which represented 25% of our workforce), the third member of our department (a very nice girl) joined a freaking cult and went to live on their compound in the woods. I swear. Thus, leaving us with 50% of our workforce.

Two days after that, the assistant manager’s mother died. As the only relative, he was obliged to fly to Florida and tend to her estate.

Leaving only me. And a hellaciously large project mid-run, along with the other workload.

Fortunately it was summer break.

I started working over 120 hours a week. I was sleeping at the office. I was showering at the office. I was going home only to get clean clothes. The monster project ground on.

Two weeks before it was supposed to be completed (at least before the data gathering stage was scheduled for completion), on a nice sunny Monday, the manager of our bids department - who was responsible for compiling deadlines - came to me and informed me that the project had to be completed and delivered to the client no later than Friday.

She wanted me to code 15,000 responses times 25 questions in four days. That’s approximately 250,000 individual responses (give or take - not everyone answered each question). Nevermind that they weren’t done gathering the information I was supposedly coding. Nevermind that the amount of material she wanted coded in four fucking days already comprised over 75,000 pages of 8-point, single-spaced text and was only getting larger. Nevermind that I was working 120-hour weeks already. Nevermind I couldn’t even give all my working time to this project (we did have other clients). Nevermind that through a perfect storm of events, there was nobody else in the firm was trained to do any of my current responsibilities.

I gave her a long, cold stare and told her it wasn’t even possible. Not with 10 times my current workforce was such a thing possible. There was actually, literally, no way it could be done. She might as well have asked me to build a functional spacecraft using only office supplies. They were equally possible.

In point of fact, the original timeline had allowed two weeks after data collection was complete to do the data processing and analysis - which was already going to be a touch-and-go situation. Two weeks with four people had been reasonable and had some cushion built in. Two weeks with three people would have been a little hectic. Two weeks with two people would have been ugly but feasible. Negative three weeks with only me…

Turns out, she’d been chatting with the client, who’d professed a desire to have the data as soon as practicable and, without checking with anyone at all, had promised them their data two weeks before deadline - a deadline I had already informed her (and the rest of management) was extremely unlikely under the circumstances.

After I got through staring at her, and became convinced she was actually serious about this insanity, I grabbed her arm and physically dragged her to the VP’s office (the lady in charge of both of us) and made her go through it again. The VP didn’t even let her finish before she started swearing like a sailor.

I did end up with a grunt-work apprentice for the duration, though. The Bids Manager whined about it, but she did work the 100-hour weeks with me and learned how to program, code and clean data.

On the plus side, unlike my former managers and the Bids Manager, I was an hourly employee. Let me tell you, the money from that overtime was good. ($10 an hour X 40) + ($15 an hour X 40) + ($30 an hour X 25). I made a lot of money that summer. I didn’t have any fun, but I did make a pile of cash.

66

I took an apartment with an elderly friend of a friend, for a not very reduced rate, to be around in case of emergency. Yeah, I was a sucker, but I did have my own floor of the house and didn’t have to do too much. So her daughter is going out of town and wants me to be the one to check on their dog (who is staying with old lady) to see whether she goes into heat. :eek:

Another one? I have no engineering/facilities management background but worked as an assistant (acctg, clerical, etc.) in a facilities dept. I know my boss was giving me projects to expand my experience, but when he told me to draw to scale the HVAC, water, lighting, etc., going on in the ceiling of a huge lab space, I was out of my league. It was part of what drove me to change jobs. I still feel bad that I never got a handle on it, but talk about outside of scope.

67

Great story, but I just gotta ask: Since when did Starbucks start hiring strippers?

OK, OK, I know what you meant, but that’s how I first read it.

68

The strangest person I ever met had a husband in prison. She asked me if I would go with her to prison to visit him and several of the other inmates who wanted to have an outside friend. :eek:

One of the few times in my life where having no official ID came in handy!

69

This happened about 25 years ago at my first job. I’d brought in a book I was reading in order to carry on with it during my lunch hour. A co-worker (I’ll call him Wanker - it wasn’t his real name but it should have been) noticed this and said something along the lines of “That looks interesting, can I borrow it?” He meant right then and there. Well, I hadn’t finished it yet so I said no - and in any case I didn’t trust him to return it if I did. But the book only cost 60p (as I say, this was 25 years ago), and was in all the bookshops, so I said “why don’t you buy a copy?”

Wanker replied “Oh, I don’t want to do that. I know, why don’t you take it up to the office and photocopy it?”

My then employers took a dim view of employees using their facilities to do personal photocopying. But Wanker wanted me to photocopy an entire book, virtually under the boss’s nose, putting my job at risk, so that he could save SIXTY PENCE. Note that he didn’t suggest doing it himself.

70

My SIL got married on the fly the first time to another Navy type. The second time around she decided she wanted the big church wedding with all the trimmings–and all her friends and family were going to pay for it. (Both her parents were dead by this time.) She wanted to hit me and my husband up for the professional photographer. We were both grad students at the time. We sent her fifty bucks.

The wedding plans fell through and we didn’t hear from her again for 10 years, when she wanted to introduce us and our small children to the sonshe’d had with some guy we never met and who was currently in prison.

71

Don’t you just love it when a knucklehead makes a promise that you have to keep?

I play guitar, but I haven’t kept up with it. Not only am I rusty, but at the time so were my guitar strings.

One day at work, I got a call from a coworker. It seems that a project had been completed for a major client, and they were having a party the next day. Coworker promised them that I was to be the entertainment. I said no. “But I promised!”, begged the jerk. Yeah, you promised, but I didn’t. Saying yes to this meant that I would have to go far out of my way after work to buy new strings, and spend half an hour of my evening restringing (while I was already totally pressed for time trying to get ready for my weekend plans).

So I said no. The jerk the intimated that if I refused, my job might not be terribly secure. I relented.

Never let a moron set up a gig for you. I was to jam with a client who fancied himself a drummer. Our “stage” was, in fact, a coffee station. We were interrupted constantly by people searching for packets of Sweet ‘n’ Low. It was the stupidest bullshit I have ever seen.

And now for the punchline: Since I had spent those two hours playing instead of working billable hours, I was told I needed to make them up. I didn’t.

72

Well, this doesn’t compare with what some of you folks have posted. But. . .
For the last 15 years of her life, my mother sold Stanley Home Products. One of their most popular products was Degreaser. When my mother died, many of her long-time customers came to the funeral home to pay their respects. So it was no surprise when Mary Ellen walked in on the second night of the viewing. But instead of walking up to the casket, she came to me, and said “I need to buy some Degreaser”. I said “Ummmm. . .you know, this is a bad time. My mother died, and I’m really busy” And she said “Well, yeah, I know, but I really need some Degreaser” After several minutes of arguing with this nitwit, my hubby came, and quietly but firmly told her that if she did not leave immediately that he would have her forcibly removed from the premises. Thing is, I’m not sure she even understands why what she did was wrong. :frowning:

Another WTF request, although it didn’t make me angry:
My FIL is a great guy, very bright, somewhat eccentric. For many years, he kept dozens of snakes, many of which were poisonous. I, OTOH, had been raised in a household with a mother that was afraid of earthworms. We wouldn’t even talk about snakes. Well, hubby and I were living on a 30-acre plot of land in western MD, and FIL was at the house, and he said to me “Hey, if you’re ever out cutting the grass, and you see a copperhead, catch it for me, okay?” :eek:
I told him if he wanted a copperhead, he’d just have to go catch it himself!

73

By proxy:

We have just finished a massive home remodel, and coincidentally the couple across the street have also been ensnared in a remodel project. I will blame the stress of remodeling for this, because the woman in question is always very nice and very considerate. But on this particular day…

We had hired a guy to do the cement and masonry work. He’s an artist – he really does amazingly solid, well-placed, craftsman-like work. The woman across the street saw what he was doing for us and offered him the job doing the needed masonry work at her place. He agreed, a handshake-type deal.

Two days before he’s to start, she tells him sorry, she doesn’t need him; she’s given the job to the contractor that was doing the rest of their work. But since they loved his work so much, even though they’re not going to pay him a cent, could he just come over and explain to their contractor exactly how he did our project, and do a couple of drawings for him, and make out a list of supplies, and watch him as he works so it will be just right?

74

As someone who is in the midst of remodelling a house, I’d say yes, she probably just completely lost her mind temporarily from being overwhelmed.

75

Back when I lived in NYC, I was working the graveyard shift in a small company. There was an employee named George, who worked the day shift. We didn’t know each other at all, except that I’d see him arrive at work as I was leaving. I don’t think we ever said one word to each other.

Well, I lived in Manhattan and George lived in New Jersey. One morning, as I was getting ready to leave, George came over to me and handed me a list of about 20 hardware items. He wanted me to go to a hardware store in Brooklyn, where they’re having a sale, and buy these items for him. His reasoning was that he had to work during the day, when they’re open, and he’s too tired to go on Saturday, after working all week.

He was visibly taken aback when I told him I wouldn’t even do that for myself, let alone someone I really don’t even know. And I especially wouldn’t do it for someone who has the chutzpah to ask for such a thing.

76

This is another one on behalf of my fiance. It’s something that has annoyed him for awhile, and the next few weeks will determine whether he and some of his coworkers start looking for work elsewhere.
The two groups involved I will call PG (Productive Group) and UG (Useless Group). They are in the same department and share salary budgets but have different managers. UG had one useful team member who did all the work while the rest of UG read newspapers or hung out at the pub. Finally that guy got fed up and threatened to quit, but the company didn’t want to lose him so they moved him to another team. Even though he’s now working for a different department his salary still comes out of PG/UG’s budget, meaning that they can’t afford to hire someone to replace him.

So UG’s manager realises “hey, my only productive team member is gone and UG don’t know how to do their work.” So he suggests that they reshuffle everyone so two new teams are made with a mix of PG and UG members. UG’s manager, being a spineless idiot, agrees. At every group meeting PG bring up how their new members literally do no work, thereby increasing their own workload, only to get fobbed off by their manager. My fiance told the manager that UG were useless and that he wasn’t going to take up their slack, only to be told: “But you’re so much more capable than UG. Can’t you just do their work for now and gradually hand it over when they are capable?”

You can imagine how PG took that request. They’ve stopped working overtime without pay, begun documenting more, applied for internal transfers, and started looking for other jobs. When exactly did the business world become all touchy-feely and all “from each according to his ability”?

77

I told a colleague that I barely know that he could pretty much use my office any Wednesday AM because I regularly go to a meeting then. It’s a great office, great location and if he wants to use it to impress a client that’s fine with me. I never asked for any money or gifts, just figured that what goes around comes around and he would probably send me some business some day, and if he didn’t no big deal. For about a year he used it pretty regularly and always called ahead of time to make sure I wouldn’t be in that day.

Then I didn’t hear form him for about six months, until one day he just showed up on a Wednesday when I was in. Fortunately, his client hadn’t arrived and I was able to put him in one of my partner’s offices for a couple of hours.

78

I worked in my family’s Thai restaurant growing up, and we have heard some pretty crazy requests over the years. Here are a few off of the top of my head.

This usually takes place when it’s insanely busy and someone calls this in: “What kind of dishes do you serve? Do you have anything with chicken?”
Yes, we do and we do tons of stuff with them. We have chicken satays, chicken in curries, salads, various types over rice, stuffed chicken wings, etc. We have about 7 pages of food. What do you want us to do with the chicken?

“Could you read the menu for me and describe what they taste like? I’m not sure what to get.”
Again, 7 pages of food and you want descriptions of the food? I’m not a freakin library. Come in and read the menu yourself.

“I want some fried rice, potstickers and lemon chicken.”
“Sorry, we can’t make that, we’re a Thai restaurant, that’s Chinese food.”
“Don’t you have the same ingredients? Can’t you make that real quick for me?”
Potstickers take a LONG time to make and I wouldn’t if I could.

“Can I get some stir-fried beef with vegetables over rice? But instead of the vegetables, can’t I have more beef?”
“Sorry, we can’t do that, beef is more costly than vegetables so you can’t substitute one thing for another unless you’re willing to pay more.”
“But I’m taking away one thing and replacing it with another! It makes sense!”
:rolleyes:

“Instead of getting spicy chicken over rice, can I replace that with assorted seafood instead? And for the same price?”
No, we won’t be giving you $10-15 worth of seafood for our lunch special price of $5.25.

It’s not a request, but I just wanted to add that I’m tired of hearing:
“Can’t you make chow mein?”
“Sorry, that’s Chinese food, we’re Thai.”
“Isn’t that basically the same thing?”

I hate food service.

79

Years ago I had a friend crashing on my couch for a couple of weeks that turned into a couple of months. He was a total moocher, but one of those guys that everyone likes because he’s funny and really easygoing. However, he was something of a degenerate. I got him a job at the restaurant I worked at and he missed his first day. He had sex with a random girl on my couch while I was upstairs. Etcetera…

Anyway, he develops this huge nasty boil in the middle of his back and I swear that thing was as big as a fist. He waits and waits to get it looked at because he doesn’t have any money. Finally, I give him money and he goes and gets it lanced. He was left with what looked like a huge hole in his back, and it was oozing and red and not something I even wanted to look at. He was having trouble changing the dressing on it and asked me to do it! He wanted me to clean it and bandage it for him. That was too much for me.

Another funny one has to do with my brother and his buddy. I had asked my brother to help me move one Saturday and he agreed to be there at noon. He and his friend waltz in and his friend looks really confused. It turns out my brother told him that I was having a party…SUPRISE! Lol, I am sure my brother got some serious payback for that.

80

Ha! That reminds me of a situation I had to endure once before:

I took my friends out for dinner at an Indian restaurant to celebrate something or other, and one of my old friends decided, when it was time to order, that he wanted a Margarita. We could not convince him that this was a stupid thing to ask, and so he dropped that on the waiter. Before he could express his astonishment, my other guest and I interrupted with, “M-, this is an Indian restaurant.” Still, he persisted with his line of questioning, and made the waiter explain that no, Margaritas were not available there.

Embarrassing enough, right? No. He then went on to ask if they had the fixings to make a Margarita. “Do you have strawberries? Tequila? A blender? Salt? Ice?” “No sir, we don’t have strawberries.”

“But there’s a farmer’s market just three blocks away… they’re probably still open…”

:smack:

I managed to convince him to try some lassi – but it was hard.

I wanted to crawl under the table – it was a place that I went frequently, too – and I know every time I went after that, the waiter pegged me as The Guy With The Idiot Friend.