What did you say to the authorities?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This thread is from one of us who got written up for some wisecrack to his boss.

So: What did you say or do, and what were the results?

Example: Highly unpopular supervisor punches in on the overhead speakers (you do that from your desk phone), and pages, “Mary Hartman! Mary Hartman!”. A faint snickering is heard in the background.

There is no question in any mind that he is paging me. So MaryFoo punches in on the overhead and, in a matter-of-fact tone, says “Nobody here by that name” and goes back to what she was doing.

A complete silence is heard throughout the offices. About one minute later, the supervisor comes over to my desk and talks to me properly. Hah.

2

During college I took a summer job driving a recycling truck. Route type job, pretty much a glorified garbage man but it paid well. One day we had 2 of 5 drivers call in and it took us 3 trucks 16 hours to finish. A few times during the day I’d radio we were never going to finish. It was meant to sound joking, but underlying I was PISSED! I had a frat party to get to and had to shower and pick up some booze.

Next morning (on 2 hours sleep) the supervisor had a written warning for my file that I had to sign to show I received it. Under steps taken : “Given a serious attitude adjustment.” I told her to go fuck herself and never looked back.
Added bonus, they went bankrupt 5 months later. :slight_smile:

3

I was down south a few years ago over the Christmas break when I was stopped at an RBT (Random Breath Testing).

The cop, while going through the usual spiel, started to have a little trouble getting his words out, at which point I interjected…

“How much have you had to drink?”

Lucky for me he had a sense of humour.

4

One time a cop stopped me and said,

“I was following you for the last 5 miles. I figured you’d slow down.”

I said, “well, obviously, I didn’t see you.”

I’ve always been somewhat deferential with bosses.

5

Some will get this, most won’t

The law won!

:smiley:

6

When I was 20, I was working at JCPenney in the shoe department. My co-worker had a problem with a return and asked the manager on duty that night (Mr. X) for advice on what to do. He told her what to do and walked away.

A few minutes later, still with the same customer, she had another question. So she came over to ask me what to do. I told her to ask Mr. X, as I can’t make that kind of decision.

Just as I was saying that to her, Mr. X walks by us and says to me, “If you have a problem with what I told her, say it to me! You don’t make the decisions around here!”

Okay, where the hell did that come from? I said to him, “I was just telling her to ask you what to do.” He then started yelling at me again about how it was not my job to make any decisions, blah blah blah. Bear in mind, we’re out on the sales floor in front of a couple of customers. So, as I’m attempting to tell him, again, that I was telling her to ask him what to do, he started walking into the stockroom, so I followed his ass in there and started yelling at him.

After a minute or two, I got fed up and said, “Fuck you, I’m out of here!” and stormed out of the store.

The next day, the store manager called me to ask what happened, so when I went to the store to meet with him, I told him everything and he sided with Mr. X completely. So that was a huge lesson learned that day. Management will always side with the higher ups.

I hated that job anyway.

7

College: Finals. I’ve had 5 days off and went home to study. I spent the entire time studying for Microbiology and Enviro Chem. About halfway back to school (1 1/2 hour drive) I remember that I hadn’t studied at all for my Conducting final. Conducting, as in orchestra, as in I have to stand up before the music faculty and “conduct” an imaginary orchestra. My final was The 1812 Overture; I have my score and my tape with me. So I pull over and tape my score to my steering wheel and there I am, driving down the road with Tchaikovsky blaring. I get pulled over by a state trooper for weaving and I explain what I’m doing. “I’m conducting the 1812 Overture and I forgot to practice!!” He looks at my steering wheel, looks back at me, and just laughs. He walks back to his car mumbling “they’ll never believe me” and drives away.

Work: Picture if you will, my boss: Tall, blond, swaggery, drives a Harley, just got rid of his Mullet-from-Hell. And he buys the supertanker Ford Extrusion. He swaggers into my office and points out the window to his ‘new ride’. I just look and him and ask, “Overcompensate much?” :smiley:

8

We’d been begging my boss to put in a window in our back room production area for a couple of years. One afternon, my boss walked into the back room and commented that it was stuffy back there. I said, “Go ahead and open the window … oh, wait … that’s right, we don’t have a window!” A couple of months later, we had one.

9

I work for the Post Office. As a big, humourless, and very anal organisation, everything has to be in writing. You can’t just ask your boss for something (changing rostered days off etc), you have to write a letter.

I got sick of writing letters, and the bosses are long sick of reading them, but I know I can’t do anything about it, so sometimes I just have fun with them. I’ll stain the letter with coffee and burn the edges treasure map style, or make the request in verse, or in “redneck”, etc. Not that this is particularly witty of me, but it breaks the monotony, and the mamagers usually get a giggle out of it too.

It’s a weird organisation, that one.

10

This had me laughing my ass off! :smiley:
Can you tell I was in band?

11

The other day I owed my boss a few cents. I got the coins I owed him and threw them at his feet one by one, saying “dance for me, monkey boy”.

12

A couple of years ago I managed a small, locally owned pet store, which was subsquently sold to two control-freak girls who were complete bitches. I mean nasty, suspicious, demeaning, whatever other unpleasant adjectives I can’t think of at the moment. I had worked at the store for several years and had gotten into the habit of coming in fifteen minutes early when I opened in order to have the lights turned on, money counted, register set up, open signs on, cat furniture and dog crates and whatever moved out to the sidewalk on display, clean the animal cages, and generally tidy up the store and make it ready for the business day before customers came into the store.

They did not like this. They saw it as clocking in early to pad my hours.

A few weeks later I was issued a formal, written reprimand for doing so. I just looked at her like she was a complete friggen’ idiot and asked if she was really reprimanding me for coming in early to open.
New boss #1 says “Well… no one else does that” and I replied “because no one else cares that there are customers waiting, and customers that have to climb over cat posts to get to the shelves, and customers who need help and then sometimes there are cages in the store until eleven o’clock until we have a moment to move them out, and by the way the feeder rat cages stink in the morning, not to mention the dirty water bowls that need changing first thing, and animals needing to be fed before I have to focus on the customers. I have been working here nearly three years, and the appearance of the store is important to me. It reflects badly on the store, and badly on me as well to have customers climbing over dog crates while I turn the lights on. Are you really so fucking stupid that you don’t understand that it’s good business practice to be open and ready for business when the doors are opened in the morning?”

Then I just walked away.

There was a small space on the front of the written reprimand for “employee comments or responses”. I filled that space and the entire back of the paper, heh.

A week later, I came into work and opened exactly at ten o’clock, not a minute earlier, and saw a notice posted on the employee bulliten board, a “Notice of Change in Policy” which read:

There was a note in my mailbox saying that a note had been added to my employee file reflecting the “change in policy enacted due to my (get this) suggestion”.

I and pretty much the entire rest of the staff quit less than a month later.

13

I once asked a State Trooper if they had a curio shop where I could buy a hat like his.

14

At one point in my checkered career, I was the secretary/admin assistant to a county sheriff. He had a whiteboard up in the hallway that I could see it from my desk where he would post important reminders. One day, he put up the date of the next Sheriff’s Association meeting. However, he abbreviated it as “Sheriff’s Ass Meeting.” I saw it and started laughing so hard I had tears coming out of my eyes. Unfortunately, when he asked what was so funny I told him about it. He didn’t speak to me the rest of the day. About a week later, he picked a fight with me as an excuse to fire me. Yes, he was that childish.

15

Unfortunately I’ve never said anything. It all stays in my head because I’m a big chicken. Someday though I expect I’ll blow like Krakatoa.

I can tell one on my mother though.

Many years ago she was bookkeeper at a little store that sold appliances and custom cabinetry. A fellow who worked there, brother of the owner, was always in legal trouble of some sort and had previously been a guest in a federal pen. One day my Mom’s boss comes up to her and introduces her to some serious-looking man in a suit. He’s an FBI agent and boss asks my mother to show him the books. Without missing a beat mom asks boss “Which set?” The agent actually found this funny and laughed. Mom’s boss, genetically lacking any sense of humor, was less amused. He ended up firing her. Ok, technically he fired her several years later but I’m sure this incident remained lurking somewhere in the back of his pea-sized brain.

16

After fifteen years of working as a waitress/hostess/bartender in the same company, I saw more than 100 managers come and go. After being told by the most recent that we were going to start a “new” teamwork approach, which he then outlined, I made a small snorting noise. It was in essence the exact same “new” policy we’d tried and seen fail 99 times before. He was quite indignant about the snort, and took me aside after the meeting to question me. I POLITELY informed him of the major flaws in his plan, all of which I backed up with ample evidence. He got huffy and then said, “You need to remember one thing, missy *(I SO love being called “missy” by someone ten years my junior :rolleyes: ) * – I am the manager here. YOU are just a waitress.”

That did it. Temper flaring, I said, “YOU need to remember something, bucko. I was working here before you had hair on your pee-pee and I will NOT take orders from an idiot.”

He wrote me up for insubordination, and went huffing into the office. The general manager said, “Wait… you’re writing LifeOnWry up for insubordination? You can’t do that! She’s been here since you were a KID! What are you, an idiot?”

17

I had the opposite conversation last March.

Arizona Highway Patrolman: Do you know how fast you were going?

Me: No

AHP: 88mph.

Me: Really? I knew I was speeding, but I didn’t know I was going that fast.

AHP: You we’re going 88 mph when I clocked you, but then you slowed waaay down.

Me: Well, yeah. That’s when I saw you.

I got a smile out of him, and he knocked the ticket down to 75 (in a 65), saving me twenty bucks.

~S

18

I had something of an attitude during my latter time in the military.

Now, granted, nucs are not the most… proper of military personnel. Unlike most enlisted personnel, nucs are trained to tell officers when they think the officer is making a mistake. And it doesn’t matter what rank the officer might be, either. At the time that I was in the Navy, the director of the Nuclear Power program had a quote running through the fleet along the lines of - the ideal nuc is disrespectful, arrogant, and doesn’t always salute.

I took that to extremes. It’s usually not a good idea ™ to tell one’s watch officer that he’s got to get his head out of his ass if he’s going to keep from having to face a green table. (The tables for accident boards were reported to be formica, green formica.) It’s also not considered a good idea ™ to tell print, in the ship’s POD (Plan of the Day, or newspaper) that three of the four commanders on the ship are dinq in their mandatory training on rad safety. Arguing with one’s leading chief is usually also not considered a good idea ™: Usually it involved a one-way trip to the brig. Or at least the worst shit duty available.

My favorite though dates back to the mandatory sexual harassment training we got after them idiot flyboys at Tailhook proved they were fratboys, not gentlemen. One of the scenarios was a LCDR had an E-2 Enlisted woman whom he ordered to kiss him. (That was reported. One can guess where the real end was.) The follow up on the scenario was that the officer was relieved of his position and given a letter of reprimand in his personnel jacket. Not much, but a flat guarantee that he’d never be promoted again. Anyways, when the scenario was finished we were asked for first reactions, and I said: “Another case of a khaki getting away with something a blue-shirt would have swung for.” The officer leading the training just turned puce, and spluttered like a leaky steam relief for about three minutes while the rest of the blue shirt scum in the room stared at me shocked I had the gonads to say what we were all thinking. The harassment training ended shortly after that, for some reason. :smiley:

19

Picture a high school lunch room. I’m sitting there with a group of my friends, and for whatever reason I’m waving around a $1 bill. A teacher walked up behind me and grabbed the bill from my hands. I whipped around to see that it was one of my least favorite teachers. I had never taken a class from her, but she always seemed to have, in my opinion at the time, a serious attitude problem as she walked around the school. (Note that a highschooler was judging an adult on her attitude. Heh.)

“Hey, give that back,” I said.

“What are you going to do for me to earn it?” she asked.

My perverted teenage brain took over. "You’ve got to give some to get some, lady."

A look of shock filled her face and the faces of the other kids at the table. She was speechless. Hell, I was speechless. I couldn’t believe I had just said that to a teacher. She sputtered, turned, and stormed away from the table. My friends were in awe, although they figured I was in some serious trouble.

The next day I was walking with a couple friends down a nearly-empty hallway after school. The same teacher was ahead of us a ways. As we approached her I said, “Hey, you never gave me back my dollar.”

Her face turned red as she realized who was speaking to her, and that this insolent teenage bastard had the nerve to ask for her money back. “I think you owe me one HELL of an apology before I’ll even consider giving it back,” she fumed.

I paused, looked at her, shrugged my shoulders and said “Eh, it isn’t worth it.” With that I continued down the hallway and we never spoke to each other again.

The whole event was so unlike me. I mean, I was an introvert around authority figures. I was a friggin’ brown-nosing teacher’s pet for Pete’s sake! And here I made a rather crass sexual reference to a teacher – a semi-attractive one, I should note. I’m not especially proud of it, but my friends still love to bring it up.

20

I knew I wasn’t the only nuc here.

Anyway, had a commander I reported to who was very light in technical knowledge. We got into an argument one day about how to properly rearrange the electric plant during a casualty on an aircraft carrier. He came up with one scenario that was physically impossible and pretty much impractical to boot even if The Book didn’t tell you how it needed to be done. So when I pointed out that this wasn’t How It Was Done, he said, “Show me where it’s not written!”
A moment of stunned silence, then “Well, sir, we could start in the Library of Congress.”