The Horrors of the "Professional" World - Stories that will make you wonder how we exist.

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Another one from the vault of exceptional people at my work.

A woman a while back used to get a lift in with her friend, and absolutely detested public transport.

Said friend who had the car, had booked off a day because their kid (sports day or hospital appointment or something).

The other woman tried to get the time off over and over, but it wasn't going to happen as too many people were off that day.

Surprise surprise, she phones in on the day claiming she is ill. She explained she hadn't been feeling well for a while and was going to the hospital to get bloods done.

Now despite her pretty much saying "I'm not coming into work on x day, I wont", she claimed to everyone she was having a heart attack on that day and that's why she couldn't come in.
 
Benzo withdrawal, unlike opiate withdrawal (except in the rarest of cases), can actually kill you.

I think it's pretty repugnant how Big Pharma deliberately addicted people to the most addictive class of chemicals ever invented.

They do work incredibly well, though. Just like opiates for pain. The addiction/dependence is only a big deal due to stigma and medical researchers' infighting. In regulated dosage they're all right even in the long term.

We see a lot of ODs from people who've been cut off abruptly and move on over to buying on the street. It's pretty sad.

But I'm just thinking anyone acting that freaked out about prescriptions had to be getting one or the other.
 
was it opiates or benzos?

Neither, she was losing her shit over an inhaler. Which we never put on hold because that kills people. But like I said, lady needed to calm her fucking tits because she had only left the office an hour ago and it usually takes about two for the pharmacy to fill medications.
 
Neither, she was losing her shit over an inhaler. Which we never put on hold because that kills people. But like I said, lady needed to calm her fucking tits because she had only left the office an hour ago and it usually takes about two for the pharmacy to fill medications.
now that's batshit
 
I used to work part-time as an English tutor for a local university. The amount of grown-ass adults who could not wrap their heads around the concept of plagiarism was nothing short of awe-inspiring, but one particular student went above and beyond the call of stupidity. This girl showed up twenty minutes before the tutoring center closed the night before her essay was due. She copy-pasted everything from a Wikipedia page down to the images and links and threw a fit when I said I couldn't help her with what basically amounted to a screenshot. I thought that'd be the end of it, but she came storming in a week later screeching about how I ruined her dreams because her professor was threatening to have her expelled. We eventually had to call campus security.

Then there was that other guy who expected me to proofread an entire goddamn novel for $20 and acted like I was missing out on a great deal when I refused. His exact words: "You would barely have to change it." I took a look at the first few pages for giggles, and I swear to God that thing changed tenses three times in the first sentence. It was apparently supposed to be a "mature" take on Red Riding Hood, and no detail was spared as the heroine spent a paragraph waxing poetic about her breasts while simultaneously getting her throat ripped out by the Big Bad Wolf. I deserved an Oscar for not laughing in his face.
 
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I used to work part-time as an English tutor for a local university. The amount of grown-ass adults who could not wrap their heads around the concept of plagiarism was nothing short of awe-inspiring, but one particular student went above and beyond the call of stupidity.

People who don't understand why plagiarism is wrong simply need to be put to death. Nobody this stupid can possibly ever contribute anything to this world but evil and stupidity. I keep a supply of Zyklon B for this purpose.
 
I cracked open a desktop system at work for a client to replace the hard drive. Inside was a plastic bag with two syringes and an empty vial of Lidocaine. I called my boss, who called her boss, who thought we were shitting her, and came down to see for herself. She just kinda stared at the bag for a minute, then took the bag with her. About five minutes after that we get a call telling everyone who touched the bag to wash their hands thoroughly and to use hand sanitizer. Lidocaine is a local anesthetic that is most often used in dentistry but has some other uses as well. We looked up the ticket, and it didn't come from a hospital or dentist's office. I was curious and did some research and found that aside from its legit uses, Lidocaine is often used to cut cocaine to make the buyer think it's higher quality, as uncut cocaine numbs the gums when it's applied (so I read). I'm guessing that's what it was used for, but I have no idea how it ended up inside a computer from a corporate client.
 
I cracked open a desktop system at work for a client to replace the hard drive. Inside was a plastic bag with two syringes and an empty vial of Lidocaine. I called my boss, who called her boss, who thought we were shitting her, and came down to see for herself. She just kinda stared at the bag for a minute, then took the bag with her. About five minutes after that we get a call telling everyone who touched the bag to wash their hands thoroughly and to use hand sanitizer. Lidocaine is a local anesthetic that is most often used in dentistry but has some other uses as well. We looked up the ticket, and it didn't come from a hospital or dentist's office. I was curious and did some research and found that aside from its legit uses, Lidocaine is often used to cut cocaine to make the buyer think it's higher quality, as uncut cocaine numbs the gums when it's applied (so I read). I'm guessing that's what it was used for, but I have no idea how it ended up inside a computer from a corporate client.
There's gonna be some drug tests somewhere soon.
 
I used to work part-time as an English tutor for a local university. The amount of grown-ass adults who could not wrap their heads around the concept of plagiarism was nothing short of awe-inspiring, but one particular student went above and beyond the call of stupidity. This girl showed up twenty minutes before the tutoring center closed the night before her essay was due. She copy-pasted everything from a Wikipedia page down to the images and links and threw a fit when I said I couldn't help her with what basically amounted to a screenshot. I thought that'd be the end of it, but she came storming in a week later screeching about how I ruined her dreams because her professor was threatening to have her expelled. We eventually had to call campus security.

Then there was that other guy who expected me to proofread an entire goddamn novel for $20 and acted like I was missing out on a great deal when I refused. His exact words: "You would barely have to change it." I took a look at the first few pages for giggles, and I swear to God that thing changed tenses three times in the first sentence. It was apparently supposed to be a "mature" take on Red Riding Hood, and no detail was spared as the heroine spent a paragraph waxing poetic about her breasts while simultaneously getting her throat ripped out by the Big Bad Wolf. I deserved an Oscar for not laughing in his face.
I've had some interesting experiences at my college's tutoring center, some people are just really bad at processing basic information. When I was the receptionist I had to tell a girl no less than ten times that we did not have a bio-chem tutor available at the exact second she was in there. We had a bio-chem tutor, we had one sceduled in a few hours, but no I cannot summon one right now.
Scheduling one-on-ones could also be a mess. When my friends was the main receptionist she ended up dealing with a guy (who was my personal horrorcow but that's another can of worms) who did not understand the concept of why you schedule an appointment.
The way one-on-one weekly tutoring appointments work is that the student sends and email to us to request one, we send them back an email with a tutor to meet with, a day, and a time. If they confirm that works, then they are expected to show up weekly at that time and day with that tutor. This guy sent an email requesting one-one-one sessions, my friend planned to have him with a certain tutor yadda yadda- He didn't send a confirmation back, but instead showed up at a random time on a random day and met with a random tutor his mom suggested him to meet. This tutor was doing drop-in only and wasn't available for appointments but agreed to help him for just that day.
My friend tried to send another email getting this guy to confirm but he never did, he just met with a random tutor again. He did this three times in a row and never got an actual one-on-one set up becasue he didn't understand the concept of confirming or even reading an email. Every tutor that had to work with him said he was nearly impossible to teach and it was like he wasn't even listening to what they were saying. There were also people who refused to tutor him for being creepy and looking like a serial killer but that's an additional can of worms.
 
I've had some interesting experiences at my college's tutoring center, some people are just really bad at processing basic information. When I was the receptionist I had to tell a girl no less than ten times that we did not have a bio-chem tutor available at the exact second she was in there. We had a bio-chem tutor, we had one sceduled in a few hours, but no I cannot summon one right now.
Scheduling one-on-ones could also be a mess. When my friends was the main receptionist she ended up dealing with a guy (who was my personal horrorcow but that's another can of worms) who did not understand the concept of why you schedule an appointment.
The way one-on-one weekly tutoring appointments work is that the student sends and email to us to request one, we send them back an email with a tutor to meet with, a day, and a time. If they confirm that works, then they are expected to show up weekly at that time and day with that tutor. This guy sent an email requesting one-one-one sessions, my friend planned to have him with a certain tutor yadda yadda- He didn't send a confirmation back, but instead showed up at a random time on a random day and met with a random tutor his mom suggested him to meet. This tutor was doing drop-in only and wasn't available for appointments but agreed to help him for just that day.
My friend tried to send another email getting this guy to confirm but he never did, he just met with a random tutor again. He did this three times in a row and never got an actual one-on-one set up becasue he didn't understand the concept of confirming or even reading an email. Every tutor that had to work with him said he was nearly impossible to teach and it was like he wasn't even listening to what they were saying. There were also people who refused to tutor him for being creepy and looking like a serial killer but that's an additional can of worms.
I vote you open the cans of worms.
 
I vote you open the cans of worms.
Oh dear, that's quite a lot of worms to unleash but if you insist! I tried to be a little vauge for the sake of not :powerlevel:ing (there's still some worms in that can!) but this is still kind of long, sorry about that.
I'm sure I've mentioned this guy in a few places here because he just provided so many weird stories. Basically I used to be friends with a guy who I met back in middle school due to us both being socially incompetant weeaboos. He was actually pretty funny back then though he could be a lot to manage at times. There was the whole thing with him claiming George W. Bush was the Antichrist. He would just scream this in the quad during lunch. In a computer apps class we had to turn in a paper about what we would do with x amount of dollars and his paper was an elaborate plan to assasinate Bush by drowning him in a kiddie pool full of fermenting pickle juice. Also there was the whole thing about him loving Dean Koontz so much he claimed he would take a bullet for him, that was a little weird. The guy really had no filter and had the tendancy to creep out everyone who didn't know him very well. And good lord did he say some stupid shit. He thought that "bartering" was when the Taliban kills people and steals their land, he once claimed that the comic Maus was racist because the Jews were mice and the Nazis were cats, he said not liking Ellen DeGeneres was an insult to lesbians, he said that my grandmother would go to hell because we cremated her and kept her ashes instead of burying her according to some Jewish tradition. Neither of us were Jewish.
In fact, early in high school he was a devoted Pastafarian. He had a FSM shirt that he wore all the time, owned the Flying Spaghettti Monster bible or something, would pass out printed flyers to people about Pastaferianism. It did cause contention with his religious family (who were apparently all either preachy born-again types or in really weird Christian cults) particularly his dad. He hated how religious his dad was and would mock him for being Christian all the time. I bring up religion since it has a big role in why we aren't friends and how he's a total nutbar.

Now later in high school, this guy started to have some issues with emotional stability. He got really angry at the slightest povocation, way more angry than a rational person should get. It wasn't directed towards us, but towards people he arbitrarily decided were bullies. Basically anyone who ever told him to calm down, no matter now nicely, would be labeled a bully. If we tried to tell him to calm down, it was like talking to a brick wall. Like I said above you could tell him something a million times and he just wouldn't get it.
It got to the point that he was screaming incoherent nonsence at people in the middle of P.E for asking him to pass a ball. It sounds like it would be funny, but Jesus it was scary at the time. Not because he was screaming at the biggest, scariest, Mexican kid in the class and was in danger of needing to be peeled off the pavement, but becasue I thought he was gonna start directing his rage at me.
About this time, he had a complete 180 on his religious views. He was now a devout Christian becasue when he started to hear evil voices in his house one night, he prayed and they went away! This was kind of a problem becasue I was getting into being an occultist edgelord. Where before he mocked his dad for being Christian, he demanded I turn to Jesus. This is the point where I decided this guy was too much damn work and I didn't need to be friends with the guy. Well motherfucker went full-on beucoup dinky-dau at this point. He decided to go through a full year of my social media posts to find this time I advertised a club fundraiser going on at a pizza place. I don't speak schizophrenia but apparently "hey eat shitty pizza here" translates to "please kill my friend in his sleep also Satan is my infernal lord".
Next day at lunch he angrily confronted me as to the fact that I posted his home address online (it was the pizza place address) and that he would be calling the police on me becasue I was threatenting to kill him. There were allegations of witchcraft in there somewhere. Fuck, he just looked insane the whole time he was yelling. I eventually tried to get a counsellor involved cause I thought the dude was gonna kill me, unfortunatly my counsellor was retarded so decided that as long as crazy guy said "no hard feelings, it was fine."
Rest of the year was awkward, He never caused screaming mayhem in college as far as I know but he always looked one bad day away from Elliot Rodger-ing the place. Last I heard he was institutionalized for some period of time.

So in conclusion crazy people are hard to tutor in math.
 
Anyone have any go-to lines that you use to shut down unwanted small-talk from co-workers who just can't seem to take a fucking hint?

Me, I'm partial to: "I'm sorry, did you need something?"

It's super effective. If you think I'm being a shit for no reason, keep in mind that I'm not the one bugging people who are clearly busy and asking them a retarded question (of which there is only a small range of answers and hardly the fodder for any kind of back-and-forth discussion), contributing nothing in response, and standing around like Captain Linger expecting them to do all the heavy lifting in the conversation even though I'm the one who initiated it.
 
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Marketing people playing engineer. Makes me fucking crazy.
Dude watch more Star Trek.
"Relics", TNG. Scotty comes back from the transporter grave to explain to Geordi the secret of good engineering: Lie about how long it takes normally, so you can then be a miracle worker in a pinch.
Tell sales everything takes twice as long or is half as effective, that way every now and then you can GIVE 'EM ALL SHE'S GOT, CAP'N and wow you just barely managed to squeeze that out in this rare occasion.
 
Dude watch more Star Trek.
"Relics", TNG. Scotty comes back from the transporter grave to explain to Geordi the secret of good engineering: Lie about how long it takes normally, so you can then be a miracle worker in a pinch.
Tell sales everything takes twice as long or is half as effective, that way every now and then you can GIVE 'EM ALL SHE'S GOT, CAP'N and wow you just barely managed to squeeze that out in this rare occasion.

Saw it, live by it.

But when they ask for the blatantly impossible in a way that forcibly reminds me that they don't understand the very basics of electricity, and tell me that this is inconvenient for them, I don't bother. I just laugh at them until my boss gets around to saying I should shut up and stop mocking them.
 
Saw it, live by it.

But when they ask for the blatantly impossible in a way that forcibly reminds me that they don't understand the very basics of electricity, and tell me that this is inconvenient for them, I don't bother. I just laugh at them until my boss gets around to saying I should shut up and stop mocking them.

I cannae change the law of physics Cap'n!
 
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