Tales from the Trenches

[Will Graham]

Tell me your horrible, interesting or funny work stories. Here are a few of mine.


I used to work for an ice cream delivery company, which everyone assumed would be an amazing job. I hate ice cream though, and the guys I worked with were abysmal shits. They were a small enough company so they only really delivered as far as a few neighbouring counties. Which lead to them hating HB, a rival company with national coverage. Some shops have two fridges so one company uses one, and another uses the other. In most shops though, a fridge is divided into slots, and the slots are then assigned to the individual ice cream distribution companies. This has been a dull paragraph but now my stories will make more sense

I was out with one of the drivers making his deliveries for the day, when we arrived at a big enough shop. We went in and were stocking one of the fridges, this was a shop where companies had separate fridges. The HB fridge was right next to ours and had this big vinyl sticker on it. This sticker was maybe a metre and a half by half a metre at its widest parts. These things were made to never come off once they were placed on something. Martin (the guy I was with) nudged me and walked over to the HB fridge. At least I think he meant to nudge me, but he just elbowed me in the eye. For a good five minutes he was there trying to rip the sticker off the HB fridge, he had gone bright red and was grunting like a donkey that had swallowed a lump of plastic. I just kind of stood there and smiled while people walked by looking at us. Eventually he tore it off and threw it under some shelves.

Another time we were parked outside a shopping centre and Martin told me it was where all the yummy mummies shopped, before handing me an ice cream and winking. I am only 60% sure that I wasn't being groomed

He used to shout "poof" out the window at guys who drove mini coopers

My first delivery stop with him was in a place called Darndale, one of the most dangerous places in the country. Even the Alsatians go around in pairs in Darndale etc. Anyways, I was waiting in the van while he went into the shop to find out how much ice cream they wanted, and have a chin wag with the owner. Before he went in he told me that some junkies might come around messing with the van and all that, of course I reassured him I'd stay in the van and stay safe. He looked confused for a second before looking me dead in the eye and saying, "No Conor you don't understand, no matter what the ice cream comes first"

The dividers in the ice cream fridges were adjustable, so the drivers used to go into a shop and expand the dividers so their sections were three times the size they should be. Purposefully crushing the other companies' ice creams in the process.

Once we were moving a mini freight of ice cream through a shop, and till this day I am convinced he tried to run over two guys from HB with it in one of the aisles

I have more stories about that and my current job, but this post is already rather long

 

[SaShman]

I used to work at Pizza hut. I remember one time a women, who was clearly tripping balls, came in and just paced up and down the store for a while, walked up to the checkout, said "the KGB is bad, don't sell alcohol to children" and left.

My boss dared me $20 to scull a tin of jalapeno juice which I accepted...fucking stupid decision I ended up going home sick after.

He also dared me $20 to scull two litres of iced coffee in two minutes on a separate occasion..again fucking stupid. I threw up and again I went home sick. Back then I was making fuck all money there anyway so the $20 pretty much covered the hours I missed from going home.

When I first started my current job, the management wanted to redesign the store layout. Me and the other new guys basically had to do odd jobs around the place. One such job involved moving some stuff up to a loft above an office. In this loft we found a box full of 80's porn mags and a golliwogg.

 

[Richard B Riddick]

I worked at a grocery store for a time.

-Once I was cleaning up someones puke on the ground. This little girl was walking down the aisle completely self absorbed with a vacant expression on her face. Even though she must have seen me cleaning up the mess from more than 70 feet away, she still managed to put her shoe right in the middle of it.

-Same job, on weekends I'd work the 6 am opening shift sometimes. There was a middle aged asian guy living in his car who would hang out in the parking lot & he'd approach me and start talking. He'd say things like he was parked in a parking lot by the harbor and he saw a black guy beating a black woman with a wrench and she was screaming for help & things like that. Of course, he was homeless, old and didn't have a cell fone so I guess there was nothing he could do to intervene. Sad lyfe.

-Same job. Once on the weekend, I worked opening shift and one of the things I did was clean bathrooms. One weekend, I looked in the men's bathroom & it looked pretty clean so I didn't have to do much. I looked in the women's bathroom & there was blood smeared all over the toilet seats in two of the stalls. I cleaned it & never said a word about it. Soo. I guess if anyone ever had an *accident* in a bathroom with their period blood before... Don't feel bad, ladies. You aren't the only one!!

(There are other stories that might be better from other jobs I've had, but that's enough for now I'm thinking...)

 

[Tucker]

At my first job at this candy shop this super fat kid came in and said "DO YOU HAVE ANY CANDY" and I mean, it was a candy shop. Candy EVERYWHERE. And he wasn't blind or anything, so I just said "No." He started to cry and he ran out of the shop. Weirdest thing I ever saw

Luckily nobody else was in the shop and my boss was in the back so she didn't see anything

 

[Jack's Smirking Revenge]

i work at a cinema, and i once got called a cunt by a customer because it was apparently my fault he didn't have pockets in his trousers to put his change in.

there was also a woman who didn't understand the concept of orange wednesday (buy one ticket and get a another free) and demanded that she should get her ticket for half price with her orange wednesday code, because her friends had split the payment between them and essentially paid half price each.

there was a woman once who was almost in tears of rage because a man had apparently slapped her son, and she was screaming for the police to be called. we told her multiple times that the security guards were on the way (the cinema is in a shopping centre) but we couldn't phone the police because the landline can't make outgoing calls, and she started shouting at staff to use their mobiles to phone the police, but of course we aren't allowed them on shift so we couldn't.

 

[Channizard]

I ran myself over with my own car when I was a pizza delivery driver.

 

[Abstract Debauchery]

At work... I cropdust people. For people unfamiliar with the term, I fart as I pass by people. 95% of the time they're silent but deadly farts. No one knows who does this. If they ever found out they would kill me. So the other day I was walking through the break room after lunch and I had a huge case of the taco farts. I walk through the break room and let out some controlled fart gas everywhere. Then I left the room. No sooner than ten seconds later I hear a "WHAT THE HELL?!" from someone in the break room. Apparently, it smelled so bad people had to leave.

I had to run from the back because I couldn't stop laughing.

 

[Channizard]

I used to get people fired from work. Back when I worked at McD's about 2/3 years ago, if I had any issues with people/they were generic cunts who needed to be shot, I'd go crying to the manager who babied me and usually by next week they were gone. She didn't have full authority or anything, but I knew how to turn on the waterworks easy enough to get my way, especially when it came to people who were 'being unreasonable in the workplace and making it difficult for others to get through the day'. It happened to at least 3 girls.

 

[Will Graham]

Really I meant horrible things that happened to you rather than you being the horrible thing that happened to someone else. That is still a relevant story though I suppose

 

[Channizard]

Oh, I thought we were just discussing horrible things in general, regardless if you were the cause or affect.

Well in any case I still ran myself over. I was doing a delivery run, parked at the top of a driveway and got out. I pulled the e-brake on the car and it didn't go anywhere, despite being on a hill. However, as I got out, I saw it was in Drive still. Me, overlooking that fact that it was still stationary, sat back down and started switching gears. While the e-brake was on, it failed and I started rolling back. After it would cross the road, it would go down a 15 foot embankment towards, so when the door got caught on a curb, I threw myself out. I got caught by the door, and in the summer wearing capri's, got dragged along the ground and got wicked road rash on my legs, as well as a hole in my foot when a rock got caught against my ankle.

The car went over the embankment, and I was lying on the ground, and just start bawling my eyes out. I got one month's paid leave from work, a mention in the paper )Delivery Driver runs self over with own car), a new(ish) car, and some bitchin scars.

I was not the only casualty though.

Since I'd had the food and was getting out of the car/got back in, the pizzas went diving out the vehicle with me. After that, whenever the address came up a note was attached "Park at bottom of driveway".

 

[Will Graham]

I work weekends and the occasional evening shift in a small centra. For UK people it's like spar, or 7/11 for the Americans. Some lady came to the counter with a net of red onions and I scanned them through and told her it was two euro. She mentioned that she thought they were only one euro, so I came out from behind the counter and went to the Fruit&Veg aisle to check. Every third Sunday we have lot of price changes, and the Sunday that had just gone was a third Sunday. I suspected that someone simply hadn't updated the price of onions on the system.

I was wrong though. There are two types of onions, red ones and normal ones. The normal onions were on the top shelf with the price (i.e. the price saying one euro) attached to the edge of the shelf. Below them in a box were the red onions, which didn't actually have a label. Before I even opened my mouth to point this out, she had already started ranting. Claiming that it was impossible for her to know which onions were which price. We had some boxes of potatoes, and one of those had the price on the top edge of the box rather than below it. She said it was impossible for anyone to know how to read the prices on the products, and that it was an attempt by us to obfuscate our prices to trick the customer. She then insisted that we had purposefully made it impossible for a consumer to make an informed decision. Then she followed up with accusations that what we were doing was highly illegal, and the Consumer Association of Ireland could get us closed down.

Keep in mind that the labels don't just have prices on them, they explicitly name the product. For example the potato sign said 'Wilkinsons potatoes £3.50' and the sign beside it said 'Centra own potatoes £1.00'. There is no way you could be confused if you read the labels. So while she was ranting and raving I just had to stand there listening to her and agreeing. Rather than saying "well no, you just have to be able to read".