When Customers/Clients/Colleagues Say/Do Stupid Things

[nogojones]

Used to work with this lad - Pinky. Thick as shit, but a real grafter. If he was told to dig a hole he's just keep digging til the end of the shift.

We were on a down shift and most of us were clearing scrap or greasing plant. Pinkys job for the shift was to clear a sump pit that had flooded as the pump was fucked. So the crane drops a small skip down the pit , Pinky puts his wellies on and gets to work clearing 2ft of water.

We're all up top looking down on him whilst we're having a cuppa and a fag. He's cursing us out for being lazy cunts (we were). He's filling the skip using a shovel! digging like crazy at the water. After 20 minutes we shout down "Eh Pinky, you considered using a bucket?"

 

[skyscraper101]

One of my biggest irritants is being a glorified conduit when simple common sense says to put everyone involved on copy.

E.g. when people who when emailing a reply which needs to involve a third person into a general discussion which still involves the original recipient, instead of CCing that person directly into the same reply, they just tell me who I need to contact, thus making me do the unnecessary CCing - the very thing they could’ve just done themselves with a few key strokes and with virtually no effort.

Also tech people one one side, emailing me to ask the tech people on the other side to do something technical which would just faster get resolved with less potential for me to misunderstand, if they spoke tech to each other and put me on CC instead.

 

[nogojones]

I once phoned our IT dept to try and get them to install Firefox on our PC as IE was proper shit back then (2005ish).

"What's Firefox?"

We worked out the super secret IT admin password in the end and did all our own IT support after that

 

[maomao]

I once phoned our IT dept to try and get them to install Firefox on our PC as IE was proper shit back then (2005ish).

"What's Firefox?"

We worked out the super secret IT admin password in the end and did all our own IT support after that

I had an off site outsourced IT manager tell me that the only site I could possibly need to do my job helping drivers find addresses round London was Yell.com and that everything else on the internet was shut down. Couldn't even get Google Maps. I had to sit and listen to every call between him and management (which I still had access to) to retrieve the password so I could do my job properly. They gave up trying a few weeks later.

 

[maomao]

The thickest thing a colleague of mine ever did was over twenty years ago when I was a controller for a small cash taxi company in North London. We had a particularly thick driver known appropriately as Bonehead who normally wasn't trusted to do anything other than just driving people from the office. One day I was a bit busy or maybe felt sorry for him so gave him a job to Heathrow with a pickup coming back to our area a couple of hours later. I explained to phone me to track the flight (was all ceefax in those days, didn't have Internet) and even wrote the name board out for him. The job was a no show as the customer was unable to find him (possibly didn't even have a mobile number for the passenger back then). When I went through what had gone wrong with him it turned out that rather than walking into the airport and standing with the other drivers at arrivals he had sat in his car in the car park with a name board in his window expecting the passenger to walk round the car park and find him.

 

[Mation]

When I went through what had gone wrong with him it turned out that rather than walking into the airport and standing with the other drivers at arrivals he had sat in his car in the car park with a name board in his window expecting the passenger to walk round the car park and find him.

Had you told him that that's what he needed to do, it being the first time he was doing this kind of pickup?

 

[maomao]

Had you told him that that's what he needed to do, it being the first time he was doing this kind of pickup?

No. I've sent thousands of drivers to pick up tens of thousands of passengers though and no-one needed this explaining. The lack of people generally walking around the car park looking in windows should have tipped him off.

 

[Mation]

No. I've sent thousands of drivers to pick up tens of thousands of passengers though and no-one needed this explaining.

Yes. But on that occasion you sent someone who hadn't previously been trusted to do that job and for whom you felt the need to write the name board. You can't really blame him for you only giving him partial instructions.

 

[maomao]

Yes. But on that occasion you sent someone who hadn't previously been trusted to do that job and for whom you felt the need to write the name board. You can't really blame him for you only giving him partial instructions.

Bonehead Steve has long moved on and to my knowledge bears me no ill will over the events of last century.

 

[Mation]

Bonehead Steve has long moved on and to my knowledge bears me no ill will over the events of last century.

Good for him! Shame the controller hasn't realised in the intervening 20 years that some people need more support than others, instead continuing to see him as a 'bonehead'.

 

[maomao]

Good for him! Shame the controller hasn't realised in the intervening 20 years that some people need more support than others.

Crikey. That's a bit of a leap.

I'm not particularly proud of my job and I know it has a very bad reputation particularly with people who've driven in this industry but I'm generally supportive and helpful and have stuck up for drivers when I've needed to over the years. In other words there are some proper cunts do my job and while I really want a new line of work (wife being made redundant last week mot helping with this) I've managed to do my job for fifteen of the last twenty one years without being something I wouldn't approve of.

 

[Mation]

Crikey. That's a bit of a leap.

I'm not particularly proud of my job and I know it has a very bad reputation particularly with people who've driven in this industry but I'm generally supportive and helpful and have stuck up for drivers when I've needed to over the years. In other words there are some proper cunts do my job and while I really want a new line of work (wife being made redundant last week mot helping with this) I've managed to do my job for fifteen of the last twenty one years without being something I wouldn't approve of.

Ok. Well it's not like I haven't got stuck thinking about an event in one particular way, roped off from the rest of my thinking, only to realise, sometimes years later, that it could have been viewed differently.

If that sounds patronising, apologies. I don't mean it to. This is something that does happen to me. Perhaps it doesn't to you.

Anyway. I've said my bit. I'll leave it there.

 

[LeytonCatLady]

Just remembered another one from when I worked at a housing management company. Some of our properties were managed on behalf of landlords, for others we were the landlord, including hostels/emergency accommodation. One day, a woman rang in complaining that our building opposite her had no curtains in the downstairs window and she could see into their main communal room and "I expect you to put curtains up right away. I do not want to be reminded that I live opposite a homeless shelter!" It was so tempting to point out that the poor sods living there probably didn't enjoy having her for a neighbour either, but I wouldn't have put it past her to get me fired if I said that. Instead, I had to content myself with reminding her that we couldn't discuss our tenants or properties with her, and that she could always move if she didn't like her neighbourhood.

 

[Elpenor]

A gem today from the bloke who talks nonstop (who’s actually quite a nice guy but I try and avoid being in on the same day as he’s distracting)

“only 100,000 people speak Welsh, Cornish is more widely spoken”