Sorry For Your Losses

I was informed my father had passed away and I wrote my boss and his
deputy (located in an office in another state) that I would be at
work that day – but would be out the following week for bereavement
leave as I had to travel to another state for the funeral.

The deputy e-mailed his condolences later that morning, and my boss
called me later that morning at my office to express his condolences
and inform me I was being terminated, but he was willing to grant me
bereavement leave for the following week if I really needed the time
off.

Like Dad used to say, some days you have to laugh to keep from
crying.

4 Out Of 5 Dentists Agree

My new supervisor must have selective early onset Alzheimer’s,
because she never remembers what I say or do except when I make a
mistake.

About two weeks ago, I made a dentist appointment for a routine
cleaning and x-rays as I haven’t been in quite a while. Less than 5
minutes after making the appointment, I e-mailed her to ask if I may
keep the appointment and have about 2 hours away from the office. She
approved my request via e-mail and all was well.

When I returned from my appointment and entered my leave in our
official computer system to show how long I had actually been out of
the office, I e-mailed her to say the request was online pending
official approval.

The next day, she came by my cube to say, “Can you meet with my and
[my boss] in 5 mintues?”

My gut knew this was going to be bad….

My supervisor told my boss that I had just taken off from work
without telling anyone, asking for leave, explaining what had
happened, or anything else. I had abandoned my post and gone AWOL for
2 hours and was “blowing her off” by not being communicative.

Angry, I said as calmly as I could, “No, that is not correct. I put
my leave request in for today’s my dentist appointment 2 weeks ago
and have [my supervisor's] approval in my Inbox, which I will forward
to both of you after this meeting.” I did just that and my supervisor
was proven wrong. Did I get an apology or confession that she’d made
a mistake? Of course not.

I am still working here as I am “trapped” in a 2 year internship.
However, as soon as my probationary period is over, I am out of
here!

Unknowns

I worked for a specialty retailer in loss prevention at the district
level some years ago. I was used to bizzare talk from the corporate
office and the regional managers, but this one took the cake:

The company was rolling out a new cash register system and my boss
sent us out an email in anticipation of it. His exact words were,
“What I want is a complete list of all unanticipated unknowns we will
encounter.”

Zippity Do Da

For a short time in college I worked as a pastor’s assistant. I got
paid 7 dollars an hour to basically run errands and answer phones for
him. Once however, he decided he wanted a database of all the people
in our town of 100,000 people, I handed him the phone book, he told
me he wanted them sorted by zip code and set upon me the task of
entering every name, address and phone number from the phone book
into an excel spreadsheet that could then be sorted by zip code. I
only made it about halfway through the A’s when I decided to just
tell him I wasn’t working on it, as it would have taken years to
complete the task.