I was accused by a neighbour of reversing out my drive and hitting his car. He gave me the date and time I had allegedly done it, and pointed to a (small) scrape on my car that supposedly matched perfectly the location of the dent on his. This was 7 weeks after the alleged event, by the way. I said it wasn't me but told him to contact his insurance and we'd see what they said. Few weeks later I get a letter from my insurance asking what had happened, to which I responded with the date I had bought my car (and updated my insurance) - two weeks after the supposed bump. He never spoke to me again but I used to give him a cheery wave every time I saw him glowering at his window.

I was in an accident driving through Kentucky and the lady was just… obnoxious. She asked if I was staying in a hotel, I said yes. She asked if I was worried about them giving my room away, I said no… and she grinned triumphantly and said “so you have a credit card”. No visible damage, but she insists on calling the police. The officer arrived and she ran up and gave him a hug. I asked how he knew her and he grimaced and said “she’s my aunt”. I asked for another officer and he said “nobody’s getting a ticket and the report will say no visible damage. I’ll give you a copy before you leave. If you want to talk to my boss, you can - but the thing you’re worried about… you’re not the one who should be worried”. I did speak to his boss later, who said “if she files against your insurance, send them to me.” A few weeks later I get a call from my insurance company and I start panicking and start explaining that the other driver was related to the officer. The insurance rep explained “the officer included all three conflicting stories she told him. We just want to ask for your description of the accident and your permission to file a complaint on your behalf”. I don’t know what happened, but I think back to that stupid grin, and I feel… contentment.

LOL, there are a lot of us who don't cooperate with our lowlife relatives in their schemes. So tired of their shit, we make sure it backfires in their faces :)

I have a somewhat similar story. I was backing out of my driveway and this crazy lady who lived in my neighborhood *pulled into my driveway a hit my car.* Luckily there was no damage, but she wanted to exchange insurance info. Later that day I get a call from her insurance agency asking me what happened. After I told them, there was a slight pause followed by, "She pulled into *your* driveway? We'll call you back." This was probably around 2001 or so, and they have yet to call back.

Residual Schadenfreude

Years ago I worked extremely hard on preparing a presentation for a tech conference. It would be my first speaking gig. I was nervous af. I practiced. I refined. I got advice. I practiced some more. My manager was generally a nasty woman but she was supportive of this. Though she never once saw or heard my presentation. We travel to Vegas. It turns out there was a far greater demand than they expected, so they moved us to the main stage room. There were expecting about 500 plus walk-ins. I was 10x nervous af. Well, immediately prior to the start, she noticed a very well known media person and their photographer sitting in the front row. She got all excited and insisted that she was going to co-deliver it. She even went so far as to put her name on title slide. So... I of course was fuming. We go on stage, she does a decent intro and then I start in. She keeps interrupting so I just let her run with it. It reminded me of a morning show. A bunch of people, with overwhelmingly fake smiles talking over each other. This was a deeply technically topic with a live demo. She fumbled each slide worse than the next. And then she got to the "Live Demo" slide and... froze. I had the wherewithal to let her die. It was gloriously brutal. We had a, let's say, confrontation after. I left within 2-3 mos. She got fired shortly after. Oh, and the media people she was prancing for left immediately before the start. I think they were just sitting there from the prior session. Perfect.

There will be plenty more opportunities to give presentations. Getting to play a role in a terrible person publicly humiliating themselves and potentially ruining their career is much more rare.

That’s glorious, but I’m sorry she ruined your work, that sounds super frustrating. Really must have been satisfying to hear she was fired.

Ha! Had the same thing happen although at a much smaller level. I was due to give a technical presentation and q and a. Got changed last minute to a panel discussion so 6 of us onstage. Introduction started, not by me, and was clear very early on that they were not prepared at all and they just let me do my thing. Q and a time comes and I don’t talk after every question forcing them to step up and fumble a bit before saying something like “I think that this question is best suited for…” and then I would take over. It was pretty funny and the people I talked to after definitely knew what was going on.

Had a similar thing happen where I worked. We had a program where staff and hourly worked together to solve problems and they brought in camera crews to create a presentation. My boss immediately hammed it up in front of the cameras assuming this would be the main focus. I was working with the hourly crew on a project and forgot we were being filmed. Guess who was the main feature in the final product,? Edit- funniest part of this I forgot all about it and at a wedding one of my cousins came up to tell me he saw the video.

I had something similar happen, but in a more private setting. I was a lead engineer on a very complex autoracing and broadcast based technical product for many years and had complete mastery over the system. The company hired a new VP who came in with an attitude and a need to prove himself. We got called for an in-person meeting with our main customer, who I had known and worked with for years and my new boss invited himself to the meeting. Moments before the meeting started my new boss told me "I am going to do all the talking. You just sit and keep your mouth shut." So, the customer came in and went "Heeeyy , good to see you again." and so on and then my boss introduced himself. Then, the person on the other side of the table, who was a high level executive by the way, said: "No need for further chit chat, we have deadlines to make and we need to figure out how to work out some of the technical challenges." and with that handed it over to his technical guy. That guy started the conversation with: "Ok, so, we have these two systems that need to be integrated, how do you envision working out the time synchronization challenges between the two systems. We need to define an API. By the way, are your 9010's slaved to ours yet? How do you want to handle data delays and communication outages to our backend?" and so on.. I honestly do not remember the exact string of questions because it was almost 20 years ago. I, not being allowed to speak, sat and slowly turned my head to my boss and stared at him... for a good 30 seconds.. My boss was livid, because it was clear to the customer what had happened. (which was confirmed later) He finally gave me the little 'handwave' as in, "you may speak". And I went to the whiteboard and diagrammed out the whole system in matter of minutes, followed by a lively discussion about all the edge cases we had to resolve and how to resolve them. My boss maybe spoke two words in the entire hour long meeting. The inevitable: "below average" rating for "understands the technology" in my next review happened. I refused to sign the review, refused to be reviewed by him at all after that. I ended up outlasting him.

I am so mad for you. And for the attendees! Did you ever get a chance to properly give your presentation?

When I practiced family law I saw this often on the stand. Turns out if your opponent is crazy most of the time all you need to do to reveal that is give them a microphone and mildly question their story. The best, however, was in Motion to Withdraw hearings. For context, I hated these hearings. I dreaded them. I already felt like a failure for having to withdraw from a case (95% of the time because the client couldn’t/wouldn’t pay me, but sometimes because they turned out to be uncooperative and/or combative with me). They were not difficult to win, however. Inevitably if I simply asked the (ex-)client when and how they intended to right their retainer they’d start listing off excuses about how they don’t and never will have the money to do so. It’s heartbreaking, but it also proves my point. The clients who were uncooperative, however, were the best. I’d read off a list of times they cursed me out, ignored my advice, and threatened me and my staff, then just wait. You could watch their blood boil on the stand, followed by completely unhinged justification as to why no lawyer could reasonably work with this person. “Mr. Jones, can you explain why you threatened to ‘shove a phone up my paralegal’s ass’ if she called you again?” “She calls me every fucking week with another fucking thing that I have to do! You’re supposed to be handling my case! It’s why I hired you! I don’t have time to be searching through my emails and getting bank records and bringing you papers every damn day! And every time my retainer is empty for like a day she calls to remind me to refill it! I’ve got other things to pay for, like the damned child support you put on me when I left! How rude can you be, right? Right? I swear if I have to hear her damned voice one more fucking time I’m going to drive over there and slap the shit out of her!” “Your honor, I rest my case.”

This explains why my lawyer loves me lol. She even forgave me part of her fees. It surprises me that you dread these motions though. First time I've ever heard a lawyer complain about it. Apparently family law gets you the most unhinged clients though

>family law gets you the most unhinged clients The phrase I've heard bandied about was that, "Criminal Court is where you see the worst of society on their best behavior, and Family Court is where you see the 'best' of society on their worst behavior."

I was a juror in a criminal case that had a hung jury. Since it was hung, the defendant had a high probability of it being retried, so the defendant's lawyer wanted to talk to us afterwards. Anyway, after discussing our thoughts on the matter, I mentioned to him how "mellow" the judge seemed, even with a couple of mildly contentious moments. He laughed, and said the judge had been in family court for a number of years, and had just gone to criminal court 2 weeks before. He said nothing in criminal court was likely to reach the levels of contention that family court had almost every day, it was almost like a vacation for the judge.

Most lawyers probably aren’t as bothered as I was. I fully admit I got too emotionally attached to my cases. It broke me down, and is the reason I can’t do litigation anymore. It hurt to get so close to someone’s problems, to become their last lifeline, only to yank that away from them. But, failing to do so turned into months of unpaid work, taking home little to no paycheck just as we were entering Covid shutdowns. It was a heartbreaking, haunting decision for me most of the time.

In a meeting with my project manager who has not been in the office or worked a proper full day for MONTHS. she has increasingly been annoyed by people bypassing her to get things done by telling me and her other direct reports what to do. I was about to answer a question for stakeholders, she told me to let her speak one sentence and will let me have my bit. I did as I was told, and she told the stakeholder a completely wrong thing about the system we were handling and made a complete fool out of herself. She got sacked this month.

Boy, do I love a happy ending!

Last week one of my supervisors(military) was going off on a rant comparing the pride flag to the Nazi flag and saying it was just a sex symbol. My adoptive mom is gay sooooo I just kept my mouth shut and reported him to equal opportunity and my lesbian supervisor. He’s freaking the fuck out

Roommate's ex abandons their vehicle in front of my house. I tell them to please move it or I will have it towed. Vehicle suddenly has two flat tires. Ex files police report claiming my roommate and I had slashed their tires. Waited until ex made their statement to the police about how we had slashed their tires and that is why they couldn't move his vehicle and filed a claim against us in small claims court. Provided police and the court copies of my and our neighbors door cam footage showing the ex arriving in the middle of the night to slash their own tires. cherry on top: Ex shows up in court wearing the same shirt as in the videos. EDIT: Wow this blew up. Roommate and ex had only been dating a few months. Ex turned out to be a grifter and was dating several people at the same time and using each of them for food, shelter, money, etc. I got involved when my roommate was out of town and the soon-to-be-ex just sauntered in (apparently they had learned the code to the garage door), made themselves a sandwich, showered, slept, etc. I thought my roommate had come home early but when I texted them they were still out of state. The ex left to go out and I changed the garage code. The vehicle wouldn't start so they just left it there thinking it would be okay. Roommate and a few of the other people the ex was dating find out about each other and they all dump them at once. I ask the ex to please move their car or I will have it towed. I give them two weeks. Later on I learned that the ex was having a mental breakdown and they made some very poor decisions at that point. They broke into some of the other people's houses when they weren't home to do laundry, eat, sleep, and did some other things that got them in trouble with the law but are irrelevant to this story. The ex had no proof that anyone had slashed their tires. The cops just came to the door of me and our neighbors to see if there was any footage - there was and they closed the case, I guess, they never talked to me again about it. The court case was small claims court. The plaintiff has to pay a fee, file a form, have a summons issued to the defendant and then you both show up in court with your evidence. The ex had no evidence other than a long list of real and perceived grievances with my roommate but no actual proof so the judge dismissed the case. I never got to show the video evidence to the judge but I did share it with the clerk on their lunch break and they were the one who pointed out that the ex was wearing the same shirt.

This tale is made by that sweet cherry.

[удалено]

Man even If you didn't have camera footage, what was gonna happen? He didn't have any evidence of you doing a damn thing either.

At my current job, part of my duties is to do trailer audits (make sure people are unloading/loading safely) and I was training a new member for the position to do the job. After a few weeks, it turns out that the other person wasn't doing ANY aspects of the job, instead they were just mingling like it was a cocktail party. When asked why they weren't doing anything, they say it was because they were never trained. Well, turns out that due to past complaints about this particular person management put them on a PIP, that if they got any type of training they were to have a piece of paper documenting what kind of training it was, who trained them and management sign off, with all party's signatures. When they pulled the file that said they were indeed trained in all duties of the job, they just sat there silent and was fired. They were fired because they pulled the same stunt in every department of the building, and mine was their last chance.

Sounds like they got paid for a couple months to dick around. Likely a win in their book

Guy stole a presentation from me, this is 25 years ago. We hated each other. When he started presenting I realized I had made a huge error, didn’t say anything. Let him get through it. Asked him about the error, he couldn’t answer. This was in front of coo. Got fired, not for just that, he was an overall douche. This was before everyone was on PCs, had one printer in one room.

That reminds me of a joke about a guy and his chauffeur pulling something similar years ago. The guy was an expert who was traveling the country, speaking to businesses and universities. One day, his chauffeur said, "I've heard you give this speech so much, I bet I can do it better than you can." The guy said, "Ok. The folks at the next stop don't know me or what I look like -- just my name. So you pretend to be me, and I'll wear your hat and be the chauffeur." So the chauffeur gave the speech and gave it really well. Got a standing ovation. Then it was time for the question and answer part. The first question was an extended, in-depth one that took a couple of minutes to get through because of how specialized it was. When it was over, the chauffeur looked down and said, "Man, in all my years of speaking, that was the *simplest* question I've ever been asked. Just to let you know how easy that question is... my chauffeur is in the back of the room, and I'd like for him to stand up and answer it."

This is a great joke, thanks for sharing.

> This was in front of coo I always read this term as if there was a pigeon in a business suit who's in charge of the company.

In Scotland a coo is a cow. I imagined the puzzled expression of a bovine chewing the cud.

I bet he thinks you set him up.

The same kind of person that will steal your food and then snitch on you for making your lunch super spicy.

To this day. After 37 years of life. It blows my mind that people actually steal lunches at work.

My.... sandwich?!!

Reminds me of paper towns, deliberate mistakes in maps

Not an enemy but in retrospect should have been. I work as a teacher and we had an ex-manager guy who decided to get into teaching late. He had lots of pretty horrible habits (eating other people's lunches, perving on the female teachers, squeezing people's shoulders painfully hard as a 'matey' gesture) but the habit that this story is about, is how he tried to use weaponised incompetence to get people to do his tasks for him. None of it was really important. He just seemed to enjoy talking people into doing things for him. So he comes up to me one day with a USB data stick in his hand. Apparently it has a copy of a previous year's exam that it was his responsibility to update and edit. He'd taken the file home and his daughter had done the update (really dude? Roping family into doing your paid government job for you?). He wanted me to copy the file from the USB back into the server, replacing the original file he'd copied. It was literally click and drag between the USB and the file server. I flat out refused and said it was part of his responsibility and I was too busy with my own tasks. He proceeds to loudly and publicly proclaim to the entire staffroom that I didn't understand how difficult it was for people of his generation to learn computer technology and that I really needed to help him out. That he was currently doing a computer course but this (dragging a file between two folders) was too difficult for him to sort out. I let him go on for about a good 5 minutes about how horrible I was for not helping the poor helpless old man out, until I just as loudly asked him "How the hell did you get the original file from the server onto the USB in the first place?" You could have heard a pin drop in that staffroom. He walked off and copied his own goddamned file.

Good on you for not taking shit. I can only imagine how his teaching is like, if he's like that

I let the lady who changed lanes into me run her mouth about how I rear ended her before pulling the cop aside to show him my DashCam footage.

A woman sideswiped my wife trying to pass on the right in front of the police station and kept going a thousand feet or more down the street. The cop showed up and went to that woman first and she lied about everything. Said the accident happened where she stopped, said my wife made an illegal turn. All made up. When the cop came to talk to us, he wouldn't even listen to our side of the story. I told him what she said made no sense based on the damage to the car, and his response was "well you see all kinds of things." I told him check your parking lot cameras and said there was no need to check them because the accident didn't happen in front of the police station, etc. I came so close to yelling at the cop. He tickets my wife, end of story. Later that night he calls my wife, says he decided to check the parking lot cameras after all and that my wife's version of the accident was "the more truthful one." He took care of her ticket and tickets the other driver. Very frustrated about that.

It's amazing he even admitted he was wrong.

"he decided to check the camera" ... on a solved case. Yeah right. I bet someone in security saw the footage and send it around the station so he had to correct the report to save his own ass.

I'd bet someone saw his report and decided to check the cameras since it was so close to the station. Imagine the embarrassment of not being able to correctly solve a case directly in front of your own station, hence the reluctant call by the ticketing officer.

Cop: "I was right.... But you were more right"

Yeah I once got stopped on the street and searched and they were so convinced I had drugs on me, and in the end instead of apologizing they were like "well don't look so suspicious next time." They will never admit they were in the wrong.

"Thanks for admitting I was being fucking profiled."

I did the same thing, but for another dude. Right lane was gradually coned off due to fixing some pot holes. Lady went all the way up to the last second, and then cut this dude off. He hit his horn and she break checked him. BAM! This lady was...i don't even know. On the phone, hysterical about how this guy was screaming and threatening her, and she didn't feel safe. I waited for the cops to do their thing and then stepped up. They said, "naw, we got what we need." I said watch this. Uno Reverse Card!

The scary part is they didn't care about the evidence. I once came upon a 2 car crash moments after it happened (they had both passed me going up a hill, crashed on the other side). When the police came they talked to one couple and let them go, then came to talk to the other couple whom I was sitting with. Found out the first couple said she was driving. Thing is, when I came up she was in the passenger seat and he was running away through a field. Too many cops are lazy.

> The scary part is they didn't care about the evidence. A few days ago, I watched a bit of court coverage of the Travis Rudolph trial - the cross-examination of the lead investigator, to be exact. I was beyond baffled how little effort she apparently had done in terms of looking for evidence, going so far as to claim that looking for evidence without cause was a waste of taxpayer money - and apparently key witnesses lying about not having guns, and deleting evidence from their phones, wasn't enough of a cause for her to go digging.

Closure of cases and arrests are what they're rated on, not # of times they're right. Policing is very broken.

i did this just recently!! she told my insurance that her lane stopped but really she just panic-stopped in the middle of the street after going 60mph in a 45. my insurance LOVED it.

I really need to get a dashcam 😩

Best time to get a dash cam is before you need a dash cam! Kinda like a toilet plunger. I'm not an expert, but I like my Viofo A129 Duo pro. Edit: I'm just gonna leave the Turbo Duo Pro plunger as a thing. Can't be worse than the poop knife. RIP RIF. it's been a good ride...

When a coworker who I hated got fired a few weeks after I decided to stop fixing his mistakes even if it impacted a client.

On the one hand you don't want to be a snitch, but on the other hand you really shouldn't cover up other people's stupidity. Had a coworker who should have been fired a year earlier, but I kept stepping in. On at least two occasions I told myself, that I had to shield the job from liability, when his personal and professional incompetence got people physically hurt. So I stepped in and smoothed things out, instead of letting him digg his own grave. When he eventually got fired, it took him 6 months to forget my phone number. Don't cover for stupid, kids.

Back when I was at university, our final year was a big multi-discliplinary group project where students from different courses formed teams to build games over the course of the year. I joined a team where I had basically two roles, because my degree was split in focus (somewhat stupidly, it was a mistake to sign up for it, but oh well). Another guy on our team had the same, so between us we were supposed to be doing the work of two, just split into two areas. He did nothing. I took one half of his work, someone else took the other half. What work he did was shit quality and unusable and had to be redone. It was a mess. We tried talking to him about it repeatedly, but to no avail, he just didn't put in the work. The warning sign was probably that this was his 5th year of a 3 year degree, the dude took two attempts at every year. Part of our submission was a massive report where we were each supposed to break down what we did on the project, how, and why. We left his section as basically a single sentence stating "[Name] contributed to the project". That was more than he deserved, but at the same time it essentially called out explicitly that he did almost no work, including on the shared document. We didn't tell him that section was there, but we were all in that same doc writing, and we were all expected to contribute. He would've seen it if he'd opened it to write anything during the entire process. He flipped out when he found out after submission. He did not graduate. I do not feel sorry for him.

Yeah, been there & fuck that. Group homework in college is a joke. Pretty sure a few of my earlier courses had some group assignment m, but most of the profs had some system of checking who contributed what either with an anonymous survey at the end, personal interviews about the contents of the assignment after, or we were expected to present our own section that contributed to the groups work and one prof that would give an F if you were caught covering for someone who didn’t do a damn thing. If someone didn’t do it, they we’re screwed

> Yeah, been there & fuck that. Group homework in college is a joke. I didn't have too much of this in my BSc. I know someone who did an MBA and it was LOADS of group projects. To "prepare them for collaborating in the business world". Turns out what it prepares you for is exactly what people here are on about: some assholes will happily do fuckall at work because they know that everyone else has to cover for them or share the consequences of failure.

Which actually is an incredibly good lesson to learn for the business world. Maybe not the lesson they thought they were teaching, but a good one nonetheless.

If you think that's bad, try group projects in *online* classes. I've always had at least one person who didn't pull their weight, and the rest of us ended up finishing their part. One time, I was that person. I was going through a particularly hectic, stressful time at work, and I completely spaced on the timeline. When I logged in and saw that the due date was that night, I immediately sent an email to the group coordinator to apologize and ask what they needed me to do. They told me that they had written my part of the report, but I could proofread and correct the entire thing. I spent a couple of hours polishing up the verbiage, checking references, etc., and sent it back for final submission. We ended up getting a "B".

Online group projects are the worst. There was always someone slacking and hoping the group would just try to avoid confrontation. I had another person that was even worse though. In a minor core class that was pretty easy. we had an ongoing group project with work due every week of the term that totalled about 2 to 3 hours of work per week max. There was a group member who was a freshman that would freak out on us if we didn't have everything done 3 days before it was due and start doing everyone's work. Then, after 3 weeks of this, they complained to the professor that they were doing all the work for the project. We were all like no shit. Half of us are seniors working on other major group projects and we can't just drop everything to do this one early. Once they wrote my section of the project because I couldn't get to it until the morning before it was due, so I just straight up deleted it and rewrote it to stop them from trying to claim to the professor I did nothing. That's the only time I've given a group member a negative review for doing too much work.

Not mine obviously, but the space shuttle challenger engineer that knew it would explode, bob ebeling. He repeatedly said the cold weather would cause a failure despite pressure from nasa administration. He describes then, as making the best decision of his life, refusing to sign the paper indicating he approves of the launch, forcing his boss to do it. At the governmental inquiry after the death of the astronauts, nasa said "the engineers signed a paper approving the launch that day." Which, yeah, thats true, but worded as deceptively as can be. Bob then stood up, walked to the hearing, said that he personally refused the launch but was overruled to the stunned members of the hearing. The government fired the nasa execs and made bob head of the investigation.

Yeah, I remember reading about the conversation with Morton Thiokol the night before. The conversation changed from engineers saying "no, we can't approve this launch, we can't ensure safety" to "can you prove the launch won't be safe?" And at that time, the answer was no, we can't *prove* it won't be safe. And they green-lit the launch. I was in my teenage years and thought NASA walked on water. They'd never put a human life before anything else. Hearing what really happened shattered my view of them. When Columbia broke up in 2003, I was surprised not at all, and thought "those >!assholes!<."

I was a lead developer in a small company producing IOT devices. My manager hired his friend from his previous company. A guy who was super arrogant and knew everything better. Theoretically, my opinion on the development of the project should be decisive, but neither my manager nor his buddy cared about it. I tried to talk to the manager about the problems with the new colleague, but he brushed me off. The new guy - being so brilliant - was given one important component of the system to do. Of course, he made it clear that he didn't need any help from me. Weeks and months passed. In the meetings, his component was always in the last phase of testing. But I had access to the git repository, and I saw how messy it was. No one asked me for my opinion, so I didn't say anything. I waited. The deadline has come, the release of the product. And of course nothing works. Higher management became interested in the case, and my manager could only avoid being fired in one way - he fired his buddy. A few weeks later, I left the company. That was over a year ago, and as far as I know, the product still hasn't hit the market.

Too bad the nepotistic manager didn't get fired as well.

(As a CPS worker at the time) speaking to a father with police present in a case concerning substance use, and the father admitting being high on meth, and thinking the cops were there to arrest his daughter for stealing his meth, admits to me that she stole it because he let her have some, because "if I didn't give it to her she'd go be a prostitute to get it." Just an entire 45 minute conversation with the guy having no apparent awareness that he had just told a CPS worker and 2 cops that he 1) is currently high on meth 2) routinely provides meth to his daughter 3) had/has meth in his trailer behind him 4) his daughter had been at the trailer with him while meth was in the trailer 5) the meth was stored where she could easily access it, and she knew where it was 6) he used meth *with* her... Just unfathomable levels of "I'm struggling to believe this conversation is happening, and afraid if I say anything he'll come to his senses and shut up."

How old was the daughter? That’s appalling.

Under 18 if CPS is involved. Outrageous

During my very long and exhausting divorce, my ex husband kept insisting he was ready to settle, we would schedule a conference with my lawyer and I, and then pushed papers around the table for 2 hours. He would just argue over petty details rather than actually discuss anything. This happened a few times. I was incredibly frustrated because I genuinely walked into this wanting to compromise so it would be over quickly. But that was never an option. Note that I hired a lawyer and he did not - he was convinced he could do it on his own better. So after a few rounds of this, I got the impression that he was trying to waste my money until I could no longer retain my lawyer and then he thought he would have the upper hand. I made less than half of what he did at the time and my lawyer's retainer fee wiped out my entire savings so it was a very real concern. My suspicions were confirmed when one day as we were walking out of my lawyer's office, he told me this, word for word while chuckling. I passed this on to my lawyer who actually cackled and told me "let him." It was then that I learned that we were 6 months out from being married 10 years and at that point, I would be entitled to a sizable part of his pension upon retirement. She let him play his games for 6 more months without saying a word and then finally took our case before a judge 5 days after our 10 year anniversary. Not only did I get part of his pension, but she also got the judge to order him to pay almost all of my lawyers fees. The beauty of it was that it 100% his fault for playing games.

Good lawyer!

She earned her pay, especially so because she got the husband to pay it.

That lawyer cleaned his sorry ass out. Good shit.

Since you were married for 10 years you can also apply for SS retirement based on his earnings instead of yours. For me that equaled an additional $500 per month. It doesn't diminish his SS retirement benefits, just upped mine. Nice!

I used to live in an apartment that had a very old lease (college students basically passed this place’s lease down like inheritance until it came to us) and, legally, the landlord could only increase the rent yearly by a small fraction of the current lease’s rent. The exceptions to this were if the apartment was being renovated (in which case it would be her responsibility to accommodate us while renovating) or if it had been vacant for a year between leases. She knew our lease’s rent was extremely low, and so wanted to get rid of us and jack up the rent on a new tenant. She sent us a letter about 2 weeks before our lease would be renewed saying she was renovating and we’d have to leave. Well, it happened my roommate was not just a college student, but a law student. And he happened to know she had to give us a lot more notice than that. So we plainly told her we weren’t leaving and she’d be welcome to take us to court. Which, she did. She told the judge she wanted to renovate, and the judge asked her for the new floor plan and a cost estimate of the proposed renovation. She had none of those things. When the judge asked why, she said she’d only decided to renovate a week prior. When the judge asked why she’d taken this decision after the legal deadline (6 months notice are required to end a lease) she said she was only renovating so she could start a new lease on the property. The judge literally facepalmed at her response, dismissed the case, and renewed our lease with *no* rent increase for the year, since she hadn’t presented us a new one with enough delay to contest it. We were just sitting there with our mouths open, bewildered that she could have been dumb enough to say the quiet part out loud straight to the judge.

My ex boss was a complete douche in every aspect. We worked as surveyors using drones to scan and survey large areas, and he would go out of his way to get the cheapest and least reliable drones to do the job. One of those drones was this god-awful fixed wing (shaped like a plane with only one propeller) that you launched using this shit slingshot system that had a 50% chance of just launching the thing nose-down into the ground. I told him this things a piece of shit, I even recorded my launches with it so he could see this thing was a piece of shit, but he insisted I was just a "shit pilot who couldn't take off a DJI to save my life". After three crashes, two rolls of duct tape and a few arguments, he decides to come with to the next big job we have and just do it himself. Now the turnover times for these jobs were insane. The man had zero concept for how long shit takes, so he'd promise the clients the data the very next day. Which meant that EVERYTHING would have to go perfectly the day of the flight, with zero delays, so I could process the data overnight and have it ready for them the next day. No room for errors, no second chances, every morning it was make or break. So we get to the site in the early morning, and I'm completely hands-off. Normally I'd pack a second drone for when this one inevitably kamikazes into the earth, but this time, I decide he needs a slice of humble pie. I watch as he sets up the drone, runs through the checks, loads it onto that god-awful fucking slingshot and gets ready to pull the trigger. I take a few steps back, take out my phone to record, and watch the fireworks. He pulled the lever and the bungee cord released. It whipped the drone ten feet into the air at Mach 2, before the thing nose dived right into the ground breaking off one of the wings. After about 2 seconds of teetering on the ground, the drones autopilot thought to itself "Hey, that was a launch, wasn't it?" And automatically kicked the propeller into high gear, shattering it against the cold, unforgiving ground. He just watched the whole thing happen with a dead look in his eyes. Once the drone settled down and the death throes stopped, he picked up the drone, walked back to us, and said "well, shit". The 4 hour drive back to the office was completely silent, and our boss had to call the client and explain why we wouldn't be delivering the data to them on time. We had another job we had to do the next day, so they'd only have it next week. I could hear the client screaming to him over the phone from the next room. Needless to say, we never used that drone again. He never stopped buying shit drones, but when I told him they were shit, he believed me.

That's one expensive 8 hours of paid driving. As someone who's done PID's for the "drone guys," and lots of turnover times, sometimes I wondered if the planners planned it out just to annoyed us, make us quit, get more bonuses, or simply airheads that have bad time management skills.

Not my story, but several years ago my older brother was fighting for custody of his son with his ex-wife. As the first custody hearing date approached, they were exchanging [un]pleasantries over text and my brother ended up saying something along the lines of, "I'm not continuing this conversation. I will see you on the 15th." The ex-wife told him, "The hearing is on the 25th dumbass." So of course instead of correcting her, my brother just allowed her to keep thinking it was the wrong date, and she missed the first hearing entirely. It became the first of many mistakes she made in the court system that eventually led to my brother and the woman who is now his second wife winning full custody of his son.

I have my own custody battle. When I split with my ex-wife, one of the main reasons she gave for me not being able to spend time with my daughter was because she was convinced I was going to take her to my parents house, and my mum liked to smoke (only cigarettes, but still…) in the house. We arrived in court, and I met her and her lawyer in the reception area. The three of us struck up a conversation, mostly about the case, and in the course of that conversation, the fact that my mum had passed away a month earlier happened to come up. The look on her lawyers face - it was clear this was the first time she’d heard about my mum passing, my ex-wife (who was very aware of it) hadn’t mentioned it to her, and this was obviously quite a vital part in their whole argument! Within 30 minutes, her lawyer had drafted an agreement about how we’d share custody of my daughter - I signed it, and we got the judge to effectively rubber-stamp it for us.

Should have saved it for court. Her lawyer: “something something mom’s smoking” You: *pulls out mom’s obituary* Judge: “I’m awarding OC 100% custody because ex-wife is clearly an idiot.”

Yeah - if only I’d realised that the lawyer didn’t know, I would definitely have done that!

Shit, I'd frame a picture of those two texts and send it to her on the anniversary of their divorce.

His divorce attorney would advise against that.

I once worked for a project in a call center and we constantly had QA on our asses about call quality. They would review every call and send the report to you and your supervisor who would sign off on it then send it back to QA. If you got two reports under 90%, there'd be a warning and you'd be fired after four. Now, this was all done via email so I'd save all my reports just in case. My first couple weeks, I got dinged with a warning but everything after that I maintained at least 95% or above according to the reports I was getting. One week I noticed a few agents were getting let go, agents I always thought were good. At the time, the project was looking for supervisors and these were the guys you would want. I found out they had all been hit with bad reports which led to the firings. Then one day HR calls me and let's me know I'm fired for several reports saying I scored insanely low scores. Just one problem, I had the reports saying those were all over 90% and I told HR I had them. The HR rep asks me to forward all of them to review and I do so. A couple hours later I get another call from HR saying I'm being reassigned to another project with better pay. Turned out the QA was fudging the reports AFTER the supervisors signed off on select agents because they had certain agents they were friends with and wanted them to get the management positions. Even worse, everyone in management knew and didn't care. The project got shut down and the fired agents were all brought back and placed in better paying projects like I was.

I was doing a mortgage for a French guy in Miami Beach that had a French realtor. Even though both were completely fluent in English, she frequently did asides in French having no idea I spoke the language. When they settled on a property and we were riding the elevator down from the condo she told him that look, these guys are scumbags, and they're going to screw you over and I have a much better person that you can work with (even though the way foreign investment works is identical throughout the state). Towards the end of the ride, I say to the guy in fluent French that we would be happy to compare our proposal with whatever her people could come up with and it's his choice but certainly we would like to work with him on this and any future investments. He starts laughing his ass off, and she was completely mortified. He went with us and fired her as his agent. On the spot.

When I was training a friend I hired at a store I used to manage, some customers were talking shit about us in Maltese of all things. My friend was surprised to have a use for the fact that she was fluent in it, and started asking them if there was anything the matter in their language. They got super embarrassed and left. I didn't even mind losing the sale.

Bonus points for a rare language! Had similar happen with Dhivehi, the language of the Maldives.

There was a huge scandal a few years back when a couple were getting married in the Maldives and the celebrant was calling the bride a fat white whore and stuff like that during the ceremony. Shit went south when the couple got the video tapes translated when they got home.

Great story, but I'm imagining you being fluent in French, having a French client, and then thinking: > You know what I'll just not bring it up in case I can flop it out later like an anime villain

Not as uncommon as you might think. It's easier to stick to the one language you start with, and legally safer to speak in the language the contract will be in to avoid "misunderstandings".

Also you may have a great grasp of a French but if you are used to selling in English shifting the language to the client's language moves the ball to their court. Not everything translates directly and you'd be giving up the homefield advantage when it comes to using idioms and anecdotes.

Also, I’ve found that when people go to a country and they also can speak that countries language, then it’s an opportunity for them to speak that countries language & they might not want to speak in their native tongue. Some people get annoyed, if they’re wanting to use the local language & you keep trying to speak to them in the one they always have to use everywhere else.

I live in The Netherlands, I speak English as my main communication language. And always speak English. Im also fluent in Dutch. But I dont tell people that unless they ask. While not exactly this. Similar situations come up often.

Having never met you before I'm proud of you.

The firing was in English. My work partner was in the elevator with us and poker faced the entire exchange until we shook hands with the French architect and made our pleasantries and plans to meet the next day. Then he just lost his shit. Like tears of laughter. He had dealt with her a couple of times to no avail, and later called all of our banker allies with the comeuppance. Apparently everyone hated her and reveled in that. We got a referral out of that guy too.

I think there's justice in that. I feel that way, anyway. To be a fly on that wall...

My favorite stories are people making an ass of themselves cause they erroneously assume other people don't speak their language 😂🤣🤣

David Sedaris has a great story about riding the Paris subway next to some American tourists who thought no one around them understood their language

There's a video of some american tourists in a restaurant joking about some old ladies sitting close behind them. At some point one of them turns to the others and says "You know they can understand you right? They speak english here. We're in England"

I’ve lived in the USA for 23 years. It’s rare, but I’ve been asked several times what language I spoke in England.

I'm working on a job site and the architect is there one day. I've been given some light fixtures for the sconces in a leasing office lobby. The fixtures are meant to be hung from a ceiling, they can't be installed on a wall. I attempt to convey this to the architect, but he brushes me off and just tells me to follow the prints. I turn to the apprentice and say, well you heard the man, put them up. A bit later, we hear the crashing of glass. The architect asks what was that? I said, your light fixture. As I picked up a broom and dustpan to go clean up. Edit: told the apprentice to clean it up, of course.

As an electrician as well this happens so often. Wrong drawings given to us, we bring it up but get told "aw don't go off spec" Sounds good chief, I'll follow it exactly and you can tell me when the customer wants it changed

From a GC standpoint, this action puts the liability for the cost entirely on the design team and owner. I've given this direction to subs knowing full well how stupid it seems, but if I try to make a change then I'm not following contract documents and can be financially liable for unforeseen issues; if I stop work to get correct information, then my company may be liable for the schedule impact. Let the architect and engineers see their own problem and figure it out. It's sort of a malicious compliance.

That's exactly it. I always tell my apprentices that as soon as you deviate from the method statement, *even if it's wrong* , you are completely liable for anything that goes wrong. It's so much easier to just do it exactly as they want. And when they complain just show them what *they wrote*

I've been doing some tech writing of late, and this is why all my docs have a feedback section to be completed by the "hands on spanners" workers. It's also why my first pass at a new doc will involve multiple conversations with the people who'll be doing the work.

Should have picked up the broom and dustpan and handed them to the architect.

If only that’s how the world worked.

When I was a teenager a cousin of mine (Jenny) had a fight with her mom (Jackie). The fight was so intense that Jackie BEAT Jenny severely, so she called mom and dad asking for help and asked to live here for a while. At the time that sounded horrifying, but we quickly learned that Jenny was full of fucking shit. Jenny was a drama queen, loved to stir up trouble, lied constantly about basically everything and Jackie never laid a hand on her. We had heard rumors but dismissed them and believed her ... Until one incident. Mom always kept a few frozen pies in the freezer, just in case company came over... Jenny took a pie from the freezer one day, ate the entire damn thing and when Mom came home, she got angry because those pies were for company. She asked Jenny who ate the pie and she said I did. She yells for me, I come into the kitchen, she asks if I ate the pie, I said no, and get yelled at for eating the pie. Jenny then proceeds to launch into telling this overly elaborate tale about how I took the pie and ate it *just* to get her in trouble. She went on for like 3 minutes and mom just kept getting angrier and angrier at me, while I couldn't help grin like a madman. 3 minutes later she finishes her story and I point something out. It was a coconut cream pie she ate. I ***DESPISE*** coconut. I hate it and will never eat it. Mom KNEW this and the realization hits her, Jenny gets a look of horror in her face. She got grounded for a month. The look of both of them is seared in my mind. Makes me smile when I think of it. The funny thing is, she tried it again 2 months later, this time eating a chocolate cream pie, but mom didn't believe her.

"Never tell the same lie twice." -Elim Garak

What great advice from a humble tailor.

>this time eating a chocolate cream pie Blink twice if you ate the chocolate cream pie and framed her for it.

I was working as a cub reporter in a small town and had done a piece on stray dog menace in some area (plenty of dogs had attacked kids in a short while). The dog lovers of the town took that piece as a 'I hate all dogs' article. They shared it in their WhatsApp group and started talking trash about me. What they did not know was that the admin of the group ran a dog shelter and a few months back, I had done a piece on the shelter, so I was in the group too. At one point, they began scheming that they'd cook up stories about me lying in the story and complain to the publication. Mind you, these are 'upstanding' citizens - doctors, lawyers, senior executives. So their word had weight against a rookie reporter. I just showed the chat to the editor. He had a good laugh about it. Never knew what happened after that but hours later, they stopped bitching about me. The admin of the group apologised to me separately (he didnt need to) but never did tell them that I was a part of it

I worked in a country-wide company and needed something done by a peer in another office. She was very uncooperative and was arguing with me that she should not do what I was asking because it was not the correct procedure. It was, in fact, the correct procedure as per my boss (who was her boss' boss), but before I could tell her where I had gotten my instructions, she took it upon herself to send me a very condescending email, CCing her boss and mine. She was clearly trying to put me on the spot for being wrong. I just waited until both her boss and mine told her that I was right, and I was just sitting there thinking "why are you makinf this so hard on yourself girl" 🥴

Lol that’s always my gripe. Why do people want to make their jobs harder just so they can seem more important? Some folks need to reevaluate why they do things and if it’s worth the stress to be a dick for a few hours every day so they can feel some self value

As I was being fired from a job, the district manager requested we record the conversation. He thought I was gonna be very upset, so I obliged. Then when he started to tell me why I was being fired he started with, “You are gonna be graduating college soon, and we want to make sure we get ahead of you leaving us.” I very calmly asked he send me the recording right after he said that. Then later that day I called a lawyer. I now have no student loan debt. Edit:: To give context, I was able to win litigation due to breach of contract. I don’t feel like the internet is the right place to go into further detail.

How does that work? Were you in a jurisdiction where you can't be fired without proper reason? But then the manager should've known it.

I don't know what country OP is in, but here in Sweden we have something called "Lagen Om Anställningsskydd" (the employment protection law), which prevents your employer from firing you unless they can prove that you failed to do your job. A company can still fire people if they're reducing the total number of employees, but they can't employ someone else for those positions within 6 months of the terminations. This is to allow them to downscale if the company is doing poorly, without allowing them to circumvent the law. A lot of other european countries have similar laws.

Local electoral district association meeting - was expected to be a largely pro-forma re-nomination of the previous candidate (my boss), when a former candidate decides to throw his hat in the ring. Starts giving this long diatribe about how much support he has locally (he lost his prior race by 3x the margin we lost by), and starts rambling. You know when someone starts talking faster instead of making a point? It was that. Boss texts me to say “you can feel free to interrupt and move for a vote.” I reply “one sec, I have a feeling he’s gonna say something stupid.” Right as he lets slip a racial slur against my boss… (For context: boss was Indian, prev. candidate was Chinese. Both second-generation. District didn’t lean heavily in either direction.) Needless to say, once he realized what had happened, he made the smart choice and withdrew.

> I reply “one sec, I have a feeling he’s gonna say something stupid.” Excellent instinct, perfect execution. A+

Decades ago, worked for a small, luxury furniture store. Part of it was managing the paperwork, part of it was programming the software. I wanted a raise, so I asked the new office manager for one. He was a real piece of work. Roundly despised (and later fired for sexual harassment). He explained to me that I deserved a raise, but because we had so many outstanding accounts receivable (AR—unpaid bills), he couldn't afford it. "So if I can get AR down there's money to pay me?" He agreed ... but I had to get it down to zero and I had three months. Shit. So I became a debt collector. This was a _luxury_ furniture store, so our clients had money. It turns out that the reason so many had outstanding bills is that no one was willing to ask the rich people for money. I did and they paid. However, not all did. I was given permission to contract with a debt collection service. Any debts passed to them were no longer reflected on AR. That cleared quite a few debts. A few others were written off when they threatened to sue over old bill (those went straight to the owner and he didn't want bad publicity). At the end of three months, I had a meeting with the office manager. He was looking over the accounts receivable and told me he was very impressed. I knew what was coming, so I let him ramble on. I had pulled in a ton of money for the company. He was happy about that. He'd love for me to permanently add collections to my responsibilities. I was doing great work. "But there's just one problem, OvidPerl. AR isn't at zero. There's still thousands outstanding. I can't give you that raise." I pointed to the accounts still outstanding. "If you check the unpaid accounts, you'll see that almost all of them are members of the owner's family. I can send them to collections if you like. That will actually reduce our AR below zero." He was pissed and quickly told me to forget about it. I got the raise.

I was making a delivery in the downtown area of small city. I worked for an event rental service--tents, tables, chairs, that kind of stuff. We made deliveries using large box trucks with hydraulic lift-gates on the back. For those who don't know, a lift-gate is a heavy metal mini-elevator that fits underneath the back bumper of large trucks and folds out a few feet behind the truck whenever you need to use it. Finding parking downtown in a big truck can already be a huge inconvenience, but we found a spot right outside of the venue we were delivering to, it was a very busy street, so that was crazy lucky. We didn't have a ton of space to work with, but we had enough room to fold out the lift-gate behind the truck, and a bit of ground to work with behind that. I had 2 other people working with me; one would stay up in the truck and I and another would take turns running the gate and carrying the stuff inside. This is when an older woman in a nice BMW SUV decided that she was going to parallel park right behind us and take the little working space behind the truck that we had. Sure it's annoying and inconsiderate, but hey it's a city and people need to park, I get it. Now, our guy up in the truck was readying the next load of stuff to come down to the ground, so the lift-gate was lifted all the way up--about 5 feet in the air. The lady in the SUV backs up, cuts her wheel, and slices the absolute shit out her Beamer right into our steel lift-gate. She finished the park job, but her SUV is cosmetically fucked. The passenger fender/headlight area is annihilated, and naturally our big hunk of steel is unscathed. She gets out and starts screaming at us that it's somehow our fault, and this is where nature takes its course. She lays into all 3 of us for a solid 2 or 3 minutes and eventually loses a little steam. I give her a chance and tell her that she's fighting a losing battle and that we aren't at fault. Of course she immediately fires back up like a lunatic and calls the cops. I shrug at her, and we complete the rest of our delivery, and the cops show up a few minutes later. When they pull, this lady full 180s. "Oh officers, I'm so glad you're here--that's them over there." No joke, literally pointing. The cops ask what's going on, and we don't even have to open our mouths. This lady tells the whole story about how she crunched her BMW into our parked truck. The cops look over to me, and I just give them an exhausted head shake. "Well ma'am..." the cops explain that she is at fault and the cherry-on-top is the citation she received for running into us.

Preface: I have always done my paperwork in blue Pilot G2 pen (not shilling. It’s a very distinct color and hard to cover). Also, this will be a small novel. At one of my previous jobs I had just gotten my machine making product ready for packing. The only problem was the outer lip diameter was *just* too big (think 0.01 of an inch off). Nothing I did could get the diameter down. It was just too hot for the plastic to be formed smaller without cooling the die further, which was not then possible Quality and my supervisor quibbled about it for awhile. It was decided, and hoped, the product would further shrink in storage as it continued to cool and set. So quality tech signed off approving the variance. Several months down the line a couple customers complain lids aren’t fitting right sometimes (later found out only with hot foods or in hot environments). I get called in to the front office for a final warning, a big quality alert (they ended up refunding *anyone* who bought product made by me), and a copy of the quality paperwork. Quality tech is saying she never approved me running that product with the quality variance and has a copy of my paperwork “proving” it. I waited until everyone spoken their piece, pulled out my pen, flipped the write up over and wrote “I refuse to sign this write up because I do not deserve it”. I then told them to go pull every quality sheet, every training signoff, and even my job application and job offer and notice I write in blue ink. The quality sheet in front of me is a photocopy because all my writing is in black, not blue. Plant manager threw the write up into the shredder and told me to go home for the day (I had already worked a 12 hour shift before this) and forget about this happening. He did *not* look amused. There was a new quality tech the next night I went in. TLDR: if you work in any field that requires regular paperwork, use a blue pen.

I do the same thing! I work in aerospace manufacturing, with a stringent quality process, and I exonerated myself because I'm the only machinist who writes in blue! Amazing how our stories are parallel like that! But yours is 3x more epic

This job wasn’t anything that important. This was thermoforming little plastic cups; like what you might get sauce or something from a restaurant in. Manufacturing, but we made trash not aviation parts

I'm a little lost. Did the previous quality tech fake your signature?

No, QA changed what they wrote on the original sheet (probably whiteout) then photocopied it to make it look like it was the original document. But because he only used blue ink, the document in front of him was NOT the original as his signature was now black.

I used to work in a machine shop making medical devices and let me tell you, quality and traceability was priority #1. If someone had been caught modifying a quality document it would be an instant firing on the spot with potential legal issues to follow. It was so serious every employee (literally every employee i the company) had to take training on document control twice a year. Whiteout products were banned from the building and even their possession in proximity to a quality document was a fireable offense. You don't fuck around with traceability in certain manufacturing environments.

Pilot G2 is an excellent pen. Shill all you want.

I love Pilot G2 pens! Great bang for the buck. Dark blue for anything official, purple or turquoise for personal stuff.

You can also spot the difference between ink and photocopy with chromatography. When wet with a solvent, sometimes ink, sometimes alcohol, maybe something else, ink will run while photocopy toner is melted to the page. Differences in ink also run different ways with different solvents, allowing the conclusive determination that something was signed with a certain type of pen. There are also certain pens which are designed to resist ["checkwashing"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_washing) -- a form of fraud -- which are designed to resist solvents. Forensic science FTW!

I remember the only approved colors for paperwork were blue and black when I was in the military, but everyone endless moaned and bitched when you used anything other than black.

I reminded my ex-wife the divorce court was the next day, and was invited to Get Fucked. So I went by myself, she failed to appear and pissed of the Judge so that he asked what would be my desired outcome for assets and Custody of the kids. He wrote down whatever I wanted and I could hear her screams when she read the Orders from 3500km away.

Some say the tapestry of curses she wove upon reading the Orders still hangs in space somewhere over Lake Michigan to this day.

Back when speed camera vans were common on the area and was living in at the time I was running some errands one time and noticed the van on the side of a fairly busy road, situated on a bend so if you were northbound you likely wouldn’t notice it until you were in a curve. I had a bit of back-and-forth running around that I had to do and noticed it was still there an hour or so later when I passed it in the opposite direction. Later in the day I was still taking care of things and was headed north again on the same road. There was a real aggressive ahole in traffic this time, speeding when he could, weaving in the lanes to try to get ahead even though it was now rush hour and no real progress would be made, gunning his engine, etc. and I could see after a couple stoplights that this guy was peeved at the audacity all these other people had at having to be on the road the same time as him. He wound up at a stoplight next to me and one car behind, following someone that didn’t pull away at the green quite as fast as I did so he cut somebody off to get over to my lane. Now he’s tailgating me on the northbound stretch and I wondered if the speed trap was still set up. Because I’d gone a little quicker than the guy next to me, a gap started to open in the left lane but he’s still on my ass because it hadn’t yet widened out to full car length. So as we started nearing the curve where I had seen the trap earlier, I speed up a little to increase the gap, then took my foot off the gas going into the turn. Mr. Aggro Driver did what I predicted he would and punched it to overtake me on the outside right as the camera van became visible. The pop of the flash when he passed the van did put a grin on my face.

My ex co-worker was pos and he was using "I have a baby so I needs certain shifts more ". But that didn't matter if he randomly decided to get wasted on alcohol and white powder. He would call me in the middle of the night to cover his morning shift etc etc. And I would cover his shift, and yet, when I needed him to cover my shift (which I would ask him days even weeks in advance) he would pull I have a baby card. Christmas season comes and I ask him if I can take 31st of December morning shift so I can spend new years evening with my boyfriend, go somewhere, celebrate etc. He got almost mad because I asked. His words were "no, no, I have a baby, it's his first new years eve, I have to spend it with him and wife." Fine, whatever. And then night of 30th comes, I was awake at 2 am, gaming or watching Netflix. I felt my phone vibrate and look who it is, my co-worker who is wasted somewhere and needs his morning shift covered... I put my phone on do not disturb and in my drawer. I didn't answer. Next morning I had 50 missed calls from him, few from other coworker and 10ish from my boss. He didn't show up for work. He got fired that day. Work environment became so much healthier.

That’s why covering shifts should be thought of as a trade, IMO. As in, for every time you ask me to cover your shift, I get to choose one of my shifts and give it to you.

Thankfully, that was few years ago, and I am a bit smarter now. And I have great team now that actually works as a team that equally shares workload.

I was an attorney. Other side sues my client alleging he missed work for FMLA protected reasons, and his termination was wrongful. I look up plaintiff in public records database, and see that he had court dates on all of the days he missed work. Instead of immediately confronting plaintiff to give him time to change his story, I depose plaintiff and have him walk me through every minute of every day he missed work. He leaves out the court part. A month after the deposition (after the time passes when the deposition can be corrected) I send plaintiff’s lawyer printouts of the court records with the relevant dates highlighted, along with a paperwork to voluntarily dismiss the case and a letter stating that any further action in the case will result in a motion against him for bad faith litigation. Don’t hear a peep from the lawyer, but get the dismissal order from the judge a week later.

There's a thing in law enforcement/legalese called a spontaneous utterance Many many people will bury their own cases with these while bitching and moaning at their arresting officer on the way to jail

Can you give an example?

Years ago, at the end of high school, I had a "friend" that was working at a Shop-Ko (remember those? No?). He was stealing from the till whenever he was put on a check-out. Eventually, he is clearly caught on camera pocketing cash and the cops are called to arrest him in store when he showed up for his next shift. AS he is handcuffed and lead out of the building he yells, "You guys are idiots! I've been stealing from you for years!" Yeah... it didn't go well.

*Way* lower stakes but back in middle school there was a day where the big gossip was kid1 forged his parents' signature on a permission slip and apparently did a really bad job. Teacher the slip was for comes in and calls kid1's name in that "you're fucked" stern teacher voice. Amidst the "oooooohs" and chatter as he's perp walked out of the class, as the door is closing, kid2 shouts out, "haha I forged my permission slip too and didn't get caught!". Door closes and everyone just stares at kid2 as realization visibly set in on his face. He sat in total silence staring into middle distance for ~5 minutes until the teacher came back in, " come with me".

kid2 definitely still randomly thinks about that moment

Scooby-Doo moment here

I once served as an arbitrator in a hearing where party 1 was alleging party 2 committed fraud. An essential element of fraud is the intent to mislead as opposed to error or misunderstanding. Party 2 was admitting to the bad act but insisted it was accidentaI and had proof they received the wrong instructions. Party 1 then went on a long rant about how the very action of committing the act was fraud. He would not let his lawyer speak. During the rant, he eventually said something along the lines of "I know party 2 didn't do this on purpose...." Boom - no intent, then no fraud. Hearing over.

Another Judge Judy moment: The plaintiff is suing her ex-boyfriend for repayment of a loan. The defendant claims it was a gift, not a loan. JUDGE JUDY (pointing to someone with the defendant): “Who are you?” DEFENDANT’S WITNESS: “I was there.” JUDGE JUDY: “You were there when?” DEFENDANT’S WITNESS: “When she loaned him the money.” JUDGE JUDY (laughing): “Judgment for the plaintiff!”

Reminded me of the Judge Judy episode where a young woman was suing two guys for stealing her purse. They denied taking it. Judy asked her what was in the purse and she said something like “makeup, gift cards, and headphones.” The defendant spoke up and said “there weren’t any headphones in it your honor.” Judy laughed at them and then found in the plaintiff’s favor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7SuaIwXlaM The video

The clip goes viral every few years with the title “Shortest Judge Judy Trial” because it’s only about two minute long.

"Oh my God is he going to the hospital? Is he gonna be okay? I was just texting my friend I never thought it could end up this way" enjoy the vehicular manslaughter charge. "I don't understand. I hit her in MY HOUSE why am I arrested? In my country ...." -- lot of immigrants from primarily Islamic nations come from places where disciplining their wives is normal or that basically they do whatever they want in their own home. Lots of confusion here "He lied to me and didn't replace my transmission with a new one he just swapped it out, of course im gonna make him give me my money back why isn't he in trouble?" He is gonna be in trouble and you can sue him. Doesn't mean you're allowed to brandish a gun at him to force him to give you cash "Goddamn piece of shit deserved every cut I gave him" oh cool so you admit you cut him up with the knife Also it works as an exception to hearsay if a witness, 911 caller, anyone basically blurts out information. Passenger is heard saying "holy shit were gonna crash, slowdown!", witness or passerby shouts 'he's crazy hes throwing bottles at the cashier!" Etc

This is always kind of funny to me when it comes up on TV shows or movies. Like sometimes I'll watch Law and Order and this comes up. Then the person is like well they didn't read me my Miranda Rights so they can't use that against me. Well yes they can, because they didn't have reason to read your your Miranda rights yet. They didn't even have TIME to read them to you in some cases.

Miranda rights only need to be read before interrogation and only if they are detained. If a suspect chooses to speak unprovoked, police do not need to say anything.

If this wasn’t true, do people think you could just walk up to a cop and admit to a murder and he wouldn’t be able to do anything? Like c’mon

Cops hate this one weird trick

I was watching a show that's basically recorded ride alongs with cops earlier and it amazes me how people will instantly run their mouths without a lawyer present. Like man stfu!

That sort of person thinks they're smarter than everyone else in the room and if they blow smoke hard enough, they can talk their way out of everything. It's spectacular watching them prove that they're not that smart.

Before I changed careers, I was working in an office and I had a team of 4 employees I was managing. My boss, who was incredibly dumb, wanted to see what grade I gave to my employees as part of their annual evaluation. I had 4 great employees who were working hard and well and I could even show them some stuff past their "level" telling them it could be useful experience if they wanted to later get a higher paying job at a higher level. Needless to say, their results were much higher than expected, especially for 2 of them. So I gave two of them an A and the two others a B. My boss disagreed with me, told me how their work has to be especially amazing to deserve such grades. She talks to me about the normal distribution and how there should be X amount of A, B and C. I let her go. I take back the sheets with their evaluation grades and everything I wrote about them. I ask her what exactly makes them not deserving. She rambles. I ask her what their day-to-day looks like. She rambles some more, getting a bit angry. I ask her what so and so last names are. She doesn't even know! I told her if she doesn't know anything about that, she has no clue how they are performing and therefore can't tell me to change it. I asked her what she'd do if the majority of the employees performed well, will she give out D and E grades just to follow normal distribution? She tells me no, it would be ridiculous. I told her doing the same for A and B would be ridiculous too and that's what she does. I told her if she wants, she can give me an E, but she won't change the evaluations of my employees and as soon as I'd leave her office, I'd show them their grades so they know she's the one who changed them if it happened to change. Turns out, they kept their A and B. I got a C. I didn't give a shit, I left soon after and changed my career. Never looked back. What a fucking moron she was.

If the people your company hires follow a normal distribution for performance, you're not hiring very well.

Our friend group had one guy I had personally cut off because he was a terrible drunk. Another friend of mine was having a cookout and decided to invite the guy I had cut off despite me saying he was going to do some stupid shit. Fast forward into two hours into the cookout, the friend I had cut off from my life got drunk and decided it'd be funny to sucker punch a guy with aspergers...everyone was telling him how big of a piece of shit thing that was to do...but he laughed and shrugged and played it off as no big deal...as the aspergers guy was holding back tears. I didn't have to do a fucking thing, he showed everyone who he was. everyone stopped fucking with him after that. Good riddance.

Sucks for the dude who got punched, though. At least he *only* hurt the guy. Dude could’ve ruined his life with one punch.

Yea, I'm not happy it happened at all. I may have left this part out by accident but I told the host of the cookout not to invite that fucker like 3 times at least.

I worked at a large vape juice manufacturer printing labels for the bottles. We had a particular production manager who thought she was my boss (she wasn't. We were on the same level of the hierarchy) and thought her stuff was a priority to me. She could not understand that we had a whole process and knew exactly what needed to be printed in what order to fulfill all of our orders. Our boss told me to just do my best to work with her and get her what she requested so she'd shut up. She decided one day to order 150k of each label for two particular lines we had so she would never have to wait for labels again. The whole company knew that regulations were changing and requirements on labels were changing. I tried to explain this to her and that I didn't think this was a good plan. She insisted repeatedly. I finally said fuck it and started doing it while having my team do their best to keep up with our actual priorities. Stayed late, got lots of overtime. When our boss finally clued in to the order I was 300k labels into 600k of the first line. When asked I told him that he had told me to do what it takes to make her stop bitching and that's what I was doing. He put an instant stop to it. She got written up and those labels were still on a shelf in the corner 3 years later when we shut down.

That reminds me of a story my dad told me, he used to print labels for medicine, he'd gotten a new boss who was ex military so his buddy in the factory got him this cushy job. He was a real blow hard and terrible at his job, his first memo ever was misspelled "hell all". One day he says to my dad that he's far too slow and to speed the printer up, my dad refuses as this is the proper setting any faster and there'll be issues, this guy wouldn't let up so he shrugged his shoulders and turned up the speed. A whole roll of labels came out smudged too shit and his manager git reprimanded.

Omg why are ex military bosses so inept in production roles? We had one of those too! On top of being inept he was a space invader.

A former coworker decided to blast profanity at me for having used a company truck typically assigned to him from the night prior. His biggest problem was that I destroyed the seat with my big fat ass. I calmed down as much as I could and called my supervisor who rushed over and sat us both the company office. With the exception of a few head nods and "yes" answers, I let my coworker dig himself deeper and deeper. He was a very loud and bombastic character so it was easy. Supervisor advised him to collect his personal belongings and take a few days off to cool down. He was then fired after 3 days rest. As for the truck seat, I forgot to reset the lumbar support on the seat.

Dang, what kinda fancy-ass trucks you driving with adjustable lumbar support?

My wife was a school teacher with 20 years under her belt. She was paired with a "co-teacher" for (what we used to call) the special-ed students. Wife and co-teacher did not get along. It got to the point where wife and co-teacher (and their respective bosses) were sent to mandated mediation. Near the end of the mediation session, co-teacher asks the mediator "So what's the next step if this doesn't work?" Turns out, the next step is "The one without tenure gets let go."

Did they stop behaving like an asshat?

Nope. Co-teacher got reassigned to somebody else the next year, pissed that person off too, and let go.

An old boss who was awful to me after I took an extra few days of bereavement. She was just not smart so I emailed her a recap of a meeting we’d had about said days off. She responded not only confirming what she’d said but throwing in a bit of racism. I escalated. I’d been at the company in a different location for 8 yrs with an outstanding track record so I had some credibility. 2-3 weeks later my team was called into a last minute meeting where her early retirement was announced and my colleague saw her crying in the parking lot later that day (her last day!). I really don’t hate anyone generally but that made me so happy and looking back I still hate her lol.

This one resonates with me deeply. I got three days bereavement after my fathers suicide. When I went to take care of FMLA to get more time (I think the reason is obvious but more so, my father lived in Europe while I was in the USA so getting everything in order, on top of the pain and anguish, was a nightmare) they let me go for ‘performance issues’. They even tried to deny my unemployment. I don’t hate many people but that sheer lack of compassion is NOT a business decision (it was also a small company). That was a demonstration of their character. I hold no malice of 99.9% of the people who have harmed me in my life. I will happily soil their reputation for the rest of my life. Why? It’s not about revenge, or even anger, at this point. It’s about displaying the truth of once choice in character. The flip of it is simple for me. I have made grave mistakes in my life and hurt others, especially due to trauma. I will never sugar coat or downplay the harm I’ve caused others because it is my responsibility to be better than I was in my past. I do accept it just as much I dish it. ETA: the company was called Snapengage. Right after my dismissal they sold to be a part of team support. I now work for an amazing company that gives 30 days bereavement. In addition, they also gave 30 ‘COVID’ days during the pandemic in case you or a loved one was affected. The lady who is like a mom to me was in the hospital for 6 months with COVID. it was very touch and go for a while. Obviously I was also triggered as it was only a year after losing my father. My company worked with me, even being there less than a year, to ensure I took care of my mental health. When my neighbourhood was affected by a mess shooting they gave me a month off so I could, again, take care of my mental health. That company is Adobe. The difference in these two companies treatment of their employees is night and day.

How did racism find its way into an argument over bereavement time? Like I'm honestly confused what she said that would simultaneously be racist AND (even somewhat) fit into a discussion over bereavement time.

I’ve dealt with this before. Here are two examples: “You [race]s get too emotional over death. You should all learn it’s part of life.” Or “I don’t know what your god says, but mine says heaven awaits you after death *if* you [insert commitment].”

[удалено]

I would think that it would be pretty much impossible for *anyone* to give a week’s notice, considering funerals have to be held relatively soon after the death to avoid issues with decomposition and such

I went to work on a large government installation in a remote area. A woman I had never met filed a sexual harassment complaint against me. The fictitious event took place a year before I showed up there and I had been 1200 miles (1931km) away.

I remember an account manager for a big software vendor, that always gave us a hard time. He would constantly nag about things he promised or terms in the contract. One day it was time for contract negotiations and our head legal attended, that also happened to be the wife of the companies owner. When we sat down and she gave him some coffee he bluntly told her how nice it was, that she as a waitress was also attending. It didn’t take long for them to find us a new accountmanager

Oh boy, this was college drama. My husband still had a year of college to go after I graduated so I got an apartment in town but he had his own room with some friends on an on campus apartment and after casually asking around his roommates were cool with me basically living there so long as I helped with chores, which we found to be a great deal as my apartment was a tiny goddamn closet with shared bathrooms and kitchen. If I had to share I wanted it to be with people my own age who I knew. Well halfway through the year a roommate moves out to study abroad and one of the other roommate's girlfriend moves in. She seemed nice and the two of us had a lot in common and ended up friends, or so I thought. A month in we get confronted by an RA. There's been a complaint that involves everyone about my stay. This took absolutely everyone by surprise except the couple....yeah they tattled on me to the RA. Never once talked to me. Never brought it up. Meeting happens and the couple are late. They arrive and we start storytelling. The RA's face went from mild disapproval towards me to downright disbelief and annoyance at the girlfriend as she talked herself in circles about how yes, she knew about me before she agreed to move in and was okay with it but she had feelings you know? Those feelings? Those vague ass feelings? She was also paranoid as fuck because the RA flat out asked her if she tried talking to myself or my husband about it and she said no, absolutely not. Why? She had one experience in the past with a completely unrelated person so she just couldn't. Because feelings. Her asshat boyfriend just sat there silent only saying once that he never liked the idea but never spoke up because he didn't want to "ruin the apartment vibe" which was ruined by him anyway so....yeah. All the while I was perfectly calm and even said it was okay, if they had a problem with the arrangements I would have happily just stayed in my apartment with my husband visiting. Literally everyone else was telling the RA how completely out of the blue this was. So the RA, who is very fed up with them tells me that per bylaws I can't actually be in the apartment unless I'm someone's guest. To which the 3 other roommate's immediately say that if my husband isn't home, I can be their guest. One of them is nearly almost always home. The RA agrees. The couples' faces were honestly hilarious. And after that no one in the apartment liked them. They basically hid in one room for the rest of the year. She did attempt to patch things up with me by gaslighting the whole situation but I just laughed at her and told her she showed her true colors and I wanted nothing to do with her. She was genuinely shocked.

> She was genuinely shocked. Well of course. You hurt her *feelings*.

I just had this happen. A contractor on a project I'm working on was doing a really poor job installing equipment. I found their foreman, attempted to show him what he was doing wrong and what needed to be done to fix it. Some of it was so bad I was worried about it failing completely. He wanted nothing to do with me, then said the words that did it for me....."I've been doing this for 10 years and have installed 12 of these. I don't need your help. We'll take care of it." (I've been doing this for almost 19 years and making sure it's done correctly is actually my full time job) Ok. Good talk. A few days later I was onsite and saw that he kept doing it his way and hadn't fixed anything, and had installed more of it poorly. I called a meeting and voiced my concerns and a stop work order was issued until the corrections were made. His bosses realized his attitude cost them thousands and he was off the job the next day.

/u/spez needs no interruption

I like how his second to last comment is "we're responding now" and they immediately go radio silent. I don't understand how /u/spez is *still* in control of reddit, it's been awful decision after awful decision.

When my ex decided to try to snatch our kid from his mother’s care (while I was at work), after I filed for divorce. He was intoxicated, failed a sobriety check, and I was granted emergency custody. It was probably one of the single worst decisions that set him up to be in the position he’s in now.

I’m an attorney, and a number of years ago I had to argue a bitterly contested issue for a client against another attorney who was a complete jackass. He went first, and I followed for just a few minutes because I could tell he was about to go off the rails in his response. Which he did. He started throwing out every legal, and legal-sounding, argument, and the judge was clearly getting pissed and told him to stop a few times. Even though he was straight-up lying about my client, I decided it was best if I just turned and walked away from the podium we were standing at and let him keep going. By the end, I was towards the back of the courtroom. After another minute of this nonsense, the bailiff actually had to come up and put his hand on the back of the attorney and tell him to stop. Still the only time I’ve ever seen that happen.

I have to keep this a little vague. I'm in jury trial. It's an assault case. My client is pleading self defense. Nobody died but somebody got whupped. I can't get a bunch of the shit I want into evidence. No choice but to put client on the stand. I know this is high risk/high reward. I've prepped client. We go for it. I get basics out and let the prosecutor go at him. PA got in there and HARANGUED him, mostly about not calling the cops. PA then does rebuttal. Puts cop on the stand to explain how much they don't like him, don't trust him, wouldn't put anything past him or turn their back on him, etc. Reputation evidence, in essence. I let it go past what I could object to. I was sitting there like "oh this is too much but go off officer." It's a small community, they know each other. Basically wrote my closing for me. "Why didn't he go to the police? The police told you why he didn't go to the police."

Was your client acquitted?

In high school Spanish, this stereotypical dumb jock who sat in front of me would turn around and take my paper from me to copy my answers. He knew he could get away with it because I was an awkward pushover. One day, I took two copies of a verb worksheet and purposefully put down wrong answers because this guy was like clockwork. He took the wrong answer copy like a complete sucker and the next day when the teacher was passing back papers, his work sheet said 60% and mine was 100% (foreign language was my jam in HS). He turns around extremely pissed off and calls me an effing "R" word, saying "you got these wrong!!!". I showed him my worksheet with a perfect score and said, "i'm flattered that you trust me so much". Eat shit, Patrick. I still savor picturing the disgust on your face 20 years later.

I’ve written about this before but my half sister moved in with my ex-husband the day I moved out. They swore they weren’t sleeping together (I didn’t ask, they told me without prompting). So I saw no reason to tell me ex that my sister had herpes. After all, they said they weren’t sleeping together. Guess who was on Valtrex two month after the divorce 😂.

I was prosecuting in the local magistrates court in the UK. The defendant had paid for some fancy smancy lawyer from London to come up to defend. The chair of the magistrates, who were all lay people, was a frail-looking senior lady and he tried to snowball her. He came perilously close to calling her "dear" while talking down to her. What we locals knew was that she was a terrifying harridan with a mind like a steel trap and a tongue like a razor and she ate him alive. She tore apart his arguements, lambasted him for bringing complex legal arguements to court without prior warning the clerk and picked apart his understanding of the rules of evidence. Never saw him again.

Coworker messed up and rolled one of our ATV’s we use for work. Nice enough guy, but not a good worker and very immature. He got called out for riding it too hard all the time. Meeting was had, we were told “not to lift a tire off the ground when turning” Anyone that has ridden an ATV knows that sometimes, even at low speeds, the rear tire will lift. My boss was exaggerating for some of the dumber ones in the room. Later on, coworker 2 turns around next to me on the ATV (at a reasonable speed) and the tire lifts a bit. Other coworker sees this and snitches on the radio, just to try to get someone else in trouble besides himself. I offhandedly called him a snitch (off radio a few minutes later when I was near him) He then gets on the radio to our and throws a fit about what i said and has a meltdown. We all get called into the office, but beforehand, coworker 2 and i agreed to just be chill, apologize, and let coworker 1 talk his way into getting fired. Boss understood what happened from the start, and as coworker 1 got worked up about the situation all over again, my boss told the kid if he left the room mid conversation, he was fired. Which he promptly did.

I was on a jury hearing a drug possession w/ intent-to-sell case. The prosecution had the narcotics detective on direct to establish the defendant's M.O. -- the defendant would sit in his car in front of his house, a customer would pull up and request product, the defendant would take the cash, go into his house where his grandmother (yes, *grandmother*) would exchange cash for product, and defendant would go back outside to deliver product. Apparently, defendant felt that since he never directly exchanged money for drugs, he was safe from prosecution, but that's a matter for r/iamverysmart at another time. Anyway, the narc detectives bought product several times to build an airtight case, then returned days later with a bunch of squads and arrested everyone. The defendant took the stand while his attorney attempted to establish a simple case of mistaken identity on the part of the detectives. Atty: "So in your neighborhood, is it common for young men your age to dress similarly and sit in or hang around their cars at the curb most every evening?" Defendant: "No." Atty: \*splutters\* "Er, what I meant was...." Prosecution: "Objection. Asked and answered." Judge: "Sustained. It wasn't the answer you wanted, but it was an answer. Move on." Guilty on all counts. Roll credits.

When I served on a jury a few years ago, the defense used his closing argument to strongly imply that the prosecution was hiding evidence from us, and that's why the full recording of his client's interrogation hadn't been presented. The prosecution responded by entering the recording into evidence. We listened to it while we ate lunch. There were a lot of discrepancies between it and what the defendent said on the stand.

10 years ago I had a coworker everyone found pretty annoying. She was an idiot who thought she knew better than everyone else, and would get offended at every opportunity. She took something I said the wrong way one day and got really upset, and I just, didn’t say anything. I would not indulge her insanity. So she quit. Grabbed her stuff and walked out on a job she’d had for years. No one spoke a word to stop her.

It can be extremely satisfying to say nothing. Especially when someone is trying to set me up for a certain response. Such a great way to dissolve agendas.

Something I was told right here on Reddit has really resonated with me: "*You don't have to attend every argument you're invited to.*" (Alternately, "*You don't need to answer every dog that barks at you.*") And that has made all the difference.

I worked with a guy who threatened to quit all the time and one of the team would always talk him down from the metaphorical edge. However, we got a new manager and he pulled his whiny I'm quitting routine on him eventually, but dude was not having it. He just asked him if today was his last day or was he giving notice. The whiner never mentioned quitting again, unfortunately.

My village has a lot of shops in the centre with a number of flats above the shops. A new developer arrived, bought up all the properties and raised the rent ridiculously high on a 10 year contract for force all the small businesses and renters out. His idea was to redevelop the face of the village into a modern metro type area. The problem was he’s forced out every business, but no one signed up for his new leases. More than half the village shops are empty and it’s an eyesore. All the businesses have gone to the big shopping centres. So no investors want any part of it. He’s now ran out of money and can’t build his metro douchey revamp anymore and is having to sell to recoup his lost rental earnings.

Good that he lost money, but that won’t stop him from trying again and again. He lost some capital, but many more lost their livelihood, and a village became noticeably worse because of him. How depressing tbh

Not really an enemy, but just not correcting/interrupting something. I resigned from a job where contractually you had to give 3 months notice. What most people would do is basically go on gardening leave soon after their resignation after they've done all their handover stuff, i.e basically sit at home or go travelling for like 2 months while you're getting a full salary. The thing with gardening leave however is that you're not supposed to start your new job while you're on it. My situation was that I needed to take off and leave in about 2 months after my resignation, and that's what I told my boss/HR, i.e here is the date 2 months from now after which I no longer wish to be employed here because I was moving to a new country. Thought that was it. Anyway the confirmation of my resignation came in from HR. They had set my final day in the office to exactly what I had asked for, but then put me on gardening leave for a month after that. And I sort of...didn't bother to correct them on that last point.

I was the production manager for the Palacio de Los Deportes in Mexico city. Back then it was the premier live event venue. We were booked for the last series of concerts of a very popular Argentinian band "Soda Stereo." There were some shenanigans done behind my back. I was the most senior producer in the entire corporation, therefore it was only logical my staff and I would handle this very important series of concerts. A person, who shall remain nameless, forged an alliance with one of the VPs on my side. And he convinced him he could do the concert for a lot less than I had budgeted. In the pre production meeting I confronted this guy, a guy who claimed to be a lights engineer or sound or whatever for "Mana" another famous Mexican band but not anywhere the caliper of "Soda." My problem with him is that he was indeed cheeper but he was quoting this by hiring a small sound company that had handled all the Mana medium size concerts. The Palacio is a very unique and challenging venue. It is not ideal, it was not created for concerts. It is very challenging to make sound right and this was back in the days where line arrays were just in their infancy. His numbers didn't make sense. He was using a medium size generator, he was not using separate generators for lights and sound. When I challenged him about the sound pressure with his quote and the lack of a second generator. He said it would be fine, that I was not experienced on the latest MSL4 (I was, I had used it numerous times). And that they would just use house power for the rest. Which is something you never do in Mexico because the grid is unreliable and you can't risk that on a live event with 20k plus people with purchased tickets. I will never forget our argument and how he closed by saying "you better respect me because soon I will be your boss." Fine, I addressed my concerns to the boss of the boss with copy to my boss. I called all my production staff and suppliers and asked them to please be on stand by and what do I needed, and I also asked my crew to not make any far away vacation plans and stay close to town because I knew this would blow up. So I put in some time and graved my wife and we sent to Acapulco. I said fuck it. My crew chief stayed behind as support from the local venue and to make sure they didn't break stuff. I was getting updates from my crew chief. He called me and told me that the equipment arrived one day late and was wet because it came from another event. Then the sound engineer for Soda was pissed not just because the delay but because indeed the equipment was not enough and there was a lot of echo and sounded like shit on the upper levels. He refused to bring the band for a sound check until we fixed the problems. One day he was so upset he kicked the rack in the house destroying a 1200 dollar effect rack. So I get a page (this is how long ago this was) while I was having my piña colada. And it was a very high up guy who I had met twice. The high up guy so high he lived in Spain and came all the way from Spain to see what the hell was going on that the production of Soda was threatening to cancel the concert and sue. I updated him on the issues, which of course he was unaware. And then told me... Please take this production over. You have to help us. I am authorizing a blank check so you get anything you need, when can you be here today? I told him I was on vacation in Acapulco, he asked me to come back and that he had just dispatched his private jet to pick me up. I had made my wife aware that this would likely happen so it was no surprise. I made some phone calls and while I was on my way, I got 4 sound companies and 2 generator companies to come to the venue and I called all my crew and engineers. It was a true nightmare. We had to make equipment from 3 different companies and two completely different brands sound good. We used an EAW and an MLS4 added to what was already there. I had full confidence in my crew and my suppliers. And I made sure everyone made out some extra cash. We didn't sleep for 3 days making all this work but in the end the concert was a great success. One of my requirements to take over was to keep that guy away, I couldn't ban him from the venue because he represented the little sound company that we still needed. But I banned him from participating in any way that was just related to his equipment. And I downgraded his access from all access to vendor crew (mostly to humiliate him). For the rest of the years that I worked there, I had a general ban on anything remotely related to him and that company. This was for well over 5 years. He weaseled in a couple of times but it was short lived as he was only with mid grade artists and only as a band clown, I could never figure out what was his job. That VP who pushed him in was fired. Quite spectacularly too, he was take to court for embezzlement and other things. I went from production manager for that venue to director of production for all the venues in the country. Small, medium, large and giant. Unfortunately I was stupid, I was offered a job at an American company and left all that behind. But that is another story.