Customer: “My printer is out of ink. It says I need Magneto.”

Me: *Fighting laughter.* “I think this is what you need.”

I get him some magenta ink compatible with his printer. Now, in the store’s office, whenever the printer is running low, the running joke is that the printer is telling us in a dramatic voice: “Find help… find… Magneto!”

This superseded the previous running joke where a customer needing cyan called it cayenne.

One of my coworkers has been assigned to make announcements to the customers over the store speakers. She does not always stick to the script.

Coworker: “Step right up for sensational savings on stunning, stylish, summer sandals! Sleek selections, slashed significantly! Shop smart, save splendidly!”

Someone in Home Goods starts clapping. A little later:

Coworker: “Fabulous finds for fashion-forward folks!”

At that exact moment, our manager walks past, stops mid-stride, and says:

Manager: “Stop a-litter-ing in the store!”

I work at a company that sells equipment like furniture and computers to schools. Most of our orders come through our website, but we also take a lot by phone, especially when a person hasn’t made up their mind about what specific items they want and needs to discuss it.

One day I get a phone call from a woman who introduces herself as the deputy head teacher at a brand-new school. She wants to order computer equipment for the teachers to use in their classrooms, for the offices, for the student computer labs, and for the school library.  

This is a LOT of equipment.

She doesn’t have specifics of the requirements and doesn’t seem to know a lot about computers, so she asks me to recommend models for the different purposes, and I run through some options with her, making a list as I go about everything she wants. 

Unsurprisingly, the list starts to add up very quickly to a substantial cost. She didn’t give me a budget to stick to, so I’m just suggesting the best models we have that seem to suit her needs.

Eventually, we are nearing the end of the conversation; I have read off the list of everything she’s asked me for and got her to confirm that she’s happy with it, and she starts giving me the address and other details for delivery. It occurs to me that we still haven’t mentioned money, and that I’ll need to set up an account for her school.

Me: “I’ll need to set up an account for you. Do you have a school credit card?”

Caller: “A credit card? Like what you buy things with?”

Me: “Yes.”

Caller: “To buy… the computers?”

Me: “That’s right. For everything on the list I just read to you, the total would come to £[a large amount].”

Thus far in the conversation, she had been quite professional in manners and tone. Now, however, she began speaking so coquettishly and cutely, I could picture her twirling a bit of hair around her finger as she spoke.

Caller: “Weeeeeeeell… I thought maybe you’d like to just give them to me? Like a little present for me?”

Me: “…”

Caller: “Because I’ve been working sooooooo hard on the school, and it’s for the little children. So you should just give me the stuff?”

Me: “I’m sorry, but this is a business. We don’t just give away computers on this scale. If your budget is tight, I can recommend some lower-cost options—”

Caller: “Nooooo! I want the nice ones! The nice ones! But they’re for the children, so you should give them to me for free as a present! Do you hate children?”

Gobsmacked at this behaviour, I am trying to work out how to answer when I hear a scuffle on the other end of the line, and the woman arguing with somebody. Then the phone is hung up.

Wondering if I’ve been pranked, I return to some other work. About ten minutes later, another call comes through, this time from our receptionist, who tells me she has a caller who is looking for a member of staff who just dealt with a caller asking for presents. I confirm that this was me, and the very amused receptionist puts the call through.

It was the headteacher of the school calling to apologise for the previous call. The caller had not been the deputy head teacher; she was a member of the office staff who had volunteered to contact us, claiming she had a way to get us to give her a discount.

The head teacher overheard the last minute or so of our conversation, and when she realised that the woman was trying to guilt a company into giving them free stuff, she took the phone away from her. She wanted to know if I still had time to help her choose computers, and we had the same conversation all over again. This time, however, we ended up with a totally different final list, as the head teacher actually knew the requirements and budget.

I woke up on Friday to find that my internet wasn’t working. At first, I thought it was a temporary outage, and I had errands to run, so I wasn’t worried too much, but when I got home, it still wasn’t working, and the broadband light on my modem was red.

I went through my internet’s companion app, but it couldn’t find anything and recommended sending a tech, but my Dad was coming into town, and he knows a thing or two about technology, so I figured I’d see if he knew what to do before calling one in. Dad arrives and agrees with the assessment that we need a tech, so we give the company a call. The AI isn’t very helpful, and there was a wait for a representative, so we set up a callback time. The callback comes around, and the conversation goes something like this:

Agent: “Hello, my name is Jason. Can I please have your name?”

Me: *Gives name.*

Agent: “Hello, my name is Jason. Can I please have your name?”

Me: *Gives name again.*

Agent: “If you are having trouble hearing me, please hang up.”

And that’s what we do (we’re not convinced he was a real person), but we call the number again and get an actual agent who sets us an appointment for Thursday.

Saturday rolls around, and I decide to take the modem up to the local internet company store to see if there is something wrong with the modem, but that ends up being a bust. However, when walking behind my apartment building, we notice a tech working on the box in the next building over. The tech tells us that the outage is due to a cut cable, and he was in the process of patching the wire into the next building, but he was on a tight schedule and didn’t have time to do ours. No worries, we now know what is causing the outage.

Sunday is pretty uneventful from the outage perspective, but we do call in to let the internet people know what is going on and manage to get my appointment moved to Wednesday.

Monday, I decided to go to my apartment complex’s office to let them know what’s going on. They promised to give the company a call to try to get things fixed before Wednesday. 

Tuesday rolls around, still no WiFi. I go to the office to get updates and am met with a visibly frustrated office manager who is also annoyed that my issue hadn’t been fixed. Apparently, a company truck had been in the complex, and she thought that they were there to fix things. She promises to keep writing them and asks me to update her as things go on.

Wednesday rolls around. The tech comes out and confirms what we already knew: a cut cable, and calls out a field tech (the same one who was there Saturday) to patch me in. The field tech arrives much sooner than I expected, and the problem is at least temporarily solved, although my internet is still a little jumpy.

I’m a policeman. My colleague is getting a call from our dispatcher. After:

Colleague: “Drive us to [Address] in [Village] for… uh… [uses the code for a stolen vehicle]. It just happened.”

Me: “If it just happened, why do you not sound very concerned?

Colleague: “The vehicle stolen was a lawnmower.”

Me: “Okay?”

Colleague: “Dispatch is still on the phone with the caller. He’s… uh… in pursuit of the thief. On foot.”

Me: “Oh.”

We drove for five minutes to see an old man driving down the street on a sit-down lawnmower, looking angry. Behind him was another old man, on the phone to 999 (our 911), walking ‘in pursuit’ of the guy who had stolen his lawnmower.

What added to the comedy of this ‘high-speed pursuit’ was that the old man who called in the theft was also walking his slow old dog.

Turned out the old geezer on the lawnmower was a village neighbor who wanted to borrow the lawnmower and wouldn’t take no for an answer, so it was resolved quickly, but that image of the ‘road chase’ will forever be in my mind.