dystop

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
 
 

So it was my first job was a server at a very popular 24 hour breakfast diner/chain. We had lots of colorful customers.

One morning, I’m serving a woman sitting by herself. I ask her what I can get her, and she says she’d like an omelette. We have a list of pre-built omelettes, or you can build your own, so I ask her how she’d like her omelette. “Just a regular omelette, please” she tells me.

“Okay, so you don’t want one of the signature omelettes, what would you like inside of yours?” I ask

“Nothing, just a regular omelette.” She replies with a huff

I pause for a second because this order does occur, but not often. Some people like their eggs scrambled and cooked, then rolled up. “So you’d like an omelette with nothing inside?”

“YES! A plain omelette!” She snaps, now irritated that I’ve questioned her several times.

Cue malicious compliance.

So I enter the order, a 5-egg omelette with no fillings and no toppings. A few minutes later it comes out, and she is appalled. “What is THIS?!”

"Your plain omelette," I reply...

“But where is the cheese, or the ham or the onions?!” She is irate.

“Ma’am, you ordered an omelette with nothing inside...”

She gets cocky and says, “An omelette is eggs rolled up with ham, cheese, and onions! Everything else is extra! You should know this, working at a breakfast place!”

I look at her deadpan and inform her “Actually, ma’am, omelette is French for scrambled eggs that are fried and rolled or folded; everything else is extra.”

I’m busy so I walk off and help other colorful customers, meanwhile she flags down a manager to complain, who confirms what I told her and points out that in the menu there is, very specifically, a ham cheese and onion omelette with a large picture in the middle of the page.

Then tells her she has to re-order her meal and wait a second time.

She didn’t leave a tip.

TL;DR: A customer ordered a "regular omelette" and got annoyed when I asked questions about fillings or toppings. So, I put in the order for a 5-egg plain omelette. She was so irritated and complained to the manager who backed me up. She had to order again and didn't leave a tip.

[reposted from reddit]

 

[REPOST]

There are a handful of rules to saluting in the American military. The when, why, and how is drilled into you from boot camp until the day you leave. Even the order in which the salutes are rendered have meaning. When it comes to vehicles there are helpful insignia and stickers to indicate if its an officer such as a colored sticker located on the front windshield.

My base was small enough where it was everyone's job at some point to do sentry duty at the front gate which had housing for military families. Sentry duty was pretty basic, you'd stop every vehicle, check IDs and then wave them through. If they were an officer you'd see it coming with those colored stickers and after verifying the identity of the officer, you'd salute and send them on their way.

One day while on duty I approached a vehicle with an officer's sticker and there was only the officer's wife driving in the vehicle. I returned her ID, wished her a nice day and waved her through. Pausing with a stern look, "Where's my salute?"

Now, Karen here was wife to a higher ranking officer and has clearly has fallen under the impression people are saluting her somewhere along the way. Some of the junior enlisted might've even been saluting her as they're more prone to f*ck ups.

I politely replied, "Ma'am salutes are only rendered to commissioned officers." Angrily pointing her fingers at the front of her windshield towards her husband's officer sticker, "I have a sticker and you need to salute the sticker." Curtly I continued, "I'm afraid that sticker is not an officer either."

Frustrated she pulled through and left my post. My cover guy and I watched her drive down the street and pull right into the administrative building with the top brass and huffed into the building as quickly as her body would take her. We exchange a look between us with wry smiles knowing exactly where this is probably going.

Later that day, we get a new official base-wide mandate. From here forward all enlisted will salute vehicle stickers of officers regardless of who's in the vehicle. Rodger that.

Cue malicious compliance.

It's worth noting that when you salute an officer as enlisted, you do it first, and you hold that salute until you are saluted in return and they lower theirs. Only then do you lower your salute. It signals that you're saluting them, and they're replying.

Additionally, when saluting a group of officers, you generally direct your salute and greeting to the highest-ranking individual. Now as far as I know this stupid sticker salute order has no accommodation for how a 2004 Toyota Camry fits into the officers pecking order. Additionally if the car is unoccupied, it's not like that sticker is removed.

After that order came through we all began saluting stickers. Personally, I'd direct my salute to the sticker. I would also prioritize sticker salutes over officers. Let me tell you, walking through parking lots was a blast as I saluted empty cars on my way to where ever. More and more people saw me doing it, and more and more people started doing it.

Not long after the order was publicly rescinded, which hilariously had the balancing effect of never rendering a salute to anyone but a clearly known officer cementing Karen never getting her unearned salutes.

TL;DR: Civilian wife demanded to be saluted because her husband was an officer, used her clout to get a rule enlisted ordering us to salute vehicle stickers. We all followed orders and saluted vehicle stickers, prioritized them over officers, and even empty vehicles in parking lots until the rule was rescinded, ensuring the civilian wife never got her salutes.

 

WELCOME!

Hello, and thanks for joining us during this exciting time in the fediverse!

It's been less than one month since I created this community, and somehow it's grown into a thriving community with >17k subscribers (~15.1k on lemmy.world, ~1.9k on the next few largest instances combined).

When I left that other site and created this community, I did it because I liked the sub and thought it would be fun to replicate (plus I was procrastinating, and I wanted to have something better to procrastinate with in future). I didn't realise it would grow so big so fast. Which brings me to my main point today...

NEW MODS!

We have a mod team now - please welcome (I hope I'm doing this correctly) @Kaiser@lemmy.world, @Imotali@lemmy.world, and @archonet@lemmy.world ! Together, the four of us will ~~control the narrative by deleting posts/comments that don't fit our worldview~~ ~~abuse our power by banning whoever we don't like~~ hopefully do absolutely nothing cos y'all have been pretty nice so far.

(Also I was going to send out a group message to all the mods first but I realised lemmy doesn't have the ability to do group messages. So for some of the mods this may be the first time they're seeing their fellow mods. Maybe we need some sort of way to communicate? idk I'm pretty new to this lemmy thing and you can tell I'm a real professional here)

Anyway, keep doing what y'all are doing for now.

==============================================

[EVERYTHING BELOW WAS IN MY PREVIOUS PINNED POST, SO IF YOU READ THAT, FEEL FREE TO SKIP THE REST OF THE POST AND GO SPEND YOUR TIME (UN)PRODUCTIVELY ELSEWHERE]

NAVIGATING THE FEDIVERSE

If you’re new - no need to have a detailed understanding of the fediverse. Just dive right in, and you’ll learn the rest along the way.

Step 1: Join an instance. Don’t overthink this, any one is fine. You're going to hear people talking about server uptime, defederating, and a whole bunch of stuff. If you're interested, that's fine, but if not, just politely nod and smile, then blindly point to a random server and join it. Think of it as an email provider - there are slight differences, but you can send/receive emails to (almost) anyone with any provider. I recommend lemmy.world and lemm.ee

Step 2: Find communities. Click on “Communities” and change it from “Local” to “All”. Subscribe as you see fit.

Step 3 (Most Important): Post! Contribute wherever you feel like.

“WHAT CAN I POST?”

As the sidebar says, anything that involves “conforming to the letter, but not the spirit, of a request”. This is usually to the detriment of the requester, but I recognize that may be hard to judge all the time.

For now, this includes text posts, images, videos and links. All I ask is that the “malicious compliance” aspect should be apparent - if you’re making a text post, be sure to explain this part; if it’s an image/video/link, use the “Body” field to elaborate.

For now, posts/images about events that did not happen to you or anyone you know is fair game, as long as it happened. Fiction writing is a good skill, but not encouraged here.

You’ll notice that I said “for now” a lot. That’s because I wouldn’t be surprised if the rules changed over time. If we do change the rules, it will be done in consultation with you guys, and with advance notice. Which brings me to…

FEEDBACK

I (and the mod team) would love to hear your thoughts on how we can make this a better place. If there’s anything you’re unhappy with, or if you just have suggestions, please post them in this thread. If you prefer, you can also message any one of us.

OTHER COMMUNITIES

Remember how I said we wouldn't abuse our power? I'm adding a shoutout here to two other communities that are totally awesome because I created them:

Feel free to join and participate if it’s of interest to you!

 

[REPOST]

This was back in the '80s, my first job, working as a maintenance man at a local hotel. I'd been working there part-time since I was 16 and when I turned 18, I got a notice to attend jury duty. I picked a week and I let my boss know.

The owner of the hotel found out and sees me in the hallway and tells me that I need to do "whatever it takes" to get out of jury duty because he needs me at the hotel that week for a large dog show, and if I'm not at work, I'm fired.

When I get to jury duty, day 1, I get selected for a week-long trial, and the judge asks jurors if there's any reason we cannot serve on the jury. They go around... When they get to me, I'm nervous, never been in court before and too scared to lie.

Cue malicious compliance.

I tell the judge that the owner of the business I work at will fire me if I'm not back today and said I needed to do everything I can to get out of jury duty or I'm fired, other than that I'm fine serving. The judge looks p*ssed.

The judge has me approach the bench, asks for the name of the owner, location, etc. Then he hands the court officer a paper and says something to the officer. I'm told to return to the jury box. About an hour later (still selecting a jury), the officer returns with the owner, visibly shaken, in handcuffs and walked to the front of the judge's bench.

The owner is standing in front of the judge. The judge asks him questions which he apologetically tries to worm out of.

Then the judge instructs him that I will be here for jury duty, I will serve as long as I need to, and he should NOT do anything to retaliate against me -- and that the judge is filing charges and will be instructing the clerk to check with me regularly and if, for any reason, I am fired or face any disciplinary action at work - he will hold the owner in contempt, violation of a court order, and a bunch more legal stuff. He will spend time in jail thinking about how important jury duty is.

Then the judge makes him apologize to me, in court!

I made it onto the jury and I served the week. I reported back to work the following week. I expected some blowback, but I never got fired, none of my shifts were changed and I got paid for my time in jury - I didn't ask why I got paid.

The clerk did check back a few times and I was told to call the judge's clerk's direct phone number if anything happened. It was awesome, I was pretty much bullet-proof and worked until I saved enough to go back to school.

TL;DR: When I got my first notice for jury duty, my boss told me to get out of it or I'd be fired. Being the scared 18-year old that I was, when the judge asked if any of us couldn't serve, I told him what my boss had said. The judge had my boss dragged into court and threatened with jail time. I ended up serving on the jury and getting paid for the days I missed at work.

 

If you create a community, please try and populate it with content. I see a lot of new communities with 0-1 posts from the mod. That's not nearly enough to get people engaged - users are going to see that it's a ghost town and leave.

If you have enough interest to create a community, you probably know something about the subject matter, so PLEASE add some posts (5-10 would be a good start). Maybe some questions to get people talking, even popular reposts from other sites. It sucks shouting into a void, but if you don't do it, everyone else will also be shouting into a void.

Also please consider whether you need to create a community! When there are 100 million users of the site, there may be 1000 people who are interested in the same exact niche tabletop RPG as you, but there are <500,000 users here for now, so you'll be lucky to find 10. Consider creating a thread in a broader community (like boardgames) until you have enough people talking in the thread that it gets messy - then it's time to create a separate community.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

 

[REPOST]

Back in the 1980's I worked for a sporting goods company as a catalog designer. Small company, privately owned. I was the entire advertising department. I created four catalogs a year - these were responsible for most of our mail-order sales (pre-internet) to the tune of around $700K a year.

We sent the catalogs via bulk mail using a mailing service - this let us send them for a much discounted rate. To do this required the use of a bulk mail permit, and placing the permit info on the mailing area of the catalog. Technically it's called a "fiche."

Enter a new boss, call him Ron. I was #1 - the only one - in my department. For some reason the company owner hired Ron as a favor to a friend. From day one he was micromanaging, questioning everything, and screwing up my very tight schedule. This was BEFORE computers were common. EVERYTHING was by hand. Literally typing out copy and reducing it on a photocopier to fit. Developing the photo film myself, making prints, etc. The actual printer had to add screens to the photos so they'd print, burn metal plates, and so on. All time consuming and expensive. Deadlines could not be missed. So I was stuck with several 16 hour days come crunch-time.

I was complaining to the owner, but he really couldn't care less. I really wanted to stick it to Ron and the opportunity presented itself. Constant threats of "my way or you're fired" were getting to me. The latest pre-summer catalog was done (summer was our BIG season.) I had to give him my mock-up (photocopied sheets stapled together) of the final catalog for his approval - a new step added after he demanded it. He looked at it and sent it back with several pointless revisions. And a note to remove that "ugly permit box" because it was not needed. Where he worked previously stuffed their mailers in envelopes - the envelopes had the fiche, but their mailer did this last step. I simply asked him to initial the changes as this was the final approved version and was going to the printer the next day. There was no time to check it again. So he did. I knew it would be a total mess and it's something I would NEVER would have done in the past.

50,000 catalogs printed and shipped directly to the mailer. The day they arrive at the mailer the boss gets a call from the sales rep. "We can't mail your catalogs." Boss storms into my area of the building and is literally screaming. Ron is now pissed and yelling at me, joined by the boss. I swear - spittle and froth, vein bulging screaming. Minimum two week delay, wasted money, lost sales. I explain what happened, the threat to fire me, and showed the owner the changes to the final copy. Initialed by Ron. He was going to give Ron a 2nd chance until the bill came in from the printer. They had to stamp 50,000 catalogs by hand. We had to rent their permit, since that's what was on their stamp. Rental and labor was almost $8,000. Adjusted for inflation that's $20,000. Plus our early summer sales boost was off by almost $50K from previous years. Or $200K adjusted for inflation.

Ron WAS fired. I was left alone after that.