Ridiculous work complaints - tell me yours!

[YourFinestPantaloons]

I'm a teacher and Head told me this morning that a parent has complained because she saw me last Saturday night in the local cocktail bar having shots.

Apparently it's despicable that an educator of her child would behave in such a way and lead such a terrible example to pupils - as it turns out, her underage DD was with her (must have been at 11pm IIRC) in the adults-only pub and was 'appalled' at Miss Pantaloons' behaviour

Thankfully my Head is normal and we just laughed our heads off about it. these complaints happen very frequently. A colleague once got a complaint because she was seen with penis paraphernalia in town on her hen do. I think some people think teachers are just robots that turn off at 4pm and have to stay in the classroom over the weekend.

What's the most amusing complaint you've ever got at work?

I had someone (a customer) complain to my manager recently that I was too far down the screen in teams/zooms calls. I am short. The chair is on maximum height and I don't want to be over the screen halfway mark or people can see down my cleavage.

@justbecauseofit "I apologised for my face "

Sorry but 😂😂😂 amazing.

I worked in a supermarket while I did my a levels, and went back to do extra shifts in the uni Christmas holidays and every year without fail we’d be told that we had ruined christmas by at least one person who turned up 10 mins before closing on Christmas Eve, expecting to find a turkey, mince pies, etc. It’s like people were surprised by Christmas being sprung on them unexpectedly every year.

It was fresh sprouts in Asda when I heard it, this woman was hysterical 5 minutes before closing, Don't you know it's Christmas? You could see the other customers dying to break into song.

@nosuchluck25

Teaching is full of ridiculous complaints. Mine have stemmed from observations where I have sounded too Northern and sat down for too long! This is why the profession is hemorrhaging experienced teachers.

I was teaching a lesson about geometrical constructions using compasses, I was criticised because I asked them the do it more than once, a waste of time. The idea that it was a skill that needed practice to improve accuracy was lost on the critic, a PE teacher on the SLT.

@FoxgloveSummers

I had a complaint made against me by someone on my own team, because I dared to have lunch with another member of the team. Apparently because it was just the two of us popping out to have our sandwiches in the park, and we hadn't invited everyone else, it was bullying. Spoiler: it wasn't.

In catering I also had the complaint that someone's chips were cold. Well yes that does tend to happen if you ignore them for 30 minutes after they're served. Presumably she thought they were in a magical thermal basket.

I had your first one too!

I'm still friends with her a decade later and our DDs are best friends. I never think about nor see anyone else from that awful place. We invited people but they didn't want to come. Couldn't win! So I left!

So many!

I used to work on a Unilever customer care line.

Here are a few.

You washing powder has created stains on my dressing gown. He sent it in, they were stains where he'd been scratching his arse through the dressing gown. They were skid stains

There are 79 teabags in my box of approx 80 or whatever. It's an approx it's done on weight.

There is a foreign object in my chicken tonight sauce. It was a chicken bone, obv from the chicken that was added. It was a wish bone.

My pot noodle is leaking. Yes it is, we can see the four prong marks from the fork you obv used to mix it up.

I can't believe it's not butter. How can you say that I can believe it's not butter. Fucking boss. So can I.

Fish fingerers. There is one extra in the pack captain Birdseye has caused murder here over the extra finger.

All day, everyday. Best job I ever had. Spent all day listening to this shit.

@FoxgloveSummers I'm going through this at the moment - went for lunch with colleagues for the first time in 2 years and people have been grumbling that we didn't invite all the female teachers aged 25-50 so it's bullying nah it's because some of you are pricks

@TheNestedIf

That the test data I had built a function to randomise wasn't consistent every time the test was run.

My head teacher once told me that everyone (my gcse pupils) should be above average. ( she didn’t mean above national average)

Her grasp of statistics meant for interesting chats every September with the annual gcse results post mortem.

@OhYeahyeahyeah

At my workplace, Customers often complain their fish dish is 'too fishy'

I’ve done this! The fish tasted and smelt so strong..the owner of the cafe agreed it was probably out of date and threw the plate away. Maybe that’s what they mean.,,

Worked as a waitress. Customer didn’t like the green gravy on the pasta
It was pesto, I explained it’s meant to be green
This in fact was the height of impudence and the chef was summoned . Chef was somewhat more animated and swearie in his explanation

Not me but I witnessed a few weeks back , we was driving out of a multi storey car park in a busy seaside town , traffic was queuing onto the road and a backlog due to some temporary traffic lights further down on the road so it was taking a bit to get out of car park . As we was waiting at the lights , this one guy got out of his car behind us and shouted at some poor guy who was sat having a break outside he was just a maintenance guy or something from multi storey . This guy was demanding maintenance guy to ‘sort ‘ the traffic lights . Maintenance guy looked very puzzled and explained traffic lights were not his responsibility. The guy was fuming and stormed back to his car in a rage , did give me a chuckle while I was waiting .

@NatMoz

I used to work in complaints and there was an issue so I offered £150 compensation. Fair enough you'd think as it wasn't a huge error.

No the complainer wanted £250,000 in compensation. He took it to the Financial Ombudsman Service and after it went to the highest level, it was agreed that my original compensation offer was fair and reasonable

Similar one - customer complained she'd been sold the wrong sort of mortgage (interest only not repayment). Mortgage company said fine, you can have the one you think you should have been sold but it will cost you much more, or you're free to pay the money back and get one elsewhere. Customer was outraged and complained both that she should be allowed to keep the money but that she should also be entitled to around four times as much in compensation. She took it all the way to court and lost spectacularly.

@Badlytornfrube

I had a mum complain that her daughter’s knickers were filthy and I should teach her to change them more frequently.

The girl was 12 and I was her history teacher.

WTAF?

Her grasp of statistics meant for interesting chats every September with the annual gcse results post mortem.

Reminds me of a very long half hour trying to explain to my fellow governors the difference between 'percentage increase' and 'increase in percentages' during the September post mortem!

Reception teacher complained my 4 year old took too long to get changed for PE and back again. Could I please spend half term getting her to practice buttons and putting on her tie.

When I gently suggested that if getting changed was a trial for her as well as the children, mightn't it be sensible if the button up collar and tie were replaced with an easy peasy polo shirt, I got a very unpleasant cat's bum face and she turned her back on me.

So, I wrote a very polite letter to the Head about age appropriate clothes and role models for the children. The reception children had polo shirts and a new head of early years a year later.

@BecauseMyRingBurnsSheila no way! I thought only my former colleague was that stupid. I agree though, still really good friends with lunch buddy, left not long after and would avoid the others on sight!

@Larryyourwaiter

I thought of another payroll one. Another leaver who rang on the 25th January because she hadn’t received her ‘full pay’. Her last ‘working day’ was Jan 5th and she started new job on Jan 6th. She thought because she had ‘worked’ in January she would get a full months pay. She had complained to her new workplace too for taking 5 days off. It took a lot of explaining and she was upset as she had spent at Christmas expecting 2 full pay-packets. She was a senior employee.

I had some one who was dismissed in January, contact me as he had only been paid a couple of hours holiday in his final pay. He kept telling me he should have been been paid for 250 hours as he is full time. Yes, but you only accrued x amount of hours by your leave date. He didn’t understand that he would need to work a full year to accrue his full entitlement. We went round and round in circles for ages

Yes, in my (worst job ever) as a complaints manager, people were utterly convinced that the Financial Ombudsman Service would give them thousands of pounds of compensation. One extra special knob told me that because his hire car had been delivered 3 days late, he had lost a huge sum of money for his business and had been unable to pay his VAT bill. He lived 4 miles from his office and wasn't insured to drive on business. Offered 100 quid or so. He was outraged and toddled off to the FOS, who a year or so later agreed that 100 was fair.....
Also those that thought as it would cost 600 quid to us as a business if they complained to FOS, I should just give them the 600 quid now.

I once had the answer book to our Maths text book nicked by one of the local scallies, I knew he'd taken it because a) he started doing homework for the first time and b) his homework included answers like '12.5cm, accept +/- 0.3cm'.

Reminds me of when we had a physics text book with answers at the back. We used to go through all sorts of manipulations to get an answer that matched. One day I'd left my homework so late that I just rushed through applying what I hoped was the correct method and then just left my answers even though they were apparently wrong according to the textbook - I thought I'd get into less trouble for getting them wrong than for not doing it at all.

Turned out something had gone wrong with the printing of the answers for that exercise and I got totally undeserved credit for being the only one in the class who got them all right. My classmates were thoroughly pissed off with me, and I couldn't help feeling that they had a right to be.

I work in a pharmacy and we refused to do an emergency supply. The customer threatened to sue me if he died 🙄😂

I used to work in a company dealing with Government Grants for businesses. Potential claimant phones in, I go through his information, do a double check with Companies House - business not eligible. He then asks me to commit a fraud ( basically lie on his application) . I remind him 3 times that all calls are recorded, he is not eligible & fraud is illegal. After swearing profusely at me he emails the CEO of my company and the relevant Government department to complain that I WOULDNT HELP HIM COMMIT FRAUD.

Oh and an ofsted one.
I was teaching adults in an FE college. They were all 18 plus, doing apprenticeships. I was a training manager, working in FE for the first time. It was a very diverse place. Local population prob 50% white Britisjh, 30% Asian, 10% Black, 10% East European. I taught them one afternoon a week for 3 hrs.
They had all gone to various local schools and saw it as a great time to catch up socially. Being adults, I let them sit where they liked but as a trainer I would mix up the working groups as we went through the session.
Apparently I should have made sure that people from the same ethnic background did not sit together cos this hindered integration.
Who knew?

Thanks, @amatsip!

@Ratonastick it wasn't a confectionery company was it?!

@wlv12

Community midwife.

I was on sick leave as my mum had died of covid. A patient wanted to know my name and complained to the NMC that I’d ruined her pregnancy by taking time off.

I only missed one appointment - her first one. The complaint went in before I even met her.

We had someone complaining because we couldn't tell them exactly when a colleague who had just gone off with covid would be back at work.