The first friend used to work in retail sales, and had a fairly standard complaint for someone in that industry, namely having to deal with eejits on a regular basis. He invented a trick that I’ve occasionally thought of applying to certain colleagues, but I’ve never quite managed to summon up the courage. \nIf an especially obnoxious customer was giving my friend an especially hard time, he’d say “my manager lets me tell one customer per month to fuck off. But I’m not going to waste that on you<\/i>“. <\/p>\n
If anyone complained, he could legitimately say that in fact he very specifically did NOT tell that customer to fuck off.<\/p>\n
This person no longer works in retail sales, and is much happier as a result.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
The second friend comes from a very religious Irish Catholic family, but never voluntarily goes to mass or confession. However, these are not optional activities on her trips back to Ireland to visit her folks. On the first trip home after leaving the country, she told the priest in the confession box at the local church the truth – i.e. that it had been 11 months since her last confession. She got a very stern lecture and a whole heap of penances (she retains enough of her family’s beliefs that not doing the penances given to her by her priest would be unthinkable; she had to do them all, to the letter).\nOn her second visit home, she told the priest that it had been two weeks since her last confession. <\/p>\n
And then she listed her sins as “lying”.<\/p>\n
A half-hearted slap on the wrist and she was out of there with a fraction of the penances of the first time.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Genius!<\/p>\n
(Hi Mermaid! I told you I could get a blog post out of the first anecdote on this list!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m still too embroiled in deadline stresses to come up with anything original myself, so here are some little tricks and loopholes devised by two of my more ingenious friends. Use at your own peril, especially the first one… The … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-career","category-silliness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}