The apartment complex I live in is over fifty years old — and so is its plumbing. We’re in the middle of a total renovation of all the plumbing in every apartment and with that, completely new bathrooms. We get to choose from a standard offering of tiles and furniture for our new bathrooms. If the existing bathroom is less than ten years old, there is also the option — for free — to restore features outside the standard. In my case, it’s a full-length mirror framed by the same tiles as on the floor (which is a four-color checkerboard). The rest of wall is white tiles.

The project manager discusses solutions with me and makes 2D and 3D drawings of my new bathroom, including the mirror. (Recreating the floor would extend the work by a week, so I say no to that.) I have once again chosen white tiles for the wall, expecting a frame of black ones (the floor tiles) around my mirror.

The renovation for each apartment takes five weeks, during which we have no indoor plumbing, so I have found temporary accommodation elsewhere. Before I leave, I notice that the workers themselves have taped printouts of the 3D drawing to my main door to refer to while they work. 

I go home once or twice a week to pick up mail and check on progress. On the Saturday at the end of week four, I see that they have tiled the bathroom. And there is no mirror. The wall it is supposed to be on is just the big white tiles. I email the project manager and include my photos of the bathroom wall and the drawing on the door, asking if it is too late to fix this.

On Monday, a slightly panicked and very apologetic master bricklayer calls me. We discuss solutions and arrive at a compromise. He can get the mirror itself in place, but he cannot do the special tile framing around it. I’m happy I’m at least getting the mirror, so I agree. 

Master Bricklayer: “Do you have the perspective drawing for the mirror?”

Me: “…You mean the one hanging on my door?”

I could practically hear him blushing when he realized what he’d asked.

I’m sure the work week started with a lot of yelling, but I now have a mirror.

I work in a movie theater. To keep kids from getting too bored while their parents are paying for snacks, I will often talk to them for a few moments if there’s time. I’ll ask if they’re looking forward to the movie, or I’ll point out one of their snacks and tell them I really like that one, too, or I’ll pay them a minor compliment — telling them their shirt is cool or that I like their light up shoes, for example.

Me: “I like your glasses!”

The young girl I’m talking to looks away, tugging at her glasses.

Girl’s Mom: “Thank you! She just got them a few days ago.”

Seeing how the girl seems very self-conscious about them, I give her a wide smile.

Me: “They’re really cool! I wish I looked as cool as you do. In fact…”

I turn around, pull out the reading glasses that I now keep nearby for just this reason, and put them on.

Me: “There! Now I look almost as cool as you, don’t you think?”

Girl: *Grinning widely* “Yes!”

As they leave with their snacks, I overhear the mom talking to her.

Girl’s Mom: “See, she thought they were cool! Wasn’t that nice?”

The girl agreed, and they walked away. I’ve done this at least five times now, and the kids always leave with their heads held high. I hope that if they hear negative comments from someone else, they can at least remember that another person thought they looked cool.

The Norway Cup is one of the biggest sporting events in the world, with tens of thousands of players and literally thousands of football matches (that’s “soccer” for our American readers) over the course of a week. I was a referee there several years in a row during the 2000s, and there are many stories I could tell; this one is one of them.

This time, though, the story is about the time Mother Nature threw a spanner in the works. A few days into the tournament, it started raining. A lot. The tournament was held on a huge open grass field, and as the rain kept coming, water started building up on some of the pitches. Playing football in the rain isn’t a problem in itself, but when there’s standing water out there, it gets a bit difficult. You’re not allowed to pick up the ball and run with it like you do in American football, so it usually rolls around on the grass when the players dribble or pass it. That’s hard to do when there are several inches of standing water on the pitch.

I was refereeing a match for some twelve-year-olds when it started to become clear that the pitch was getting unusable. The ball wouldn’t roll on the grass, stopping in the puddles that kept growing in size and depth. Eventually, most of the pitch was covered in standing water.

We tried our best to continue, but at the half-time break, I called the coaches over.

Me: “I don’t think we can continue this, do you?”

Coach #1: “No, the goals are flooded. The ball stops before the goal line every time you take a shot!”

Coach #2: “Yeah, this isn’t football anymore; it’s water polo!”

We had a laugh about the absurd situation, and I notified them that I was officially halting the match and that I would inform the organizers. As I packed up my stuff to leave, I could see the kids playing in the puddles, jumping and sliding in the water, which at this point was literally going up to our ankles.

In the organizers’ office, though, they were less sympathetic.

Organizer: “You stopped a match?”

Me: “Yes, on pitch twenty-four. There’s water—”

Organizer: “You’re not supposed to stop matches because of rain.”

Me: “Actually, I am. When the pitch is unusable, the referee is the one who decides whether the match can continue.”

Organizer: “You’re not supposed to do that. Not playing a match creates holes in the schedule. This creates a lot of problems for us.”

Me: “I don’t know what to tell you. There’s standing water all over the pitch. It isn’t possible to play football there at the moment. The players are currently swimming in it.”

The man seemed frustrated, but he didn’t offer any solution, instead just going around in circles and mumbling that I shouldn’t have stopped the game from being played. As this kind of thing is the organizers’ task to deal with rather than mine, I left him to handle it and went back to the building where we stayed during the tournament.

Not half an hour later, messages started popping up on our phones as well as being posted on the official posters in the cafeteria. Apparently, the organizers had been flooded with cancellations mere minutes after I left their building. It turned out that my match just happened to be on the worst pitch; it was in a small depression on the field so that water would accumulate there before anywhere else, meaning I was the first referee in the tournament to cancel a match.

The next day, the national newspapers ran stories from the tournament with pictures of kids happily splashing around in the puddles. The grass field had turned into a one-foot-deep lake. The organizers did (amazingly) manage to save the tournament by moving hundreds of matches to astroturf pitches all around the city, driving referees around in cars, and sending buses to transport players.

I still wonder about that one organizer I talked to, though. I mean, either he was just oblivious to the amount of water out there, or he genuinely thought football could be played in a lake.

Related:
Please Observe Our Looks Of Disdain

When I was a kid, our whole family went to a sporting goods store. We all needed new things of different sorts: my sisters needed some winter clothing, I needed some football stuff, my mom needed some hiking boots, etc.

Dad was “the money”. He wasn’t buying anything for himself, so he just hung out near the cash register while the rest of us shopped for all the stuff that we needed. It took over an hour.

Eventually, we brought all the stuff up to the cashier. It cost quite a lot (the equivalent of over $1,000) seeing as we had a lot of stuff. At this point, my dad turned to the cashier with a smile.

Dad: “Any chance of a ‘waiting discount’, since I’ve been so good, waiting here for an hour?”

The cashier smiled back and gave him a 10% discount — a significant amount since the total was so high.

As my dad put it later: you can always ask. The worst that can happen is that they say no.

Fifteen years ago, I took a Safety At Sea course while working on a passenger ship. Our instructor was going over various codes that could be announced over the PA system in cases of emergency — not the ones aimed at the passengers, but the ones alerting the crew to assemble at their stations. One of these was the code for a ship-wide search. Usually, this meant a missing person, like a lost child, but it could be anything, including bombs. And then he told us this story, which I have never forgotten.

The instructor was doing a refresher course on safety on a large cruise ship which (obviously) was otherwise unidentified. This course featured a lot of practical exercises, including a bomb search. The crew was assembled at their stations and told they were to search for explosives, which in actuality was just a box with the word “bomb” written on it. And off they went to search every nook and cranny of their designated area.

What the crew didn’t know was that the instructor had decided to add a second, more realistic “bomb”, which he had made in his cabin. It was nothing dangerous, just some wooden rods held together with tape and some electrical wires sticking out on one side — your typical action movie bomb. It sat on his desk for several days once he’d assembled it, and he hid it in a completely different location than the other one. The intended lesson was that when searching for dangerous objects such as these, you can’t stop after finding just one.

When the first “bomb” was found and brought to him, he asked the crew to keep searching because they needed to be sure there was only one aboard. And so he waited for the second one to be found. And waited. And waited.

After the crew had all done a very thorough search of the ship, they reported that they were sure there was nothing more to be found. The instructor was confused but accepted it. He’d done the rounds during the searches, and there was no reason to believe they’d been anything but thorough. He headed back to his cabin, intending to collect his more realistic prop later.

It was sitting on his desk. It turned out that he’d hidden the prop in the section assigned to the housekeeper who vacuumed his room. She’d recognised it and promptly returned it to his room. It was certainly an unexpected outcome, but at least he knew it had been found!