I work at the front desk of a hotel. The hotel is pretty upscale and sits on a marina. A happy couple checked in the night before their wedding, and I just knew they’d be a handful, but I still seriously underestimated them.

On the first night (wedding eve), they kept calling for maintenance because they couldn’t get the fireplace to turn on or the jets in the tub to work. (It turned out that the trick was to press “on”.) Then, the complaints of loud sex start rolling in, followed by complaints of heated arguing.

We all survived night one. The wedding day was here. They got married on a boat with mainly the groom’s family on board. The bride got so drunk that they literally ditched her a** at the marina. One of the dock hands found her, eighties dress and all, wandering the boat slips.

We sent security to help her, but they couldn’t find her. While they were searching, she stumbled into the lobby bare-footed, losing her s***, grabbing every guest who had the misfortune of walking by, and sobbing to them. She nearly ruined a guest’s Versace suit crying on his arm (unsolicited and very awkwardly). Luckily, he was a good sport.

Before security could make it back, the groom showed up. They proceed to have a public argument and make-up (with plenty of PDA) for all to see.

Security finally rescued me and got them to their room. The last of the fun was more noise complaints of loud sex and arguing. Security pretty much had to set up camp on their floor.

I’m sure they’re still happily married to this day.

When I was in elementary school, we went on a field trip to a historical pre-US fort. It was a long drive to the fort on the bus, and we were not very patient children. School started at 7:30 am and we were loaded onto the bus around 8:00 am.

When we got there around 10:00 am, it turned out that the school had forgotten to buy tickets for us, or even to let the fort know we were coming. One of our teachers stayed behind at the fort to negotiate with the staff while the school buses brought us to a McDonald’s with a Play Place.

Unfortunately, the McDonald’s manager saw a full busload of children descending upon the play place and said, “No way.” While the bus driver was trying to make the sharp turn into the parking lot, the manager knocked on the window of the bus and told the driver, in no uncertain terms, that we would not be permitted to play in the Play Place as there were more of us than their maximum safety capacity allowed.

We wound up driving around apparently aimlessly until we stopped at a park in the countryside and were let out of the bus. Only it turned out not to be a park, as a farmer arrived to tell the driver that it was private property, and we were to leave. We weren’t even given long enough to finish the packed lunches we’d broken out. We were ordered to eat them on the bus.

Now, at about 1:00 pm, out of snacks and still quite rambunctiously energetic with no outlet for our energy, we drove back to the fort to pick up the teacher who had been left behind. She had been unable to secure places for us at the fort. After that, we drove back to the school where we were dropped off only to head home.

The parents found out about what happened and tore the school administration a new one. Rather than learn their lesson, the school announced that, for an indefinite period of time, there would be no further field trips.

We never had another field trip as long as I was there, and after asking around at our reunion with some of the young parents who were once children I went to school alongside, I’ve learned that it was almost ten years after I graduated before that school started doing field trips again.

Decades ago, I worked for a popular pizza delivery chain. This was before their ordering system was computerized, so when someone called to place an order, we had to write the information manually on the form, which was composed of multiple carbonless copies; the bottom copy was used to track our stats. Friday and Saturday nights were our busiest times; with multiple phone lines, we’d get fifty to sixty calls an hour.

I clocked in early on a Saturday afternoon and answered the phone. The caller said he was an FBI agent, that he and his partner had been on a surveillance assignment the night before, that a pizza had been delivered to them (even though they hadn’t ordered pizza), and that he wanted me to remove that address from our records so nobody would know where they were.

1. We’re talking about one line, on a paper copy, buried somewhere among (easily) another fifty-plus sheets, each containing twenty lines.
2. Those sheets were locked in the file cabinet in the manager’s office until the franchise owner picked them up.
3. He wouldn’t tell me the address (for security reasons, of course), only the approximate time the order had been placed.
4. This was in a popular summer resort area, so house/apartment occupants changed about as often as hotel room occupants. I’m not going to permanently put a residence on our “Do Not Deliver” list just because the US Government is the current occupant.

I told the manager about it, and he said not to worry; it would be nearly impossible and with astronomical odds for anyone to decide, “Hey, let’s break into the pizza delivery storefront, break into the manager’s office, bust open all the drawers on their file cabinet, and go through all the order sheets to find the FBI agents.” Especially when it was obvious that somebody already had their location.

I thought it was like a comedic scene in a movie, actually: FBI sets up a stake-out, and the bad guys not only know they’re being watched but by whom and from where, so they order a pizza for them… but I’m supposed to destroy the record of the address so the bad guys can’t find the agents.

I’m at a church Christmas party, and we’re doing a white elephant gift exchange. A woman is opening a box full of items, and one is a whistle. [Woman] is known for being a bit out there.

Woman: “A whistle! I can use this for [Husband]! When I blow it, he comes!”

We all die laughing.

Woman: *Confused* “Why is everyone laughing?”

Husband: “I’ll explain it to you later…”

I am a stagehand for a small theater. We have a chamber music performance today — basically a small group of musicians playing Christmas carols while the emcee invites the audience to sing along. Most of the patrons are parents with gaggles of young children.

Normally, our customers are pretty easy to manage, but tensions are running high today as there are numerous ticketing issues.

It turns out that many people bought their tickets from an unverified third party which takes their money and then books the seats on our website. If the seats they paid for are unavailable, the site books them in different seats or just takes their money and doesn’t book any tickets.

Another issue is that there are two shows: one at 11:00 am and one at 1:00 pm. Several people who bought tickets for the 11:00 am show either mix up their times or decide to come to the 1:00 pm show instead without telling us, and because it is within two hours of the show time, our ticket scanners do not detect that they are at the wrong performance.

This leads to a ton of confusion on the part of our ushers and customers.

Typically, people are very patient in these cases — this is not the first time the third-party sites have scammed our patrons, though we’ve never had this many instances in one show — but for some reason, everyone who needs to be reseated has an attitude.

One of the customers calls my manager a c***, uncaring for the hundreds of children around him. We end up having to open the balcony to reseat people and tell them it’s our “premium seating,” but some people still aren’t satisfied.

We end up having to delay the forty-five-minute show by nearly fifteen minutes because the house manager won’t let us start until she’s accommodated these customers, and since the schedule is so tight, the show can’t go longer than forty-five minutes, so they need to cut the performance short.

Moral of the story: buy your tickets through the appropriate websites, and don’t throw a hissy fit when you show up to the wrong performance.

Related:
I’ve Got A Ticket To Deride, Part 2
I’ve Got A Ticket To Deride