(I am bilingual, a fact that my coworker seems to be jealous of. One day the phone rings and she answers it.)

Coworker: “Hello? Oh wait.” *hands phone to me* “Here. A Spanish customer.”

(I take the phone. There is a lot of background noise on the customer’s end and her cellphone is losing signal, so her words are very garbled up and choppy. I tell her to call back later, and hang up.)

Coworker: “What was that?”

Me: “Oh, her cell phone had a bad signal so her words came out all choppy. I couldn’t understand her at all!”

Coworker: “Yeah, right. I bet you don’t know Spanish! You don’t even have any accent!”

Me: “That’s because I moved here when I was a baby. But my family spoke it at home.”

(She shoots me a suspicious look and we continue on with work. The next day, a woman approaches and starts asking questions in Spanish. I didn’t get much sleep the previous night, and I’m dead tired. Plus, it’s near the end of my shift, so my brain’s fried. I try to help her as much as possible. She was inquiring about a job. Then she leaves.)

Coworker: *from behind me* “What was THAT?!”

Me: “What?”

Coworker: “You were so awkward with that Spanish-speaking woman. I knew it. You’ve lied about being bilingual! I’m telling the supervisor.”

Me: *irritated* “Look! I’ve been on my feet for the last eight hours. I can barely speak English!”

(She tells the supervisor that I’m lying. The supervisor tells her to shut up and quit causing trouble! The Spanish-speaking woman gets hired and we speak Spanish all the time, much to my coworker’s irritation!)

(It’s my first night shift at my new job. Two customers come in at around 9 pm.)

Me: “Hi. Welcome to [Restaurant]. How can I help you?”

Customer #1: “Can I have a chicken sandwich?”

Customer #2: “Ugh. Don’t do that! All the food here is crap! It’s CRAP! You’ll get FAT!”

Me: *awkwardly* “So… would you like—”

Customer #2: “It isn’t real food here, anyway. It’s all processed and fake!”

Customer #1: “Are you getting something or not?”

Customer #2: “Yeah.” *to me* “Gimme two double cheeseburgers and a medium fry.”

(After a long day of work, I go shopping for some clothes for my fiancé. I find a great bargain on some nice t-shirts. I am 24.)

Me: “These are lovely. My fiancé still uses some t-shirts from 8th grade. I thought it was well past time to upgrade.”

Cashier: “Oh wow. Yeah. Good call! Though perhaps 8th grade wasn’t that long ago?”

Me: “If he recently attended junior high, we would have a more serious problem than overused t-shirts!”

(My sister has just fallen out of her bed and is crying. My mom wakes and shakes my dad.)

Mom: “Honey, get up. Your daughter is injured.”

Dad: *sleepily* “Why is she my daughter at times like this?! You go!”

Mom: “I did the birthing. You do the check-ups. Now, go! She may be badly hurt.”

Dad: *grumpily* “Fine!”

(Dad gets up and trudges to the door, still asleep. But he goes in the walk in closet, and gets stuck there. Meanwhile, my sister is still crying.)

Dad: *pawing through clothes* “Honey! Help! I can’t get out! Is this the hallway? Where am I?”

Mom: “You’re in the closet! Oh, God!”

(Mom finally gets up and takes care of my sister. After, she finds my dad asleep on the closet floor. The next morning he has no memory of what happened!)

(We have a tendency to go through ice cream bars fairly quickly in my household, with my father being the main offender. We have in the freezer a type of ice cream bar called a ‘Choco Taco,’ which my sister picked out. There’s only one left. We’d been talking about the ice cream in the freezer already. Both she and I know full well what he’s referring to.)

Dad: “Can I eat your taco?”

(We’re both used to him making double-entendres and then getting on our case for having our minds in the gutter when we point out how dirty he’s being. So, we react as expected.)

Both: “Dad, that’s disgusting!”

Dad: “What?”

Me: “That’s not really something you should be saying to your daughter.”

Dad: “What?”

Me: “Wait, you seriously don’t know what ‘taco’ is slang for?”

Dad: “No. I really wasn’t trying to be disgusting this time. What is it?”

(My sister explains it to him. He’s appropriately mortified. We relate this incident to our mother when she got home from work. We’re amazed to find that she didn’t know what ‘taco’ was slang for, either. We were left looking at each other, wondering if some sort of generation gap was involved.)