In November, I get a call from my close friend. His father-in-law wants to treat himself to a new computer for Christmas, but since none of them are very tech-savvy, [Friend] suggested I get involved. He’s also on a rather tight budget.

After giving me some details, and emphasizing that I will be compensated for this, [Friend] gets me into direct contact with [Father-In-Law].

I talk [Father-In-Law] through the build I have in mind for him, which should be more than adequate for the games he wants to play, and I make sure to explain that I can easily just grab his previous hard drive and CD burner and put them in the new computer at no extra charge. I also find out that he already bought a GPU earlier this year so that knocks a significant chunk off the cost for the whole operation.

I give him my estimate — we’re talking about 750€ here — and he agrees.

Then, I suggest that I can knock another hundred or so off that without sacrificing processing power if he’s okay with buying used parts since I was looking to upgrade my own computer anyway, and he agrees again.

I’m excited. This is just the cash injection I need to finally buy the parts I want, and my old parts go into good hands right away. I’m so excited that I almost order the new parts already just to have them a bit earlier.

Boy, am I glad I didn’t.

About a week before [Friend] and I agree to go out and get [Father-In-Law]’s PC set up, I get a text message saying that [Father-In-Law] has reconsidered and will be buying a prebuilt computer from a local electronics store. He thinks he’s getting a better deal this way.

After the date comes around, I get [Friend] to send me the model number of the PC [Father-In-Law] ended up buying, and after crunching some numbers, it turns out that I could have built this same exact PC using new parts for just under 600€, and keep in mind that this one does include a new GPU and that the price includes my fee.

[Father-In-Law] paid 1100€ for it.

Also, [Father-In-Law] now has no one to transfer his old hard drive — or the data off of it — into the new PC.

And to top it all off, the PC didn’t come with any optical drives, so he went and bought an external one… for another 100€.

So, bottom line, he paid twice as much for a lesser computer, and I’m still saving for my upgrade.

I work in retail. We have a regular customer who is usually in the store past closing.

On one occasion, I ask her why she does this.

Customer: “Oh, I always wait until after you close to finish my shopping because I get all the attention on me since you all want to go home!”

(This happened on New Year’s eve & I get that they were busy, but that’s no excuse for what happened.)

I was doing some last minute shopping on New Year’s eve & decided to grab something to-go from the burger place in the mall, I could see the line was long so I placed my order & paid through the burger chain’s own app as I was walking towards the restaurant.

When I got to within view from the counter I saw on the “immediately ready” -screen behind the counter that they had the burger I ordered immediately ready so I figured this would only take a minute or two & stayed near the counter, the cashier kept taking orders from people who came after me, so I figured she was too busy to check the online orders at this time. Then she seemed to be entering something to the POS & a minute later a guy walked to the pickup counter to pick up an order, I figured I’d be getting notification about my order being ready in a moment, after another few minutes of the cashier serving other people while my order was yet to be addressed, I walked up to the pickup counter and after a minute when the manager told the cashier to take care of me, the cashier finally came to me.

Cashier: “Hi, you’re the guy who ordered a double burger?”
Me: “Yeah. TEN MINUTES AGO.”
Cashier: “Sorry about that, can I see the code?”
Me: “You need to mark my order as ready first.”
Cashier: *deer in the headlights*
Me: *gesturing at the POS* “my order, on that machine, mark it as ready for pickup so I can get the code, the burger has been on that rack behind you for the entire ten minutes I have been here.”

Cashier does so, and a couple seconds later as I am trying to show her the code I just received, she goes to serve yet another customer who had arrived after me instead, before coming back to get the code & hand me my order.
Cashier: “Here you go, sorry again!”

I just grabbed the bag and left. Judging by the fact that she marked someone else’s order as ready minutes after I arrived & minutes before her manager forced her to serve me, she was definitely checking the pre-order queue while serving everyone else & was simply ignoring my order, a fact that was confirmed by her first words to me: “Hi, you’re the guy who ordered a double burger?” The fact that she had marked someone else’s order as ready for pickup (she was the only employee to have touched any of the three points of sales at the counter in the ten minutes I was there-) means she *knew* how to mark an order as ready & simply didn’t do it with my order until she was forced to, not sure what she was trying to achieve by faking confusion when I said she needs to mark my order as ready before I can show her the code…

I am in high school during the global health crisis. Because of the general chaos, the school has a generous policy where students can choose on a day-to-day basis whether they want to attend school in person or online; we are marked present either way.

I wake up one morning feeling a little under the weather, so I decide to stay home and attend classes online. Religion class rolls around and a new assignment is introduced, just a simple one-day thing. Materials are available online, and we’re told that we’ll present them the next day.

So, the next day, I roll into religion class with my finished project, in person this time. As I watch my other classmates present, I realize one crucial detail that I missed while working on this assignment.

It was supposed to be a group project.

After everyone else has presented, I stand up to present mine, assuming I might as well. As soon as I stand up, my teacher says I don’t have to present — having realized at some point that he never put me in a group — but I present anyway.

The presentation goes fine, my project is just as good as anyone else’s, and I get an A. Sometimes doing a whole group project by yourself actually does work out!

It’s New Year’s Day. My parents and I are at my sister and brother-in-law’s for dinner. After dinner, as has become tradition, we play a card game based around golf. You have eight cards in two rows of four, and each round you flip and/or replace a card. You want the lowest number of points, and having two of the same number in one column zero out. My parents happen to each be drinking a bottle of beer.

My mom has flipped six of her eight cards. She’s got one column left and draws a card. It matches one of the other cards in a column that is already zeroed out, so she’s disappointed. If you have two sets of one number, it gives you a negative number of points.

Me: “You know you have two cards left to flip right there.”

Mom: “Oh! I didn’t even see that.”

She proceeds to flip one card over and replace it with the one she just drew.

Sister: “Too many [drink]s over there, huh?”

Cue laughter and jokes about beer.