A customer comes up to the register, and I go over to help.

Customer: “Can I get a plain scone?”

Me: “We only have blueberry and orange.”

Customer: “I really wanted a plain scone.”

Me: “I have blueberry scones and orange scones.”

This time, I also point out each scone as I say the flavor. The customer walks to the other side of the (small-ish) case and points at the croissants.

Customer: “That’s the one I want.”

Me: “So, the croissant?”

Customer: “What? What’s that?”

Me: “That is a croissant.”

Customer: “Yes, the plain one! It’s right there!”

I start to ring her up so I can bag up the croissant while she pays, and as she’s walking back to the register, she says to me:

Customer: “I think you were getting confused!”

Not my fault you don’t know a croissant from a scone!

I’m the same person whose rock broke in Iowa City in this story.

When I was a child, doing laundry was one of my chores. One day, my dad purchased a pair of “pre-distressed” jeans that were dyed to look like they had mud on the knees.

At some point, after we had both forgotten about this event, I washed them and brought them back to Dad. He said they were still dirty and insisted I rewash the entire load. So, I did, and once more, he insisted that the load was dirty and that I rewash it.

It took three repetitions of this before I started trying to figure out which specific item was doing it, and I found the jeans.

I returned the load without the jeans, and Dad accepted it. Then, I gave him the jeans, and he said they were dirty and that I had to rewash them.

I tried repeatedly to wash those jeans, including getting spot remover and scrubbing, but Dad would not accept them as clean. Finally, I threw them out without telling him.

Later, when shopping, I saw the same jeans with the exact same “stains” in the store and remembered Dad bragging to me about how he had bought jeans with fake stains on them to be more “hip”.

Related:
Our Condolences For The Loss Of A Really Cool Rock

A customer storms up to me at the help desk. To say she looks angry would be an understatement.

Guest: “Your check-in staff lied to me! They said if I wanted to call reception I could just dial 0, but nothing is happening!”

Me: “If there’s an issue with the phone in your room, we can get that replaced straight away. What room number are—”

Guest: “What phone in my room? I mean this! Look!”

She shows me her personal iPhone and exaggeratedly presses 0.

Guest: “See? Nothing!”

This was hands down the weirdest thing I’ve seen.

I do a lot of fieldwork at remote sites. “Remote” doesn’t really mean “inaccessible”, but it does mean it’s d*** hard to get to sometimes. I’m talking four to six miles into a wilderness, two miles from any established trail. Now, picture my coworker and me setting up a bark beetle trap in the middle of the forest in such a location. She squeaked a bit and pointed, whispering, “I think I see a bear!”

I turned my head and watched a fuzzy brown splotch moving through some thick undergrowth in the distance, kind of walking toward us, but it looked strange. It wasn’t really moving like a bear should.

A few minutes later, the shape popped out of the brush into a clearing, and I now knew why it looked weird. It was an extremely overweight man, I’m guessing in his mid-forties, buck-naked except for a bandana, eating… a KFC chicken sandwich, judging by the wrapper. He was just casually walking through the woods munching away, dangly bits and all flopping around like nothing was out of the ordinary.

I have no idea how he was even able to walk out there. I was wearing Vibram soles because of the random sharp rock pockets from the nearby lava fields and cinder cones.

We called it a day about six hours earlier than we should have and got the h*** out of there as fast as we could. My coworker refused to ever go back to that location, and I had to finish installing the trap by myself a week later.

I think my brain is trying to embarrass me. This happened a few years back. The director came round the office to hand out our payslips.

Me: “Ooh! It’s that time of the month again!”

Everyone in the office stopped to laugh at what I said.

Me: “No, that’s not what I meant. I mean it’s that period when…”

And I promptly went, “AAARGH!” when I realised that I hadn’t made things any better.

Yeah, I went quite the shade of red.