I am picking up a woman to go on a date. She gets in the car, and before even saying hello or anything, she asks me:

Date: “Do you recycle?”

Me: “Uh, yeah. I recycle.”

Date: “We’re not gonna get along.”

And she just left. I have no idea what happened.

This happened when I was still a supervisor and was relayed to me by one of my colleagues.

A flight for one of the smaller island airports was cancelled due to high winds at that airport. This airport had the particular feature of being smack between the ocean and a mountain, so the wind heading was even more important there, and that day, the tower there even ordered a shutdown of all takeoff and landing operations.

A group from the mainland was very upset over this cancelation and began raising their voices at the two agents doing the cancellation in the boarding longue. The station manager, who was just going to fetch coffee at the lounge cafe, heard the yelling and introduced himself, asking what the problem was.

Angry Passenger: “We demand to fly there today!“

Station Manager: “Ma’am, that airport is closed due to high winds.”

Angry Passenger: “Then I demand that you charter an Air Force plane to take us there. NOW!”

Station Manager: “What are you, insane? Air Traffic Control are the ones who shut down the airport, and they have final authority. If they say no planes are to approach an airport, no one goes near it, not even the Air Force. So, you can either take the hotel and fly tomorrow, or get a refund. But if you raise your voice again, you’ll get a refund and a ban. Understood?”

The group meekly asked for the hotel.

I have just finished serving a large group at my restaurant, and I find a big pile of money in the middle of the table! At first, I automatically assume it’s my tip; the way it’s been placed and bundled indicates it as so. However, when people do a tip this size, usually, they give it to you directly, so I do the diligent thing and turn it in after counting it. But also, it is near Christmas, and people are usually a little more generous over the holidays.

It should be noted that I work under two managers, one of whom is cool and I trust. The other is the opposite. I get the manager I trust to witness for me. The manager I don’t trust sees this happening and butts in straight away.

Bad Manager: “There’s no way can you keep all that.”

Good Manager: “Why?”

Bad Manager: “That’s too much. It has to be a mistake.”

Good Manager: “And [My Name] has handed it in, in good faith, knowing our process for such an event, which is…?”

[Good Manager] leaves the sentence hanging, giving a chance for [Bad Manager] to finish it for him. He just gives a blank look.

Good Manager: *Sighing* “…which is that we keep the money in the safe for seven days, and if no one comes to claim it, it belongs to the waitstaff assigned to the table it was left for.”

Bad Manager: “Hmph! There’s no way they left that much on purpose. How much is in there anyway?”

[Good Manager] double-checks the amount, even as [Bad Manager] tries to grab at it.

Good Manager: *To me* “I’ll make sure [Owner] is also aware of where this money came from, okay?”

I look at [Bad Manager], who is glaring at me.

Me: “Thanks, but can I just do one more thing?”

Under the watchful eyes of both managers, I seal the money in an envelope in front of the cameras. I make sure it’s signed and dated, and only then is it locked in the safe.

The next day, this shady-looking guy whom I’ve never seen before comes into the restaurant.

Shady Guy: “Yeah… hi… I, uh… left some money here yesterday. Did you find it?”

My heart drops.

Me: “How much was it?”

The shady guy states the exact amount that was left behind. However, I am immediately suspicious, as I don’t remember seeing this guy at the table yesterday at all.

Me: “Oh, was it the booth table at the back, next to the model horse?”

Shady Guy: “Yeah… that’s the one.”

Me: “Interesting, as we don’t have a model horse — or booths.”

Shady Guy: “Look, just give me my money! Who cares what table it was at?”

I go fetch my manager (the cool one, obviously), who comes out and talks to the guy.

Good Manager: “I’m going to need to see further proof, like a card statement showing you were actually here yesterday. If not, we’ll have to check the CCTV to see if you were at the table.”

Shady Guy: “I spoke to [Bad Manager] on the phone! He said I could just come and collect it!”

Good Manager: “Oh, did he, now? Let me look into that.”

I try to go back about my business, but I won’t lie and say I’m not very distracted by how it is all going to turn out.

About half an hour later, I see the owner storming in. (He doesn’t usually come down to the restaurant on the weekends. Then, a shouting match can be briefly heard in the office. [Bad Manager] then storms out, and the shady guy leaves after him. [Good Manager] comes up to me.

Good Manager: “Just as I thought. [Bad Manager] told that guy to come in and claim the money, and then they were going to split it. He told him the amount that was left, but he didn’t realise I kept twenty back from the pile myself, so he didn’t have the correct amount.”

Me: “So, if he sent in somebody claiming they lost the money…”

Good Manager: “…they would have had the incorrect amount, too. I did that because I thought [Bad Manager] might try to be smart about it, but he was even more stupid than I thought.”

Me: “What do you mean?”

Good Manager: “That guy he sent in? That’s his cousin. The same cousin you can see on that giant photo of him on his shooting trip a few years back. If you’re gonna send someone in to pretend to be a stranger, don’t pick the one member of the family the staff here are gonna recognize!”

Me: “Oh, wow!”

Six days later, after [Bad Manager] had been fired, the owner came up to me with the still-sealed envelope. The tip was mine! He also offered me the managerial job that [Bad Manager] had just been fired from! Two Christmas miracles at once!

I’m the author of this story. This was not the first time I scared or weirded out one of my housemates in relation to my studies.

I studied Archaeology for two years before switching to English. The Archaeology department at this university occupied an old building in the centre of the city. This building housed a single classroom, several labs, a library, and plenty of offices and storage rooms for Archaeological finds. It also housed the university’s archaeozoological reference collection, the place involved in this story.

An archaeozoological reference collection is basically a collection of animal bones. Archaeozoology (sometimes also called Zooarchaeology) is the study of animal remains found during archaeological work. Basically, archaeologists find plenty of animal bones, teeth, etc., and objects made out of or with them, and archaeozoologists find out whatever these objects can teach us (like what kind of livestock people held in the past, for instance).

A large part of this is identifying which animal a particular bone belonged to, and to make that a lot easier, archaeologists use a reference collection. This reference collection contains clean, whole bones from as many animals of varying ages as the curators of the collections can get their hands on (usually simply by buying carcasses from butchers or farmers). It’s all neatly organized for easy access — in our case, in labeled drawers and cupboards, though some of the cooler-looking animal skulls were on display, and some of the larger sets of spinal columns and ribcages were mounted on the wall. So, when an archaeologist is trying to identify a bone, they can take it to the reference collection and just compare it to various bones until they (hopefully) find a match.

In our building, this reference collection was housed in part of the attic and was referred to by students and faculty as “The Bone Attic”, being an attic full of bones. No, I guess it isn’t the most imaginative nickname, but it’s less of a mouthful than “archaeozoological reference collection”.

I took Archaeozoology 101 during my second year, and the course consisted of two weekly classes: a seminar in a classroom and a lab class held in The Bone Attic.

One day, I went to the lab class as usual, bought groceries afterward, and then went home. Some hours after coming home, I noticed that I had somehow lost one of the earrings I was wearing, though when and where was a mystery. Of course, I started looking for it around the house first, but after turning my room and the communal spaces upside down and coming up empty, I started fearing I’d lost it somewhere else. It wasn’t a particularly valuable piece of jewelry, but I was very fond of it, so I was put out.

I was standing in the kitchen, trying to think of a place in the house I hadn’t searched yet, when my housemate, who had gone out shortly before I started searching, came home.

Housemate: “Hey, [My Name].”

Me: “Hiya, [Housemate]. Say, you haven’t by any chance found an earring lying around somewhere around here? The dangly kind, with an owl?”

Housemate: “No, sorry.”

Me: *Pretty caught up in my thoughts* “Too bad. I guess I lost it in The Bone Attic.”

Housemate: “The what?”

Me: *Still not fully paying attention* “Oh, it’s where we keep all the bones.”

Then, I realized just how that sounded. [Housemate] was side-eyeing me hard, like he was trying to decide if he should ask.

Me: *Quickly* “I mentioned that I study Archaeology, right?”

Housemate: “Yeeeeess?”

Me: “Then please allow me to explain to you what an archaeozoological reference collection is.”

[Housemate] and I laughed about it after I’d given him the explanation, though he did say it still sounded a little creepy. But, as he put it, this was why I studied Archaeology and he studied Economics: different interests.

I did find my missing earring the next day, though not in The Bone Attic. It turned out that I somehow lost it at the supermarket, where it was found by an employee sweeping the store after closing and put in the Lost-and-Found bin.

I didn’t bring up The Bone Attic in conversation again, though, unless I was either prompted or speaking with another scientist.

Related:
We Looked It Up. Brayn Wende Fuzzy.

A customer was complaining to a manager that I refused to accept her coupon. The coupon was from a completely different store that didn’t even have a branch in our region. She further claimed that I supposedly swore at her and told her to “get the f*** out”.

Manager: “Okay, first of all, I can hear what’s going on from my office over there, and I definitely would have heard someone using foul language. That’s aside from the fact that I can very easily go review our surveillance footage. Which employee are you referring to, by the way?”

Customer: “He looked like [rough description of me], and he talks with this fake tough-guy accent, trying to sound like he’s from New York City.”

Manager: “That’s because he is from New York City, stupid!”