Yesterday, I had a rare interaction at a grocery store.

I had gone to get several things and went through the register with very little wait. I got out to my car and realized I had forgotten a couple of small things. I went back inside and went to the aisle where they were located, but didn’t see exactly what I was looking for. 

I spent about five minutes deciding on what to get instead and headed to the registers. There were several open, and none of them seemed to have more than one customer, but every customer had a lot of items. I hate self-checkout, so I finally picked one where the customer seemed to have the fewest items.

I got in line and noticed they were a young family: Dad, Mom, toddler, and baby in a sling across Dad’s chest. They were still unloading their cart when Dad looked at me and saw that I didn’t seem to have much.

Dad: “Do you have many items?”

I showed him what I had, and he said:

Dad: “You know you can use the self-checkout rather than waiting.”

I kind of resented that he seemed to think I didn’t know that.

Me: “I hate self-checkout.”

He then looked at the Mom, then back at me, and picked up my two items and handed them to the cashier, who rang them up and put them in a bag.

Dad: “So you don’t have to wait for us, today your things are on me.”

I tried to thank him, but he was too busy with his family to pay attention, so I left. My total was less than $6, I think, but I was very grateful to this young family. I will look for an opportunity to pass it on in the near future. Maybe I will even do it more than once.

I work at a video game store. A man is standing at the counter holding a copy of Super Mario Odyssey for the Nintendo Switch, around when it first came out.

Customer: “Will this work on my son’s Xbox?”

Me: “No, sir. Mario is a Nintendo character, so his games only work on Nintendo consoles like the Switch.”

Customer: “But my son asked for this game.”

Me: “Then you’d need to make sure he has a Switch to play it on.”

Customer: “Well, I’m buying it anyway. My son is a tech genius. He told me he knows how to ’emulate’ things. He’ll just find a way to make the Xbox recognize the game.”

Me: “Sir, if your son can’t ’emulate’ a Nintendo Switch cartridge on his Xbox, you can’t bring it back for a refund once opened.”

Customer: “You won’t be seeing me again.”

The customer pays and leaves. He’s back that afternoon.

Customer: “He… uh… wanted Spiderman for the Xbox.”

To his credit, the customer doesn’t complain or demand a refund. He just buys the correct game and leaves, tail tucked.

Coworker: “How did he mix up Mario for Spiderman?”

Me: “Uh… they’re both red?”

I posted this story. And because good things always come in threes, and bad things always come in twos, it’s time for the story of the second time my family went to Las Vegas.

This time, at least, I was over twenty-one, but the group was larger: I brought my girlfriend, my brother brought his girlfriend, my other brother brought his wife, and my sister brought her boyfriend. So, in addition to the six people in the family already, we had four more people for a total of ten. And the one thing that we could all agree on was “how cool would it be to see the Grand Canyon?” So we decided to organize a trip to the Grand Canyon for all of us, but due to conflicting schedules, my oldest brother and his wife could not make it.

They were the lucky ones.

To keep costs down, we took redeye flights into Vegas. By the time we checked into our hotel and got to our rooms, it was 2 AM. In our infinite wisdom, we determined that we would go to the Grand Canyon on the first day of the trip. Get it out of the way, you know?

The bus picked us up at 5 AM to take us to the gathering point. That’s three hours of sleep.

We milled around the bus terminal for about an hour (thankfully, there was free coffee and donuts), mostly still feeling like we needed another ten hours of sleep. But the bus eventually picked us up and we climbed on board. The trip would take us over the Hoover Dam in about an hour, and we would stop there to do the tourist thing for about an hour before continuing on. Total travel time to the Grand Canyon: about five hours. Excellent, an opportunity to sleep.

Quoth the bus driver: “No one sleeps on my bus. If you sleep on my bus, I sleep on my bus, and that’s bad for all of us.”

And if you’re wondering, yes, he DID call people out when he saw them nodding off.

The Hoover Dam was pretty spectacular, but we were all feeling the exhaustion already. Surely it would be worth it: the Grand Canyon is one of the natural wonders of the world!

By the time we got there, we were all exhausted beyond reason, to the point that I got the Call of the Void looking at the Grand Canyon. It was truly amazing, breathtaking, and scary. It was now about 3 PM. I think. It’s a little fuzzy on the memory.

We were at the Grand Canyon for about ninety minutes (I think), and then we clambered back on the bus, where the no-sleeping rule from the bus driver was less strictly enforced, but still enforced if he saw too many people asleep. We figured, no problem, we’d be back to our hotel by about 8 or 9 PM, and we could sleep.

As the sun fell below the mesas of Arizona and the world grew dark, we realized that was optimistic.

I still don’t know the route we took to the Grand Canyon. I don’t know how we got there, how we got back, what took so long, or how time seemed to stretch and contract at the same time to make everything a nightmarishly torturous experience.

What I do know is that we got back to Vegas around 11 PM.

By this point, my brother and his girlfriend were sitting far away from each other, evidently to avoid getting upset at each other. My sister was curled into a tiny ball – legs up against her chest, arms around her legs, head down – and her boyfriend was across the aisle from her. I found out later that she was so tired and angry that she was trying really, really hard not to lash out physically (she is not a violent person, but she was pushed well beyond her limit). My parents? Passed out. I was still struggling along, and my girlfriend was asleep on my shoulder. Surely, surely, we were almost there.

The bus driver dropped everyone off in order, from one side of the Vegas Strip to the other. And it was our (un)lucky day: we were the last to be dropped off.

We finally managed to get off the bus and into the hotel at midnight. No one said anything. We just went to our rooms and passed out.

We STILL tell this story twenty years later, not because it’s a fun memory, but because it’s an example of how something so wondrous can be surrounded by absolute Hell. And it’s kind of funny.

And the kicker? The reason that my sister was ready to absolutely destroy someone? Around 9 PM, another passenger on the bus asked the driver if there was an advantage to going to the part of the Grand Canyon we had to, the long trip.

“If you’ve never been there before,” he said, “not really. The shorter trip or the longer one will get you an amazing view either way. I recommend the shorter trip to new people. It’s only about five or six hours.”

Back in 1989, I worked as a bagger in a grocery store. We always had this friendly regular who loved getting us to ask him trivia questions every week.

Cashier: “What’s the most populated city in the world?”

Me: “Oh, that’s a good one. I haven’t a clue.”

Regular: “Phoenix!”

Phoenix was pretty small back then, so the cashier and I started giving each other quizzical looks.

Regular: *Catching on.* “Oh, did you mean out of the whole world? I thought you said the United States. In the world, it would be New York City.”

There was a recent incident at the office where I work, where a male employee slapped the butt of a female employee as she was walking past his desk. The situation escalated further when he tried to backhand her after she got in his face over the slap. The police did end up getting involved, but he didn’t end up actually arrested, apparently, as he was back in the office later that week, with an HR meeting at the end of the week to ‘discuss his continued employment’.

I have no idea why this wasn’t a formality or just a form letter letting him know he was terminated, but apparently, him staying on as an employee was actually a serious consideration.

Regardless, what I do know is that his defense was, apparently, that she had been ‘walking sexily’, and that she was therefore ‘basically begging’ him to slap her butt.

What p***es me off most is that this wasn’t just thrown out as sexist garbage, but, instead, one of the HR people involved in the meeting apparently seriously suggested that they call in his victim to ‘demonstrate’ how she was walking, so that they could ‘conclusively rule out’ him being incited to do what he did.

Thankfully, my manager (who was also [Slapping Employee]’s manager) and the other HR rep in the meeting were able to basically browbeat him over how dumb of an idea that was (probably notable that the HR rep making that suggestion was an old white guy, while the other rep was younger, female, and Hispanic).

Regardless, [Slapping Employee] did end up being let go, as he was belligerent and unapologetic about what he’d done.

As for how I know what happened in the meeting? My manager decided to break confidentiality specifically to let all of his female reports, including me, know exactly what [Old White HR Rep] had suggested, as apparently that suggestion wasn’t enough to bring his employment under question, and my manager was going to be retiring shortly, so he wanted all of us to be warned if [Old White HR Rep] ended up trying to pull anything similar in incidents we were involved in after [Manager] retired.