It’s kind of a running joke in my family that [Sister] is a reality warper. Her luck is, quite simply, absurd. Sometimes, it feels like the world is bending over backward to accommodate her.

I’ve got a long list of events I can rattle off to prove her luck, but that’s for another time. This is a conversation that happened at the start of this year.

Sister: “I want to get a new gaming PC. Can you build one for me?”

Friend: “Sure thing. But maybe now isn’t such a good time? There’s a shortage of GPUs at the moment, and so they now cost a bomb. At your budget, the GPU would eat up nearly half of it alone. We’d have to really skimp on the rest of the computer.”

Sister: “Okay. I’m gonna have to study for my finals, anyway, so you don’t have to build it until summer.”

Friend: “But the parts…”

Sister: *Waving dismissively* “I’m sure it’ll sort itself out by summer.”

Me: “Sis, that’s not likely to happen.”

Sister: *Rolling her eyes* “All right, fine.” *Takes a deep breath* “I, [Sister], wish, here and now, that the GPU price would go down by the time my final exams are over.”

She gave us a baleful look.

Sister: “Problem solved.”

Fast forward a few months into 2022, and suddenly, Crypto crashes, causing cryptocurrency miners to start selling their GPUs, driving GPU prices down right around the time [Sister] is wrapping up her exams and has told [Friend] to start ordering parts.

Two weeks later, [Friend], [Sister], and I are sitting down in my room, each holding a brand new GPU. We found someone online who was offering a buy-one-get-two-free deal, I kid you not.

Me: “Well, that was stupid. Even by the standards of your luck, this was particularly egregious.”

Friend: *Disbelievingly* “A trillion-dollar crash. I lost years of investments — five thousand dollars — all because you wanted GPUs to be cheaper.”

He shakes his head.

Friend: “You must have burnt an entire lifetime’s worth of luck with that.”

Sister: “Nah, I’ve still got plenty left in the tank. Mark my words.”

Another two weeks later, [Sister] went to Las Vegas with her friends and won fifteen thousand bucks while playing cards. Yeah, her luck is still going strong.

A woman comes up to me and asks me for help finding canned black beans. I showed her where they are located and help her find a brand she’s happy with.

Customer: “Thank you so much!”

Me: “No problem!”

I turn to leave, but she grabs my wrist and pulls me back around.

Customer: “No, no, the proper response is ‘You’re welcome,’ not ‘No problem’.”

I wrench my arm out of her grasp.

Me: “Excuse me. You have no business touching any of the staff members here!”

Customer: “How dare you speak to me that way?!”

Me: “I’ve read about people like you on the Internet. I’m afraid that attitude won’t fly in this store. You need to go to the registers and get out.”

Customer: “Who the f*** do you think you are?!”

Me: “I’m an assistant manager, and I am the manager on duty for the day. I’ll escort you out.”

This is where I made what could have panned out to be a fatal mistake: I turned my back on her. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a hospital bed. With a few quick questions to the hospital staff, I found out that the woman had been brought to the same hospital and was also under arrest. My manager was then brought in to explain to me what had happened ahead of the police coming in to speak to me.

Apparently, as soon as I turned around, the woman grabbed a can of soup and threw it as hard as she could at the back of my head, which rendered me unconscious. She then turned and threatened another customer with an “object out of her purse”. The other customer, not willing to put up with that level of bulls***, rammed her with his shopping cart, breaking her ankle.

The hero customer had then called for help and began first aid while paramedics arrived.

I pressed charges against the woman and won all of my court days. She is currently in prison, and I am working at the same store as the new manager. I met the hero customer after returning to work a few weeks after the incident, and we have now been together for two years, as well. With no lasting health issues, this incident gave me three weeks of paid vacation and a soap opera-style significant other meeting.

Since then, I have never confronted a customer myself again. The store schedule changed to add two more people to the floor, and we were provided with radios and earpieces to communicate. The last thing the previous manager did before leaving was taking us all through training on how to use the new system and how to identify when we should engage and when we should call the police immediately.

Many years ago, the local volunteer fire department held drill (training) every Monday night at 6:00 pm. The call signal for the drill was to sound the call sirens three times.

One Monday, a firefighter going to drill saw that the elderly couple who lived just up the street was having a chimney fire.

Naturally, he ran in and told the chief, who called out the department, and then the firefighter telephoned the couple to tell them that the fire department was on the way.

The elderly couple, being hard of hearing, hadn’t noticed the chimney fire… and were somewhat confused to receive a call telling them the fire department was on their way!

In the UK, we have a thing called the CCF — Combined Cadet Force — where teenagers can join a group run by the various military forces, and it serves as an introduction to the military. I join the one at my school, and mostly we learn things like drill, map reading and orienteering, and military tactics. Once a term, we go and do a two-day training exercise out in the field, which normally culminates in doing an overnight exercise.

As part of the CCF, we all have to take the weapons safety test, and only then are we allowed to carry the rifles — though, of course, they are loaded with blanks for the exercise. However, many of the teachers only volunteer for the day and so are not allowed anywhere near the rifles.

As one of the older students, I am playing an enemy with one other student and a few other teachers. As the teachers are not allowed to carry rifles and we are in the middle of a forest, they decide to go and find some sticks to carry around and yell “bang” with.

About five minutes later, the first teacher comes back with a long, thin stick, so we decide this is a good rifle replacement. The second comes back with a slightly bigger stick, so we decide he is the sniper. After a while, the final teacher comes panting back to our position carrying what can only be described as a log on her shoulder. We all fall about laughing after someone suggests that this stick is the rocket-powered grenade launcher and is completely over the top for the situation.

I work in the bakery of a chain grocery store. Today, I’m alone in the bakery with my coworker, who is about four months pregnant, baking some cookies and boxing them up before we go home for the day.

One of our regulars wanders past and waves as she drops some things into her trolley. As always, her service dog is silently following her with his vest on. I’ve never asked what the dog is for — that seems incredibly rude — but have often wondered as she seems healthy, though I know there are tonnes of invisible illnesses. I’m boxing up some more cookies when I hear our customer talking to her dog.

Regular: “Hey, [Dog]! What the h***?! Heel!”

The dog has walked away from the customer and is sitting at the gate into the bakery, whining and pawing at it. I’ve never seen this dog break focus for even a split second, so I am highly confused. My coworker walks over to the gate to make sure it is latched and the dog starts whining even louder.

By now, the customer has come over and clipped the dog’s lead to its harness again, apologizing profusely.

Regular: “I’m so sorry. He has never done this before; he’s been trained as a service dog since he was a puppy. Come on, [Dog].”

The dog whines and paws at the gate again, refusing to move. The regular looks over the gate at my coworker and squints.

Regular: “Are you diabetic?”

Coworker: “No? I mean, I feel a little gross today, but that’s to be expected.”

My coworker laughs awkwardly and gestures at her bump.

Regular: “I’m sorry to ask this, but could you come on this side of the gate? I promise he won’t hurt you.”

My coworker glances at me and I shrug, still not really getting what’s happening. My coworker goes out the gate and the dog stops whining, instead sniffing my coworker’s hands and legs thoroughly. He takes a step back and then lays down and puts his paws on his nose.

Regular: “Are you sure, [Dog]?”

The dog gives one solid, quiet bark and then gets up and circles my coworker again before spinning in a circle and putting his paw on her knee.

Regular: *To me* “You need to call an ambulance.”

My coworker is suddenly out of her shock.

Coworker: “Oh, no, really, I’m totally fine! Just a bit worn out today.”

Regular: “No, honey. I don’t know if you’ve got gestational diabetes or something else is wrong, but he’s telling me your blood sugar is critically low. That’s why he’s trying to get you to sit down; he thinks you’re going to faint — and you might. He’s never indicated wrong. Do you have juice or some jellybeans?”

I call for my manager and he comes down, agreeing that we should probably call an ambulance to be on the safe side. That’s just as well, because the regular is threatening to do it herself. Luckily, being a small town, a lady walking past overhears and comes over to talk to my coworker. The lady is a nurse, so she is checking my coworker’s pulse on a little stopwatch when my regular starts digging through her bag.

Regular: “Here. I keep this around in case my continuous monitor breaks or something happens to my phone and I can’t read my numbers. I’ve got a fresh lancet here. Do you want to check her sugars?”

She handed the nurse a little blood sugar testing kit and stepped back out of the fray of my manager, my coworker, the nurse, and a couple of other store workers who had come to see what the noise was about. [Regular]’s dog had gone back to being the picture of obedience and was sitting under her trolley out of the way. 

The nurse used the little monitor on my coworker and it beeped and flashed red, the screen not giving us any numbers, just reading “LOW” in big letters. The ambulance arrived a few minutes later and took my coworker away, and we all continued with our day.

A few days later, my coworker came back to work. She showed us the blood sugar monitor she has to use for the rest of her pregnancy and told us that the doctor said it was a miracle she was still conscious at the time with her sugars so low. My coworker was terrified; she’d been planning on finishing up at work and going home to take a nap, which the doctor said would have been absolutely disastrous, even fatal, since she lives alone.

The next time my regular came through, the dog didn’t even glance at my coworker. He did, however, get the biggest meaty bone the butcher department could find for him!

This story is part of our end-of-year Feel Good roundup for 2022!

Read the next Feel Good 2022 story!

Read the Feel Good 2022 roundup!