It’s my final day working at a fast food restaurant. All is well for the first few hours, and then the sun goes down and the crazy comes out.

First problem: the cook goes on a break, and just… never comes back. The manager tries to call him and tries calling his emergency contact, and gets nothing. I am told he will be fired for this. Not long ago I’d given him a ride home and heard his sob story about how much he needs the job to take care of his kids. Well. Can’t win them all, right?

We who remain notice a car has been sitting in the lot for a while. The other two are convinced it’s a sex trafficker. I’m more worried someone had a heart attack and died in the car, so I grab a spoon and head out to check. Nope, just someone parked and eating. Crisis averted?

The other worker leaves on schedule, so it is down to the manager and me. She’s not had a chance to lock up the lobby, so people keep wandering in and trying to order. Naturally, we find it impossible to clean the store before closing, so we’ll obviously be here fairly late.

Even with all of this, all is going fairly smoothly. The manager cooks while I take orders, make drinks, smoothies, shakes, etc., pack orders, give them to our honored guests, and issue the standard pleasantries.

And then the concert gets out.

We’d been warned of this, but there’s no way to prepare for an onslaught of hungry people that I lack the stomach to turn away, cars wrapping around the block when we’re short-staffed, and trying to clean an entire store. Several people offer condolences and a few give tips. The manager tries calling corporate to get permission to shut down early, but nothing comes of it. She next tells me to stop taking orders, but I can’t exactly tell people who’ve been waiting for twenty minutes that we won’t take their order while we’re still open, and she won’t do it either, so on we go.

Finally, midnight rolls around and the outside lights shut off. Obviously, people are not thrilled to be turned away, and one car says they ordered mobile and already paid — not accurate, as payment is not taken until we activate the order at the store, but whatever — and insists on being served. The computers have shut down and won’t actually load their order, so we have to look at the tiny screen, memorize what to get, and run back and forth across the store. To make it worse, this last car of my career is full of extremely polite and nice people, so it’s not like we can tell them what direction to f*** off in.

A good half an hour after closing, we finally get their order finished. They give each of us $10 for the trouble, and I wave them off into the wild black yonder with a fake-cheery, “Thank you for choosing [Fast Food Place]!” What a night.

And now I’m off to boot camp. It can’t possibly be as bad.

I took Tae Kwon Do for several years until I left for college, and at the time of this story, I was either a belt away from my black belt or had just gotten my first Dan. I was studying Olympic-style Tae Kwon Do, which is more sport than defensive art. Its sparring rules are designed to encourage interesting fights to watch more than to teach practical defense. Because of this, a number of things that are practical in a real fight, like grappling and punching, are either illegal or unable to score points when sparring.

Recently, we had a new person taking classes: an old friend of the person who ran the dojo who already had a black belt and training in a few different martial arts. He was always trying to get people to agree to bend the sparring rules to allow things he was taught but aren’t legal in our sparring, like grappling or punching to the head. By itself, this wouldn’t be too big a problem, except he wasn’t very good at taking no for an answer and would try to use these techniques even when his sparring partner didn’t agree to change the rules. He only did it with advanced belts and did it infrequently enough that, while annoying, it never quite reached the level of his being properly punished. Being friends with the owner likely helped him, as well.

On the day of this story, more for fun than anything else, we were doing two-on-one sparring matches, with two lower belts against one higher belt. I was going up against our master’s friend and had been paired up with a young girl who had only been sparring for a little while and still had the hesitancy that is often seen in new sparrers. While in a real fight, two on one is a massive advantage given the rules and limits of sparring, and with my partner’s lack of experience or aggression, I didn’t think she would be able to contribute much to the match. That meant the fight would mostly come down to me versus my opponent, who was far more experienced, which meant we would almost certainly lose the match.

I was worried that my new partner would be intermediated if our foe started using illegal moves she wasn’t ready to deal with, so before the match started, I politely reminded him that we wanted to stick to legal moves only without any of the stuff he liked to add.

My opponent seemed to take this as a challenge; the very moment the fight started, he dive-tackled me and grappled me to the floor. Not only was this illegal, but it was also rather foolish, as it put him on the ground and tied up with me while my partner was still free. Rather than trying to break his grapple, I instead did my best to tangle his legs and arms up with me so he couldn’t get up and told my partner to start kicking him while was defenseless. He had just turned an almost guaranteed win if he had just followed the rules into a rather inglorious defeat at the hands (feet?) of someone barely experienced enough to be allowed to spar at all.

Luckily for him, my partner seemed to realize how unfair the situation was, and as I said, she wasn’t remotely aggressive, so her “kicks” were barely more than taps, more demonstrating the damage she could do than really trying to inflict harm. Despite this, I could see our opponent growing increasingly infuriated with every strike.

Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, I wasn’t able to keep my opponent tangled on the floor forever. Eventually, he managed to untangle himself and get up, at which point he went at my partner full force. He was clearly angry and not holding back nearly as much as an experienced black belt should against a newbie sparrer. I was honestly worried he would hurt my partner, so I rushed to get up and knock him away from her with a push kick so I could get between the two of them. Luckily, time ran out seconds after I’d knocked him away and the match ended before anyone was hurt.

My partner wasn’t badly hurt; he had landed a few very solid blows on her padding that winded her, but they didn’t cause any lasting harm. She was, however, terrified and upset at having been chased down and so viciously focused on, and I still wonder if he would have harmed her if it wasn’t for my intervention and time running out. As far as I was concerned, he had gone too far this time.

Despite being nothing more than a high school student, I went against my instincts and spoke to my master about his friend and my concerns after class was over that night. He agreed with me that his friend had pushed too far this time and told me he planned to have a “talk” with his friend. I don’t know what that talk entailed, but I noticed that the friend stopped coming to class not long after that.

I have a coworker who used to be pretty good but has now decided that things are still the way they were when he started working.

Our employer, like most, forbids alcohol on company premises — totally forbids it — because they’ve learned the hard way that many people will drink on the job and lie about it. Proving they’ve been drinking is a bit tricky, but simple possession is easy enough in most cases.

[Coworker] goes to Cabo San Lucas and brings our manager a bottle of a kind of booze that’s not available locally but is readily available in Cabo.

This is ethically questionable in the first place since it creates the appearance of trying to exert an undue influence on the manager; we’ve all had to take ethics training about things like this every year for at least ten years.

So, [Coworker] brings the bottle into work and hands it to our manager, completely unwrapped. The boss carefully explains that he can’t possess booze on company property, but he’ll let it slide this once, just don’t do it again.

[Coworker] complains to several of us. We all tell him that you can’t do that, reminding him of the ethics issues, and suggest that if he wants to ring the manager booze, he needs to meet the boss offsite and give him the bottle there. [Coworker]’s response is, “That’s stupid!” We all remind him that those are the rules, and the manager should have written him up for it.

Guess what [Coworker] does the next time he goes to Cabo? Yep, exactly the same thing. This time, the boss gives [Coworker] an official verbal warning, and [Coworker] whines mightily about it.

Some months later, [Coworker] goes back to Cabo. Lather, rinse, repeat. This time, he gets a formal write-up, and oh, the whining! This time, he gets very little sympathy, and only from people who don’t know the backstory.

After a couple more self-inflicted issues, [Coworker] retires.

I’m driving my car on a busy city road and a guy in a company van behind me is doing his level best to cause an accident, tailgating and popping out from time to time as if to overtake. I’d rather have this kind of driver in front of me, so I give him room to pass, only for him to do the same with the next car in front.

I realise from the logos on the van that it’s a small company that we do business with, so I pull over and give them a call. The front office assistant picks up the phone.

Me: “I would like to let you know that one of your guys is driving recklessly and you might want to do something about it before he gets into an accident. The license plate is [number].”

Assistant: “I see. I’ll let the management know, but…”

She does the verbal equivalent of a shrug.

Me: “Oh. You don’t have a program for safe driving, that kind of thing?”

Employee: “Oh, we do. It’s just that the current driver is the company owner.”

One evening, a group of teenage boys and girls comes to a movie. There are about five girls and six boys, all around fifteen to eighteen years old. Every ten minutes or so, two, three, or four boys come out, head to the men’s room, followed a few minutes later by a few of the girls, who of course head to the ladies’ room. When they each emerge, they come out giggling and being sort of secretive about something and acting somewhat suspiciously. During the first hour or so of the movie, they rotate between boys heading to the men’s room and girls to the ladies’ room, making two or three trips each. 

The usher, now really suspicious, approaches me while I’m at the concession stand.

Usher: *To me* “Something’s going on with that group of teens. I’m going into the men’s room to check it out. Can you stand by the door and make sure no one comes in for just a minute or two while I take a quick look?”

Me: “Oh, sure. No problem.”

He goes into the men’s room and checks around. Being an older theatre, the toilets are all the old style that have the water tanks on the back of the toilet bowl. He takes the lid off one and finds two partially empty six-packs of beer in the toilet. He checks the other three, and they all have six-packs hidden in the bowl, two with one or two beers gone; the other two are still full six-packs.

He comes out and shows me what he found. I take the beer to the office and leave it in a refrigerator we have in there. He grabs a woman from the office to check the ladies’ room and has her check to ensure there’s nobody in there.

Given the all-clear, he checks the toilets in there and finds essentially the same thing. Again, he removes the beer and puts it in the office refrigerator. We then wait to see what happens.

A few minutes later, three of the girls come out, head to the ladies’ room. A minute or so later, they come running out, whispering to each other with a confused look on their faces, and quickly head back to their seats. They come back with two of the boys who head to the men’s room. We overhear them saying things in a whisper, like:

Boys: “What do you mean? Are you sure? It’s missing? How could it be gone? How can that be?”

They have the girls go in and check the ladies’ room again. Moments later, the boys come running, just as the other girls show up from the theatre, apparently wondering what’s up. The boys run back into the theatre, and then the other boys now also head to the men’s room, while the girls who just came out from the theater head into the ladies’ room.

Both groups come out from their respective restrooms and they all head back to their seats. My friend, the older usher, goes in and watches them from the back of the darkened theater. They are all whispering trying to figure out what the heck happened to their beer!

Just then, it seems that the oldest boy and the oldest girl apparently think something’s up, like perhaps the rest are putting them on or whatever, so they get up, and each goes into their respective restroom. They emerge moments later, with very confused looks on their faces, realizing that all their beer has somehow disappeared! They stand outside in the hallway where the restrooms are located, whispering to each other about what could possibly have happened. After a minute or two, they go back to their seats and finish watching the movie, which ends just over an hour later.

When the movie ends, the whole group is walking past us in the lobby, and we hear them talking among themselves:

Teens: “I don’t get it.” “Where could it go?” “Do you suppose that jerk from school took it?” “I don’t think so; I didn’t see him here tonight.” “You didn’t believe me when I told you it was gone, did you?” “Well, it was so weird. I don’t get it…”

And so on.

They continue this chatter for a few seconds. Just as they are passing the older usher, he gives them an enthusiastic wave and shouts out to them:

Usher: “Thanks for all the beer, kids!”

The look on the teenagers’ faces was priceless as they all turned to look at him, realized that we’d found their “secret” stash of beer, and skedaddled out the door!

We didn’t bother calling the police, since we’d confiscated their beer and didn’t feel like dealing with it, which would have entailed staying until well after midnight, for sure. We just got a big kick out of it and laughed about it for months afterward! The five of us staff members all had a couple of beers each after our shifts ended that night and left the rest for another night. We never had that issue again, but from then on, we would check for hidden beer whenever we had a group of teens attending a movie.