(As a college student in the 1970s, I work as a department store cashier. A woman comes to the register in a big hurry and with a big attitude. She begins to toss merchandise from her cart onto the counter. We have just started using electronic cash registers, but they aren’t very fast. In pre-barcode days, all the prices have to be entered on the keypad, and each entry has to process before another entry can be started. This woman keeps yelling at me to go faster and berating me for being so slow. As I have no bagger helping me, it is taking even longer. Impatiently, she starts flinging items into bags herself, which actually holds up even more, because while I am ringing up I also have to keep an eye on her to make sure she doesn’t bag items I haven’t rung up yet. Then, she grabs one of those cylindrical packages of imported cookies and as she flings it into the bag, it bounces, hits the floor, and rolls about six feet away. We both stare at it. She turns to me and shouts:)

Customer: “You go pick that up!”

Me: “I can’t. I’m not allowed to leave the register in the middle of a transaction.”

(After glaring at me, she stalks over to the cookies, picks them up, slams them into the bag, pays for her order, and marches to the door, where she turns and snaps:)

Customer: “I’ve been shopping at [Store] for fifteen years and you are the first not-nice cashier I’ve ever had!”

(I can’t help myself; I snap back:)

Me: “Well, I’ve been working here for only two months, and unfortunately, you are not the first not-nice customer I’ve ever had!”

(This happens when I am ten years old. My parents have briefly gotten back together at the time of this story, after being divorced since I was an infant. It should be noted that my dad has had custody of me all my life. Beyond weekend visits with my mom, I’ve actually never lived with her. Things get… interesting quickly.) 

Me: *to my mom not long after she and my younger half-sister move in* “Ugh, I hate doing dishes!” 

Mom: “Well, if you pick up the rest of the house for me, I’ll do the dishes.” 

Me: *excited* “Really?! Deal!”

(For ten-year-old me, it honestly seems like a great trade. My dad is lazy with housework, so to me, picking up the house means cleaning up trash, straightening, and putting things away. However, with my mom, I learn a completely different version. While she cleans dishes by hand, which takes less than an hour, she has me vacuuming, mopping, scrubbing, dusting, and pretty much gutting every room in the home from the moment I step inside after getting home from school around 3:00 pm until my dad gets home around 6:00 pm. I try to ask my mom to lighten the load, but she won’t hear of it because we had a “deal.” And I don’t want to tell my dad because I complained so much about doing dishes before. This goes on for weeks until one night…)

Me: *literally falling asleep on my feet while my dad asks my sister and me what we want for dinner* 

Dad: “[My Name]? Hey! [My Name]?”

Me: *jerks awake* “What?”

Dad: “What’s wrong?” 

Me: “I’m tired.” 

Dad: “Why?” 

Me: “I was doing chores.” 

Dad: “Are you seriously tired just from doing dishes?”

Me: *quietly shakes my head* 

Dad: *in a pure authoritarian voice that must be obeyed* “What, then?” 

Me: “I’ve been cleaning the house.” 

Dad: “What do you mean?”

Me: *explains everything* 

Dad: “She’s been having you clean since you got home?!” 

Me: *nods meekly, thinking I’m in trouble*

Dad: “Have you had your after-school snack?” 

Me: *shakes head* 

Dad: “Is your homework even done?” 

Me: *shakes head, feeling a little panicked* “I haven’t had time. I didn’t even have a chance to sit down.”

(Just then, my mom comes out from the back of the house.) 

Mom: *angrily* “Is [My Name] complaining about her chores?” 

(At that point, my dad sent me out of the kitchen. Long story short, I never had to do three hours’ worth of chores again, nor did I ever complain about having to do dishes. Essentially, my mom, who did not work, had me doing what she was responsible for and passing it off as if she’d been cleaning all along. Sadly, this was not the only thing she did while living with us, including wedging herself between me and my dad, throwing out a religious item of mine that was a gift from him because she did not “approve,” and even throwing away my perfectly good Game Boy, because she claimed I was going to get a new one that was in color. I was not upset when my parents separated after a year and I no longer had to endure the evil stepmom version of my own mother. And, twenty years later, I’m still waiting on that Game Boy Color, though I’d settle for the latest version of PlayStation.)

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After getting out of work, my husband picks me up at home so we can go shopping together. On our way, we stop at this really busy intersection where we sometimes have to wait a few minutes to be able to make a left turn.

We are behind a woman in a minivan and there is no other car behind us at this point. After at least three minutes, she has had more than enough time to turn on many occasions but she keeps starting to move and then changing her mind and hitting the brakes. We are getting a bit annoyed, and when there is a break in traffic and she is still not turning, my husband decides to honk the car horn once. 

About a minute goes by and there is finally another break in traffic, but to our utter disbelief, she opens her door and gets out of her car. She walks up next to our car and starts screaming at my husband that he doesn’t understand that it’s when she “feels like it” that she will be able to turn and that she really needs to “feel like it”! She actually makes the air quotes saying that. My husband is at a loss for words, but I tell her that while she is waiting to “feel like it,” other people are waiting. The woman goes silent when she sees that there is now a long line of about ten cars behind us and other people are honking. A good thirty seconds later, the woman is still standing there like an idiot with her mouth open. 

Realizing that we are going to wait a really, really long time for her to move, my husband decides to change lanes and turn right to find an alternate route. A few minutes later at a stop sign, he makes eye contact with me, looking really serious and he asks me, “Did that just happen?” I tell him that two people can’t have the same hallucination, so yes, it did, and we both burst out in laughter. 

I really don’t know how she managed to get her driver’s license!

(I am at a pharmacy at 3:00 am trying to pick up some toilet paper. There are two people arguing somewhere near the rear of the store and the store clerk is falling asleep at the checkout. It is when I get to the toilet paper section that I discover that the people arguing are standing in front of my goal. Not wanting to get anywhere near this nasty-sounding fight, I go down a few aisles to wait out the storm. That’s when I hear this gem:)

Lady: “We ain’t buying that s***ty a** s***!”

Guy: “That crap you always buy always gets all up in my a**. We be buying a** wipes, not f****** tissue paper!”

Lady: “I’m not rubbing my crotch with this sandpaper bulls***!”

Guy: “This ain’t nothing like sandpaper. This s*** be tight and it ain’t gonna rub ya raw!”

(I’m an aisle over at this point trying not to laugh too loudly. They’re making sailors proud with their foul language. I’ve never heard such a colorful argument about toilet paper before. They continue this for a bit when the guy drops some math on the lady.)

Guy: “Look right here. This has 200 sheets per f****** roll. There be four rolls in this s***. With five sheets for every hardcore a**-wiping and four hardcore a**-wipings for each s***, this f****** roll gonna last for ten hardcore s*** sessions. That’s f****** forty hardcore s***s for five f****** dollars. And your b****-a** s*** costs f****** ten bucks and I gotta dig the f****** s*** nuggets out of my a** every time I use this s***.”

(They must have heard me laughing at this point as they got really quiet. I don’t know if the guy ever convinced the lady to buy whatever it was. Definitely spiced up my earlier morning.)

This happened about five years ago when I worked as an IT technician in a factory. I was an infrastructure technician and I had a colleague — we’ll call him J — who, like me, had a weird sense of humour. J told me that the following happened to him one day. 

At the time, we had two wireless networks; one was our corporate network, and only for laptops, barcode scanners, and company mobile phones. The other was technically only for visitors, but employees tended to connect their personal mobile phones to it. 

Our visitor network was only available in certain parts of our two factories. However, someone had managed to find the Wi-Fi code for the corporate network, so quite a few people connected their personal mobile phones to it. Our SysAdmin had to block these devices because they took up valuable IP addresses that were needed for devices like handheld barcode scanners.

One day, J went round to the stores to look at a printer that wasn’t working. He fixed it and got chatting with the stores guys. One of the younger guys asked J why he had suddenly lost connection to the corporate Wi-Fi. J, completely deadpan said, “Yeah, we had to block personal devices because we discovered that some people were using the corporate network to look at p*rnography on their mobile phones.” Defensively, the storeman replied, “I only did that once!”

J went very quiet, looked the storeman in the eye, and said, “I was only joking!” The storeman blushed bright red, and said, “Oh, so was I!”