I’m the author of “The Fire Can’t Get You if the Asthma Gets You First!“, this time with a very cute story from after I transferred to a different middle school.

This middle school had a very unorthodox reward system in place for students. Our mascot was a wildcat (insert High School Musical jokes here), and the reward was simply called “Paws”.

These Paws were a little three-inch square of paper with a lion pawprint on them and two lines: one for the student’s name, and one for the name of the teacher who issued it. Students earned them through various means–helping teachers, behaving in class, getting perfect scores on difficult assignments, and things like that– and would collect them. One thing to note was that teachers often didn’t give Paws out to a student two days in a row, so as not to seem like they were showing favoritism.

What was the point of collecting them, you may ask? Well, these Paws were a currency!

On Fridays during the lunch period, there was a small school store that would open, and we could buy things with the Paws we’d earned. Candy and snacks, books, crayons and colored pencils, small toys, things like that. The reason for having our names on the Paws was to ensure we weren’t using another student’s Paws for a purchase.

When I first enrolled, I didn’t know what Paws were for, and was a little confused when, on my second day, one of my teachers came over to my desk and slipped a little piece of paper with a pawprint on it under my notebook–I don’t even remember how I earned it.

After class, I hung back for a moment to ask about it; she explained that the Paws were used to buy things at the school store at lunch on Friday. I was excited–my old school didn’t have anything like this!

I did my best to earn as many Paws as I could during the week. Being the new, awkward kid in class, I probably seemed like an overachiever, but I was too excited to care. By the end of the week, I had earned about ten Paws altogether.

Friday rolled around, and come lunchtime, the gates of the kingdom opened. Each table of five students was called one at a time to shop in the school store, and it was at this point that I learned that the ten Paws I had earned were…meager. One student had a manila folder packed to the brim with Paws he had accumulated over a few weeks, one student had an inch-thick stack bound with rubber bands…

When it was our class’s turn to go shopping, I brought my piddling ten Paws in…and I realized why the students had saved so many.

This store was PACKED full of cute stationery, snacks, and the like. Small items, like erasers or singular pencils, were one Paw apiece, but other items like stylized notebooks or honey buns were five. To get anything of note, you needed to save up. I guess it was to teach us the value of saving money or something, without actually using money?

One thing in particular caught my eye–a pack of twistable colored pencils. In the singular week I’d been there, it was no secret that I loved to draw, and loved to get my hands on new art supplies. The pack was eighteen colors–including shimmering metallic colors. It would have been amazing to work with.

It was also fifteen Paws, and there was only one left.

There wasn’t any guarantee that it would have still been there next week–there was another lunch period, after all, and we also weren’t the last table called in. Someone else might buy it before I could save enough to get it.

It was a bummer, but I accepted that I probably wouldn’t be able to get them. Instead, I used my Paws to buy myself two spiral-bound college-ruled notebooks and returned to my seat dejected but not empty-handed.

I ended up having to step away to use the restroom as lunch was working through me a bit too quickly for my liking, and tucked my notebooks into my binder for safekeeping as I had been the first one to come back to our table. I was gone all of five minutes, and when I came back…there was something in my seat.

The pack of twistable colored pencils.

One of the other kids at my table had a very tiny smile on her face while she watched me put two and two together.

Those colored pencils saw a LOT of use.

My mother inherited the building and parking lot a bar was located inside. She had two beers in her life by age sixty, (one by accident! She thought Twisted Tea was just fun tea) and had no interest in bars.

The bar itself was… not great. Not the worst, but it was right on the edge of the city and part of the county that was rapidly declining.

For twenty years, she got a check for rent from the same man. Then one day, she got a check from a different person with a different name for the bar.

She called and asked who they were, what was going on, etc.

The confused person who answered said something like:

Tenant: “Why do you care as long as you’re getting paid?”

Mother: “Because you’re my TENANT and I have no idea who you are or how to contact you outside of calling the landline in the bar!”

The bar owner and other staff were mystified as to why the OWNER OF THEIR BUILDING would ever need to know who they are.

So eventually, they bought the building. Fair enough. They continued renting the parking lot for a few hundred a month, but checks started coming in late, slowly, or not at all. There was always a promise that it was TOTALLY in the mail, and then it showed up three weeks later… marked the three weeks after it was due.

Complaints and calls to the seedy bar were ignored.

So my mother did what anyone would do.

She called every… single… tow truck…. in the area, and told them the entire parking lot is free rein. Tow everything.

We weren’t there for the aftermath, but apparently, about two hundred people in a city known for its violence and gun crime left the bars one weekend to find every car was gone.

Somehow, a check was never late again!

I am in line behind a customer at a video game store. The cashier is trying very hard to be friendly, but the customer has the typical “ignoring what you are saying, even when it benefits me” attitude.

Cashier: “Would you like to pick out a third game? We have a buy two, get one free sale going on, and you already have two games. Your third is free.”

Customer: “STOP TRYING TO UPSELL ME! I DON’T WANT MORE OF YOUR CRAP!”

Cashier: “It’s… it’s free…”

Customer: “SURE IT IS. THAT’S HOW THEY GET YOU!”

Me: “I’ll take your third free item if you don’t care. Madden 2022 PS4.”

Customer: “Ha, I don’t care. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Sure, you can have my “free” item.”

Cashier: “Well, here’s your Madden 2022 copy, sir!”

The transaction processed, the customer begins to walk away in a huff.

Me: “Oh dang, don’t you know it? I don’t own a PS4! So crazy! I guess I’ll trade this in for cash?”

Cashier: *Catching on.* “Oh no, what a debacle! Here’s your [value] in cash, sir!”

Me: “Crazy! Thanks for the free money!”

Customer: “…wait, what?”

At my very first job, I was a cashier at a chain grocery store. I have two stories about the crap I had to put up with at this place.

The first one was at Thanksgiving. Unlike most other places, we were open to make bank off of people doing last-second shopping. I’m pretty sure they hiked up prices for a bigger profit, too. We also weren’t going to close early; we were open full hours, so anyone working that day more than likely didn’t get to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner with their families.

I was scheduled from noon to 9:00 pm that day. I’ve worked Black Friday shifts that were less chaotic than this nightmare. It was a sea of people who had to make last-second purchases for dinner or had to replace Aunt Trudy’s green bean and cranberry surprise. It was horrible.

Per the employee handbook, for shifts that are longer than six hours, employees were entitled to two fifteen-minute breaks plus a half-hour unpaid lunch. However, as the bottom-rung new girl, I did not get this. No, I was told that if I wanted a lunch break, I would have to forgo my two fifteen-minute breaks and combine them. Meanwhile, the other cashiers were either given their proper breaks or were on shorter shifts.

They didn’t give me my fifteen-minute breaks anyway, so I had to work nine hours straight without food, on Thanksgiving, away from my family. And when I pointed out the handbook? “Oh, we don’t follow that.”

I had just turned twenty, this was my first job, and I had a complete meltdown when I got home that night because I was so hungry and tired and had been taken complete advantage of. The only reason I didn’t quit on the spot was that I needed the money.

Fast forward about two months. We got nailed with a horrible blizzard that shut down the entire city. Roads were completely buried to where plows could barely get through, and even after plowing, there was so much ice that the roads were just plain not safe to drive on. I was not risking my life for minimum wage, so I called and let my managers know I couldn’t make it in for my shift, nor could I check my schedule for the coming week.

This time, they were much more understanding — just about the entire staff had called out due to the weather, and there were no customers, so they were going to close up early. They told me to just stay safe and call in for my schedule day by day. That wasn’t enough to redeem the place after the previous incident, but whatever.

I called every day to check the schedule and confirm whether or not I’d be in. On Wednesday, three days into the complete shutdown of the city, a manager told me I wasn’t on the schedule. Okay, that was fine with me; I could do my laundry and get some cleaning done.

Then, 11:00 am rolled around, and I got a phone call… from another manager, asking why I wasn’t at the store.

Me: “When I called a couple of hours ago, [Manager #1] told me I wasn’t scheduled today.”

Manager #2: “You are on the schedule, and since you didn’t call to let us know you weren’t coming in, you’ll be written up if you don’t show up.”

So, even with the roads still frozen like Cocytus, I put on my uniform (which was still slightly damp, as it didn’t even get half a cycle in the dryer) and went in.

As soon as I was clocked in, I got called to the office by the store manager. He went into a spiel about how disappointed he was that I didn’t call to confirm that I wouldn’t be in, and blah, blah, blah.

Me: “I did call. I spoke to [Manager #1], who checked the schedule and confirmed with me that I was not scheduled.”

Store Manager: “I understand, but your schedule is your responsibility, and we have to write you up for no-call-no-show.”

To h*** with that place. I took off my badge and called my dad to pick me back up. I quit on the spot and left. Good luck getting another cashier on short notice in this mess, jacka**.

I am a large Polish-Irish-American man. I like the food of my ancestors, but I LOVE Indian food. I enjoy Chinese food, Japanese, Colombian, Brazilian, and Mexican, but Indian is my favorite to order at a restaurant. So, I was excited to see an “Indian fusion” place in a shopping center food court, and I stopped in.

It was Mexican-Indian fusion which was… interesting. The naan was thick and basically used as a gordita/burrito wrap in place of a real tortilla. The rice was basically the same. There were four or five types of chicken, some clearly Mexcian… inspired… and others clearly Indian. 

The labels were generic — “Spicy chicken!” “Curry!” “Vegetable medley!” — so I looked at the worker. He was clearly from India, with a strong accent and tired eyes.

Me: “I’m not sure what the spicy chicken is, or what this… sauce is. Do you have a chana masala, or a saag paneer? Is that curry a roghan ghosht?”

There was a long pause before the worker replied.

Worker: “You called all of those foods by their correct names, even with a bit of an American accent. That means you’ve had real food before. This… is not real food. You will not like it.”

Me: “It smells nice! And I am very hungry.”

Worker: “You are a white man who knows what a roghan ghosht is. You must have traveled or gone to a good restaurant before. All of this is bad fast food.”

Me: “Well, I will take this and this and hope for the best.”

Worker: “I simply work here. I won’t be insulted if you hate it. Which you will. No American who likes chana masala will like the crap we sell here.”

It’s been over a decade, and I still remember this man clearly. And I will always cherish the memory of, “You are a white man who knows what roghan ghosht is. You asked for saag paneer. This food is beneath us both.”