Years and years ago, I worked as a bank teller. Ninety percent of my job was just cashing cheques and being a living ATM. This was back when pennies were still in use.

One day, this guy comes in.

Customer: “I need a lot of pennies — a ridiculous amount of pennies. [Local Business] screwed me over, and I want to pull the classic: pay for something with an inconvenient amount of loose change.”

He’s super excited to explain how this business screwed him over. I won’t bore you with the details, but it’s pretty clear even in his telling that it is perfectly fair he is being charged this money. He’s practically giggling as he explains how inconvenient it will be for the people he’s paying.

But here’s the thing. Maybe this works down in the States, but in Canada, there is a very reasonable limit to how much you can pay with change. The payee is allowed to reject any loose change payment over a certain amount.

Thinking I might be able to save everyone involved a bunch of hassle — myself included — I explain this to my customer. The guy isn’t having it. He just keeps saying:

Customer: “Pennies are money, so I’m allowed to do it, and you’d better give me my pennies!”

At this point, I figure it’s not really my problem what he wants to do with his money, and I get to work.

He wants a few hundred dollars in pennies. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s like 300 pounds. It’s so many pennies that I have to tell him we don’t actually have enough on hand. We have to make a special order for him. There’s a small fee, but he doesn’t care.

A few days later, he happily loads up boxes and boxes of pennies and leaves.

A week later, he’s back — only now, he’s dragging in a hockey bag of loose pennies. I guess he spent some time opening all the rolls just to make it harder.

Customer: “[Local Business]’s owner refused to accept my payment. So… I’d like to deposit this bag of pennies back into my account, and I’ll bring the rest in later.”

Me: “Sir, we only take rolled coins; you’ll have to do that first.”

I’m not sure when Coinstar machines came out, but my small town definitely didn’t have one.

I missed the man’s return, but I heard that he eventually came back after going through the trouble of rerolling all his money — a lot of trouble to get right back to where he started.

If only he had listened.

One thing our bank does as a courtesy is print temporary checks at the bank for people who just need checks to pay bills very quickly. We have a machine that does all the encoding. A customer comes up to me with one of these checks.

Customer: “Why won’t [Home Improvement Store] take my check?”

These temporary checks don’t have check numbers on them.

Me: “I can’t comment on [Store]’s policy, but these temporary checks are for things like paying your phone bill.”

Customer: “Why would you give me checks that I can’t use?”

Me: “You can use them, just not for [Store].”

Customer: “But why won’t [Store] take them?”

Me: “I don’t work at [Store], so I don’t know.”

After going back and forth like this, he finally left saying, “Thanks.” As he was right at the door, he said over his shoulder, “…for nothing!”

I used to work at a large bank in the UK as a junior support analyst. In the early days, I surprised my colleagues by picking up shell and SQL scripting really quickly, and I became the go-to for creating bespoke reporting for issues that needed monitoring — usually PDFs with a list of discrepancies — that would go to executives to take into meetings.

I handed in my notice for a better role elsewhere, so I needed to hand over this work to someone in my team — my manager. (We were a small team.)

The handover went well, and the first thing my manager did was to make the report look nicer, with better fonts and company logos, as the report was being distributed to a wider audience in the company.

At the same time, an adjacent team — the one that looked after all the expensive printers — was getting looked into by the IT security team for distributing adult material at work, something my manager and I laughed about.

It turns out, my manager, being lazy, just used the URL of the company logo instead of adding it into the script.

The image was hosted by a conspiracy website in Berlin. I can only imagine that this site was seeing a ping/image download every morning at 8:35, and an admin there did a reverse IP trace, only to discover it was owned by the bank that the logo was from.

This German genius replaced the image with — to keep it SFW — a picture of a very beautiful woman with her legs spread while balancing on something large. It had been at the bottom of every report for approximately five weeks — thousands of emails.

It was discovered by an executive while he was holding his freshly printed report. The image was on the back page facing everyone else in the meeting, full of other executives.

I’m pretty sure nothing came of it, and everyone involved thought it was hilarious, but my manager got very lucky!

I work at a major bank as a teller. A middle-aged couple comes in.

Customer: “We want to deposit some cash into our account.”

The cash they want to deposit is a fake $5,000 bill on yellow paper with golden-colored foil and a picture of former president Donald Trump on it.

I honestly think that this is a joke, so I start laughing really hard, but they get angry.

Customer: “That bill came directly from Trump, and as such, it is legitimate! We were told that we could deposit it at any bank with either ‘US’ or ‘America’ in its name!”

Me: “Sir, ma’am, Trump has no authority to issue bills, and this is probably intended to be some sort of souvenir.”

They storm out in a rage.

Customer: “We’re going to bring this to another bank! That one will have ‘America’ in its name!”

Clearly, our bank with “US” in the name wasn’t American enough because it was just “US” and not “USA”.

I wished them luck on their way out the door, but that only seemed to make them angrier.

Early on Monday morning, a young couple came into the bank.

Couple: “We’re on vacation, and our card was taken by the ATM yesterday.”

Me: “We are not normally able to return cards to customers; we mail them back to their bank of origin.”

Couple: “But we’re on vacation from the USA. We need our card!”

They showed me their passports.

I got permission from my manager to retrieve the card, and I photocopied the papers and returned the card to them.

Five minutes later, they sheepishly walked back inside. They had tried the card at the ATM again, and the ATM had confiscated it once more.