I am working at the customer service desk at a craft store when the phone rings.

Customer: “Hi, do you have any geese?”

Me: “Uh… geese?”

Customer: “Yeah, like a little goose to put on your desk?”

I figure she means a figurine or a plushie. It’s close to Easter, so maybe we have something in our seasonal section.

Me: “If you hold for a minute, I’ll go check for you.”

I look in our seasonal Easter section but don’t find much.

Me: “Ma’am, I found some duck plushies, but no geese.”

Customer: “Well, do the ducks look like geese?”

Me: *Utterly dumbfounded* “Umm… I’m sorry, but I’m not an expert on the differences between ducks and geese. You could come in and look at our selection to see if anything works for you?”

Customer: “Okay, thank you!”

The customer was polite and friendly the whole time. But really, who calls a craft store looking for geese?

While designing a Sherlock Holmes poster for a children’s theater group. 

Client: “You know how you have both Watson and Holmes? Just take out Watson and make Holmes bigger. Also, take out Sherlock’s hands.”

Me: “But then the notebook he’s holding will be floating…”

Client: “I can’t overstate how okay I am with a floating notebook.”

I am a forklift driver at a warehouse. The duty manager is telling me what needs to be done next when a guy storms up to him.

Customer: “You have way too many handicapped spaces in your parking lot! There are six spaces and there is a car in only one of them. I demand that this be changed! I mean, if they are handicapped, how much can they carry?”

Duty Manager: “I’m sorry you feel that way, but the number of spaces is determined by law. Before we opened, the Fire Marshall measured the size of our sales floor and gave us a maximum occupancy number, and that is what determines how many spaces we, by law, must have.”

Customer: “Thank you. I did not know that. I am going to go home and write my congressman right now.”

He then turned and stomped out.

I apparently have some kind of death wish, because I start working in a large store the last week of October. It is a frenzy, and I am put in charge of the Toys and Electronics sections, the two busiest sections for this time of year.

By the time Christmas Eve comes around, I am pretty comfortable in my role and closing the store. I am working with a training manager who is about my age but pretty out of touch with anything not dealing with hunting or sports.

We are getting ready to close the store and I hear wailing — not screaming, but it sounds like someone’s world is ending.

I round the corner and there is a woman losing her mind and my poor training manager just looks helpless. I get the mental “HELP ME” scream.

Me: “Is there something I can assist with today?”

Woman: “I’M THE WORST GRANDMOTHER EVER! I FORGOT WHAT KIND OF TOY I’M SUPPOSED TO GET MY GRANDDAUGHTER AND THEY ARE ON A PLANE, SO I CAN’T CALL AND ASK!”

Me: “Oh, no! Can you try to describe it to me?”

Woman: “It’s the one with the pictures.”

Me: “That doesn’t really narrow it down much. Can you remember anything else?”

Woman: “It says the pictures!”

While I am in my thirties, I don’t have children, but I can vaguely form a picture of what she is talking about. I can’t quite name it yet, but I definitely recall it from my days of being a youth assistant in my youth church growing up.

Training Manager: “I can walk you over to our infant section and we can look there and see.”

Woman: *Cutting him off* “I already looked there; I didn’t see it. They are going to ban me from being Grandma if I don’t get this toy!”

I highly doubt this, but [Training Manager] asks her to humor him, and they walk back over to the infant section. I have a hunch out of nowhere and walk to our tucked-away “Retro Toys” section, and there it is, staring me in the face: the “See-And-Say” in all its glory. I can barely hide my smile as I put the toy behind my back and track them down in the infant department.

Woman: “It isn’t here, it isn’t here.”

She just keeps repeating this over and over.

Me: “Ma’am, is this the toy you were looking for?”

She sees it and instinctively leaps at me giving me a surprisingly powerful hug.

Woman: “That’s it! That’s the toy! Oh, thank you, thank you, both of you! Thank you so much!”

Tears of joy are streaming down her face as she continues to hug both of us. After a few more seconds of gratitude, she puts the toy in her cart and says, in the coolest cool-granny way possible:

Woman: “Granny of the year, thanks to you boys!”

I never knew a ten-dollar toy could bring someone that much joy. Huh, neat.

I am the office food thief. I honestly consider it fair wages because I’m also the only one who cleans the refrigerator and the desks. I look for food that’s about to expire and I eat it. I also watch people’s lunches, write their names and the date on it if they forget, and make sure that if a lunch is in the fridge longer than a week and a half, it gets thrown away.

The new manager decides to do something about all this food theft. It is all me. I keep track of all the food in the office. My desk is closest to the fridge for a reason. She says it’s completely unacceptable and that if she catches someone stealing food she’s going to fire them.

So, I stop… and I also stop cleaning out the office fridge. Within about six months, the office fridge is so full of expired food and freezer-burned TV diners as to be unusable. The fridge itself stinks. Worse, certain coworkers have filled their desks with candy and snacks, bags with five chips, quarter-filled Cheetos bags, melted chocolates, etc. Those have attracted mice and insects.

I approach the manager and make an offer: I’ll take on the responsibility of keeping the fridge and desks clear of expired or old food, and in exchange, I can eat what I want.

The manager gives me a weird look like she thinks it’s weird that I like eating almost expired food, or maybe like she realized what was happening… but she accepts.

I take a few evenings after work is over and clean out the fridge with soap and water, check all the foods, throw out the old sack lunches, clean out the desk drawers with soap and water, install new mouse and insect traps, put a new de-stinkifier in the fridge, and go back to being the office food thief… with official sponsorship!