Shops have started to open up after the quarantine, so I treat my family to their first take-away in months. The hype is unbelievable with queues at every store and traffic jams all over the city. It’s like they are giving the food away.

I stop by a walk-in sandwich shop a few days later. Inside, I see two women at the counter who both seem to be in their twenties. As I join the queue, it seems that the first is finished and the second is choosing her salad.

Woman #2: “No salad.”

Worker: “None at all?”

Woman #2: *With heaps of attitude* “Uh, no! Mayo! I want mayo on that.”

Worker: “Mayonnaise, okay.”

Woman #2: “More. More!”

The worker dutifully fills the sandwich with mayonnaise; at this point, it looks more like cake frosting. A thick layer covers nearly all of the meat and cheese. It looks disgusting and I must be staring, as the second woman glares at me.

Woman #2: “Hey, [Woman #1], you want a cookie?”

She glares at me again.

Woman #1: “Yeah, get me one.”

Woman #2: *Insincerely* “Oh, no! They only have six left! Oh, well, some people won’t be getting any at all.”

She looks at me like she has won some grand scheme.

Woman #2: “Give me allll six.”

They leave, cackling. I turn to the other worker to pay, utterly bemused.

Worker: “Did you want a cookie? I have more to put out; we didn’t have a chance yet.”

Me: “Not really, thank you. I’m not sure what that was about.”

Worker: “Oh, they come in quite regularly. The one on the left, [Woman #2], scoops the extra mayo out with the cookie and eats it like a dip!”

I got my food and left. I wish I had chosen anything other than mayo.

Related:
A Big Mayo No No, Part 5
A Big Mayo No No, Part 4
A Big Mayo No No, Part 3
A Big Mayo No No, Part 2
A Big Mayo No No

I am at the electronics store one day. I’m a bit of a videophile and have just recently upgraded my TV and Blu-Ray player to 4K models, so I am excitedly picking up a few movies on 4K to test out the system. I snag about four movies and go to stand in line. There is a man who looks to be in his late fifties or early sixties ahead of me. He turns around and glances at the movies I am holding.

Customer: “Pfft. Show-off.”

I am not sure I heard him properly.

Me: “What was that?”

Customer: “I said you’re a show-off. Buying that overpriced crap! My son is the same way. DVD was perfect enough! You don’t need this Blu-Ray, 4K, jib-jab nonsense! You’re just spending money to say you’re spending money! Go put them back!”

Me: “Okay… I’m sorry, I guess?”

Customer: “Go put them back!”

Me: “Uh… no?”

Customer: “Go. Put. Them. Back. You don’t need them!”

Me: “Dude… leave me alone!”

Customer: “You should put them back!”

He then scowls and turns back around. When he gets up to the register, he starts ranting and telling the cashier I’m a jacka**. When he is finally done and I get up to the cashier, he turns around as he leaves and shouts one last thing.

Customer: “F****** SHOW-OFF!”

I have no clue what the guy had against me buying 4K discs, but at least the story had a silver lining; the discs looked fantastic on my display! And “Go put them back!” became a bit of a running joke with my friends for a while after I told them the story.

Related:
I Got 9.99 Problems And You’re All Of Them
I Got 244 Problems And You’re 422 Of Them
I Got 99 Problems, And… We Should Really Get Out Of Here
I Got 99 Problems And You’re Sixty Of Them
I Got 99 Problems And All Of Them Are Unpaid For Items

I’m in the living room on my computer and my wife is asleep in the bedroom. She talks in her sleep a lot.

I hear her mumbling.

Me: “Honey?”

Wife: “How long?”

Me: “How long what?”

Wife: *Impatiently* “How long do I have to be in the hamster ball?”

Me: *Laughing* “You’re not in a hamster ball.”

Wife: “BUT HOW LONG DO I HAVE TO BE IN THE HAMSTER BALL?!”

Me: “You’re asleep, honey. You’re fine.”

Wife: *Sounding offended* “I am NOT.”

Me: “I promise, you are.”

Wife: “I’m not asleep! I’M IN A HAMSTER BALL!”

She began snoring immediately. I woke her up for real a few minutes later because I was laughing so hard.

My sister and I are on vacation in Haiti, and we go down to sit on the beach. I spot it first.

Me: “Hey, there’s the beach. I’m going to it.”

I figure that she’ll be right behind me, but when I turn around, there’s no one! I figure that she went to the bathroom or got some drinks, and I spread out my towel. Many minutes go by, and I’m wondering where exactly is she. We don’t have our cellphones in this country, so I can’t text or call her.

Finally, she emerges, looking frazzled.

Sister: “There you are! You disappeared!”

Me: “I told you I was going to the beach. Where were you?”

Sister: “Looking for you, and then I got jumped on by a group trying to sell me a doll for voodoo!”

Me: “What?! Seriously?”

Sister: “They dragged me into this shop full of potions and creepy demonic masks. It was horrible.”

Later, I asked her to show me this shop, and she did. It wasn’t as bad as I thought, but it did have statues of fornicating animals. I couldn’t help laughing, and the women were very offended and shooed me out! We won’t be going back.

I worked in retail in the late 1980s. One of my coworkers was an unbelievably stingy woman. Amongst the many examples I can give you: she would pay in exact change for anything, would walk a mile in the rain to save two cents on groceries, go to thrift stores or haggle to buy clothes for her children — and always at least a size too small, I noticed — and would wear the same outfit every day until it fell apart or she really needed a shower. Speaking of which, she would use soap from the employee bathroom during breaks instead of buying her own. Here are some memorable instances of her penny-pinching.

When we were being given a raise of $3.50 a day, she asked, “Could you possibly give me this week’s money in advance? I need to buy extra gas.”

My boss asked, “Why?”

She replied that her daughter needed a new Girl Scout uniform. When he said he couldn’t do this, she said, “Fine, I’ll sort it out myself.”

When I saw her daughter delivering Girl Scout cookies, she was wearing a uniform with a massive tear underneath her armpit and dried mud on the hem. I asked her why and she shrugged, saying, “Mom said she can’t afford to sew it up.”

Now, my family wasn’t poor by any stretch of the imagination. True, my coworker worked in retail, but her ex-husband earned more than enough to pay alimony checks. I asked why she hadn’t asked him for more and was told that she didn’t want to spend money on a stamp.

Another example is when we were holding a Christmas celebration. I had brought in a box of chocolates, as everyone was bringing their own food. There was quite a bit leftover, and even a quiche that had been out-of-date; the person who had brought it in had misread the label and threw it in the trash. Guess what happened to the leftover food? That’s right; my coworker took it all home. She said to me, “Why waste going to the grocery when this perfectly good food is enough to feed me for at least a day? Roughly three meals, to be exact.”

I had never heard of anyone who ate crackers, chicken Kiev, or quiche for breakfast, but there you go. She also took half my box of chocolates, in case you’re interested.

But what really took the biscuit didn’t happen at work, specifically. I was carpooling my own kids to soccer practice and had offered to take my coworker’s son, as well; I promised that I would give him a uniform as my own kids had outgrown theirs. I arrived back at the house with its overgrown front yard and saw that my coworker had stapled the curtains together in the front room and duct-taped cardboard over her kids’ window.

When I asked why, she told me, “Why bother getting a blind when this is much cheaper?” or something like that.

My coworker lived in a two-story house with excellent plumbing and heating and in a good area, but she washed laundry in the bathtub, sometimes after her children had been in it, collected bottles and cans that the family used and sold them to a recycling plant — not that that is a bad idea in itself — had oranges on forks as an after-dinner treat, made her daughter give her all of her babysitting money when she grew old enough to go on a regular basis, let a graffiti mark on the ceiling stay there for ten years, gave her son a Barbie backpack for high school because it was going for cheap at the retail and made him keep it for four years, and broke the handle off the freezer door and never got it fixed.

However, she died ten years ago at a relatively young age and left each of her children $70,000. So I guess that’s something.