Many moons ago, I used to help run a sports scheme for my local municipal area in my country during the school holidays. Kids aged five to twelve could come along, their parents would pay a heavily subsidised small nominal fee, and get a cool four-hour sports session of soccer, basketball, tennis, etc. It ran very successfully and was really popular.

Around halftime, there would be a break to get a drink and a snack. There was a little 7-Eleven-style store just around the corner from the field/grass where we ran the scheme, so kids could get refreshments if they had money. We tended to walk everyone down there as there was a nice seating area outside the shop.

The trouble was, the kids started buying the most sugary snacks, candy, and drinks they could, and ended up hyper for the next hour, then had a sugar crash and were irritable little horrors for the final half hour. Magically, they’d all be fine about pick-up time.

To get around this, I banned the kids from buying anything sugary, and only savory snacks or fruit with water could be purchased. This lasted two days before the entitled parents of these little darlings complained to my boss that I wasn’t letting their kids buy whatever the h*** they wanted.

I was told by my boss to just let them buy whatever they wanted again, because apparently, “you’re not their dentist, it doesn’t matter what they buy!”

Fine, you wanna play rough, let’s do this.

From then on, we didn’t go to the shop at half-time, we went forty-five minutes before the end. They had just enough time to get super annoying and hyper before it was home time, then their parents had to deal with their sugary carnage at home. I kept it that way till the end of the summer and felt so much delight at these entitled a**holes having to deal with their own kids being awful, day after day.

The next summer, nobody complained when I went back to regulating their purchases at snack time. Win-win!

Volunteering at a summer camp, I am helping put together “pillow treats”: little candies with a nice note on them for the campers to find on their pillows before bed. As I’m adding the notes to the candies, I realize we are going to run out of candy well before we run out of notes. I go to the volunteer in charge of the pillow treats.

Me: “Hey, are there any more candies for the pillow treats?”

Volunteer: “No, I bought two packs of sixty and printed a hundred and twenty notes, so that should be enough.”

Me: “Well, we’re out of candies and we’ve got about twenty notes left.”

Volunteer: “What?! I know I ordered enough!”

We dig through the trash and pull out the bags that the candies came in. She points to a big circle with numbers in it printed on the front of the bag.

Volunteer: “See?! Sixty!”

Me: “…calories per serving.”

She stares at the bag blankly for a second before closing her eyes and laughing at herself in chagrin. I manage to locate the actual number of candies in the bag (fifty, located on the nutritional info panel), and we are able to supplement with a different kind of candy to finish the pillow treats.

My eight-year-old daughter went to a church-sponsored day camp with a friend of hers. She came home giggling.

Daughter: “Mom, at the snack table, they had a bowl of apples and a bowl of cookies. There was a sign on the apples saying, “Take only one. God is watching.” But the sign on the cookies said, “Go for it. God’s watching the apples!””

I work in a camping and outdoor supply department. I’m straightening up the wall of sleeping bags when a customer walks over holding a big tent bag.

Customer: “This says it sleeps four. Does that mean four people can actually sleep in it?”

Me: “Yes, it’s sized for four adults. Though it might be a bit snug depending on how much gear you bring inside.”

Customer: “Right, because I bought a ‘sleeps two’ tent once and we barely fit with our backpacks.”

Me: “Yeah, the numbers are based on people lying down like packed pencils.”

Customer: “So it’s not accurate?”

Me: “I mean, technically, it sleeps four. Comfortably? That’s between you and your tolerance for elbows.”

Those must have been the magic words as he splurged on a six-person tent in the end.

My family and I went camping with another family. As we sat around the fire one evening, the other family’s father mentioned being skeptical of the moon landing. (He was born in the late 1970s, and this happened when he was near forty and I was about thirty-five.) Intrigued at meeting a “Moon Landing Is A Hoax” person in real life, I asked what made him question it.

Him: “The more I look into it and research it, I just don’t see how we could have made it to the moon back in the 1960s.”

Me: “So, you’re only unsure about Apollos 11 and 12, not 14 through 17?”

Him: “What are you talking about?”

Me: “The other times we went to the moon.”

Him: “Other times?”

Me: “Apollo 11 and 12 happened in 1969. Apollo 13 was in 1970 but didn’t make it. Apollos 14, 15, 16, and 17 made it to the moon like 11 and 12.”

Him: “Really?”

Me: “…Yeah. There were ten other Apollo missions, preparing for the eleventh mission to the moon. Apollo 1 is famous for all the astronauts dying on the launchpad when the shuttle caught fire. And before the Apollo missions, there were the Mercury and Gemini ones. Part of the Space Race.”

Him: “So… the movie Apollo 13 happened?”

The talk kinda petered out after that. But I very much question the “research” he did if he didn’t realize there were sixteen other Apollo missions, let alone five other moon landings.