Because I mentioned this story in a comment on this NotAlwaysLegal story, and it’s apparently rather popular, here’s the whole shebang.

I worked in a fast food restaurant, and this was my third robbery in as many months. I’d been working doubles due to an especially cruddy general manager calling in every day, and I was just dead on my feet as the only competent manager left in the store willing to work. (I was not paid enough to deal with that, but that’s a fiasco for another time…)

It was about 10:45 pm, and we were getting into the first big after-bar rush that hit us when my drive-thru cashier heard a rattling sound in the lobby. None of us thought much of it; it was an old building, after all, and it was summertime, so we just figured it was the AC unit. We got through the first rush mostly fine, if absolutely barren for fried foods, so I decided to just drop some fries and make everything else to order, as late as it was. 

The rattling sound came again, louder this time, and I was cussing my way back up to the lobby to make yet another maintenance report when all of a sudden, this scrawny guy in his twenties appeared from behind the pop machine. For reference, the center of the dining room was hidden behind this behemoth, so we had no clue he was out there in the slightest. 

At first, I thought that I’d locked him in and started apologizing profusely; I was on day fifteen of seven, but I felt awful that I’d missed a customer…

So I’d thought. 

He demanded chicken tenders and all the cash in the store, waving what I (and my coworkers) thought was a knife. He was definitely high on something, and something inside me simply… snapped. I told him in the deadest voice I’ve ever produced:

Me: “You’ll be waiting ten minutes for the fryer. And I only have fifty bucks available. All the other registers have been removed and the cash dropped, and I just cleaned out the drive-thru’s excess cash before the last rush.”

I’m guessing it was due to the drugs, but he simply nodded and shuffled over to wait at one of the tables. In the stronger light over the table, the knife was revealed to be a piece of metal. I started the tenders, had my team hide in the back while I grabbed my phone, and breathed a sigh of relief when the sheriff’s deputy and a squad car showed up. 

The guy got pretty new bracelets and an attempted robbery charge.

And I made him pay for the tenders.

Related:
Forget Nerves Of Steel; This One’s Got Nerves Of Retail Exhaustion

I am helping some friends of mine, who are a couple, carry their new sixty-five-inch TV into their house. They are buying it because their old sixty-five-inch broke. (If you have cats, bolt down your electronics!)

Once the nice new TV is all set up:

Me: “What shall we do with the old TV?”

Friend #1: “Let’s put it in the new TV box.”

Me: “Are we taking it to the recycling center?”

Friend #2: “Leave it outside the porch for a few hours. We’ll take it if it’s still there.”

Me: “…if?”

I help them as instructed, and as they said, we leave the broken TV in the new box outside on their porch. We have dinner and chat for a little bit, and then, when it’s time to head to the dump…

Me: “Oh, hey! The box is gone!”

Friend #1: “Yup. We live in a neighborhood of thieves.”

Friend #2: “It sucks not being able to get secure deliveries, but it’s great when you need to save yourself a trip to the dump. Leave a box out the front for a few hours and it’ll be gone, guaranteed.”

Me: “Oh, wow.”

Friend #1: “I wish I could be there when they haul that TV to wherever they’re going and find out it’s no good…”

I live in a fairly small coastal town where not much usually happens, but this week, we made county-wide news with a case of attempted grand theft. The story has to be one of the best examples of “the more you read, the worse it gets” that I have ever heard.

Our most posh neighborhood consists of a lot of mansions on the water. Apparently, the suspect tried to steal an extremely expensive kayak from the dock in the backyard of one of these mansions… in broad daylight… by paddling away in the kayak!

But it gets better. What makes this neighborhood so expensive is not just that it’s on the water, but also that through some clever engineering, the waterways there are not subject to the coastal tides, so the rich people can enjoy their boats and docks twenty-four-seven. 

How did they achieve this? By closing off the waterways with locks! So, all the police had to do was to wait for the thief, furiously paddling in his getaway kayak, to get to the lock and then sit there — for five full minutes — waiting for the gates to open. 

Needless to say, the suspect was arrested, and the posh kayaks are safe in their docks once again.

I regularly use the same chain garage for any work I need on my car. Their building is squeezed into an oddly-shaped site in a busy part of the city that isn’t very practical, but they make it work.

Customers aren’t allowed past a certain point, so we drive our cars into a small area with several marked parking spaces, park, walk into the office to register our car, confirm what we brought it in for, and hand over the keys. Then, a member of staff drives the car back when they are ready for it. Once the work is finished on the car, because there are never enough parking spaces at the front, they put the cars in a yard behind the building until the owner arrives, and then a staff member drives it out to us at the front.

I have brought my car in for its MOT (an annual roadworthiness test). I drop it off in the morning and come back to the garage after work to pick it up. I drive a Fiat 500, a small model with a fairly distinctive appearance, in pastel green. I’ve been in the office to pay and pick up the paperwork, and the staff member behind the counter tells me that a mechanic is bringing the car around right now, so I step out the door of the office into the front area to wait.

As I step out, a woman who looks to already be in a huff walks in from the street and looks around, frowning. She spots me, hesitates, and then walks over and stands next to me, looking in the same direction as me but never at me. I have the sneaking suspicion that she has decided I look like I know what I’m doing and so is going to copy me. (I don’t know what it is about me, but this happens a lot.)

A few moments later, one of the mechanics drives my car around the corner from the workshop area. He’s going very slowly due to the awkward layout, and I start to move to the spot where I assume he is going to pull up. As soon as I take a step, the woman takes off running toward my car. Before the mechanic has even stopped it, she is alongside it and trying to open the driver’s door. I rush over, just as the mechanic opens the door to get out. I see he’s about to hand her the key.

Me: “Wait! That’s my car!”

Woman: “Nnno! Nnno!”

She yells this at me like she’s trying to stop a dog from jumping up at her. The mechanic pauses and holds onto the keys.

Mechanic: *To me* “What’s the registration of your car?”

Me: “It’s [correct registration].”

Mechanic: “Okay.” *To the woman* “This is this lady’s car. I’ll bring yours out next. What was the registration?”

Woman: “This is my car! The registration is [something similar to what I said but with the characters in the wrong order].”

Realising she got it wrong, she walks around to the front of my car to look at the plate and starts reading it off. Meanwhile, I show the mechanic the paperwork for the car which I am still holding, and he hands me the keys. The staff member from the office has come out to see what’s happening, and I think that I’d better speak with him, so I surreptitiously lock the car and put the keys in my bag.

As the guy from the office approaches, the mechanic points at the woman and says to him:

Mechanic: “I think she was trying to steal this car.”

The woman goes off like a rocket, stamping, swearing up a storm, and screaming that the garage has messed up and is sending her precious, beloved car off with a thieving w****! She then throws herself onto the bonnet — at least, she attempts to, but she misjudges it and slides onto the ground, thankfully without denting the car.

A manager then comes out of the office and approaches. The mechanic explains to her what has happened while the woman picks herself up off the floor, now loudly complaining about it being dirty. (It’s a garage, love.) To my surprise, the manager says this to the woman:

Manager: “Mrs. [Woman], we spoke about this last time. Just because a car is brought out while you are standing here, it doesn’t mean it’s your car. Please go into the office. I will deal with your paperwork and call for your car, and then you can leave.”

The way she says “leave” sounds very final, but I don’t think the woman notices. The fight goes out of her a bit, and she follows the manager and the office staff member back to the office while the mechanic looks over the bonnet of my car to make sure it hasn’t been damaged

We are still standing there when the woman’s car is brought out. It is a large, dark grey SUV, quite new but covered in scratches and dents. The mechanic and I both look from that car to mine, and I’m sure we are both wondering how she could possibly have mistaken my car for hers. It strikes me that she might be drunk or something.

Me: “Do you think that woman should actually be driving?”

Mechanic: “No. I think the manager is probably calling the police on her, though. That’ll be fireworks.”

Having had enough drama for the afternoon, I thanked him and left.

Related:
People Who Make You Think “How Are You Allowed To Drive?”

I’ve had a problem off and on with my landline phone for almost twenty years now. I am autistic, and I qualify under state law for a bare-bones, no-frills landline phone line for really cheap; the idea is that I have a phone to call 911 on if necessary.

For some reason that I have never discovered, the local phone company that supplies that lifeline landline is utterly convinced, beyond any reason, that I am operating a small business and the landline is my business phone line.

For the first few years living here, I averaged one telemarketing call and two mailed promotional letters inviting me to upgrade to a business phone line. I always said no because the basic business line doesn’t do anything my lifeline doesn’t with regard to voice calls, and while it works better for faxes or modems, I never used those on that line.

Then, one month, without my knowledge, they switched me to a business line, causing my phone bill to go from $12 a month to $90 a month. But I was on paperless billing because my monthly bill was fixed by law — $12 a month — so I just kept paying my $12, and the unpaid bills kept piling up.

Eventually, the phone company sent me a paper Final Notice in the mail, saying that if I didn’t pay my bill in full immediately, they’d cut me off and take me to court.

I probably should have let them do it, because it is illegal under state law for them to cut a lifeline plan, and the judge would not be amused about that fact, nor would the judge be happy that they had switched my phone line from a lifeline plan to an expensive business plan without permission from anyone with authority to sign contracts on my behalf.

But, I decided to skip the hassle and just point out the problem to the customer service representative on the phone.

My next bill — no longer paperless — showed the proper balance owed: $12.

But… ever since, I’ve been averaging one promotional letter per week from the phone company trying to get me to upgrade the phone service for “my” small business to one of their business plans, so I’m always wary of it happening again.