The charity shop where I volunteer has a strict policy that only two customers are allowed in at any given time for health reasons. While most have been understanding about this, there are always a few exceptions.
A middle-aged man walks past a queue of people waiting outside the shop and starts to enter the shop.
Me: “Sir, please could you wait outside? We’re only allowing two customers in at a time.”
Clearly seeing this as a personal slight, the man snaps.
Customer: “Where does it say that?”
His wife slapped him on the arm, pointed at the three-foot-tall sign in the window, and dragged him away. If she ever comes in without him, she’s getting my volunteer discount.
Related:
Behind Every Angry Man, Is A Long-Suffering Wife
After a few months of wearing masks, my workplace switched to “face shields” — plastic shields covering the face, strapped onto a band or nose clip — to reduce stress on our part while still fulfilling company (and other) rules.
Since temperatures started to rise again, a coworker of mine brought fresh ice cream on cones from a shop directly next to ours for us to enjoy.
Remember the face shields? I surely forgot, only reminded after I licked the inside of the screen and squished the ice cream on the other side of it.
We have a national coin shortage due to the health crisis. As a result, our self-checkouts are credit or debit card only. There are bright orange signs in front of the self-checkout area and at each station.
As soon as you scan your first item, there is a prompt reminding you that it’s cards only and asking if you want to proceed. You have to press “no” or “yes” to continue. “Yes” is the second option.
Having read many stories of people managing to ignore the most blatant signs on this site, I have to ask the person manning the area a question.
Me: “Do people still try to pay with cash?”
Cashier: “All day long!”
Related:
Check Yourself Before You Self-Checkout, Part 3
Check Yourself Before You Self-Checkout, Part 2
Check Yourself Before You Self-Checkout
My mother has a bad habit of changing subjects mid-conversation and then getting upset that we haven’t followed along with her train of thought.
We are talking about a recent illness outbreak that is not very far from us. She then mentions that they had a lady come out to care for my invalid father, that she didn’t wear a mask, and that she mentioned that she had been to the outbreak hotspot that day so they had made a complaint to the care providers.
Mother: “She recently had a baby; she should have known better. She named him Joe. Joe! Joe’s got lung cancer that’s gone to his brain.”
I am horrified to hear that about a baby.
Me: “Oh, my God! Was he born with it?”
Mum: “What are you talking about?”
Me: “Was the baby born with cancer?”
Mum looks at me as if I am the dumbest person on earth and talks to me the same way.
Mum: “No, you remember Joe, your sister’s stupid ex-husband? That’s who I am talking about. You’re as bad as your father; he never listens to me, either.
Me: “What did you expect? One moment you are talking about a baby named Joe and the next you tell me that Joe has cancer. I couldn’t tell that you were talking about two different people.”
Mum just shrugged. She can’t understand how we get so frustrated with her when she does things like this. It makes sense to her, so why wouldn’t it make sense to others?
During the global health crisis, my mother is out of work due to school closures — she works for a school district — so she fills her idle time by making cloth masks for friends and family. She runs out of elastic for straps early on, and since most of the fabric and craft stores in our areas are closed, she places an order online for a roll of elastic. She’s given a tracking number and she waits for it to arrive.
And waits… and waits… and waits…
At first, we assume that the shipment is simply delayed due to the current global crisis; mail and shipments, in general, are slow at the moment. But when she checks the tracking information online a week after the order was supposed to arrive, she finds that the package has gone from the original shipper in Oklahoma to a town in Nevada… to California… then back to Nevada… then to Utah… and then back to Nevada.
Weeks pass, and soon checking the tracking information on this package has stopped being annoying and has become hilarious. Every evening, Mom checks the tracking number and goes “Where will my package end up tonight?” And for whatever reason, it keeps bouncing between random cities throughout the USA and this town in Nevada — a town whose name isn’t even remotely similar to the name of our hometown in Idaho.
Mom does finally contact the company, which gives her a full refund for the wayward package… and the package itself finally turns up on our doorstep over two months later, battered and dirty. I still think Mom got her money’s worth in entertainment just from tracking this package’s back-and-forth journey across the country.
