I pick up four somewhat drunk men around the age of thirty in the centre of Copenhagen. After they get in the taxi, I ask where they’re going. 

Customer #1: “Just drive south along the coast. We’re getting off in four different places.”

Within a few minutes of driving, I’m asked by the computer running the meter, the GPS, and so on, where I’ll end up and when I expect to be there. Because of this and because some people do tend to fall asleep when they’re a bit drunk, I ask where the last one of them is going.

Customer #1: “I’m going to [City thirty-five km south of Copenhagen].”

Me: “Where exactly in [City]?”

Customer #1: “It’s a very small town outside [City] called [Town].”

As it happens, I grew up in that very small town and I still have family living there, my mother being one of them.

Me: “Where are we going in [Town]?”

Customer #1: “It’s a small street called [Street].”

He is going to the very same small street my mother lives on.

Me: “And which number are we going to?”

Customer #1: “It’s number seven.”

I then look at him in the rear-view mirror.

Me: “That’s the new wooden house, isn’t it?”

His lower jaw actually dropped and I could almost see him thinking something along the lines of “Rain Man.”

I didn’t tell him that I’d passed that house thirty-five kilometres away numerous times, while they were building it, when visiting my mother further down the street.

I’m fifteen, in eighth grade, and we are having history class. Our teacher is a very calm, tall, big guy who gives this vibe of being a cool, laid back person in practically all situations.

In my class are four girls who are usually quite good at following along in class, but not today. Today they decide to be very — loudly — chatty after class starts. 

Our teacher just looks at them while quietly marking down who is present. After a while, the teacher speaks out loud to all of us in a sort of wondering way.

Teacher: “Can you be absent while still being present?”

All of us students, besides the four girls, think about it and slowly agree. Without paying any attention to the teacher, the four girls just wave their hands in a “whatever” gesture.

Four Girls: “Yes, yes. Sure, you can.”

Then, they go back to chatting.

Teacher: *With determination in his voice* “All right, then I’ll mark all of you four girls as being absent in this class.”

You should have seen how fast these four girls started to pay attention, declaring that he could not do that, since they were in the classroom. I don’t think we ever got it clear if the teacher did actually mark them as absent or not, but the four girls never did the same thing in his class again.

Some of my relatives come from Greece, and this is probably why some of the other students in my class loved to ask me whether we ate dogs at home while flaunting a mock-concerned expression. When I told them people don’t eat dogs in Greece, they would gleefully inform me that they had eaten dog while in Greece. “The waiter told me so himself!”

I found it to be an odd lie, but as these kinds of statements would usually come from students who were very fond of attention, I figured it was just one of the many lies they told to get attention and/or bully me. It was just odd that three people in my class told the same lie.

The summer before I started my last year at that school, my family and I went on vacation to Corfu. This time the vacation was a bit more interesting, as we spent time with some of the friends of my family who had kids who could speak English.

Most of them were a couple of years older than me. All of them either worked as waiters in restaurants or had done so earlier, so of course, I told them about my idiotic classmates and their ridiculous statements about eating dogs. I expected them to be annoyed about the implicit racism, but instead, they all laughed. It turns out that if guests in the restaurant were rude, they’d tell the guests that they had just eaten dog, hoping that the rude guests would vomit. They’d figure that since rude guests usually didn’t tip well anyway, they might as well be rude back.

When I came back to school after the summer, one of the girls in my class came to me and asked in the most innocent tone if I had eaten dog during my vacation.

Me: “I told you already: they don’t eat dogs in Greece!”

Classmate: “Yes, they do. I already told you the waiter told me so himself.”

Me: “And had you, by any chance, been rude to him before he told you this?”

Classmate: “…”

Me: “Yeah, he was trying to make you vomit as payback for your rudeness. I hung out with several people who work as waiters this summer and they all said that this is a very common way to get payback.”

Cue several other classmates looking embarrassed. Funnily, none of the idiots ever repeated their ridiculous claim again.

When customers buy from us, the articles get shipped from our warehouses. If the shipping gets lost either in delivery or return, in most cases, we will ask the customer to fill out a legal statement and send it to us by email. It’s for basic information about the customer, the article that got lost, date, and a signature.

Most customers get it right after one or two errors — sometimes it is just an issue with the picture being big or clear enough to read — but this caller refuses to do it at all because it’s hard.

Caller: “If I — a lawyer! — think it is difficult to fill this out correctly, how difficult do you think it is for a cashier at a grocery store or a 7/11 kiosk?”

Lady… you’d better get down from that high horse. The rest of us are only seeing you from an unflattering angle. 

Related:
Just Lawyered Yourself, Part 2
Just Lawyered Yourself

Back in 1970, my uncle and aunt took my younger brother, then age four, and me on a trip to the original Legoland in Denmark. 

About halfway there, we were driving on a main road with a speed limit of 80 km/h. As we drove over the top of a hill, there was a sign saying 60 km/h, and immediately after that there was a cable or something running across the road which I was told was used to measure the speed of all the cars driving over it. 

At the bottom of the hill, my uncle was waved to the side of the road by a policeman.

The policeman checked my uncle’s driver’s license, and after a while, he handed him a piece of paper which I now know must have been a fine. He then told my uncle to have a nice day and to drive carefully.

This was the moment my little brother lost all faith in the police, and he asked the policeman: 

Brother: “Aren’t you going to bring him in?”