I am in charge of my school’s social media account. The principal insists that he must approve every photo I post to the account. He emails me one day.

Principal: “You recently posted pictures of [Event] without my approval.”

Me: “You emailed me those pictures and told me to post them.”

Principal: “You still need to get my approval.”

He’d forgotten he was the one who sent me the pictures but didn’t want to admit it. So, from then on, every time he sent me pictures to post, I’d immediately send them right back asking if I could post them.

I’m a librarian. I’ve just received a large order of books, but something’s not right. I call the publisher.

Me: “Hi, I ordered a bunch of books from you and paid for processing. However, all the bar codes and spine labels came in an envelope, instead of already attached to the books, which I paid for.”

Representative: “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Me: “So, can I get a credit for the $5 I paid to have them come already attached?”

Representative: “We can’t offer you credit. If you like, we can send you a mailing label, you can box them back up and ship them to us, and we’ll stick the labels on and return them to you.”

Me: “You’d rather pay like fifty dollars in postage and delay my order for over a week, rather than give me a five-dollar credit?”

Representative: “Um… Yeah… We’ll credit you.”

I’m a substitute school bus driver, filling in for my full-time coworkers when they get ill, take a vacation, drive a field trip, or are absent for whatever reason. Most students don’t really care as long as I get them to where they’re supposed to go, and they simply get on without comment beyond perhaps, “Is this [Route]?”

One bright spring day, though, an elementary student got off the bus with a wave and a big, friendly smile.

Student: “Thanks for the ride! Your hair is so pretty! I love it!”

I smiled and thanked her.

Student: “You look like a Ghostbuster!”

Me: *Confused* “Th-thank… you?”

She nodded confidently.

Student: “It’s a compliment.”

I was too confused to ask for further clarification as she skipped down the road to her home.

I’m a white woman with dark, curly/wavy hair and a body type between Sigourney Weaver and Melissa McCarthy, so maybe she meant one of them? I’d be happy with either. I just hope she didn’t mean I look like Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, or Harold Ramis.

In sixth grade, my history teacher once gave us a fairly easy test, but with a question on a topic that we hadn’t learned in class. Being a huge history nerd, I had no problem answering it, not even thinking much about it.

When she gave the test results back, everyone had an eight; they had just missed the last question. I, however, had a zero, even though everything was correct.

Me: “[Teacher], why did I get a zero?”

Teacher: “Since we haven’t covered that topic yet, it’s clear that you cheated.”

Me: “I just love history; I’ve already read about that topic just for the sake of it.”

This happened in 2006, so there was absolutely no way I could have Googled the question on a smartphone, and she kept all our textbooks during tests. She looked in my desk and even in my backpack. She found no evidence of cheating, but she still insisted I had cheated.

I decided not to argue with her and instead took it to the principal. Since cheating accusations were taken very seriously at my school, the next day, my parents, the teacher, and I were called to the principal’s office. After my teacher explained the whole situation, my father went straight to her.

Father: “So, you wrote a question on a topic that you hadn’t taught, expecting everyone to fail to answer, and then you punished the only student that answered? Why did you put that question in the first place? Did you put it intentionally to lower their grades, knowing that the highest grade would be eight? Are you such a bad teacher that you don’t even know what you have taught? Or are you such an a**hole that you feel the need to bully some twelve-year-olds because you know more about history? And since [My Name] knows history, you decided to bully him?”

My teacher was livid. She tried to answer but couldn’t find the words.

To be honest, before this, the teacher had been actually a very good teacher, and I did learn a lot with her. Sadly, this wasn’t the first time she had picked a student to bully, and she was fired on spot.

When I was in grade school in the 1980s and ‘90s, the staff would have a Native American come visit and talk to the whole school. He dressed in full garb with a chief’s headdress. He brought a Tom Tom, and a lucky few of us got to play it with him, keeping a steady rhythm like a heartbeat. He would also answer questions like, “What do kids play with on the reservation?”

Native American: “The same things you play with, like Nintendo.”

One student asked how he got the bald eagle feathers for his headdress as most of us somehow knew it was illegal to have them in your possession even if you found them on the ground. I will never forget his answer. He looked out across the auditorium and held up his hand.

Native American: “Kids, I’m going to say two bad words.”

He paused for a second and held up a finger for each word he spoke.

Native American: “‘Government’ and ‘Forms’.”