I work at the front desk at a clinic. I answer the phone, and it is an obvious (to me) scam, saying that the caller is from Apple and that our cloud data has been lost or stolen. I hang up, but after I do so, I think of a way to mess with the scammers and hope they call back. They do.

Scammer: “Hi. This is Apple calling to let you know that your cloud data has been lost. We need your login information immediately to retrieve it, or it will be gone forever!”

Me: “Oh, no!”

Scammer: “Yes, it is very important that you give us your login information so we can retrieve your data.”

Me: “My data is in clouds?”

Scammer: “Yes, your cloud data.”

Me: “How’d they get my data all the way up there? Do they put it in the chemtrails?”

Scammer: “…Ma’am?”

Me: “The chemtrails! In the sky! Is that how they put my data in the clouds? My manifesto about how the earth is flat and we’re being deceived by Reptilians at the top of the chains of power is up there! Did the government steal it?”

The scammer introduced me to curses I’d never heard before and hung up.

I hate shopping for bras, as I have a large chest and it’s hard to find bras in my size. I also don’t like being measured by the employees, as I hate being touched by strangers.

My mom goes with me to the store to help me get new bras. I wanted to get them online, but Mom talked me out of it, saying it’s better to do it in person so I can try them on.

We do have some help from an employee, who recommends certain sizes without measuring me. I am relieved, thinking that for once, I can get through bra shopping without being humiliated. But as we are paying…

Employee: “What size did you get?”

I am too embarrassed to answer, as I have social anxiety, there are other customers in earshot, and I don’t want to broadcast my bust size in front of strangers. The employee does not get the hint and asks again.

Employee: *More loudly* “WHAT SIZE DID YOU GET?”

My mom told her what we got. I was eager to get out of there. I told Mom she embarrassed me and that I would have preferred to get bras online, but she ignored my concerns and said again that it was better to get bras in person so we could make sure they fit.

From now on, I am getting bras online, regardless of what my mother thinks. I also complained to the store about that indiscreet employee.

Let’s go back to the year 2001. Cargo pants were fashionable and the penny was still in production. I was only fourteen years old, so I had no car, but it was fine; my parents lived close to the best ice cream place in town, which I walked to often. Amazing ice cream within walking distance? What on earth could be wrong here?

Well, to get to and from said ice cream, I had to walk past the gas station where an employee had taken to catcalling me every time I walked past. I could not get the yummy delicious ice cream without being treated to hollers of, “Nice t*ts! Why don’t you lick something else?” and so on and so on. For weeks.

Let’s just say it’s very stupid to harass people from your place of work; they know where to find you. And since I was only fourteen, I didn’t think to go to the manager of the gas station about his employee’s conduct, and I didn’t want it to turn into a he-said-she-said, no-harm-done situation. Because, again, it was the 2000s — how lame were security cameras? I was fourteen and angry and wanted my revenge to be painful.

So, I started my quest to collect pennies — as many pennies as I could get my hands on. You had pennies, I had nickels, dimes, and even quarters, and I would trade for them. It took about a week to collect just over $2 in loose pennies. People were so willing to part with them.

One ruined walk for ice cream later, and I knew my target was at work. Home I went to gather my hoard of pennies. Into those massive cargo pants pockets they went. One short jingling walk later — during which I wasn’t 100% sure my pants weren’t about to fall down due to the weight of 200-plus pennies in my pockets — I arrived at my destination and in I went.

I grabbed what I needed for a simple $2 transaction, a pack of Skittles and a red Gatorade, and to the till I went.

My target looked rather smug. I don’t know, maybe he thought his many unwanted invitations to [perform a sex act on him] had succeeded. That is, right up until I started pulling fistfuls of pennies out of those pockets and simply dropping them on the counter. They weren’t in a Ziplock. Nope, loose pennies all over the counter.

Of course, the right to refuse an overwhelming amount of coins is and was a thing. I believe anything more than fifteen pennies was considered excessive at the time and could be refused. And so he tried.

Employee: *Defiantly* “I don’t have to take that!”

But I was angry and my revenge would not be denied, so I shot back.

Me: “Oh, but you will. You clearly wanted my attention with all your hollering over the past few weeks. So, you’ll take those pennies or I’ll have a chat with your manager.”

And so he started counting, and I stood there repeating back all the “lovely things” he had been saying to me and interjecting random numbers in for good measure. He wasn’t smart enough to make piles of ten, not that I expected smart from a boy stupid enough to sexually harass women outside of his place of work. So I kept him there. His coworker opened another till to help other customers, but she made no moves to help him.

Once the transaction was finished, I took my purchase, and before I walked out the door, I told him:

Me: “If you ever catcall me again, it will be $5 in pennies, and I will be chatting with your manager.”

Ice cream trips were so blissfully free of catcalling after that.

I know that 99.9% of cashiers don’t deserve that mountain of coins. I just wanted to share my story of that 0.01% who got what they had coming.

This story is part of our Even-More-Highest-Voted-Stories-Of-2023-(so far!) roundup!

Read the next story!

Read the roundup!

I’m in line to buy a bagel. The girl at the counter looks like she’s seventeen, at most. In front of me are two guys in their thirties, and I’m not really paying attention to them, so it takes me a while to notice that they are making some VERY inappropriate comments. The girl at the counter keeps a completely stone-faced expression the entire time, only responding with things about the bagels these men are ordering in between harassing the poor girl. I’m about to say something when:

Guy #1: “Come on, baby, a cute little thing like you…”

Guy #2: “Yeah, a nice little chick who knows about holes…”

The girl suddenly throws a bagel on the floor, does a pirouette, and starts singing with a very raspy, hoarse voice.

Girl: “AHHHHHH, YEEEEEAAHHH… YOU GOTTA GET SCHWIFTYYYYYYY! YOU GOTTA GET SCHWIFTY IN HERE… OH, OH… IT’S TIME TO GET SCHWIFTYYYY…”

Guy #1: “Eh… what?”

Girl: “TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS AND YOUR PANTIES! S*** ON THE FLOOR!”

Guy #2: “Um…”

Girl: “I’M MISTER BULLDOPS!”

She just keeps doing this, with the dance and everything. The guys just leave. I think I hear one of them mumbling, “Is that like a meme we missed or something?

Me: “I’m so sorry I didn’t do anything; I didn’t really notice what they were saying at first. But that was awesome! You are my favorite person ever!”

Girl: *Shrugs* “It’s always fun to scare them away with a little crazy. Those two would not be able to handle my crazy.”

Me: “No, they would not.”

I come back to that bagel shop all the time. I called the head office to tell them an underage person should never ever be alone in there. Those idiots haven’t been back, but there’s always more where that came from. Although, I’m not really worried about that girl at all.

Related:
Fighting Creepy With Crazy

I spent a little over two years volunteering as a focus group tester for a very large gaming company. The idea was to test the boundaries of the game to see if you could find flaws and/or crash the game, as well as provide feedback on the gameplay. When you signed up with these guys, they gave you an application with a questionnaire asking what sorts of games you were interested in playtesting for them.

My preferred style of gameplay involves as much violence, destruction, and slaughter as possible, so I selected every genre where it was theoretically possible to cause carnage: shooters, real-time strategy, fighting games, etc. You know, the fun stuff that is not meant for anything below M-Rated.

Pretty soon, I got my first call to come in for a group. I was super excited. What kind of game would I get to see? Would it have guns? Swords? Epic space battles?

Nope.

It turned out that the only part of my application the company actually looked at was my gender. I happen to have a uterus, so I was put into a group with six or seven other young ladies and told to provide feedback on a new browser-based Flash game about caring for virtual babies.

It was the most G-rated, brainless, idiotic pile of nonsense I’ve ever had the displeasure of interacting with. The focus group could have involved elementary school kids happily, assuming kids that age wanted to pretend to be a very watered-down version of a mommy.

And for some reason, the other girls were eating it up. They kept asking questions like, “Do we get to dress them up?”, “How do we feed them?”, and, “Do they talk?”

The more I listened, the more irritated I got. The staff clearly expected an easy session where all the young ladies had zero knowledge or intention to actually test the game’s ability to function under stress.

After about twenty minutes of listening to fluff noise, I decided to ask a few questions of my own.

Me: “Would it be possible to starve the babies?”

Staff: “No, that’s not possible. The babies cannot die.”

Me: “Oh. Then would it be possible to neglect the babies to the point of inducing a psychotic break?”

Staff: “No, absolutely not. The babies cannot go insane.”

Me: “Well, would it be possible to somehow pit the babies against each other in gladiatorial combat? If I give my baby a sword, can he learn to dismember the flesh of his enemies? Is my baby large enough to wield a submachine gun?”

The only answer I got to any of those was a horrified stare.

Me: “I filled out the questionnaire. Why did the idiots who are processing those only look at my gender and not my preferences?”

There was some sputtering and an awkward, vague excuse about a mistake happening “somewhere.”

About a month later, I was called back to playtest another game. This time, it was a tactical shooter. I dragged that game through the toughest trenches of gameplay and soon broke their physics engine by filling a room with corpses.

I continued to be a focus tester for the next two years, and they never again asked me to provide feedback about babies. As a bloodthirsty uterus-bearer, I couldn’t have been happier. Maybe from now on, they’ll think twice before automatically assigning work based on an outdated stereotype!