In the second semester of my freshman year in college, I received a call early on a Sunday morning telling me that my favorite uncle had passed suddenly. I was distraught.

I had to go to the main office on Monday to get documents to get my absence excused for the funeral. It didn’t help that I was already having a rough few months with my boyfriend cheating on me, breaking up with me, and then dating my best friend — while we all lived in the same dorm. Going to the office and waiting in line, I was just zoned out.

I ended up getting the admin who tended to be abrupt sometimes, so I just laid out what I needed, choking back some tears, expecting a quick response and maybe some documents.

To my great surprise, she grabbed the paperwork and walked around to my side of the desk. She very gently explained everything I needed to have my absence excused, and she did it in hushed tones to keep it private. At one point, she put her arm around me to give me a small squeeze.

To that lady, I just want to say thank you; you were one of the few who gave me such kindness during one of the hardest periods in my life. You didn’t have to go those extra steps, but you did, and for that, you have my gratitude.

Warehouse work usually isn’t difficult — shipping/receiving, cleaning, pulling orders, using forklifts, and so on. The work itself isn’t hard, but sometimes those truck drivers you have to deal with can be a real pain in the back.

I am busy working on small parcels going out via [Shipping Company]. The parcel shipping station is about ten feet away from the shipping desk where truck drivers go when they show up for deliveries. While I’m doing this, a truck driver shows up at the shipping desk. He stands there for maybe sixty seconds as I finish the order I’m working on.

I grab a last-minute order that’s come through to ship out, and I take the order form and head out to the warehouse to pull the order. I address the truck driver on my way past him.

Me: “I’ll be with you in just a couple of minutes.”

Truck Driver: “I’ve already been waiting here for over twenty minutes.”

He starts to raise his voice as he continues.

Truck Driver: “I don’t understand why it’s so hard to get help around here!”

I stop in my tracks and turn to face the driver.

Me: “You’ve been standing there for about sixty seconds, not twenty minutes. I don’t appreciate your attitude, and now it’ll be longer before you get help from me.”

Truck Driver: “I won’t be treated like this, making me wait! It’s already been over twenty minutes! I want to speak to the manager!”

Me: “Go right ahead. He’s sitting in the office, right behind you.” *Points*

The truck driver’s eyes get wide and he slowly turns around to see my manager, who has stood up from his desk and is now standing in the doorway of his office.

Manager: “I don’t like your attitude. [My Name] told you he’d be right with you, and you decided to lie about how long you’ve been standing there. You’ve been in here now for maybe three minutes. You can either wait there patiently until we get around to helping you, or you can go sit in your cab and we can come and get you when we’re ready to help you.”

The truck driver didn’t say anything else and just walked out to his cab and waited for us to get him.

Back in 2019, my husband and I purchase tickets to see a well-known comedian at a local theatre in April 2020. For obvious reasons, the show gets postponed. The venue confidently picks a new date of April 2021. Everything will be fine by then, obviously! No shock that we receive an email a few weeks before the show to say that, too, will be rescheduled.

A few months go by, and the health crisis situation “improves” in the UK to the point where most similar events are now going ahead. I’ve heard nothing about when this show has been rescheduled to, so I email the venue asking what’s happening. I don’t hear back, but I’m not too worried. To be honest, we’d only be selling the tickets anyway, as my husband is CEV (clinically extremely vulnerable to [contagious illness]), and it wouldn’t be safe for us to sit in a packed theatre.

And then, one evening in March 2022, I get an email from the venue with information about current [health crisis] protocols to be aware of for the show… which is happening the next evening! What the f***?! I double-check my emails and, sure enough, this is the first I’ve heard from them since the show was postponed in the spring of 2021. I immediately email them to point this out and request a refund.

Over the course of the next month, I go back and forth with the venue. They claim they emailed about the new date but, when challenged, they cannot prove it. They deny receiving my email asking for the new date, but I show them evidence of having sent it to two of their email accounts. They say they can only offer a refund if requested a week before the event. I point out that this would be hard for me to do when they didn’t tell me the new date until twenty-four hours before the show!

Eventually, they offer me free tickets for any of their shows. I point out that this is no use to me as theatres aren’t safe for my family. They continue to refuse a refund, insisting it’s impossible.

Finally, I ask if they have a governing body I can escalate this to or if I should just go direct to Trading Standards.

Weirdly enough, I get an email offering me a refund not twenty-four hours later!

I was on a guided tour of a cave system that was used as a bomb shelter in the War, and it still had some of the old furniture and fittings. The caves were long and twisting, and the entire tour was lit by oil lanterns that we carried.

At one point, the guide wanted to show us how sound carried and just how dark it was, so he showed us a large metal oil tank and told us to remember it. Later, at a very deep part of the cave, he had us leave our lanterns in an alcove. Then, with just his one small lantern to light our way, he led us to a cavern and left us there, in the dark.

It seemed like we were there for an eternity, standing in the pitch black with no sound, just the odd drip of water. In reality, it was a few minutes later that there was a resounding BOOM that made us all jump, and the echoes trailed on forever… until it was silent again. And it stayed silent and dark until, in the distance, we saw the guide’s single lantern slowly approaching. We all fixated on this one point of light, waiting for it to get closer, when suddenly, right next to us, the guide loudly announced:

Guide: “So! Dark, isn’t it?” 

Cue much screaming and laughter. He’d left his lantern on the floor and crept up to us.  

Well played, sir.

I work as a cashier in a grocery store chain in the southeast US. We sell a large variety of products and offer many items that other stores aren’t always able to. However, like many things in the South, our store is a little behind the times. We do not have hand scanners at the registers in our store, so if a customer comes to our register with a heavy, large, or unwieldy item, we must either type in the code for that item digit by digit or pick up that item and scan it on the register.

For a portion of time, people were buying bundles of firewood, and I had to manually pick up and scan twenty-pound bags of firewood. It was exhausting and customers genuinely seemed concerned.

Only after the last of the firewood was bought was I finally told that there is a paper with the barcode I can scan instead of having to pick up the firewood itself.

The kicker? The self-scan section has hand scanners.