Yesterday, my mom was talking to her caregiver, who does chores for her and runs errands.

Mom: “How much would a thing of liquid coffee creamer be? We have a buck forty and no creamer.”

Caregiver: “It’s a little over two dollars.”

Me: “Oh. well, no big deal. We can get some on Thursday.”

Toward the end of [Caregiver]’s shift, she got up and said:

Caregiver: “I have to go get some papers for you to sign. I’ll be right back.”

She showed up twenty or thirty minutes later, holding a thirty-two-ounce container of French vanilla coffee creamer. She’d spent that time going from store to store, trying to find creamer for my mom. She didn’t even want to be paid back, but we insisted.

We’re buying her a sixty-four-ounce thing of coffee creamer (since she likes it, too) on Thursday because none of what she did was necessary or even asked for, but we are grateful for it.

I used to work for a payday advance company. I had a crazy lady complain to my manager that I had pocketed her money. The manager got the area general manager involved, who came into the store and showed the customer the camera footage of me handing her the money.

The crazy lady still argued that I had taken her money, so my manager apologized and gave her the amount of money she claimed I’d stolen! I was furious!

About two months later, the lady came back in and told the manager she had found the cash in her other purse. She never apologized to me and never paid back the extra cash she got from us. But she was banned from ever using that company again, so I counted it as a win.

I work in a small office as a design engineer. For the past couple of weeks, I have been designing a machine for a customer, and I finally reached the stage where I start putting in all the fixing screws, nuts, dowel pins, and so on. Dowel pins are used to make sure items that require precise location are positioned correctly and don’t move when you tighten the bolts. To make inventory simpler, I try to limit the different sizes to as small a number as possible.

I had just finished placing the last dowel of this size, and I looked at the assembly list to see how many dowels I’d just placed.

I spoke to no one in particular, but loud enough for the others to hear.

Me: “Wow! I’ve just placed sixty-six dowels in this tool!”

[Coworker] looked over at my screen.

Coworker: “That’s a lot of holes in there, Stephen. How many have you got?”

Me: “A lot.”

Coworker: “That’s going to cost a fortune to make.”

Me: “Well, they’re all needed.”

Coworker: “Where I used to work, we used to charge customers £2.50 a hole for centre drilling, drilling, and reaming.”

Me: “Was that price retail or hole sale?”

Everyone in the office groaned, apart from [Coworker], who just chose to ignore it.

This did trigger a long game of pun tennis, but you’d probably find it rather boring.

About fifteen years ago, my grandfather decided to turn the former site of his house’s air conditioning unit into a small garden. The man had a nuclear green thumb; he’d buy half-dead plants from various stores and turn them into what would be prize-winning beauties (if he cared about that).

At some point, he decided to grow some ornamental Thai chilis in this garden. While not exactly as hot as a habanero, these things are about twenty or so times as hot as a jalapeño, and they lack anything resembling complex flavor (as they’re cultivated for looks rather than edibility). This means that, despite being less hot than some peppers, they’re also less tolerable. He didn’t know this, though, and picked a few once they “ripened”, placing them in a basket on the counter once he found out the hard way.

Along came my mom and me for a visit. After some talking, my grandfather decided to cook dinner for us and invited us into the kitchen. He showed me a carton of Lactaid he had bought for me (since I have trouble digesting milk) and offhandedly mentioned the gallon of rainbow sherbet in the freezer.

Seeing these gorgeous-looking peppers on the counter, I made the bold claim about how much I love eating pickled jalapeños. He gave me a little smirk and sarcastically suggested I try one of the peppers. As soon as he turned his back, I grabbed one of the things, popped the whole thing in my mouth, and began chewing. He turned back to me just in time to see me swallow, and his face went white as a ghost.

I didn’t have to wait long to find out why. In less than a second, my mouth felt like it was on fire. He quickly grabbed the Lactaid out of the fridge, but before he could pour me a glass, I yanked the carton from his hands and started guzzling. Soon enough, this half-gallon carton was outright gone, my stomach hurt, and my mouth was still on fire.

I reached for a loaf of bread on the counter and just started eating. The bread would briefly quash the heat, only for it to come back in full force. Before I knew it, the entire loaf was gone, and I’d started on the second. At that point, my grandfather was sweating nervously, and he grabbed the gallon tub of sherbet and a spoon. A good thing, as I quickly finished the second loaf and was still in agony. Blisters were now forming on my lips — a testament to how ill-advised this move was, no doubt. I started chowing down on the sherbet, while my mom called poison control.

As the phone call went on, my mom got a sheepish look on her face. She thanked the person on the other end, hung up, and told my grandpa to put the sherbert up. She then asked if he had an unused toothbrush. I was instructed to go into the bathroom, brush my entire mouth thoroughly, and come back out. Once that was done, she put petroleum jelly on my lips to soothe the blisters. It worked, but I was now incredibly nauseous from having consumed so much food. Dinner was canceled because I needed to lay down (not that I would have been able to eat it anyway), and I was directed to the couch.

I’m not sure if I had a crash course in hot foods that seriously upped my tolerance and messed with my perceptions, or if my mouth legitimately became less capable of detecting flavor, but non-spicy food seemed flavorless for several years after that. I actually ended up spending the following half-decade adding various hot sauces to pretty much everything I ate; otherwise, I found even my favorite foods horribly bland.

My fiancé and I offer sailing holidays. People book a berth in a cabin and live and sail with us for one week. This, of course, means that we actually live with our customers and spend a lot of time with them in very limited space. This happened before I met my fiancé, but I’ve heard him tell the story plenty of times, and I found all the emails, reports, and protocols from this story on my fiancé’s old laptop. It was a very interesting read.

The story takes place in Sardinia in August, which is super-duper-high-season and everything is super expensive. Really, the prices are ridiculous! Sardinia happens to be a hotspot for the rich and the famous, and they pay for their privacy by jacking up the prices.

It was a normal week for [Fiancé]. The boat was full of a mixture of people: two couples and two friends. The groups didn’t know each other before the trip.

One of the women from one of the couples was the week’s treasurer, meaning she collected money from the rest of the crew to pay for the week’s expenses, like fuel, mooring fees, etc. Because it was August, they had to pay a lot. The two friends, two women in their thirties, never had enough money to pay their part and were always in “debt”. They repeatedly said that they had tried getting money but the ATM wasn’t working, and they kept making other excuses just like that.

On day two, [Fiancé] talked to them.

Fiancé: “We are not leaving this marina until you pay your part.”

They were a bit pissy about it but agreed.

[Fiancé]’s bulls*** radar kicked in, and he decided to sleep outside in the cockpit that night. Lo and behold, at 3:00 in the morning, the two friends tried to sneak out with their luggage. They hadn’t thought anyone would notice and were horrified to see [Fiancé] out there, stopping their sneaky departure.

Fiancé: “Where are you going at this time of night? And with all your luggage?”

Friends: “Oh, we’re leaving. For good.”

[Fiancé] woke the rest of the crew up and told them to check their things. Oh, no. Cameras, phones, tablets, etc., were all gone! And the ship treasurer’s wallet, containing around 1,000€, was missing, too!

The two friends were busted and gave back the things they had tried to steal.

Fiancé: “You two go to the next ATM and get the money you owe. I’ll keep your luggage as a deposit until then.”

They grudgingly did, and then they were given all their luggage back and unceremoniously banned from the boat.

The following day, the women came back with the Italian police, claiming that my fiancé had stolen their stuff. After listening to [Fiancé] and the rest of the crew, the officers just shrugged, pointed to the German flag on the boat, and said:

Officers: “German flag, German problem.”

That was it, or so everyone thought. [Fiancé] continued the trip with the remaining crew, and everyone was happy the two women were gone. 

Two days later, the booking agency called [Fiancé], saying he had to take the woman back. Apparently, the MOTHERS of the two women — adult women in their thirties! — had called the agency. The women had no money and couldn’t afford a hotel.

[Fiancé] absolutely refused. The agency made it very clear that they would hold him financially responsible for any consequences coming from this.

Of course, the women sued. They wanted money back for the trip, the flight, the hotels, restaurants, and all kinds of expenses. [Fiancé] had the testimonies from the other guests and various receipts for stuff the women tried to reclaim, so he told his attorney to go all in.

Not only did the women lose the case, but it was also revealed that they had tried the same stunt several times before with other agencies. This was the fourth time this had happened, but it was the first time someone just didn’t pay the money back to avoid the hassle. After hearing this, the previous three agencies sued the women, wanting their money back.

The story also shows how that one agency works. As long as they don’t have any costs, they don’t care. If your actions are costing them money, they will make you pay, and they don’t care about how the rest of the crew would have felt. Imagine how they would’ve felt if the two thieving ravens had come back on board.