For a time, in an in- and outbound IT call center, I used to share a “desk island” — four triangular desks forming a rhombus shape, basically sitting face to face with each other, divided by low panels — with three colleagues. Two of them are involved in this story; following the old trope, let’s call them Alice and Bob.

One time, as I got up to go to our kitchen, both colleagues had just begun a call and I heard the following conversation.

Bob: “Hello, my name is Bob, and I am calling you from [Company].”

Alice: “Hello, Bob, how are you?”

Bob: “I’m fine, thank you. How are you doing?”

Alice: “Thank you. I’m doing good.”

For a moment, I just stood there, thinking, “Have they really called each other?”

Of course, it turned out that no, Alice had simply called someone who had the same name as Bob, and their conversations started with JUST the right delay that their generic greeting questions and answers were in PERFECT sync.

I told them afterward, and we all had a good laugh about it.

I once received a private message from a stranger on Facebook.

Stranger: “You have singlehandedly destroyed my belief that British people are intelligent and witty based on your comment in [Group].”

The message was flagged as spam, and I didn’t find it until over a year later, so the most annoying part was that I couldn’t remember what the post was or what I had said!

I’ve been preparing taxes for my company since I got out of college. It’s been nearly fifteen years. When I started, the pay was good, but it failed to keep up with inflation.

We got paid based on how many hours we worked and how many clients we took care of. I did the second most clients in the district (roughly 800 a year) but worked the most on-the-clock hours as I refused to work off the clock. This gave me a lower hourly rate than most of my colleagues.

In 2019, I only got 600 clients because of the global health crisis, and I also worked far more hours — eighty hours most weeks and 100 hours during peaks. I was promised by the manager that this would not affect my pay next year, and I would get at least the same hourly rate in 2020.

I did not, so I began a job search. I quickly found a new job that was willing to offer a third again as much as I had been previously paid and only expected me to do about 200 returns. They were a financial advising company that wanted to provide tax services to clients as a free perk.

I settled into the new job, and come April, my old job called me to see if I was willing to work for them after hours to help clear up their backlog. There was nothing abnormal about this; it was a regular practice to call back workers who’d moved on, though it usually started in March, not April.

Most of the people working at the old job were still my friends, so I decided to come back in for a few weeks. Ironically, the pay was higher for a consultant coming in after hours.

As an after-hours consultant, my name wasn’t really supposed to be put forward as “available for appointments”. I was not supposed to be seeing clients. But one of my clients from the previous year was insisting that I see him. And here’s where our story starts, though I feel those background details are necessary to understand why I’m in this position.

I opened up the client’s file, and I immediately noticed that his return had already been started. It had five Employee Identification Numbers. One of them I recognized as my own; the client had been mine the previous year. One I recognized as that of an employee who was famous for handing anyone even slightly difficult to somebody else.

The other two were listed as inactive. One number was suggestive of the employee having been hired and terminated recently. The other I recognized as belonging to a friend of mine who had died from a stroke while working in the office in March.

I noticed that most of the details were already entered, and I refamiliarized myself with the client. They were a self-employed husband-and-husband team who worked primarily from home doing Internet videos.

In previous years, I had taken their home office off on their taxes and depreciated part of their house for it. The computer system was complaining that the percentage of the house that was business use was not correctly set.

An easy fix! I opened the asset manager, opened their houses…

…and found that someone had made their house asset, named (let’s say) 171 Ixion Street into a car named 171 Ixion Street with about 800 business miles and 1,200 total miles. The same moron had also deleted their normal work car which I had named (let’s say) a 2014 Honda Civic.

The computer and electronic equipment they had been depreciating also had mileage entered onto it, though it was still listed as a computer. Upon seeing that, I honestly started crying.

I’m going to share with you some folklore from the city I was raised in. This specific piece of folklore is an establishment named Mystery Pizza. They were the most infamous pizza delivery service in town.

The first thing you need to know about Mystery Pizza is why it was a mystery. The place out of which they operated was hidden. If you could guess where they made your pizzas, you got a prize.

This led to a lot of speculation. The most common speculation I heard was that Mystery Pizza operated out of hardware stores and home improvement stores after hours and that they cooked their pizzas in propane grills.

The truth is that it operated out of the owner’s home kitchen and he valued his privacy. Eventually, he moved it to an “industrial kitchen” that was jointly used by several other businesses.

Another thing that made Mystery Pizza popular was their reputation for offering “weird” pizza. It was true that the owner was willing to put literally anything you asked for on a pizza, but what the stories don’t share is that he would charge you extra if he had to go out and buy a topping just for you.

Still, sometimes people got a craving for Poutine pizza, or Jujubees and marshmallow fluff, or whatever other drunken pizza they demanded, and the owner would happily slap on a ten-dollar surcharge and make it for them.

This wasn’t one of their original offerings, however. It started when they ran a short-term promotion called “The Mona Lisa”, which was a pizza whose ingredients were carefully arranged to look like The Mona Lisa (or if the chef wasn’t feeling up for doing The Mona Lisa, sometimes like other famous paintings).

Eventually, they stopped offering artwork pizzas, and the story got garbled into “any topping pizzas,” which the owner then took advantage of. A friend of mine once got a Tripas pizza, seasoned like the Mexican Tripa soup, but they had to pay $25 extra for it due to the specialty toppings.

The person who owned Mystery Pizza also owned a taxi company called Rainbow Taxi; their one taxi had a distinctive rainbow chequerboard pattern on it. Sometimes it was used to deliver pizzas. Sometimes you’d hail the Rainbow Taxi and find yourself sitting next to a stack of pizzas mid-delivery.

Later, the owner added a second car to his taxi fleet, a student art project he purchased from the University called The Trash Car, which had plexiglass dividers to make it possible to sit in some of the seats while the rest of the car was piled high in, well, trash — mostly paper and plastics. This vehicle was also used both for delivery and occasional passengers.

Eventually, there were changes to the law around food delivery, and the owner was no longer able to deliver food at the same time as driving passengers around. This was, apparently, the death blow to the owner’s profitability (or possibly to his enjoyment), as Mystery Pizza ceased operation soon after.

But the legends, rumors, and mysteries around it continue to this day.

When I was a teenager, in the spring of 1991, I was in the ATC (Air Training Corps) as an Air Cadet. This youth organisation was part of the RAF (Royal Air Force). I had the opportunity to fly in an F4 Phantom, and I wrote about it in this story.

Naturally, I was given a thorough safety briefing before the flight. Here’s a tale of caution I was given should I end up in a raft in the ocean, waiting for rescue.

The raft also includes a transmitter that Air Sea Rescue would use to home in on you. It starts automatically and transmits a cone shape directly up. Signals go out in all directions but not directly above the transmitter. As the rescue team gets closer, the signal gets stronger and stronger until the signal disappears completely. At that point, they know they are directly overhead, so the helicopter hovers and a member of the team is winched down.

This transmitter is extremely important because, even though the raft is a really bright colour, it is also extremely small compared to the sea and can easily be missed, especially if visibility is poor.

I was told in no uncertain terms to not mess with the transmitter aerial. And definitely don’t do what this person did.

He tried to be helpful.

He was in such a raft, awaiting rescue, and before long, one of the Air Sea Rescue helicopters came into view, so he pointed the aerial at the helicopter, rather like one would shine a torch.

The pilot, detecting that they were in the cone of silence, hovered, and the winchman was lowered. No one was there. The search resumed.

At this point, the man in the raft had let go of the aerial, so it was possible to try the search properly…

…until he tried being helpful again. And again. Several more times

All in all, what should have been a quick rescue took several hours longer than it should have. And that was only because the rescue team, realising what the helpful idiot was doing, tried to sneak up on where they thought he might be so he didn’t try and help further — but when you’re in a bright yellow, large, and very loud helicopter, that isn’t the easiest of jobs.

When they did eventually locate him, the winchman really wanted to punch him!

Related:
A Flight Of A Lifetime