Some years ago, my whole department went out to lunch at a Chinese restaurant. Everyone but my manager and I got the usual meh “fortunes” from the fortune cookies that weren’t even really fortunes. “You are talented in many ways.” Ones like that.

Manager’s Fortune: “The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.”

Ominous!

My Fortune: “You have gained the admiration of your pears.”

I asked them about that when I got home, but I guess they were embarrassed because they just sat there in the bowl.

I work for a mainstream chain movie theater. We are not independent and we only show the big releases. An older couple comes in to buy some tickets.

Customer: “Two tickets for Doctor Zhivago, please.”

Me: “Uh, we’re not showing that movie.”

Customer: “Oh, dear, did I miss it?”

Me: “By about fifty years.”

It turns out they wanted to see “Doctor Strange.”

I’m attending a bridal shower with a bunch of women from church. We’re playing a trivia game to see how much we know about the couple. As we finish and find out who got first place, etc, there’s a tie. The hostess says we might need a tiebreaker question.

Woman #1: “No, no, I concede.”

Woman #2: “Did you just say you cheated?”

Woman #3: “No, she said she’s conceited!”

It made us all chuckle. There were three winners who went home with flower arrangements of varying sizes. I’m not sure why they couldn’t have given the two first-place people the choice between the first- and second-place prizes, but whatever. One of them frequently helps host, so I assume that was part of the reason she let one of the other women have it.

I’m a new boarding school student, and the prefects are showing us underclassmen around town. We’ve been to the highlights, like the church, main shopping street, nice restaurants, and such.

Prefect #1: “And if you go up that hill, you’ll come to [Restaurant]. Best Italian food I’ve ever had in my life.”

Prefect #2: “Agreed. Everything there is good. Good food, good wine…”

Me: “Wine?”

Prefect #2: “We’re past eighteen, love. Legal to drink. Anyway, like I was saying, really fine place. Affordable, too.”

Prefect #1: “Yup. Just don’t try the Giga Pizza Challenge. You’ll lose. Both in terms of dignity and in terms of cash.”

Schoolmate: “Huh, I can take it. How bad can it be?”

Prefect #1: “My girlfriend said that when she was in your shoes last year. She couldn’t finish even a quarter of it. And even after [Prefect #2], [Upperclassmen], and I joined in to help her, we could barely finish a third of the thing.”

Prefect #2: “Yup. The four of us spent the rest of the week eating the leftovers. It. Was. Not. Fun.”

Schoolmate: “Well, you four are girls. Step aside and let a real man show you how it’s done.”

Prefect #1: “I don’t mind, but you have to promise that you’ll pay for the thing.”

And with that, our lunch destination is decided. As promised, [Schoolmate] orders the Giga Pizza Challenge. It is apparently free if someone can eat the whole thing by themselves in half an hour.

Prefect #1: “Nobody order anything else. We won’t be needing the extra food.”

Prefect #2: “Ah, but we’ll be having a bottle of the house red. This is gonna be good.”

Schoolmate: “Watch and learn, ladies. Watch and learn.”

And then the Giga Pizza comes out, and [Schoolmate] actually looks visibly concerned at the size of the thing. It’s the largest pizza I’ve ever seen. It is like five feet in diameter. It’s so large that its eight slices had to be baked individually in the pizza oven before being put together into a larger whole. And the sheer number of toppings is mind-boggling. It is almost three-dimensional with how many there are.

To his credit, [Schoolmate] puts up a valiant fight. He makes it more than a third of the way through before throwing in the towel.

Prefect #1: “Hey, he did better than the four of us combined.”

Prefect #2: “Still lost, though. Ah, well.”

She then informs the waiter of [Schoolmate]’s surrender, allowing us all to stop spectating and start eating the Giga Pizza.

Including the prefects, there are a dozen or so of us there, and we can’t even finish the d*** thing. [Schoolmate] has to return to the dorms with two massive slices of the Giga Pizza and an empty wallet.

I later become a prefect myself, and the next year…

Me: “Up that hill is the best Italian restaurant that I’ve ever been to. Just don’t try the Giga Pizza Challenge. You’ll lose.”

Underclassman: “I can take it. How bad can really it be?”

Spoiler alert: he couldn’t.

I’m told it’s essentially a school tradition that there’ll be at least one idiot in the new arrivals every year who thinks that he or she can take the Giga Pizza. And just as traditionally, they fail.

I wonder how long it’ll take before people realise that the challenge is futile.

I am serving two old ladies having a Sunday roast in our pub. I bring out both plates when one of them says:

Old Lady #1: “Oh, she has more peas than I do.”

The difference is very slight, but hey, the customer is always right, right?

Me: “Sorry, madam. Let me sort that out for you right now.”

I take her plate to the kitchen, get the chef to add some more peas to her plate, and swiftly bring it back.

Old Lady #2: “Well, now she has more peas than me!”

So, I take her plate back and add more peas. Lo and behold:

Old Lady #1: “Well, we’re right back where we started! She has more peas than I do again!”

I take a mental snapshot of the other plate, take [Old Lady #1]’s plate and do my best to add the teeniest tiniest extra portion of peas to keep them happy. Alas…

Old Lady #2: “Well, now she has more peas than me again!”

I’m about to give up and call the manager when I see the chef, looking angry, leaving his kitchen on a super-busy Sunday afternoon, barrelling up to the table with the two old ladies.

Chef: “Here, you can have all the f****** peas!“

He then poured an entire industrial-kitchen-sized bag of frozen peas all over the table and their meal, and a decent amount onto their laps.

They obviously put in a complaint, but it didn’t help that the chef was also the owner!