At our local Chinese restaurant, the food is good, but every time, something strange happens.

One time, we enter ten minutes after the doors opened. Lights are on but there is nobody, not even staff. We stand around for a few minutes and then start making polite noises until a man appears. He looks straight out of bed and drags a bottle.

He says a few things in Chinese, which we don’t understand. Then, he mumbles:

Man: “Closed. Closed. We closed.”

And he slowly disappears into the kitchen.

So we leave. Just outside the door, we meet the Chinese woman running the dining room, dragging bags and a stack of boxes, clearly too heavy for her. She asks why we’re leaving, so we tell her what happened.

She clearly understands us, as she drops everything on the floor and marches to the kitchen, her face an angry declaration of war.  

From the kitchen comes a loud discussion going back and forth, back and forth, in Chinese, between a very angry, fast-speaking woman voice and a sleepy, slow, male voice. Something breaks and the male voice stops abruptly.

The kitchen door swings open, and the woman strides out angry as a thunder cloud and then looks at us. Her face just switches to the most radiant, warm, welcoming smile you’ve ever seen, and she says with perfect, professional calm:

Woman: “Dinner will be served in ten minutes.”

I work in an optometrist’s office.

Customer: “Hi. You do glasses repairs, right? The wire snapped. Can you repair it now?”

She takes off her glasses and hands them to me. She has half-frames that use something like a fishing wire to hold the lens inside the frame, and one side has snapped. Hot glue is holding the lens to the frame, but it’s clearly just a temporary fix.

Me: “Oh, yeah, this just needs a new wire fed through. It’s a fifteen-minute job.”

Customer: “Great.”

She then sits at one of the seats, apparently content in waiting

Me: “Uh. Ma’am, you can leave and come back? If you like, you can give me your phone number and I’ll call you when I’m done.”

Customer: “You have my glasses.”

Me: “Yep, I’m just fixing them now. But you don’t need to wait.”

Customer: “I can’t even see the doorway.”

Me: “Oh!”

It actually took twenty-five minutes. The customer waited patiently, paid properly, and then left through the door without any problems.

A popular Christian kids’ video series once portrayed the story of David and Bathsheba — a Bible tale about adultery and murder — in the form of a greedy king who wants other people’s bath toys. 

My church choir is sitting up in the loft listening to the preacher get going about the need for forgiveness.

Preacher: “But why would King David need forgiveness? Isn’t he one of the Lord’s anointed ones? Well, let me remind you of the time that David went up on the roof of his palace. He looked out across the rooftops, and he saw something he should not have seen.” 

Me: *Quietly* “Rubber ducky.” 

And that’s how I caused the entire soprano section of my choir to nearly suffocate themselves laughing in the middle of a prayer service.

Decades ago, I used to drive for a number of local pizzerias in town. One was family-owned and they had their twelve-year-old daughter answer phones and take orders. Unfortunately, she had a habit of transposing numbers and getting addresses wrong.

One night, I had a late delivery to an older part of town that often had older houses converted into a number of apartments for rent. When I arrived, the lights were out on this old house, but I opened the door and started searching for apartment four. As it was dark and there only seemed to be three doors on the main floor, I went upstairs and saw a room with a light on at the end of the hallway. I knocked on the door.

It swung open to reveal this HUGE biker-type guy in the middle of making love to a woman! They slowly turned toward me in the doorway, and all I could think to do was ask:

Me: “Did you order a pizza?”

It was when he grabbed the huge hunting knife on his nightstand that I figured the answer was “No.”

It turned out that the owners’ daughter had transposed the address numbers again and I had accidentally “broken into” someone’s home!

Someone once put up a nameplate in our engineering office:

Nameplate: “Herdaing Katz, engineering manager.”

I have no idea if it was an actual person or not. I was afraid to ask!