I work at a vacation resort in the children’s center, a place with various activities for entertaining children. Two younger girls have been brought in by their mother. The older one is carrying a stuffed flamingo and the youngest has an owl in a doctor outfit.

Me: “I love your stuffies. Do they have names?”

Older Girl: “This is Mango! And Sissy’s is Doctor Who.”

Me: *To the younger girl* “I like your stuffie’s name. Why did you name it that?”

Younger Girl: “She a doctor.”

Older Girl: “And owls say, ‘whoo’.”

Mom: “They haven’t even seen the show, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

Me: “I was, actually. So it’s just a coincidence?”

Older Girl: “What show?”

Mom: *To me* “No, their godfather is a self-proclaimed geek and is quite proud of himself for convincing them to use that name.”

Older Girl: “What show, Mom?”

Mom: *To the girl* “You will have to ask your godfather about it.” *To me* “And I’ll have to figure out if it’s too late to swap their godfather for a less geeky model.”

Our call center allows us to work from home due to health reasons as long as we have a stable Internet connection, which, thankfully, I do.

Caller: “Where am I calling? This had better be an American!”

Me: “You’re calling Cebu in the Philippines, sir.”

Caller: “I want to speak to an American, d*** it!”

I try to explain more but this caller just isn’t having it. Thankfully, due to watching too many shows and YouTube, I can do a pretty good accent from someone in the US. I put them on hold, switch accents, and come back to them.

Me: “Hello, sir, you’re speaking to [My Nickname]. How can I help you?”

Caller: “Thank God, you’re an American. Where are you?”

Drawing a blank, I just think about a line from a “Star Trek” movie I have seen recently where Captain Kirk says, “I’m from Iowa; I only work in outer space.”

Me: “Iowa, sir.”

Just then, a rooster cries the typical “cock-a-doodle-do!” in the backyard of my very rural, very Filipino home that is certainly not in Iowa.

Caller: “Good! Sounds like Iowa, too! Now, my problem is—”

This story took place on the night of my nineteenth birthday party, which was more years ago than I’d care to count now. I have been a fan of Marvel comics since a young age and worked part-time in a comic book shop at the time. So, for a gag, one of my friends bought me a five-foot-tall inflatable Spider-Man.

Being students, we went to our local student union and I decided to inflate Spider-Man and put him on one of the chairs at the table. There were plenty to spare, so it wasn’t robbing anyone of a chair; I know that Peter wouldn’t have approved of that. He attracted quite a bit of attention and laughter, particularly when he got his own pint of beer. However, then, the night took a turn.

A guy ran over to our table, picked Spider-Man up, and then ran to the door. At first, I thought he was pranking us because he stopped at the door and turned back with a big grin, so I got up to walk over, and just as I was opening my mouth to say, “Very funny,” he sprinted out of the door! Several of my friends and I put down our drinks and ran out of the bar after him, but he had a head start and there were several different routes he could have taken, so we had to split up and each took a different path.

I couldn’t find him, but five minutes later one of my friends came back, triumphant, with Spider-Man under his arm! He told us that he caught up to the guy, who decided that an inflatable novelty was worth stealing but not fighting over, so he dropped it and ran off again. Thinking that was the end of it, we turned to go back into the bar only to be stopped by the bouncer.

Bouncer: “You guys are barred for tonight. Leave.”

Me: “What? Why?”

Bouncer: “You know why.”

Me: “No, actually, I really don’t. Somebody stole this—” *lifts up Spider-Man* “—from me so we just ran out to get it back. Why are we getting barred because someone stole from us?”

Bouncer: “You broke all of your glasses on the way out!”

Me: “No, we didn’t! Why would we do that? And if we had, why would we be dumb enough to come back after doing that?”

The bouncer stepped away to talk to the management on the radio for a moment before coming back.

Bouncer: “Okay, you can come in, but you have to deflate Spider-Man. He was causing too much excitement.”

When we got back to the rest of our friends, they explained that someone (presumably a friend of the thief) had picked up our glasses where we had each left them to run out, finished our drinks, and then just dropped the glasses, breaking them, before running out as well. Apparently, the bouncer had been given a garbled version of that story, hence his initial reluctance to let us back in.

Anyway, those acts of d****ebaggery aside, at least I got to tell the story about how we rescued Spider-Man on my birthday!

A few years back, I purchased a shoulder dragon plush from a convention vendor and almost immediately lost it. I retraced my steps and still couldn’t find it.

I finally went back to the vendor to explain what happened with little to no hope that they would be able to do anything.

Vendor: “Can you describe it?”

When I did, they whipped it out from behind their counter.

Vendor: “Someone dressed up as a Deadpool Eternal Sailor Moon cross-play turned it in to us in hopes that the owner would come back!”

Of course, I thanked the vendors profusely. I looked everywhere for the Eternal Sailor Moon Deadpool but never found them to give my thanks.

I work in one of several shops in a roughly fifty-mile radius that buys, sells, and trades trading card games — think: Pokemon, YuGiOh, Magic: the Gathering, that kind of stuff, and almost all of it in single cards. We buy collections of cards rather frequently, and it’s not unusual that people will stop by without their cards just to gauge how we work and how things happen.

A guy comes in one evening. He seems nice enough. He tells me he was sent by another store of our acquaintance because they couldn’t afford to buy his collection. This gets flagged in my brain as a jackpot: good cards that we can then sell? Yes, please! 

I give him the email of my manager to schedule an appointment because it’s a very large collection of cards. He’s happy, I’m happy, and I send him on his merry way. 

I’m not there when he returns, but from what I hear from my other coworkers, he comes back with a LOT of boxes, large and small, and a couple of bins. Again, this is not unusual; collections of this size come in all shapes and sizes. We’ve had people come in with plastic bags of rubber-banded cards. You name it, we’ve probably seen it.

My manager tells one of my coworkers to grab a particular box; that’s where the “good” cards are. We know what cards these are, and they’re GOOD.

My coworker grabs said box… and said box is empty. 

Uh-oh. 

Cue the manager and several coworkers frantically going through the entire collection trying to find at least two cards. I’m told this takes upwards of six hours, and I believe it. They go through the collection. They go through it twice, thrice, several more times. The cards are nowhere to be found. 

We contact the guy and tell him the cards are gone.

Guy: *Nicely* “Shoot, I didn’t check the cards after I took them from the other shop. They are there, in the other shop; that’s how they knew it was a massive collection and they couldn’t afford it.”

We contacted the other shop. They didn’t have the cards, either, they claimed. Cue the other store frantically looking. 

Please note: the guy did NOT blame my store in ANY CAPACITY, AT ALL. He didn’t even seem that fazed, to be honest. These were EXTREMELY valuable products, so what was happening here? 

I came in for my shift the other day to get the lowdown on exactly what happened to those cards, and discovered a few things:

• An employee from the other store was let go. We were not told why.
• The other store cut the guy a check for the value of the missing cards.
• A regular at our store told us that the employee who had been let go had worked at that other store for some time…
• …and there were cameras filming what happened.
• There is now a court case.

I don’t know any other details, but it turns out that it wasn’t just those two cards, it was a grand total of forty cards missing. Where those cards went, who could say, but all I know for sure is that our store cut the guy our own check — for the cards he actually gave us. 

The guy was fine, was chill, and went along his merry way… and our store managed to dodge a massive bullet we didn’t even know was there.