This happened when I was eleven years old, in year seven at secondary school. I was running late one morning, due to my younger brother throwing a strop over not wanting to go to school. As a result, I was riding my bike as fast as I could down the pavement on the street my school was on. Until, that is, I saw a fire officer’s car coming the other way. Being a pre-teen obsessed with shiny things — which a red and reflective yellow livery most definitely was — I lifted a hand to wave to the car’s occupant.

And I promptly fell off my bike. 

To his credit, the fire officer immediately stopped his car and came over to check on me. I was mostly unhurt, apart from a few grazes and an impressively skinned knee where I’d slid along a few feet. I remember being more worried about my brand new tights — completely shredded — than the multiple places I was bleeding from.

The fire officer got me loaded into the front seat of his car and my bike into the back, and he turned round to take me the rest of the way to school. He carried me to the visitor’s reception and plonked me down into one of the chairs there.

He asked the receptionist to call the nurse up from her office to come take care of me. The receptionist was unwilling to do so. I don’t remember the full conversation, as it’s been quite a few years since then, but the receptionist was arguing that the school, and therefore the school nurse, was not responsible for dealing with anything that happened off of school grounds, even if it happened on the way to school and practically within sight of the gates.

An offer was made to have an older student, a sixth-former who’d made the mistake of wandering into sight at the wrong time, escort the fire officer and me down to the nurse’s office. The receptionist dismissed the possibility that the nurse should be the one coming to a student with an injured leg. I was just faking it, by her estimation.

The sixth-former wasn’t stupid, though, and ran off during the argument — straight to the nurse’s office. He did what the receptionist wasn’t willing to do and told the nurse that she was needed in the visitor’s reception. A few minutes later, she arrived, and she promptly tore a strip off the receptionist while simultaneously reassuring me and getting all the bleeding bits bandaged up.

The fire officer left once he knew I was being taken care of, leaving my bike in the care of the groundskeepers, whose office was next to the bike sheds. The nurse had the helpful sixth-former carry me round to the student reception and pastoral care area — through the staff corridor, which was a big treat at that age — so my parents could be called to come collect me and take me for a checkup and proper wound clean at hospital.

My leg was fine, but the experience left me with a nice scar on my knee. And a few days later, some of the little jerks I went to school with decided to shove me along a pebble-dashed wall so that my other knee was also ripped up.

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.

My job seeking advisor once told me about a guy who failed his medical exam. He had applied to work on an offshore oil driller platform. He smoked about twenty cigarettes a day and was asked if he was willing to quit smoking. He said no and, therefore, failed the exam.

He even complained, saying that they should have a smoking room for smokers.

I’m bagging as usual when I am asked to move to a busier lane. Once there, I get surprised as a woman nearby suddenly starts yelling at one of my managers.

Customer: “How dare you? I’m your best customer and you treat me like this! I have a mask exception!” *Waves a small card around* “It’s from the department of masks!“

My manager continues to try to calm her down and deescalate the situation, but even if he let her just go without a mask, she wouldn’t hear him at this point.

As she storms out of the building, she cries out this gem:

Customer: “Besides, it’s my right!”

Either she was the worst actor ever, or she had no intention to hide that she was lying about having a medical condition.

This happened when I was still a med student. We were learning how to perform an opthalmoscopy, which is an examination of the retina, optic disc, etc. To do so, you normally have to use eye drops to dilate the pupil and then look at the back of the eye with a lamp. As he explains all this to us, the ophthalmologist spots my eyes.

Ophthalmologist: “Oh! Wow! You have such large pupils! That’s rare, but very useful for us! Are you okay with letting your classmates practice on you? That way, we won’t have to use the eye drops!”

Me: *Thinking this won’t take very long* “Uh, sure, okay!”

How wrong I was. What follows is literally thirty minutes of people lighting lamps directly into my eyes. The ophthalmologist encourages them to practice more, gushing about how useful it is to have a student with such large pupils! Finally…

Ophthalmologist: *Addressing me* “Oh! We only have five minutes left. You still need to take a turn, too!”

My classmates shut off their lamps and I blink, for the first time in thirty minutes not looking directly into a lamp.

Me: “Uh, sir, I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

Ophthalmologist: “What? Why not? We didn’t use the eye drops on you!”

Me: *Still blinking* “Yes, but all I can see are dancing spots in front of my eyes.” 

Ophthalmologist: “O-oh… That could happen, I guess…” *To my classmates* “Would you mind escorting her to your next class until she can see again?”

If I ever need an ophthalmologist, I now know where NOT to go. Luckily, I was never interested in that field anyway, because I never learned to perform an opthalmoscopy.