(I work at a large chain grocery store. I’m currently stocking an aisle when a customer approaches me, seeing my work apron.)

Customer: “Hello, ma’am!”

Me: “How can I help you, sir?”

Customer: “I have two things for you today. First, where is your prune juice located?”

Me: “Right over here, sir.” *walks him to the juice aisle* “And what was the second thing, sir?”

Customer: *looks uncomfortable* “If you could let your manager know that one of the toilets in the men’s room is… overflowing.”

Me: “…”

(I’m having lunch at a small diner.)

Waiter: “Hello. What can I get you?”

Me: “I’ll have fries, a chocolate shake, and a burger. No pickles or onions, please.”

Waiter: “Are you allergic?”

Me: “No, I just don’t like onions and pickled food makes me gag.”

Waiter: “Are you sure?”

Me: “How often do you have people pretending to have allergies?”

Waiter: “Too often. I don’t get why people won’t just admit they don’t like something.”

Me: “From experience, they either think disliking and being allergic are the same thing or they believe that they’ll get their food faster.”

Waiter: “Yeah, as if we didn’t have to scrub everything and use separate utensils.”

Me: “And makes it harder for people with actual allergies. Anyway, about the food…”

Waiter: “Oh, right, sorry. Coming right up.”

(While I was waiting for my food, in the booth next to me, a father kept saying his kids were allergic to cheese. The kids insisted they weren’t. The guy’s wife returned from the restroom and slapped him over the head. It turns out he didn’t like the cheesy smell and gooey mess.)

Related:
Allergic To Common Sense, Part 15
Allergic To Common Sense, Part 14
Allergic To Common Sense, Part 13

(My colleague has to teach a group of Year 5 students about puberty and how our bodies are changing.)

Colleague: “Children shouldn’t need to learn about this sort of stuff! They’re too young!”

Me: “How old were you?”

Colleague: *blushing a little* “Nobody ever taught me about sex education. I had to learn through medical textbooks.”

Me: “That seems a pretty odd way to find out about sex. Anyway, [Headmaster] wants you to be creative. Something that catches the children’s attention and let them know that this is serious. They’re growing into adults and they need to know about sex soon.”

Colleague: “But not at ten!”

Me: *shrugs* “He told us to.”

(A couple of days later, I found my colleague arguing with her classroom assistant, pleading for her not to tell the headmaster. When I came in and asked what the problem was, the classroom assistant told me that my colleague had been setting up an animation she found online for the Sex Ed talk. I won’t say which animation it was, but I will say that it is considered possibly the worst animation in the world and DEFINITELY sickening enough to watch. Apparently, the teacher was going to turn it on and make them watch the whole eighty minutes of distorted nightmares while she stood outside the door and pushed anyone back inside. This was because she didn’t want to teach primary school children about sex.)

(I work at a store with around 80 to 100 total employees. In the last few months, there have been a surprising number of people missing work due to food poisoning, about 20 times in the last three or four months. Emails have been going around, with some people complaining, some passive-aggressively implying people are making it up or blowing it out of proportion, and a few of us trying to actually make lists of restaurants in the area workers might go out to eat, or where they shopped, to see trends. We get a lot of people in the store, even if they have not had food poisoning, to describe their lunch habits. Still, even with the information, nothing really seems to add up. Some of the people usually get lunch at the restaurants nearby, but none of the restaurants seem more likely than others. Sometimes it was pizza, sometimes it was people bringing leftovers that had been fine the day before, sometimes they had eaten out, sometimes they had not. None of it seems to make a lot of sense. Today, I am in our break room for lunch when I see a coworker putting a few chicken wings on a napkin into one of the two microwaves. After a moment, something clicks in my head and I look back at the microwave with chicken inside.)

Me: “Hey, [Coworker], are you cooking chicken?”

Coworker: “Yeah! [Grocery Store] sells bags of frozen wings. They make a good lunch.”

Me: “Are they precooked?”

Coworker: “No, you have to cook them. Our microwave takes forever, though.”

Me: “Okay, so, you cook the frozen wings in the microwave?”

Coworker: “Just put them in the refrigerator in the morning and they defrost by lunchtime.”

Me: “Okay, gotcha.”

(Throughout the conversation, I don’t think my coworker picks up on my disbelief, so I just sit down and watch him as he plays on his phone, occasionally checking the chicken. At the end, the napkin the wings are on is clearly soggy with something, so he grabs another paper towel and wipes off the glass tray in the microwave, then wipes off the counter where there are a few drips. He then sets the napkin down on one of the tables and eats from it. We have paper plates on hand, but he just has the wings on a napkin. Once he finishes, he throws out the bones and gets another napkin to wipe off the damp spot left on the table under his napkin, throws it out, and goes back to the sales floor.)

Me: *on a walkie-talkie* “Hey, [Manager], could you meet me in the break room, please? I might have found the cause of the recent food issues.”

(The manager gave him a talking-to, but he genuinely did not seem to understand why what he was doing was a huge health risk. We heavily sanitized the break room with bleach, and here’s hoping the food poisoning issues are done with.)

As a child, I frequently had other people grab my shoulders and back to jump up on me and put me in a chokehold or even straight-up use a jump rope to try to strangle me. This was a near-daily occurrence and resulted in me being sent to the hospital more than once, and I have scars on my neck from a few particularly bad incidents. The teachers and administrators at the school where this was happening refused to do anything, but that’s another story entirely. The short of it is that I spent about five years getting strangled on a near-daily basis.

As a result of this, I have C-PTSD and cannot stand to have people touching my shoulders and upper back, especially from behind, unless I’m very close with them, and even then, they ask for permission before doing it. Occasional brushes don’t seem to have as severe a reaction, but anything firm is a wild card. The result of someone touching — and especially grabbing — me there has a variety of outcomes, and there seems to be no correlation between the situation and the severity of my reaction. If I and the person who touched me are lucky, I’ll just freeze up for a few seconds. If we’re both unlucky, I swing at them.

When I started my new job, I explained all of this to HR, including that despite years of therapy, I’ve had very little improvement, and they cleared me and said I wouldn’t be held liable by the company if someone grabbed me and I had a severe reaction to it. Pretty much their only requirement was that every other month, I provide receipts from my therapist as proof I was still going, and we had to make a formal document describing my condition and their assurance I wouldn’t face retaliation for it. When my boss learned of my condition, she was kind enough to move me from my cubicle to the office next to her so it would be less likely that someone could accidentally “sneak up” on me. I also have mirrors on the wall across from the door — which I keep open — in case I’m turned away from my computer, and I have a sign next to my door asking people to please knock if my back is turned.

One coworker just flat-out does not get this. Every time he greets me, it’s by grabbing my shoulder or putting a hand on my back, and even though I’ve asked him to stop and informed him of my condition multiple times, it continues. There are times it feels he even goes out of his way to do it. It’s gotten to the point that even my coworkers who only know that I don’t like my back and shoulders being touched, not the extent of my condition, tense up when they see him next to me.

A couple of days ago, it happened again, but he was completely behind me and I had no way of knowing who it was that grabbed my shoulder. Instinct kicked in, and I spun around and punched him in the throat, then again in the nose. A few coworkers came over to help calm me down and get me seated in a corner so no one would be capable of touching me without me seeing first while someone else contacted HR. The coworker who kept touching me without my permission got there first and told them I walked up and punched him without a reason, and three people from HR ended up coming over to the area I work in.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to say a thing. My other coworkers vouched for me, as did a supervisor who knows the extent of my condition and has seen me talk to the other coworker about boundaries and why I didn’t want him touching me there multiple times. All three of the HR employees were furious.

Later that night, when I got home, I found a bruise on my shoulder where he grabbed me.