I’m going on a trip. Usually, I park in the official airport parking, but I forgot to book it until the day before and it was all sold out. Instead, I book with one of the many private enterprises nearby.

I arrive in good time and park my car in a free spot. I go to the check-in hut, but there is nobody there. There is, however, a prominent sign on the door that says to go straight to the shuttle stop, and the driver will check my ticket. There is a mobile number for emergencies.

I head to the shuttle stop, where there is another sign that says the shuttle comes at fifteen and forty-five minutes past the hour. It’s currently twenty past, so I sit down to wait. Sure enough, at forty-five past on the dot, the shuttle turns up.

I chat with the driver while he checks my details.

Driver: “I’m happy you didn’t call me.”

Me: “Why would I need to call you? Everything is fine.”

Driver: “So many people call asking what to do or when will the shuttle come.”

Me: “But it’s all on the signs?”

Driver: “You think people read the signs?”

I work in a pizza place that is near a state border. The two states are in different time zones — thirty minutes apart.

A man comes in one day and stands around waiting, not approaching the counter. This isn’t unusual; I figure he made an online order and is just waiting for us to call out his name and say it is ready. After a little bit, he starts getting annoyed and eventually comes up to the counter.

Customer: “Where is my order? I did a timed order to be ready at 5:30, and I have been waiting here for fifteen minutes and it is still not ready!”

Me: “Sir, it’s only 5:15.”

He looked a little embarrassed after that and explained that he was from across the border, so his watch was set to the other time zone. Hopefully, he didn’t have somewhere urgent he needed to be, or he might have been thirty minutes late!

My husband and I are racing to get to a movie in time, which requires hopping off one subway line and getting to another a couple of blocks away. We reach the station. It’s a small one with just one entrance in sight: an opening mid-sidewalk with a staircase going down.

It’s completely clogged with waiting people, right up to the top of the stairs. These things happen, so we stand on the landing and wait for the logjam to clear. It doesn’t. A few more people arrive and wait behind us on the sidewalk as minutes go by with no movement.

People start murmuring to each other: “Is there a fire?” “Are the police down there?” The people on the stairs don’t join in or say what they see or generally act as if anyone’s behind them; they just stand there and wait.

At some point, I get a clear glimpse to the bottom and see the horrible truth: this is one big group of tourists, all waiting for the one member at the bottom who’s paying their fare at the Metrocard machine by buying one card about twenty-five times. 

People in New York are pretty nice, actually — it’s not a huge tourism spot for nothing — but the one grave sin you can commit as a visitor is to block their way. Stopping where you are on a narrow sidewalk to look at a map for a minute is kind of like doing the same in the road in your car. And blocking an entire subway entrance to use it as a waiting room is unheard of. Almost before I realize it, years of childhood vocal training come out with the power of exasperation, and I bellow:

Me: “COULD YOU PLEASE MOVE? THIS IS A SUBWAY STATION!”

The entire group jumps and then immediately snaps into a line along one edge, which is so surprising it’s almost funny; they were great at making it look like there was no room to spare. But suddenly, the stairs are accessible to all, and we can go in…

…and meet the Metrocard buyer at the bottom, who apparently is just as startled as the rest of her group, and embarrassed to boot. She decides to save face.

Woman: “You don’t have to be rude about it.”

Then, she switched to saying, “Love you, we love you!” to those passing, with the most deliberately phony sickly-sweet tone and smile she could muster. This proved (obviously) that she was the nice one around here. I had never seen someone act this childishly to my face, and I haven’t since. 

I wanted to stick around for another minute and ask her things like why “could you please move” was too harsh for her and whether they had public staircases where she came from. My husband wanted to know why had she decided to take the subway in flip-flops. But after this? We were not missing that movie.

I work for an online company. Customers make their orders, we ship them, and all are happy. Sometimes mistakes happen at the warehouse, but we try to fix them as best as possible. But some mistakes are a tiny bit… special.

Customer: *Slightly confused* “I’ve received my parcel, but… I don’t think this is correct.”

Me: “I’m sorry to hear that. What has happened?”

Customer: “I’ve received a huge parcel with machinery in it. I only ordered a sweatshirt from you.”

Yep. The customer’s order had gone from a small parcel with a sweatshirt to a huge dishwasher-size or bigger parcel with some sort of machine in it. The thing that made this all confusing is that we’re a clothing company. The only thing close to machines or electronics that we have is headphones.

We helped the customer arrange for a pick-up of the parcel with the delivery company because there was no way they could return the parcel themselves. We never really got an explanation for how this could have happened, but the most likely explanation seems to be that the delivery label on the parcel from us somehow fell off the parcel and attached itself to this monster of a parcel. How the delivery company didn’t notice the mistake is a huge mystery to us since our logo and name are very well known to them.

Our customer was, of course, refunded.

I work multiple jobs, and in my free time from my main job, I work for a delivery service.

[Delivery Service] has a uniform for their drivers, but they don’t require us to wear them. I am wearing a rainbow-striped tank top, blue-jean shorts, and flip-flops.

I have just finished shopping for a customer at a chain retailer and have just processed the order. [Retailer] is nice enough to have a stand with lots of bags for [Delivery Service] drivers to bag their ordered groceries. In this particular [Retailer], it is a closed register lane.

As I’m bagging my order, in a lane with a sign on the conveyor belt that says, “Closed,” a guy starts to unload his cart onto the unmoving belt. I look at him with confusion, and he gives me the same look. I’m wondering why he placed his stuff on a clearly closed belt, and he’s wondering why I’m not scanning his stuff.

I mean, I get it. I clearly look like a [Retailer] employee what with my red shirt (rainbow striped), nice long brown pants (blue-jean shorts), and closed-toe work shoes (flip-flops).

Customer: “Aren’t you gonna scan my stuff?”

Me: *Confused* “Dude, this register is closed, and I don’t work here.”

I could see the gears turning in his head as he finally noticed the “closed” sign and my clearly not-[Retailer] outfit. He said nothing as he reloaded his cart and went to an actually open register.

I chuckled as I left the store. I get it. On autopilot, you see a person’s presence behind a register and assume that you can go there without actually looking at the details of your surroundings. It was still pretty funny.

Related:
I Don’t Work Here, Does Not Work Here, Part 44
I Don’t Work Here, Does Not Work Here, Part 43
I Don’t Work Here, Does Not Work Here, Part 42
I Don’t Work Here, Does Not Work Here, Part 41
I Don’t Work Here, Does Not Work Here, Part 40