I play Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends. We do it at a specific house because he’s the only homeowner among us right now.

While we were playing one day, a door-to-door marketer came knocking.

My friend speaks Klingon and answered the door in Klingon, his standard way of dealing with solicitors. To our surprise, the salesman answered back in Klingon, as well. My friend wound up buying whatever it was after the salesman was able to do the whole pitch in Klingon.

My friend invited the salesman to join us at DnD next week. He accepted.

Three years later, they’re married. The salesman also isn’t working door-to-door anymore; he now manages social media accounts for a company.

This happened twenty-five years ago and I’m still mortified. My child attended a school in a swanky neighborhood because he was in special education. The neighborhood had a street with the same name as my street, except my street was NE and the other was SE.

One day before Christmas, I received a telephone call on my UNLISTED phone.

Caller: “I’m from [Church]. We were out delivering Christmas gifts yesterday and we could not find your house.”

Me: *Eloquently* “What?”

Caller: “[School] gave us your child’s name as someone who needs Christmas presents.”

Me: “I don’t need any Christmas presents. Give them to someone who needs them!”

Caller: “Are you sure you’re not just being proud?”

Me: “HE’S GETTING [POPULAR GAMING SYSTEM]!”

Honestly, I’d have reported this violation of federal law, but I liked the teacher. You can’t give out student information like that!

In my senior year of high school, I have a job as a night cleaner at a pizza place downtown. Downtown Iowa City at night is crazy. There are food carts everywhere, one of the most famous of which serves grilled cheese, but there are also crepes and Italian sodas, and gyros and tacos. There’s any food a drunk could want, and downtown Iowa City is famous for its drunks, with a LOT of bars in a one-block radius.

I usually enter the pizza place around midnight and work until 2:00 am, making sure that every single surface is clean.

I am just finishing up and getting ready to leave, putting away the cleaning supplies, when a group of people get together at the front door and start knocking on it, sort of randomly at first, but slowly, they build a rhythm and start knocking together. They start chanting:

Crowd: “We want pizza! We want pizza!”

They follow me around inside the store by the glass walls as I clean, knocking on the walls and chanting.

Crowd: “We want pizza! We want pizza!”

They pound on the maintenance door when I slip into the back area to try to go home.

Crowd: “We want pizza! We want pizza!”

I try calling the cops, but they say:

Dispatcher: “It’s just some college students in high spirits; we won’t come out for that.”

I even held the phone up to the glass so that the dispatcher could hear the chanting. No joy.

I tried pulling out a book and sitting at a table to read to signal that I wasn’t able to do anything. This just pissed them off. Some of them lowered their pants and present their a**es to me while making crude gestures. One of them pried a brick out of the plaza and flung it at the window.

Finally, I went and hid in the kitchen until the sounds died down around 3:00 am or so… an hour after the other food carts all closed. I waited a bit longer just to make sure that the last of them were bored and had gone home already!

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One of the biggest sellers of our store is bags of salt for water softeners. We sell so much of it that we keep several pallets of the stuff right by the exit and always ask customers checking out if they need some. They sell like hotcakes.

One day, I find that we’re almost out of one of our types of salts. I call plumbing so they can bring up another pallet for us, but it turns out that all three of them back there are way too busy to do that. I figure they’ll get to it when they have time, but half an hour and an empty pallet later, I have customers asking for salt and not buying any when told that it’s all the way back in plumbing. My boss starts getting on my case over that, and I figure the only option I have is to go back there with a pallet jack and bring one up myself. Sounds easy, right?

It is not easy.

I push on it with all my might and slowly creep toward the registers at a sloth’s pace, a feat only made possible by the flat, smooth, polished concrete floor. As I’m making my way up toward the registers, I do some mental math for fun, adding up the weights of these bags of salt, and realize that I am pushing just over a literal ton of salt, as in a whole 2,000 pounds.

As I’m kicking myself for not trying to find someone else who’s forklift certified, I turn into the main aisle: a very wide aisle, four pallets wide in fact, that’s a straight shot to the front. I creep down my final stretch and along enters our “wonderful” customer: a lady that walks down the aisle directly toward me. She apparently doesn’t notice the literal ton of salt in front of her, and she stops about three feet in front of me and my burden.

Now, the obvious solution to this conundrum is to quickly side-step and go around me, right?

Ah, but ’tis far too great a task for our “valued customer”, and she instead resolves to stare directly into my eyes with a look that very clearly says, “You’re in my way.” I return a look that clearly says, “Try me, b****.”

We hold eye contact for what seems like forever but really is probably a minute and a half until she finally relents and slithers away with a scowl. In this entire interaction, neither of us ever said a word to one another, at least not out loud. I make my way up to the front with my quarry without further issue, and though I expect to get a complaint later, I never do.

My roommate and I are bridesmaids in a friend’s wedding, which is being held in a fairly fancy hotel in our home state. We made our reservation almost a year before the wedding for a two-queen room. We check in and make our way up and then open the door to see a huge room with one king bed. This wouldn’t be an issue for just the two of us, but my boyfriend will be joining us the next night, and three would be a crowd in a king!

We don’t want to spend any longer than necessary in a room we won’t be staying in, so we don’t go beyond the doorway before dragging all of our bags back down to the main desk, where this conversation occurs.

Me: “Hi, I’m so sorry, but it looks like we have a single king and we need two queens.”

Front Desk Worker: “What was the room number?”

Me: “[Room number].”

Front Desk Worker: “Did you go into the second room to the left?”

Me & My Roommate: “The… what now?”

Cue me apologizing profusely for being “that customer” as we turned around and lugged everything back up to the room. In our defence, we certainly hadn’t booked a suite and didn’t expect to have two king beds! The main room was huge, so we had no reason to think there was a second room. The wedding was phenomenal, and my boyfriend and I greatly enjoyed having a separate room with a door!