I spent ten years conducting English-speaking tours of the Colosseum in Rome, Italy. This was the one question I got from a tourist that stumped me in all that time:

Tourist: “Is this where Jesus fought the lions?”

Me: “I… uh… no.”

Tourist: *Disappointed.* “Oh.”

The tourist’s spouse then chastised her:

Tourist’s Spouse: “Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone knows that happened in Jerusalem.”

Tourist: “Oh yeah!”

Some of the other tourists are chuckling at the interaction. One of the teenage boys says:

Teenage Boy Tourist: “That sounds like a bad-a** movie!”

I couldn’t help but agree!

I’m recounting to my father an episode that happened in a shop.

My father will always see scheming behind everyone’s smallest actions, and this, in particular, from anyone setting rules. He also hates this particular chain of shops for political reasons, so all his buttons are being pushed.

Me: “…and they’re getting rid of the smallest coins. So this customer is paying at the counter, and the cashier says, ‘That’ll be 24.50’, and she goes, ‘But it’s 24.48!’ And the cashier says, ‘We have started rounding to the nearest five’, and she’s like, ‘You’re robbing me!’, and he explains…”

Father: “Of course they are!”

Me: “What?”

Father: “Of course they’re robbing her! Forty-eight rounded to fifty, they’re getting two cents from every sale, do you have any idea how much money it is at the end of the year?”

Me: “Of course I do, but that does not happen, because, as the signs around the shop were saying, and as the cashier explained, there is an equal chance that it’s rounded down. Zero and five are unchanged, 1, 2, 6, and 7 are rounded down, 3, 4, 8, and 9 are rounded up. In a year, the shop gets no money from rounding.”

Father: “That’s what they want you to think! Because all they need to do is to make the last figure always a 3 or 4 or 8 or 9…”

Me: “…and ‘they’ can also control how the items in your cart add up to a sum always ending in 3, 4, 8, or 9? However, as the cashier said, if you’re so worried that the chain takes away a cent too much, you can always pay with your card, where there is no rounding. And we finally have the proven evidence that you reason exactly like one of those customers, Dad.”

The company where I was working when this happened installed photovoltaic plants for private users. At a certain moment in time, the laws were changed, and we were requested to notify the municipality where the installation was taking place about it. It was just a notification, no permission or approval needed.

Of course, being a newly changed law, we all were wary of possible problems and made sure to check everything properly before sending the paperwork, and as long as we worked with small towns or villages, everything went fine.

Until a customer living in the major city of our region bought a plant from us. Since I was due in [major city] for other business, I decided to go in person and also deliver the paperwork for [customer]’s plant. I queue at the office and as soon as I present the paperwork to the young front office employee, he quickly scans it and tells me, “these must be checked by him”, pointing to a senior employee whose sight immediately makes my Vogon detecting senses tingle.

I queue again for [Vogon] and present him with my paperwork. He takes them like he is handling a piece of soiled toilet paper, scans a couple of pages, and tells me, “This is not complete, you need to add also a 3D rendering of the building with the plant,” and hands my paperwork back.

Now, I have done my due diligence and read the municipality building code before preparing the paperwork, and nowhere does it mention that photovoltaic plants need a 3D rendering of any sort. But I am wise enough to know that arguing with [Vogon] is just going to be a waste of time and an unnecessary strain to my blood pressure, so I head back to the office.

Once there, my supervisor asks me how it went, and I relay the story, adding that I also know how to switch off [Vogon]’s power trip. There is a law in Italy that makes clear that for certain acts where the public administration is required to provide an answer, if the answer is not given within a certain time, it is fair to assume that the PA is not opposing the act.

So, I put the paperwork in a mail envelope, sent a registered mail to [Vogon]’s office, and waited to see if [Vogon] would put in writing a request conflicting with his own code. Guess what? No reply came within the time stated by the law, and we could carry out our installation.

I usually drove my own car to work every day, but one day I had to leave it at the repair shop and asked a colleague, whose commute route had my place along the way, if I could get a ride to and back.

In the morning, I get in her car and she just asks me to make room for my legs by moving her purse to the side. Then, while on the road, with the car going at 110 km/h on the highway, she just leans down to look for something in her purse, her head below the dashboard, and completely ignoring the road and the other cars ahead.

Out of sheer luck, we don’t hit anyone.

Me: “What you did was extremely dangerous!”

Coworker: “Not to worry, I do it every time and nothing has ever happened to me!”

Thanks to whatever deity was overseeing that road on that day, I got back home without any accident (thanks to the lack of any other option), but made a note to never ever ask her for a ride again.

A few days later, she comes into the office saying that she is being scammed by someone. I ask her what happened, and she starts:

Coworker: “I was driving away from the main square in my hometown, and while slowly driving, still in first gear, I was looking for something in my purse. This person in the square just jumped in front of my car and pretended I bumped into him. But everyone in my town knows he makes a living out of faking accidents and getting money out of insurance.”

Unsurprisingly, the police and the insurance, hearing that same statement, didn’t believe the story of the faked accident. She got a hefty fine and a good increase in her insurance premium, hopefully together with a practical lesson on safe driving.

Out of university, I started working in engineering in this small, family-run company. The boss/owner prided himself on being the local Steve Jobs because he also started the company in a garage with a friend and kept it running for a good thirty years (forget about never letting it grow past ten employees like the real one did…).

Boss was the stereotypical micromanager: he would not trust any of us with doing things right and would always check our work and correct it, which, considering he would always change his mind on how things needed to be done, would always result in things being done wrong and fixed “thanks to him”.

One fine day, he needed to undergo surgery to fix a problem with hemorrhoids, so he would have been off for some time: recovery from that surgery required spending a good length of time, one week or so, lying on the tummy with the “dark side of the moon” pointing up in the sky to limit pain.

First day after surgery goes well: we are actually crunching work at a fast pace because we don’t need to fix imaginary errors, and we are all in a good mood because nobody is grumbling behind our neck that we can’t do anything right.

Day two rolls in, and a couple of hours after opening time, the boss limps into the office, screaming that he must be there to save the company “else nobody will do any work.”

He then sits at his desk with just a donut pillow and starts his routine micromanaging with the visible struggle of handling the pain he was inflicting on himself.

We all at least found it ironic that he was finally experiencing first-hand what a pain in the ass he was.