I work in a huge, famous toy store in London. I am assisting customers on the floor near our rather sizeable collection of puzzles.

Customer: “What are these?”

Me: “Those are puzzles.”

Customer: “Are they board games?”

Me: “No, they’re puzzles. You put the pieces together to build up the picture on the box.”

Customer: “I don’t understand.”

I pick up a box to demonstrate.

Me: “The picture on the front of this box has been split into a thousand pieces that connect together. You rebuild the picture by figuring out how the pieces come together. It can be very therapeutic.”

Customer: “So, it’s like sudoku?”

Me: “What? No, sir. Here, one of these boxes isn’t sealed. Let me show you.”

I open the box and show him the plastic bag inside containing all the pieces.

Customer: “So, it is like sudoku! You lied to me.”

Me: “Sir, sudoku is a Japanese number puzzle. This is just a picture puzzle.”

Customer: “Well, I call these sudokus.”

Me: “Do you want one, sir?”

Customer: “Oh, no, thanks. They’re way too difficult for me.”

Me: *Under my breath* “Shocking.”

We close at 2:00 am, and it’s approaching that time. A drunk customer walks in.

Customer: “Do you guys deliver to Lewisham?”

Me: “We do.”

Customer: “I live in Lewisham, but I missed the last tube. If I order a pizza for delivery, can you bring me home with it?”

Me: *Laughs* “That’s a good trick, but our delivery guys all use bikes, so we couldn’t take you.”

Customer: “Oh… I can’t afford the taxi, and I don’t want to take the bus. I can just afford the pizza.”

Me: “I’m sorry, I don’t know what to tell you. There is a twenty-four-hour taxi place next door, though. Maybe they can bring you most of the way?”

The customer drunkenly stumbles out and speaks to the clerk at the taxi place for a moment. Then, he comes back in.

Customer: “One halal chicken pizza, please!”

Me: “So, you decided to go with the pizza instead of the taxi?”

Customer: “No, the taxi guy said he’ll take the pizza as payment!”

I laughed and got him his pizza. He walked back to the taxi place, and the taxi driver happily accepted the pizza, even offering a single slice to the drunk passenger before they headed off.

Late-night London can be a crazy place…

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This happened about five years ago, so I might get some of the terminology wrong. I had just started working in a new nursery (daycare), and on the Friday of my first week on the job, we were notified that there had been three reported cases of Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease in the baby room where I’d been working all week. We were assured that adults couldn’t get HFMD, so I toddled off to a club night that evening with my boyfriend and my best friend.

Before we arrived, I started feeling nauseated, but I assumed it was because of my social anxiety — one of my main symptoms is nausea — so I thought nothing of it. Within an hour of arriving at the club, I was feeling worse, and I noticed red spots had appeared on my hands and knees and around my mouth. I texted my boyfriend that I was feeling too ill to stay, so he and my best friend came to collect me from the dark corner I’d retreated to and took me home.

On the ride home, I felt worse and worse, and coming in from the balcony of our flat where I’d gone for a cigarette to help calm the nausea, I found I’d developed vertigo so bad I couldn’t stand up. I crawled on my hands and knees to the bedroom, and my boyfriend kept me supplied with water and checked my temperature while my best friend looked up the symptoms of HFMD. Surprise! I had every symptom going and a few more on top.

After a sleepless night with my temperature bouncing from 37°C to 39.8°C (98.6°F to 103.6°F), my boyfriend drove me to Urgent Care around 8:00 am, where I was looked over by a doctor who was far too cheerful and condescending for the time of day.

Me: “I’m fairly certain I have HFMD—”

The doctor chuckled as though I’d said I’d been bitten by a vampire.

Doctor: “Oh, yeah? How do you figure that, then?”

Me: “I have spots on my hands, feet, mouth, knees, and bum, a high temperature, nausea, and vertigo, and I just spent all week working in the baby room of a nursery where we had an HFMD outbreak.”

Doctor: “Don’t be silly; adults don’t get HFMD. Your tonsils are swollen. You’ve got tonsillitis.”

Me: “I’ve had tonsillitis before and didn’t have most of these symptoms. Are you sure?”

Doctor: “Absolutely. You can’t have HFMD and tonsillitis, anyway. I’m giving you an antibiotic prescription, but if you don’t believe me, you can always get a second option.”

I didn’t believe him, so I went to a different Urgent Care unit and went through the entire process again with a much more sympathetic nurse.

Nurse: “He said you can’t have both at the same time? That’s ridiculous. You’ve got all the symptoms of both, and your tonsils are so swollen that I’m surprised we don’t need to get you a spit bowl. I’m giving you another prescription for [something I can’t remember]. Take both, and if your temperature goes above 39°C again, come back here and tell them [Nurse] told you to.”

Thankfully, the prescriptions worked, and after a miserable few days, my temperature stabilised, I was able to walk instead of crawl, and I could eat solid food again after nothing but soup. I’m eternally grateful to that nurse for actually listening to me and not dismissing me like the doctor did the first time round. But seriously, who says you can’t have two illnesses at the same time?

As a general rule, “food delivery didn’t turn up” makes for a statistic more than an interesting story, but this one really buttered my biscuits because, out of absolutely nowhere, my ADHD diagnosis got dragged into it. This story also mentions a well-known symptom of ADHD called hyperfixation, which is actually two things: flow state, which is where you’re doing something challenging that is interesting, and perseveration, which is where you focus on something to the exclusion of other things.

This story takes place not long after the anonymised popular worldwide illness was becoming unfashionable. Working from home and takeout were both common. Due to unfortunate circumstances that I won’t go into, my home office also contained my girlfriend’s desk, and therefore, often her phone when it was charging. I was working some odd hours because I live in the UK and the bulk of my team operated out of the Bay Area in the US. I had meetings with my coworkers between 5:00 and 6:00 pm, and my girlfriend’s work officially finished at 4:00 pm, so that window was when we usually timed dinner.

One day, we were doing our “Friday takeout” household tradition, born from my company’s £25-a-week support-your-local-eatery expense allowance. We commonly ordered from a company that sounds like somebody jammed the words “delivery” and “kangaroo” together and lost a few characters in the process. Yeah, “Kangarivery”, exactly. We could order from a range of eateries via Kangarivery, and we scheduled one well in advance (for 4:00 to 4:30 pm).

One of the great features of Kangarivery is that you can watch your delivery driver as they approach, so I was tracking the imminent Kangarivery delivery (or perhaps I should say “Kangariverlivery”).

I watched the delivery driver on the map. He stopped on the road outside my block of flats and waited there for a couple of minutes. Then, he buggered off. “That’s strange,” I thought.

“Did the doorbell ring and I didn’t hear it?” you may ask, and no, it didn’t. And I know this because some days I can barely concentrate for being pulled away from my desk all day due to constant doorbell-ringing deliveries (one of the few legitimate anti-WFH arguments).

I went outside to see if the driver was coming back. Then, I observed that the order had been cancelled. My girlfriend had come out to join me, looking equally quizzical, and I confirmed with her that she had not collected the food already when I wasn’t looking.

This was already low-key annoying, as is any process where somebody just kind of doesn’t follow the process and leaves you with work to do, but now we get to the part which really tiddles my weasel. My girlfriend had a missed call from her phone which was charging on her desk (next to my desk). She proceeded to inform me that the reason I didn’t hear it go off was because of my ADHD, and I must have been hyperfixating on my work or something.

Me: “What’s your ringtone set to?”

Girlfriend: *Silence*

Me: “I ask because if it’s at a low volume or sounds like a lorry reversing in the petrol station next door, that might explain why I didn’t notice it go off.”

Girlfriend: “I don’t know!”

I let it go because I didn’t want to fight with her, despite how infuriated I was with the fact that my ADHD was somehow to blame for the fact that the delivery driver was allergic to doorbells.

I confirmed that the order had been cancelled and I had still been charged for it, and I got in touch with support. The conversation was longer but boiled down to this.

Kangarivery Support: “The delivery driver called but could not get through.”

Me: “Why didn’t they ring the doorbell?”

Kangarivery Support: “They didn’t ring the doorbell?”

Me: “They did not.”

Kangarivery Support: “One moment, please…”

A moment passed.

Kangarivery Support: “We’ll have your order resent to you.”

And so it was that we eventually received our lukewarm order at around 6:15 pm in the evening, almost two hours after the scheduled delivery, because the rider was allergic to doorbells. The fact that somehow my ADHD got dragged into someone else’s inability to follow a simple process is the reason why, to this day, despite all our modern technology, I wander into the street awaiting my Kangarivery like some kind of caveman trying to tell time by the moon, and why this story still really apples my pears.

Stephen here — the one with the puns — with another tale from my childhood.

This wasn’t the first time I surprised or embarrassed my mum — for that, you’d have to go to the doctor’s surgery, where I used a bit of unintentional wordplay — but this is probably the first time it was because of something I did deliberately.

In the UK, it is normal for health visitors to make home visits to check on the development progress of pre-school children. I was three, and a health visitor was in our home with my mum and me for my checkup.

Among the various tests I was given was a pillar box with a number of different shaped holes in the top.

Health Visitor: “Stephen, here are some blocks. Can you please put them in the pillar box?”

My mum wasn’t worried about this test, as I had a toy like it and would often pass the time putting the shapes in the correct holes. But…

The first shape I picked up was a circle. Rather than put it in the round hole, I moved it to just above the hole shaped like a triangle. I held it there for a moment or two, whilst my mum was apparently baffled and more than a little worried as to what I was doing, as I did know my shapes.

After a pause, I looked up at the health visitor.

Me: “Naaaaaaah!”

I then put the shape straight in the correct hole. I proceeded to do this with every single shape: pick it up, hold it above the wrong hole, say, “Naaaaaah,” and then put it in the right hole.

Afterward:

Mum: “He’s never done anything like that before.”

Health Visitor: “I’ve never seen anyone do anything like that before!”

She marked me as successfully completing that task, albeit unconventionally.

Given how I ultimately turned out, I guess you could say this little scene was the shape of things to come…