(I’m leaving campus late at night and I come up to the intersection at the street outside. The light is red. I press the button for the pedestrian crossing. I’ve noticed before that this intersection’s lights are badly programmed: it takes three to five minutes at night for the light to turn green after pressing the button. There’s no traffic at all, and no other people around. I press the pedestrian crossing button and wait near it. About five seconds later, a lone car comes up on the road to my left, also out of the campus, clearly intending to go straight across in the same direction as me. It stops at the red light, in the second lane away from me. Then, suddenly:)

Driver: *Hoooonk. Hooooonk. Hooooonk.*

(I’m startled and confused.)

Driver: *Hoooonk. Hooooonk. Hooooonk.*

(I’m alarmed enough that I take a couple steps away.)

Driver: *Hoooonk. Hooooonk. Hooooonk. Hooooooooonk.*

(I look over and see it’s an expensive sports car, with some very impatient-looking, young dude behind the wheel. He’s making weird and angry faces at me and gesturing wildly; either pointing at me or at the light-pole behind me, while really laying on his horn. The other side of the street is a residential neighborhood, it’s late at night, and he’s making an enormous racket. I’m understandably weirded out and I take some more steps away.)

Driver: *Hoooonk. Hooooonk. Hooooonk. Hooooooooonk. Hoooooooooooooonk.*

(He keeps on making angry faces at me and gesturing. I step away some more.)

Driver: *Hoooonk. Hooooonk. Hooooonk. Hooooooooonk. Hoooooooooooooonk.*

(With more angry faces and gesturing, I’m thoroughly freaked out. This is really weird, and there’s no one else around at all. The honking is just nonstop now. I take a wild guess and press the button for pedestrian crossing AGAIN. Like magic, the dude quits his gesticulating and lays off the horn.)

Me: *thinking* “Oh, my f****** God. Really!? That a**wipe really thought I was just standing around here waiting for a green light without having pressed the button?! And he was willing to scare the ever-living h*** out of me and wake up the whole neighborhood with this racket just to make me press that stupid button again?!“

(Surprise, surprise, nothing happened after I pressed the button again. We both had to wait several more minutes for a green light, anyway, just like always at that intersection.)

(I am in the elevator in a building on my campus which I rarely set foot in, going to the fourth floor. The elevator stops on the third floor and a half-dozen people get off. There’s a fancily-dressed woman in her forties standing maybe ten feet away, looking a little bit confused. She looks at all the people leaving the elevator and going off, some walking right by her, but she doesn’t attempt to speak to any of them. After they’ve left, she looks at me, still in the elevator.)

Woman: “Do you know if there’s a restaurant in this building?”

(I pause as I think about it, but realize I just have no clue and shake my head.)

Me: “No, I don’t.”

(The elevator doors start to slide closed and I think nothing more of it. The woman then runs over to the elevator, forces the doors back open with her hands, and sticks her head in while looking at me very intently.)

Woman: *very frantically and unnecessarily loudly* “What? What?! I didn’t hear what you just said! WHAT DID YOU SAY?”

(Wide-eyed and alarmed, I rear back away from her.)

Me: “Uh. I don’t know. I said I don’t know. Sorry.”

(The woman stares at me for several beats, very skeptically, and in a kind of crazed way, while still forcibly holding the elevator doors open.)

Woman: “Oh. Well.”

(She stares at me skeptically some more, then finally, very reluctantly, steps back and lets the elevator doors go. I keep on looking at her in alarm, then start to repeatedly press the “close doors” button in the elevator to try to get away from her as fast as possible. Lady, really, I don’t care what your issues are, but the one person who’s stayed in the elevator, with the doors about to close, is really NOT the best person to try to ask for directions.)

While going through security to board my flight, my bag was pulled from the x-ray machine for further inspection. The TSA agent proceeded to pull out not one, not two, but four fairly small water bottles, each well above three ounces, all filled. I was shocked, but then I remembered: I had recently taken another trip using this same bag where I was on the go a lot and had to drink lots of water. Since I tend to overpack and the bottles were at the bottom, I had simply forgotten they were there.

This would be unremarkable if not for one thing: this was the return flight of my current trip. Somehow, the staff at the other airport did not catch four water bottles on the x-ray! Needless to say, I was slightly concerned for the agents at the other airport.

(I work as a producer for a video game publishing company. It’s very common for us to get applications from people trying to break into the industry, as I imagine it is for other publishers. We’re currently hiring for two programmer positions, both of which pay six figures a year because they have very steep skill requirements. We get an application from a young woman currently working part time as a cashier who has an impassioned cover letter talking about how she sees this job posting as her “big chance,” how she desperately wants to break into video games, etc. She has zero related skills — nothing about coding or anything whatsoever, just a bunch of part time jobs in every day work. Ordinarily I would send her a stock response about how we’re going with another candidate, but I feel for her because I literally once was that young woman trying to break into the industry over a decade ago, so I decide to call her and explain a bit more in detail so she doesn’t get discouraged. After I’ve explained why she isn’t a fit and provided some practical advice as to how she can get more experience at an entry level, she responds:)

Applicant: “Well, I do think I’m a fit.”

Me: “Unfortunately, you’ve told me yourself that you have no programming or any type of related experience. We were very clear about the requirements we need for this job because of the duties associated with it.”

Applicant: *in an irritable, haughty tone* “Well, I’m a fast learner.”

(One of the requirements we have is minimum five years experience.)

Me: “I’m sorry, but we can’t hand off this sort of sensitive work on that type of assurance.”

Applicant: *heavy sigh* “Well, I’m willing to entertain offers on the other position.”

(The other job listing had almost the exact same requirements. I turned her down, again, and she complained about my “unhelpfulness” and said she “would have thought I would have seen the value in being willing to work with someone as a teaching experience.” Talk about entitled! Sorry I wasn’t willing to handle off a ton of sensitive work to you that you ADMITTED you were unqualified to handle due to lacking the proper credentials and experience.)

(I work at a family-run pizza shop on a busy Saturday night. The owner is helping to take calls and she receives one from a drunk customer complaining. She says she will wait for the customer to come to the store to talk to him. Five hours pass, and he is a no-show, so the owner heads home while we lock up. Ten minutes after she leaves, a car comes screeching into the parking lot and a man steps out. He almost immediately begins to berate our cashier as our remaining customers watch.)

Customer: “Where the f*** is that b****? She said she’d be here for me! G***d*** liar.”

(I step in to save our poor cashier, and I can smell the booze on him from across the counter. The cashier, meanwhile, is calling the cops to tell them about the man driving drunk.)

Me: “You must be [Customer]. She did wait for you, sir, but you told her you were on your way hours ago. She could not wait any longer for you, but I can help if you lower your voice for our other customers.”

Customer: “F*** you, you Nazi piece of s***. You and that b**** are just a couple of [anti-semitic slur] crooks. This whole place is full of Nazis. Give me my money, you [homophobic slur]!”

Me: “That is enough, sir. You can either leave now, wait for the police to come, or have our driver, the former Marine, escort you out physically. Either way, you have been barred from this restaurant.”

(He cursed a few times, called me and everyone else a Nazi again, despite me being Hispanic, then spun out of the parking lot. He was pulled over a block later by the police.)