I work in the imaging department of a hospital. Our phone lines are not public, so I’m not sure how this random older lady got through — possibly a misdial. I’m used to getting calls asking about imaging protocols or questions that I can easily direct to scheduling and registration. This lady has a heavy accent of some sort.

Lady: “Hello. I need, uh, whole foot.”

Me: “I’m sorry? Are you a patient?”

Lady: “Yes. Is it whole foot?”

Me: “Do you have an order for a foot X-ray?”

Lady: “Yes, yes, the whole foot.”

Me: “You need your whole foot X-rayed? Are you over in Ortho right now?”

Lady: “I, uh, is whole foots?”

Me: “…you want Whole Foods?”

Whole Foods is a supermarket chain.

Lady: “Yeah!”

Me: “Ma’am, this is a hospital…”

Lady: “Whole Foot!”

I hung up. It was going nowhere.

I have a common English name (like John Smith) that has led to some interesting stories over the years. To avoid confusion, and for security, I always use my middle initial when signing legal documents, i.e., John B. Smith instead of John Smith, or my full name, John [Middle Name] Smith.

Story #1: I am driving home from work and listening to the news on the radio.

Announcer: “Breaking news! John Smith who lives in [My City] has just won a groundbreaking legal decision in his favor.”

By the time I get home fifteen minutes later, I have sixteen messages on my answering machine from reporters for ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, etc. I don’t respond to the messages and let them figure it out.

Story #2: I get a bill from a collection agency wanting me to pay $8,000 for some jewelry that “I” recently bought in San Francisco. I live 400 miles away in Los Angeles and haven’t been to San Francisco in two years. I ignore the bill because it is not my debt.

What follows next are more bills demanding payment and threatening phone calls from the collection agency. 

Collection Agency #1: “We know it is you, and you’d better pay us, or we will destroy your credit rating! How about we settle for $6,000?”

At one point, the agency wants me to verify my SSN (my US government ID number) with what they have in their records, BUT I have to tell them my SSN FIRST to see if it matches. (Not happening!)

Every time I tell them “No!”, the settlement price drops until it is down to $1,000. I call a lawyer to see what my options are. He tells me to just pay it or else they will ruin my credit rating.

Me: “Your advice is to just pay them the $1,000 so they will leave me alone? That sounds like extortion to me.”

I ignored my lawyer’s STUPID advice. I never gave that collection agency a dime, and my credit rating didn’t suffer.

Story #3: Another collection agency contacts me about a $20,000 bank loan that is in default. Again, this is not my debt but a fraudulent loan taken out in my very common name. My legal signature always includes my middle initial, (John B. Smith). This loan was taken out by a person using the name John Smith, who lived in a different city than me.

On the phone with the agency representative, I ask him to show me some proof that it is my signature on the loan papers. His reply makes me laugh because he acts like that’s a VERY unusual request.

Collection Agency #2: “You want to see your signature on the loan papers? I don’t have access to those documents.”

I eventually got three copies of the checks written on the loan, and you didn’t have to be a handwriting expert to figure out that they were written by three different people. Not one of them matched my writing or my signature.

I didn’t pay that agency $20,000, and my credit rating never suffered.

As my father got into his eighties, he needed more and more help with things, and one day, he called me with an odd one. His bank wouldn’t let him into his safe deposit box. He had opened this box decades previously at a smaller bank for free. Sometime later, they sent him a letter saying that they had been bought out and that his box was now at a larger bank. He didn’t think much about it. But after several more years, when we went to the new bank to get into his box, he said they wouldn’t let him in.

So, I went into the bank and found a customer service person.

Me: “Hi. I have my father’s power of attorney, and he said that he’s having trouble getting into his safe deposit box.”

The representative took my father’s information and typed for a while.

Representative: “Hmm. Your father doesn’t have a safe deposit box with us. I’m sorry. He’s mistaken. Sometimes older people forget where their boxes are. It happens all the time.”

I went back to my dad.

Me: “Dad, I’m sorry, but you’ve got the wrong bank. They don’t have your box. They looked it up. Maybe you closed it? Maybe it’s at another bank?”

Dad: “No! Here’s the key! Here’s the letter I received. They have my box.”

I went back to the bank.

Me: “My dad is sure he has a box here. Here’s the key, and here’s a letter showing the box is at your bank.”

The representative typed for a while again, getting conspicuously annoyed.

Representative: “I don’t know what to tell you, but your father is mistaken. We do not have his box. If we did, it would show on the computer. Here’s all your father’s account information. There is no box.”

Me: “Can we try the key, please?”

Representative: “No. I can’t let you go into someone else’s box just because you have a key to it. Your father is mistaken. We don’t have his box. Please go.”

And there it sat.

Then, one day, I was at another of my father’s banks. (He believed in keeping a little money in multiple places in case of a bank failure.) I was griping to the woman there, and she wrote down a name and number on a piece of paper and said, “Call this woman.” And I did. She turned out to be the operations manager for that first bank branch.

Me: “Hi. My father thinks he has a safety deposit box at your bank, but the customer service reps say no. Is there any way you can help us?”

I heard a bunch of typing.

Operations Manager: “Your father does not have a box with us. What’s the number on the key?”

Me: “[Number].”

There was more typing.

Operations Manager: “Hmm. That’s a mystery box. We have no name attached to it, it’s not assigned to anyone, and we’re not allowed to assign it to anyone in the system. How about you come in and we try the key?”

Walking into the bank, meeting the operations manager, and going into the boxes, under the eyes of the original customer service representative… Not gonna lie. I enjoyed that. The key worked, my dad’s stuff was all there, and we grabbed it fast. The operations manager told us later that they had had computer problems migrating everything from the original bank, so that’s why it wasn’t in the computer.

Lesson: computers don’t eliminate mistakes; they just allow people to be more confident in their errors. And sometimes it’s just a matter of finding the right person to help you.

In early 2021, [contagious illness] was in the midst of ravaging the world, and the vaccine, though in existence, was not widely available yet anywhere. It was also during then that the virus was thought to reside in a dormant state for days on everything an infected person touched.

Our front receptionist had recently moved to another state, so we needed a new one. After a short hiring process, we got someone, a young woman. During the interview, she had shown a negative [illness] test. (A positive one would not disqualify someone; if they WERE the best candidate, we’d wait two weeks and bring them in. Various other people could fill in the receptionist duties in the meantime. It was more stressful than normal, but we could go for two weeks.) She would immediately begin on Monday, and people would train her on what to do and how things worked in this office.

[New Hire] had a quiet and reserved demeanor, so nobody who shadowed her, teaching her how to do things, thought much of her when she would seem to have problems understanding concepts. It would take upwards of an hour for her to pick up any concepts, so training sessions would take an entire half of a day per person. She would also request to go into their offices to ask questions.

I was not one of the people who trained [New Hire], however, as my work was entirely different from hers, though my workspace was about fifteen feet (about four and a half meters) away from her and was the closest one, and we both shared the same large open-plan room.

Once she was finished with her training, which took about three days, she turned on the radio in this room. Ordinarily, it’s on a top-forty station, but she changed it to a talk radio station that was, for a lack of a better word, extremist. The hosts were racist, xenophobic, sexist, homophobic, reactionary, and full of conspiracy theories. As the January 6th riots were very recent, they had much to say about them that I will only say was making my blood boil.

Though I believe everyone has a right to their opinion and to share it peacefully, the more I had to hear that talk radio, the more maddening it was. But I figured that if this was what [New Hire] genuinely believed, I was not going to prevent her from hearing it, so I bore with it, especially since she didn’t come across as violent. Other people walking by would change the radio back to the top-forty station, but after they left, she would change it back to the talk radio station.

Every now and then, everyone in the office would go and take a test for [illness]. For the most part, either nobody would test positive, or only one or two would, and they’d stay home for two weeks. This time, on Friday, about half the office tested positive. [New Hire], meanwhile, reported back that her test was “inconclusive”, but she wouldn’t show the results.

The owner felt suspicious about this, and he coaxed [New Hire] into showing the real, unaltered results, showing she was positive. He confronted her about it online and asked why she lied about her test results twice. When she couldn’t provide any good answer, she was fired immediately. Contact tracing officials determined that she was the source of the outbreak in the office, and it made sense; everyone who caught it either worked with her directly, touched things she touched (like the radio), or stayed in close proximity to someone who had caught it for an extended amount of time.

I was spared; my test came up negative, which I presume is because I never interacted with her besides talking to her from across the room, nor did I touch anything she did. However, because so much of the office staff tested positive, they had to quarantine for two weeks, so the following two weeks were the toughest stretch I had ever worked in that office due to being so insanely short-staffed.

Meanwhile, we discovered that while [New Hire] packed up her own valuables when she was fired, she left other various things behind, lying out in the open: a half-empty bottle of water, an unopened packet of peanut butter cups, a somewhat-used bottle of perfume, a box of tea bags, and a few other items that wouldn’t be missed. I was told to put it all in a box for her to claim if she wanted, though I was supposed to wait a week to minimize the risk of getting infected by touching her belongings. For the following few weeks, I repeatedly tried to contact her and let her know that we’d boxed up her belongings and that she could claim them, but she never responded, nor did she show up. After two months, we disposed of them.

In hindsight, a lot of the other people around the office and I believe that, as an asymptomatic carrier, she had tried to deliberately spread [illness] around the office. She acted to maximize her time close to other people, she attempted to bait me into touching things she touched, she likely spoke softly and quietly to get people to come closer to her so she could hear her, and once she had to leave, she left a bunch of her things behind that she wouldn’t claim as one last attempt to infect somebody — either me, someone who had to pick up her things, or the next receptionist.

I would really like to give her the benefit of the doubt and say she was a slow learner and was influenced by other figures in her life in certain ways, but I have a hard time believing any of that. But I really hope that was the case, as the alternative — to spread [illness] around deliberately and maliciously — boggles the mind.

I am working my daily shift at work when my cousin comes over and hands me a coffee and donuts from the local bakery.

Me: “Aww, thank you!”

Cousin: “You’re welcome! I can’t stay long as I have to get back to the guys; I will see you later at the reunion!”

He leaves and a customer comes up to me.

Customer: “Does your manager know you’re getting free coffee and donuts?”

Me: “He’s my cousin, and he took the time to get me the coffee and donuts.”

The customer tries to grab one of my donuts.

Me: “If you lay a hand on these donuts, I will throw you out so fast you will get whiplash.”

Customer: “Excuse me?”

Me: “You’re excused. Bye now, and thank you for coming to the store. Have a good day!”

My coworker and manager heard me and told me they laughed when I said that!