A customer approaches the perfume counter while looking at her phone.

Me: “Excuse me, ma’am, do you need help with the fragrances?”

Customer: “Yeah, I need to smell ‘Remembrance.'”

I am fairly familiar with our perfumes and I don’t recognize the name.

Me: “Sorry, ma’am, did you know whose perfume it is?”

Customer: “’Remembrance’!”

The customer suddenly answers her phone. I search everywhere for it, trying not to interrupt her phone call.

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am. Once more, could you tell me who the perfume is by?”

Customer: “Ugh, I told you! It’s ‘Remembrance!'”

Me: “Yes, ma’am, but whose perfume is it?”

Customer: “Oh, Ralph Lauren.”

I look through our Ralph Lauren perfumes.

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but it looks like we only have the Polo collection and ‘Romance.'”

Customer: “Yeah, it’s that one!”

Me: “Oh, sorry about that. I thought you said, ‘Remembrance.'”

Customer: “No, I said, ‘Romance.'”

I work at an ice cream and fast food restaurant. A customer returns to the counter to receive his ice cream after eating his meal.

Customer: “I’d like my sundae now.”

Me: “Yes, sir, I’ll have it right out for you.”

I make the sundae and bring it out to the customer.

Me: “Here you go, sir. Enjoy, and have a great day!”

He remains where he is standing, still waiting for something.

Me: “Was there anything else, sir?”

Customer: “Do you expect me to drink it?”

Me: “Of course not, sir. There are spoons to your left.”

He looks to see the spoons, grabs one, and walks to the door to leave.

Customer: “Have a great day, sir!”

My grandmother passed away. She was a bit of a packrat, so after going through her house for the valuable and sentimental pieces, we put the rest up for sale.

It’s an enormous garage sale that covers every room in the house, save one: the bathroom. My aunt — who is part owner of the house now along with my father — wisely locks the bathroom. We are all from out of town, so we lock our stuff in there during the day so people won’t go through our bags or use our toilet.

The sale is from Thursday until Saturday. These two encounters occur with my aunt, not known for her sweet nature.

Customer #1: “Can I use the restroom?”

Aunt: “No, I’m afraid it’s locked.”

Customer #1: “But it’s an emergency! Can’t you let me use your bathroom?”

My aunt observes the customer is not bleeding nor dancing around and there are public stores and fast food joints a few streets over.

Aunt: “No.”

Customer #1: “Well, where are you going to the bathroom?”

Aunt: “In the bathroom.”

Customer #1: “Why can you use it and not me?”

Aunt: “Because it’s my house!”

Another encounter: the local church is going to pick up the rest of the stuff for their charity sale, but that isn’t until Monday. People called the house yesterday asking if the sale was continuing, but my aunt always said no. Lo and behold, on Sunday morning, a car pulls into the driveway. By now, most of my family has left so it’s just my aunt and my mother. 

Aunt: “Hi, can I help you?”

Customer #2: “Is this the yard sale?”

Aunt: “It was, but it’s over now.”

Customer #2: “What? But the paper said you were open on Sunday!”

Aunt: “No, it didn’t. It said until Saturday.”

Customer #2: “Can I look, though?”

Aunt: “No, we don’t have enough people and our cash register is gone.”

Customer #2: “This isn’t fair! I called and spoke to someone here. They said you were open today!”

Aunt: “Lady, you spoke with me and I told you Saturday! Now leave!”

As a retail employee myself, I can honestly say my aunt is not cut out for it.

This story is part of our Garage Sale roundup!

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Read the Garage Sale roundup!

During my junior year of high school, my school decided to invite a scientist of some sort that studied the effects of climate change to come to talk to all of us. Sounds cool, right? That’s what we all thought, especially since they took up an entire class period’s worth of time for it, but we were all so wrong. This presentation went wrong on so many levels.

For starters, I’m not sure where the presenter was from, but he had a very thick accent and monotone voice and that, combined with the echoey-ness of the gym my whole school was crammed into, meant that we could barely make out a third of what he was saying.

Second, of the words we could understand, a lot of it was jargon that was quite a bit above most of our high-school brains and he had complete paragraphs on his slides you could barely read from a distance that also used a lot of the same jargon.

The most interesting part of the presentation was when the guy’s slides stopped working and IT had to come out to troubleshoot.

The next day, the administration apologized to us and praised us for being so good throughout the assembly. I’m still honestly not sure if they realized half of us fell asleep during it, which is why we were so “good.”

This happens during our first “remote learning” class meeting with our statistics teacher after the quarantine starts. She’s trying to explain how things are going to go when she’s interrupted by her six-year-old daughter. We can only hear our teacher’s side of the conversation.

Teacher: “What? No!” *Back to us* “Sorry, guys. [Daughter] wanted to have cookies for breakfast.”

Classmate: “Oh! I had cookies for breakfast!”

Teacher: “NO! DON’T TELL HER THAT!”