I was volunteering for a middle school robotics competition. After it had finished, some of us stuck around to help them pack up everything, including lugging the heavy tables the robots competed on to storage. One of my fellow judges showed up to help.

Judge: “I heard you needed some dumb muscle, so here I am.”

Me: “Thanks. I’d appreciate it.”

Judge: “Just to warn you, I don’t have that much actual muscle, but I’m extra dumb, so it evens out.”

I’d just accepted a new job and was moving a few hours north to where the job was. I usually would move with a little help from my family or friends, but I had donated my kidney a few months prior — using the recovery time after to interview for the new job, actually — and as such, I was still on a strict restriction from heavy lifting. I wasn’t going to ask my family to do all the moving for me without my help, so I caved in to pay for movers. Due to some craziness with a problem pet, the move got delayed, and I had to find any movers available on short notice instead of getting to pick ones with good reviews.

They had finished most of the move, and they were turning the moving van around to get ready to leave when the driver backed the van right into a parked car — I’m not talking about a light tap. The moving van was built like a tank and unfazed, but the car had a huge gash along its front. It might still be able to drive, but it was clearly going to need major repairs.

I’d expected them to hunt down the owner, exchange insurance information, etc. Instead, they glanced around to make sure no one was watching and then told me to meet them down the road and high-tailed the van out to a different area of the parking lot. They were clearly planning to run and hope no one noticed.

I still had to handle paying them and all the final steps. I didn’t want to antagonize them while finishing those steps, so I said nothing and went along with them for the time being. All the while, the driver who had run into the car was suddenly very eager to offer to show me around town, introduce me to the best bars (despite my not drinking), and do anything else to be my friend so I would keep my mouth shut. I was very noncommittal until the paperwork was done and I could get rid of them.

I then went into my new apartment to get some paper and write up a detailed note for the car owner as to what happened, who was responsible, and how to get hold of them. As I was leaving it on the car, a woman shouted out from a window in the apartment complex.

Woman: “Are you trying to contact the owner of that car? I saw the whole thing. They live in apartment [number].”

I tried going there to find the owner, but they didn’t open their door. Instead, I left a second note on the door explaining everything I knew and how to get into contact with me if they needed to.

I never heard back from the car’s owner directly, but a few weeks later, the man who had been driving the van called me up shocked that I had told the car owner who had demolished their vehicle.

I pointed out that it was completely unreasonable for him to expect me to screw over the innocent owner of the vehicle by not telling them what had happened and that there was another witness so it wouldn’t have mattered if I hadn’t told. I also mentioned that it was not only kind of pointless to call me now over it but very ethically questionable since he likely wasn’t supposed to have access to my phone number like that.

He was still acting as if I had somehow slighted him as I told him not to call back.

Shockingly, he didn’t end up showing me around town as he had promised, not that I wanted to take him up on that offer, anyway.

I use to work in fraud protection for a credit card company. We often had to make calls out to customers who had unusual purchases on their cards that we wanted to verify, which usually resulted in leaving a message on an answering machine. This was back in the days before voicemail.

I’d been experimenting with ways to increase the rate at which I handled calls. The biggest timekiller was waiting for the phone to ring and leaving messages, so I started writing all my notes while the phone was ringing. As soon as the answering machine picked up, while I was giving a message so routine that I didn’t need to think about it, I’d finish closing the current account and start the pre-call steps on my next account.

This, and a few other tricks I came up with, gave me a noticeably higher rate of handling accounts, enough that I was eventually asked to train others in the things I did to boost my call rate.

Unfortunately, eventually, I had someone pick up while I was leaving a message on their answering machine. This was a problem because I’d already exited out of their account and our system didn’t have a way to look up previously worked accounts.

Me: “Hello, I am calling from [Credit Card] fraud department. We’ve seen some unusual activity on your card and just wanted to verify that it was done by you. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I exited out of your account when you didn’t pick up. Please give me a minute to see if I can look it up again.”

I tried looking it up with the phone number I had just called, only to remember that I had ended up looking up and calling an alternative number to the one on the account, per our usual policy when we suspect someone took over a card and put a fake number on it. I quickly ran through a few other options in my head, but I couldn’t come up with a good way to find the account.

Me: “I’m terribly sorry, but it looks like, now that I’ve exited your account, I have no way to look it back up without an account number or social, but—”

I intended to tell him that he could call the number on the back of his card and he would be immediately directed to someone he could trust to give that information to, but he cut me off.

Man: “Oh, that’s fine. My social’s [number].”

I was shocked that he had just given that information to a random guy calling him, but I still used it to bring up his account. Since this was an alternate number that wasn’t trusted, I was still forced to ask further security questions, which he happily answered, before we could get to the suspected fraud.

In the end, it turned out that someone had taken over his account, put an address and phone number they controlled on the card, and had a new card sent to the new address. It’s nearly impossible to do that if the person in question doesn’t already have a significant amount of information about the person they’re trying to take over — most importantly, their Social Security number.

Gee, I wonder how an untrustworthy individual got hold of the Social Security number of a guy who will freely read it off to any stranger that calls him?

You will be happy to know that, after this foolish mistake, I changed my process to make sure I kept the account number of the person I had just called on one of my applications while moving forward with screening the next account in another window, so I could still find the old account if I got a late pick-up again.

I work in a hotel. One of my bellmen came down today after being asked to retrieve a guest’s items for him. The bellman went upstairs to the room, entered it, and, finding no bags, returned downstairs. On the way down, he encountered the guest.

Bellman: “Excuse me, sir, but I couldn’t find your bags.”

Guest: “Oh, they’re in the hallway.”

The bellman returned to the room to find the bags in the hallway. They were plastic shopping bags, which he thought were trash placed in the hall for housekeeping to pick up and throw out! Thank goodness my bellman got to them first!

My boyfriend and I are on vacation for a week, staying at a hotel on the beach.

Boyfriend: “What do you want to do today?”

Me: “We can go to the beach.”

Boyfriend: “It’s gonna be too hot out there.”

Me: “There’s [Amusement Park].”

Boyfriend: “Too expensive. And probably super crowded!”

Me: “The mall?”

Boyfriend: “We have a mall back home! I want to do something fun and different.”

Me: “Okay, there’s the aquarium, the zoo, or the nature reserve. We can go—”

Boyfriend: “No, they all sound stupid.”

Me: “Okay, well, you figure out what you want to do. I’m going to the lobby for breakfast.”

Boyfriend: “Can you bring me—”

I walk out, angry. When I get back upstairs, I find him sitting in bed watching racing.

Me: “This is what you want to do today?”

Boyfriend: “You didn’t offer up anything else, so yeah, I guess this is what I’m doing.”

Me: “I offered several things and you turned them all down.”

Boyfriend: “You offered stupid things.”

I walk out again and go to the beach by myself. We repeat variations of this song and dance every day that week until it is time to go home.

Boyfriend: “What a boring vacation. We could have done the same thing at home and not paid for the hotel.”

Me: “Yes, we could have. “

Boyfriend: “Why didn’t we go anywhere fun? I swear, we just stayed in the hotel room all week.”

Me: “You did. I went to the beach and the zoo and shopping.”

Boyfriend: “So, basically, you spent a bunch of money and left me alone.”

Me: “Yup. Best vacation ever.”

We broke up when we got home. I’m pretty sure he still blames me for having such a boring vacation.