A couple comes to the counter buying baby clothes. The woman is pregnant — VERY pregnant. As a mother of three myself, I can tell she’s only weeks away from the big day!

Me: “These clothes are so cute! Congratulations to you both!”

The father-to-be speaks out excitedly.

Father: “Thanks! We know we have some time, but we thought we’d get a head start on buying what we need.”

I am a little confused by the comment, “…we have some time…” but I don’t press it. However, the mother-to-be is looking a bit nervous.

Father: “Yeah, we have so much to do! Luckily, she isn’t due for another three months or so, so we should have time.”

I look at the mother again. Maybe it’s twins? Triplets?

Father: “I came back from tour to be here for the baby! They gave me three months leave! Can you believe it?!”

The mother-to-be is now just staring at the floor, looking very red.

Mother: “Honey, come on. I know you’re excited, but you don’t have to talk to everyone about it.”

Father: *To the mother* “Ha! You’re right.” *To me* “Sorry for talking your ears off!”

Me: “Well… thank you for your service. Let me get you a military discount on that.”

Father: “Thanks so much! I also saw you sold baby carriers, but they’re kind of pricey. Will they go on sale soon?”

Me: “I can apply a coupon to that for you, sir. Half price!”

Father: “Oh, for real? You won’t get into trouble? I don’t mind waiting for it to go on sale.”

Me: “No, sir, I would recommend buying it sooner. Much sooner.”

They bought the baby carrier, too. I really hope that when the baby comes “three months early” the father can do the math! 

Related:
Cause For Pregnant Pause, Part 28
Cause For Pregnant Pause, Part 27
Cause For Pregnant Pause, Part 26
Cause For Pregnant Pause, Part 25
Cause For Pregnant Pause, Part 24

When I was in the military, during training exercises, we were, of course, out there in the middle of nowhere with tents and tent stoves. And as the tents were meant to house up to sixteen people at once, things were a little packed even if we did not have sixteen people in the tent at once.

As such, all manner of accidents were prone to occur, and we always checked and rechecked that nothing flammable was too close to the stove which often burned red hot.

One… hero… left their gun, loaded with blanks, close enough to the stove that the magazine, made out of plastic, began to melt.

We noticed in the morning that this had occurred and were incredibly lucky that nothing further occurred. If those blanks had fired — which they could have, being heated up — we all would have been without ear protection and thus had our hearing severely injured. That hero got their… fiery response from everyone as he also made the cardinal mistake of bringing a loaded gun into the tent like a grade-A moron.

The faces of the munitions officers, however, were priceless to see when the hero returned the melted magazine as we were returning our gear at the very end of our service.

When my office in the early 1990s first started using email, the process was a bit more involved. Instead of being connected constantly, we had to use a modem to call a server and exchange the new emails we’d authored with incoming emails from our customers. Since the program that did the connection and email interchange was DOS-based, it was the only program that could run at a time on a particular PC.

Our secretary who handled the email found that if she didn’t disconnect, she would get informed of any new emails in real-time. Unfortunately, she could only do this if she wasn’t planning on using her computer for anything else. (The office was still using typewriters, so she still could do work.)

One day, when she went to lunch, she kept the email program connected. An older engineer saw that her computer was still connected for email, so he decided to write a joke email chastising her for leaving her email program on. It was something along the lines of:

Email: “Oops! I goofed and left my email open so that anyone can write messages pretending to be me!”

When she got back from lunch, she was very upset about the intrusion and was worried about getting in trouble even though she’d done nothing wrong.

As the office “computer guy”, (no official IT team existed), I took it upon myself to address the issue. I wrote a reply to the message along the lines of:

Reply: “This is a professional office. If you see technology on that is not your responsibility, please leave it be. Do not pull juvenile pranks.”

Though the engineer didn’t get in any trouble, he later did with another incident. He was using email to write explicit love letters to a woman he was seeing at the US Navy office. He accidentally replied to one of her messages by clicking a checkbox that sent his reply to not only everyone in our office but to everyone in the US Navy office (several hundred people). Since our email access was through the Navy, he (and we) got into a bit of hot water because of his error.

Many years ago, I had a summer job doing various kinds of manual labor at a college on the Hudson River that trained US Army officers. One day, I got my paycheck and was surprised to see that it was for an amount many, many times my usual pay. Looking closely, I realized that somehow I had been credited for 150 hours of overtime rather than 15.

Being honest by nature — not to mention smart enough to know that cashing it would eventually land me in federal prison — I hiked about a mile over to the Administration office and walked into that nice, clean office full of nice, clean people looking just like a twenty-one-year-old guy who had just spent four hours in a 100-degree warehouse restacking boxes of Army boots and then hiking a mile.

I (eventually) got the attention of one of the ladies behind the counter, and I held my check out to her.

Me: “Ma’am, I think there’s been a mistake with my paycheck.”

She didn’t even look at it, and she turned away as she spoke.

Lady: “We’re busy right now. Come back in a couple of hours.”

Me: “Ma’am, this check is for [insanely huge amount].”

The lady swiftly turned back and snatched the check out of my hand.

Lady: “Let me see that.”

I got a check for the correct amount in twenty minutes.

When I was about twenty-five and an officer in the Navy, I was in the wedding of a friend in the Marine Corps. I was the only naval officer there, and I wore my formal tuxedo-like “Dinner Dress” uniform for the ceremony. It is a very dark blue (really, black) uniform. The Marines were all in their dress uniforms, as well.

At the reception, I decided to chat up the sister of the bride. I walked over to her and said hello.

Bride’s Sister: “Could you get me a white wine?”

Me: “Sure.”

I went to the open bar and got her drink. I came back and handed it to her, and she said thank you, turned around, promptly resumed talking to her friends, and completely ignored me.

I was a little miffed, as you can imagine, but I went away and found some of my other friends.

A couple of weeks after the wedding, I was talking to the bride, and she was surprised that her sister had done that. It turns out that, based on my uniform, she thought I was a waiter, and when I brought her a drink, she figured our interaction was complete.

My Marine Corps buddies have never let me live that down, I can assure you.