I work in a library with meeting rooms to rent. Walk-in rooms are only guaranteed for the first two hours; after that, patrons may be asked to leave if the space is requested by someone else. We also have certain rooms that are available to be booked online. Online booking has priority over walk-ins because online booking is limited to once a month.

I have a group asking for a room when we are pretty full. I notice one room that has gone long past its two hours, and I sign it out to the new group. I walk over to the meeting room in question and knock on the door.

Me: “Sorry to bother you, but the room is requested by someone else.”

Patron #1: “Okay. Can we move next door to that other room?”

Me: “I think there are other people in there. The room is signed out.”

Patron #1: “No, I think it’s empty.”

Me: “Let me check.”

I walk over to the meeting room next door. It is indeed empty. 

Me: “You’re right; it is available. Just so you know, that room is available for online booking, so it’s possible someone could book it, and they’d have priority. I do think it’s unlikely this time of night, though.”

Patron #1: “Okay.”

Me: “I’ll sign you up for this other meeting room, then. Thanks.”

I leave and do just that. I’m at the desk for a couple of minutes before a member of the group I have been speaking with approaches me — not the woman I was directly interacting with, but a different group member who watched silently. 

Me: “Hi, how can I help?”

Patron #2: “What’s your name?”

I tell her.

Patron #2: “Are you new here?”

Me: *Baffled* “No…?”

Patron #2: “You were incredibly rude just now.”

Me: “…”

The patron starts walking away. I’m speechless.

Me: *Stammering* “I’m sorry about that.”

It annoys me that I apologized for doing absolutely nothing wrong, but what else do you say to that? Not just rude, but INCREDIBLY so? 

I’ve worked in customer service for about twenty years, and I’ve never had a customer complain about me. Customer service is my strength. This wasn’t my best customer interaction of all time or anything, but it was perfectly normal to me — quite mundane, in fact.

I work in a warehouse with heavy machinery, so it’s definitely not a place for kids. We have two sit-on electric forklifts that can lift up to 3,000 pounds, and the forklifts themselves weigh nearly five tons each.

I’ve seen drivers come with their big sleeper cabs, and sometimes they have someone or even their family riding with them, so I don’t question when I have a driver show up with a full semi of heavy pallets of tiles and his wife and five-year-old daughter are with him.

The pallets of tiles on this truck are pushing 2,700 pounds. Combined with the weight of my forklift, I’ve got around 12,000 pounds of weight, and I can get the forklift up to almost ten miles per hour.

Driver: “Is there a restroom my kid can use?”

Me: “There are a couple of restrooms right inside the office that she can use.”

Then, I go about unloading the truck. I take a pallet off the truck, and as I am leaving the dock area and heading into the warehouse, I come across a main intersection. When you come across one of these, you honk the horn on the forklift and take it slow because you can’t easily see what might be coming from the left or right until you clear the garage door.

I move a handful of pallets off the truck and into the warehouse, and while I am doing it, the mom is standing well off to the side at that main intersection, just watching.

I make another trip through the intersection with a pallet of tiles, honking the horn as I’m approaching the intersection. Just as I cross through the garage, I slam on the brakes as the young child goes dashing across the front of the forklift. I’m only going a couple of miles per hour, but slamming on the brakes causes the pallet to slide almost completely off the forks. It’s within inches of crushing the little girl as her mom just stands there and just watches her kid running around.

I glare at the mom.

Me: “This isn’t a f****** playground. Why would you let your kid just run around a dangerous place? I almost f****** killed her!”

I just keep my dagger stare on her as she nonchalantly saunters across the front of my forklift, takes her daughter by her hand, and calmly walks her out. I go and find the driver.

Me: “If I see your wife or kid out of the cab any time while I’m still unloading your truck, I will refuse the shipment, and you can explain to your dispatch why you’ll have to bring the material 2,000 miles back to the facility.”

The wife and kid stayed in the truck and we had no other issues. It still makes me upset to this day when I randomly think of this situation that happened almost twenty years ago and how some parents are just so clueless or uncaring.

I am a paid tax preparer. One of my regular clients is Hmong. She’s a small business owner and she’s also somewhat superstitious.

One year, she asked me if there was any way she could pay an additional dollar in taxes. Her taxes were $6,887, and apparently, 888 is a very lucky number; she said it was the number of good fortune.

Fortunately, it’s not illegal to pay more than you have to in taxes, so I set it up so that the extra dollar would go to pay next year’s taxes in advance. She was very happy about this and became a regular for me.

This year, I was working on her taxes, and when I showed her the total, she turned as white as a sheet. It was $4,444.

Client: “That is a very unlucky number. Four is the number of death; four repeated four times is very bad, indeed.”

We were able to change the number, but she was still shaken. About a week later, she showed up on my calendar again and arrived with a Catholic priest in tow. He asked permission to bless my office. I granted it.

The whole ceremony took the entire scheduled hour. My front-of-office manager thought I was crazy to allow it and that this would cost us clients. But with how shaken my regular was and how much this seemed to calm her, I felt it was a reasonable request. I own the business, anyway.

I also made sure to get a copy of the receipt for her taxes for next year.

We have a regular who really likes pickles. He’s ordered just about every sandwich on the menu multiple times, but one thing that’s consistent is he always asks for extra pickles.

I see him coming one day, and after he orders his sandwich, I ask:

Me: “Would you like extra pickles?”

Regular: “I don’t just want extra pickles. I want a prodigious quantity of pickles. I want you to go to town on that extra pickle button on your cash register like you’re playing Diablo on your mom’s old computer with your friends on LAN. I want you to punch that button like you’re in a martial arts movie doing lightning punches. I want more extra pickles than you’ve given anyone before. I want you to take my sandwich and present it to me in a jar full of pickles.”

He pauses.

Regular: “I know that’s not something I can get, so I’ll settle for ‘extra’ pickles.”

Me: “Actually, I might be able to do something for you.”

Regular: “Really?”

Me: “One moment.”

I went back and discussed my idea with the boss, and he gave us the approval to do it. We made his sandwich and put it in a pickle jar full of pickles. These things are huge.

I presented it to the customer and he started laughing. He was really happy about it! We took a picture together — him, me, and the pickle jar. The boss had the picture blown up and laminated and put it on the wall of the store.

The regular still comes in for his pickle sandwiches, though he’s never requested a jar full of pickles since.

I was working on a dance production at university. One of the choreographers was an insufferable snob; however, he was also the publicity manager for this production.

For the production logo, he designed a small circular sun with some graceful curves in front of it, each pair of which intersected. To the entire production team, they looked like abstract birds; however, the ar-TISTE scoffed down his nose at us uncultured Philistines as these were OBVIOUSLY hills (an image which coincidentally matched the theme of his personal dance piece).

The production director was completely oblivious to the drama this guy was creating, which made this particular production meeting that much more memorable.

Me: “Okay. Next on the agenda is publicity.”

Choreographer: “The mural on the Performing Arts Center wall is being painted as we speak. The department website has been updated, and the posters are due to go to the printer this afternoon.”

Production Director: “Perfect. You know, I’ve said it before, but I love the simplicity of your design this year.”

Choreographer: “Thank you!”

Production Director: “The simplicity of those birds flying against the blank canvas of the sky is so moving.”

We could feel the rage seething within our high and mighty artist while the entire production team at the table desperately tried to suppress our laughter. He continued to insist they were hills, just outside of [Production Director]’s hearing, and with much less frequency than before.