(I work at a pretty popular gas station chain. This happens more often than I can count, at times when we need more than one person on register.)

Me: *getting on register and looking for the nearest person who looks free* “Hello, have you been helped yet?”

Customer: “Yes.” *slides their stuff over towards me*

My mother was a pediatric cardiac nurse and was taking care of a boy who had just had open heart surgery. She left for the weekend, and this story was relayed to her the next morning she was in.

The mother of the young boy suddenly started to have severe abdominal pains during the night. The nurse realized after checking her over that she had forgotten to ask her a very important question: when was the last time she had had her period? The mother said, “Oh, it’s coming any day now.”

The nurse looked at the nurse supervisor who was helping her. This is a children’s hospital, so they had no labor and delivery ward. The supervisor started to panic. This hospital is up the road from another, adult hospital. So, the supervisor decided to put the mother in a wheelchair and push her down to the adult hospital. This hospital is located at the top of a hill, so as he was pushing her down to the other hospital, the wheelchair slipped out of his hand. Luckily, he caught her before she got too far away, and got her to the adult hospital before she delivered the baby.

When my mom got back that Monday, she went to the boy’s room and saw that the mother was back already. She found that the mother had been so focused on taking care of her son before his surgery and getting him the surgery that she hadn’t realized she hadn’t had her period in over seven months.

Luckily, both the son and baby were able to leave the hospital soon after, and last my mother heard they were all doing well.

I’m telling on myself in this one. I was working at a video game store in a large, busy strip mall. The parking lot was usually very crowded, so we had a constant problem with our customers parking illegally in the fire lane in front of the store. At first I would just politely inform customers they weren’t allowed to park there and they were risking getting a ticket, but only some seemed to actually care.

Then, one day, our manager told us that he’d been warned that the store could get fined for letting customers park there, and it could possibly mean us getting fired over it, so we really needed to enforce the parking rules. I never found out if that was actually true, but in any case, I wasn’t going to risk losing my job because customers were being lazy and parking illegally.

Eventually, I started to get a bit overzealous about it. Whenever I saw someone parking in the fire lane I would quickly rush out to the sidewalk so I could tell them to move their car.

For whatever reason, this particular week was really bad with people parking in the fire lane. During my last shift of the week, I was starting to get really frustrated, as it had happened multiple times in the first couple hours of my shift. Then, I noticed a huge vehicle pulling up and parking in front of the store. At my wit’s end, I rushed out to the sidewalk, ready to yell, when the coin finally dropped and I realized the vehicle I was looking at was a firetruck — the exact vehicle that the fire lane is meant for!

Fortunately, I caught myself before I blurted out anything stupid. The firefighters weren’t there for an emergency. It turns out they were just bored and were coming to shop for some video games to take back to the station house to play while they waited for a call.

They were extremely nice, and while ringing them out I admitted to how I almost yelled at them for where they parked. They got a good chuckle out of it.

(I’m a manager at a local fast food burger joint. I am in the back office counting money when my drive-thru employee approaches me.)

Employee: “A customer drove up to the window and he is being very rude. I don’t know what to do, so I closed the window and came to get you.”

(I walk over to drive-thru and open the window.)

Me: “Hello, sir, what seems to be the problem?”

Customer: “As I was trying to explain to your worker, we have been sitting in drive-thru for fifteen minutes, and I ordered one small vanilla milkshake. I demand compensation for the long wait time.”

(He then begins to count everyone in his car.)

Customer: “There are five of us, so I think five free, large milkshakes is fair enough.”

(The way the customer has been talking to me, and the fact that he ordered only one small milkshake when he had four people with him, makes me suspicious that he is trying to get free food from us. Even so, giving him five large milkshakes is out of the question.)

Me: “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t offer you five free milkshakes. I can give you your small one for free, and if you feel that isn’t enough, then you can email [Owner] about your complaint.”

Customer: “F*** YOU!”

(They speed off. The next customer pulls up. I take their money, and give them their food, along with the small vanilla milkshake that would have been thrown away.)

Me: “Have a free milkshake, courtesy of the customer ahead of you.”

(Overheard at a playground…)

Mother: “Are your children wearing traditional Japanese kimonos?”

Japanese Mother: “No, they’re Star Wars costumes.”