My coworker and I are talking to a guest about traveling in Yellowstone National Park in November.

Guest: “I think the entrances are all closed.”

Me: *Checking the website.* “Mostly, but you can travel from Gardiner to Cooke City. That road has to stay open year-round.”

Guest: “Good! I want to see bears!”

Coworker: “You might be able to, but they are getting ready to den. There’s no guarantee.”

Guest: “I WILL see bears!”

Coworker & I: “Okaaaaay…”

Guest: “Will I need bear spray?”

Me: “It’s never a bad idea, but if you don’t bring some, you can stay in your car. The camera you showed us has a good zoom.”

Guest: “But I want to get close to them!”

Coworker: “No, you don’t! And the rules are that you have to stay a hundred yards away.”

Guest: “But what if no one is watching?”

Me: “Bears are fast and—”

Guest: “—So am I!

Coworker: “You are not as fast as they are.”

Guest: “Come on! You have bears in town, right?”

Me: “We have black bears, not grizzlies.”

Coworker: “And we still don’t WALK UP TO THEM!”

The guest huffed and headed to her room. My manager cracked up the next morning when I told her. We watched the headlines the next several days but no mention of her.

I work overnights stocking shelves in a big box store. Our store is closed on Christmas. The way our shift gets our day off is we get Christmas Eve off, but go in for our usual shift Christmas Day night.

As I arrive at work, I see a man peering in the door. Thinking it’s one of our newer employees, I let him know:

Me: “Hi! The employee entrance is open.”

Then he turns around, and I see it’s actually a customer.

Customer: “Oh, you are open!”

Me: “Well, no, it’s 10 PM on Christmas Day. But we open early tomorrow morning.”

Customer: “Oh darn.”

I will never know what was so important that he needed it at 10 PM on Christmas Day but he didn’t get it from us. At least he was nice about it.

A customer comes over to my cutting station with a sheet of OSB (oriented strand board), that distinct engineered wood that’s made by sticking together lots of wood strands.

Customer: “I want this OSB cut in half.”

Me: “No problem.”

I do the cut for her and slide both halves toward her.

Customer: “I only want one half.”

Me: “Well, you’re paying for both, so you can take both.”

Customer: “No, I’m only paying for what I need, which is half.”

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but it doesn’t work like that. You have to buy the whole sheet whether you use it all or not.”

Customer: “Stop trying to screw me over and just sell me my half!”

Me: “The system doesn’t allow me to do that. I can only print stickers for whole sheets, not portions of them.”

Customer: “Well, what if I said I wanted half or nothing?”

Me: “Then I’d say enjoy your ride home with nothing, ma’am.”

She grumbled but took both halves.

I play volleyball, and at the end of the season, we get free tickets to a college volleyball game. The other team is from one of the Dakotas, so the parents traveled quite a ways, and this is college volleyball; it’s pretty intense.

The opposing team’s parents are quite… rude.

One of the moms sitting two rows ahead of us is making some pretty snide comments, you know, stuff like our team should learn the rules.

I’m sitting there chatting with one of my teammates about the game, while this lady is yapping away. My teammate and I had had enough of her by the third set, so we decided to get some payback.

We move down a row so we’re sitting right behind her, and settle in. Now, I can be a pretty loud person, as is my teammate. So, whenever our team scores a point, we scream. In unison, and extremely loudly. We direct it using our hands right into her ears, which means that she had two people screaming in her ears.

She moved.

To the other side of the gym.

Many years ago, I worked for an office running Medicaid for the state I’m in. Most of the submitted claims were scanned in and automated, which was fine, but sometimes this led to amusing situations like the following. I tried to summarize it to remove the unnecessary details.

Me: *Answering phone.* “Thank you for calling. How may I help you?”

Caller: “Yes, we received an explanation of benefits and think there may have been a pretty hefty mistake made.”

Me: *Bracing myself for the inevitable yelling, as this never is a good start.* “Sure, what’s the claim number so I can look it up?”

They give it to me, and I pull up the file, not immediately seeing anything suspicious.

Caller: “If you look at this, we were paid for 100 units of this service, but it should have been 1.00; the decimal was left out.”

Me: “Ah, okay, let me make some notes and get this straightened out.”

Caller: “If this caller had 100 of these done on that day, I really feel sorry for him.”

Me: *Now curious.* “Oh? Let me see what it was…”

I proceed to pull up details of the claim and immediately have to fight back laughter.

Caller: “No patient, ever, wants to have more than one colonoscopy done in a single day.” *Quietly laughs.*

Me: *Trying to maintain my professionalism.* “All I can say is ouch… Anyways, I have noted the error, we’ll start the paperwork to get it corrected.”

I proceed to end the call as quickly as possible before I crack up laughing. Patient, whoever you were, I really hope you had a lot of ice packs and padding to sit on after that horrifying day of a hundred colonoscopies.