I work at a futon shop. I am helping a woman who doesn’t know the size of her bed and therefore the size of the fitted sheet she needs. I try every way of trying to help her determine or remember, but she keeps answering:

Customer: “It’s just a bed! A regular bed!”

I even resort to explaining the concept of size, in desperation, using clothing size as an example.

Nope, she seems to be listening, I think we might be getting somewhere, and then, nope! She’s right back at “a regular bed!”

Finally, my manager butts in to say, very politely, calmly, and kindly:

Manager: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we can’t help you. I’m sorry, but we can’t sell you anything.”

He had to say it several times, but eventually, she gave up and left. Bizarre. She was educated and well-spoken… How could she have missed being aware of the very concept of bed/mattress/sheet sizes?!

I work as a bartender at a nightclub in New York City. Two fellows with thick European accents come up to the bar, and one asks in all earnestness:

Customer: “Two lines of Coke, please.”

I just stare at him for a couple of seconds. Yup, he’s serious.

Me: “Coke… Uh… cola?”

Customer: “No, to sniff.”

He then does a little mime demonstration for me to really drive home what is by now abundantly clear.

Me: “Ah, I see; you’re an idiot. Go get arrested somewhere else.”

A client says he wants to work with me on a video. He immediately sends me a script for a super complicated effects-heavy project, with every shot described exactly to the second.

When I tell him my fee and explain that this will definitely cost extra given how many complicated effects he wants, he acts surprised.

Client: “But my budget is only $200.”

Many years ago, I worked for a contracting firm in New York that specialized in Lexan glass windows. We were contacted by a very well-known jewelry firm near Wall Street about replacing their aging front display window with an extremely large panel of Lexan. By “extremely large”, I mean two inches thick, six feet high, and fourteen feet long! This panel was literally going to be bulletproof! The owners wanted to get rid of the “jailhouse ambiance” of having huge vertical bars all across the display window.

They and we agreed upon a price for the installation — almost astronomical considering it was just a big window. As we removed the old window and the bars, we realized that the framework surrounding what would be the new window badly needed beefing up for better security. We recommended a couple of other contractors to perform that work as that was outside the scope of our knowledge and experience. The owners, already unhappy about the amount they were having to spend, declined to do so even after we practically begged them to and required them to sign off on an agreement holding us harmless for the framework holding the new Lexan panel.

A week after we completed the installation, we got a frantic phone call early in the morning from the owners of the jewelry store. My boss and I arrived at the store’s location to find that the thieves had come very well-prepared. They had drilled two holes in the Lexan panel, installed collapsible grappling hooks on chains through the panel, and apparently simply hooked the chains to a tow ball on the back of a large vehicle. The entire Lexan panel was laying on the sidewalk — completely undamaged except for some minor scratches and the two drilled holes — along with the chains and grappling hooks, having been completely jerked out of the storefront.

We all — the police, the store owners, my boss, and me — stood there gazing at the now-empty display window and cases in the store. The store had lost close to a million dollars in jewelry and expensive watches.

The owners immediately tried to blame our company for the failure of the Lexan panel to protect the store. We took the position that the Lexan had done exactly what we’d promised and that its mostly undamaged condition was a testament to that.

Our insurance company and their attorneys argued with their insurance company and attorneys in arbitration for months until the judge hearing the case finally found completely in our favor. His analogy and the lesson: when the plumber putting in your new toilet says you need to replace the floor under it, and that’s out of his scope of work, LISTEN TO HIM!

This is going to sound weird, but I’m working on the set of a science-themed television show for a major network, and we need samples of water from hotdog vendors. We’re filming a segment about the cleanliness of the water the hotdogs are sitting in, so we’re performing a somewhat-scientific test by collecting water from as many carts as possible and running a few simple assays for coliform bacteria and other things you wouldn’t want your hotdog floating in.

Or, at least, that’s the goal. The problem is that no hotdog vendor is willing to give us a sample of their water. Although we’ve assured them that we’re just going to report generally on our findings and not identify or even show any vendors (it’s all filmed in a studio), they’re understandably reluctant to involve themselves in the project.

So, now we have a problem. We have a script, a shooting schedule, and lots of set pieces related to hotdog water, but we didn’t anticipate such difficulty getting the actual hotdog water.

I’m called away to something else, and when I come back a couple of hours later, I see that the production assistants have somehow collected water from something like twenty different carts; before, we had zero! I ask them how they were able to do this, and apparently, the secret was sending an attractive female production assistant to collect the water. From what I understand, most of the interactions went like this.

Production Assistant: “Hi, can I have some of the water from your cart?”

Vendor: “Uh, why?”

Production Assistant: “Because I like it.”

And that was it. Every single vendor she approached gave her a container full of water, no other questions asked.