I was at a rather popular big-name retail store looking to get a game that had been released that day. I had to wait for the sole cashier at the store’s electronics department to be finished with a couple of customers before they could get me the game from behind a locked glass door and then ring me up. All of a sudden one of the customers decided to get on his phone for… too long.

The cashier noticed me and told me to wait a minute, which I was willing to do because stuff happens. They must have noticed my patience for the customers was starting to run thin, as they put the customers’ order aside, got the game I wanted out, canceled their order after informing them they were on the phone and holding up the line for too long, and then rang me up.

To that cashier: you didn’t have to do that, but kudos, and if you’re reading this, I hope you’re having a good day.

CONTENT WARNING: Fatal Car Accident

My wife and I are raising my ten-year-old son, my eight-year-old niece, and my seven-year-old daughter. We adopted my niece more than a year ago. My sister was a single mother, and my niece, sister, and her boyfriend were in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. My sister and her boyfriend both died.

My niece survived but was paralyzed from her lower back down, and she had to come to terms with her mom’s death, adjust to living in our family, and learn how to live her new life in a wheelchair.

At first, we were worried about how our kids would react to their cousin living with us. She wasn’t close to us before; the reason we were adopting her was that she didn’t have anywhere else to go. Our kids had met her a few times before. Due to the hospital’s health crisis regulations at the time, the only visitors allowed in the hospital she was staying at were adults, and they really preferred that those adults were my wife and me. We tried to have the kids talk on Zoom, but they never really connected. My son in particular can be very resistant to any changes at home and was pretty upset already about the ways we were changing our house to make it more accessible.

We brought my niece home after a few months in the hospital, and as expected, my son wasn’t incredibly happy about this. He didn’t say anything to her face about it, but she could tell he wasn’t happy about her being there.

The next morning, I woke up at seven, and as I went into the kitchen to start making breakfast, I saw my niece’s wheelchair… but no niece in it. I heard strange noises coming from the living room, and I walked in to see my son with my niece sitting on his shoulders, my niece being very small for her age. They were both giggling and laughing and searching for something on the mantle above the fireplace.

I got my niece back into her wheelchair and asked what happened. All that they would tell me was that my niece’s glasses had somehow ended up on the mantel. My son was too short to see it from where he was standing, and my niece was too nearsighted to find her glasses without wearing them, so they were just doing their best to work together to find the glasses.

I was upset that my son had just picked her up and put her on his shoulders, and we had a long talk about safety, but I’m also incredibly relieved; it’s been six months, and my son, niece, and daughter are best friends. I asked my son what changed, and he just said that it was impossible to stay mad at his cousin when she’s such an amazing person.

Both of my kids are very patient and supportive of my niece’s trauma, anxiety, and physical disability, and my niece is incredibly loving and grateful in return.

This story is part of our Highest-Voted-Inspirational-Stories-Of-2023-(so far!) roundup!

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About 95% of our business is done online, and our products are shipped to the customers. As part of the process, the warehouse team will pick and pack the box and then process the shipping label. Our team then processes the invoice to make sure all the money’s good and something didn’t slip through. Then, it goes back to the warehouse to be finalized. It’s not the most efficient system, but it definitely cuts down on mistakes… usually.

As of late, though, the warehouse has been “getting in gear” later and later in the day. True, they still get everything processed, but now it puts a time crunch on us, since our team is also in charge of entering the orders, so we end up not getting that done because we’re too busy invoicing. The shipping manager insists that we’re exaggerating and it’s not so bad, so I get permission to run a few reports, which my boss takes into the next meeting.

This isn’t counting high-priority or special request orders, of which there are only a couple per day at most.

Monday: 10 orders picked at 12:00 pm, 21 orders picked at 1:00 pm, 29 orders picked at 2:00 pm, 42 orders picked at 3:00 pm. The first label was generated at 3:30 pm.

Tuesday: 8 orders picked at 12:00 pm, 16 orders picked at 1:00 pm, 35 orders picked at 2:00 pm, 47 orders picked at 3:00 pm. The first label was generated at 3:47 pm.

Wednesday: 15 orders picked at 12:00 pm, 31 orders picked at 2:00 pm, 45 orders picked at 3:00 pm, 57 orders picked at 4:00 pm. The first label was generated at 4:07 pm.

Thursday “didn’t count” because we were having system problems in the morning that affected the whole company.

By the time they had the meeting on Friday at 3:00 pm, there were “only” 32 orders picked, and we hadn’t gotten any orders back to invoice.

I wasn’t privy to the conversation, but the muffled shouting of the confrontation between the office manager, the warehouse manager, and the shipping team made its way from the office in the warehouse into the main office for a good fifteen minutes afterward.

Weirdly, the next week, we started getting labels earlier in the day.

I was bartending at a basement bar venue that was a decent-sized place. We had two bartenders and a barback on this particular Sunday. The other bartender was my favorite type of guy to work with: jaded and surly with a sense of humor.

The barback, however, had been setting off red flags since he’d started a few months before. He just kind of seemed like a sketchy druggie. I started hearing that he was asking for advances on his check to buy coke and getting yakked up in the broom closet. I trusted the people telling me these things, but I always verify for myself, so I started paying closer attention to him.

I noticed that [Barback] would sweep behind the bar toward the end of the night, which I would never do when I was a barback. You wash dishes and stock as directed by the bartenders; you generally don’t belong behind the bar unless you are bartending. But I wasn’t trying to be a jerk to the guy for sweeping.

Tips had been feeling light for a little while, but I never had a smoking gun until the night in question. I was counting up our tips to split between [Bartender], [Barback], and myself when I realized I only had four $20s. The problem is that when I adjusted all my credit card tips, I pulled out five $20s, and that wasn’t counting [Bartender]’s $20s.

I announced that something was off. [Barback] started to sweat. The owner went to check the camera and, sure enough, saw [Barback] go in for his signature sweep behind the bar right after we pulled our credit card tips. As soon as our backs were turned, this slimy motherf***er dipped his hand into the tip bucket and took $100 out.

[Owner] told him to give it back now or deal with the cops. He had it stashed away in a shadowy corner like the rat he was.

He got fired immediately. [Bartender], [Owner], and I spent the next couple of hours drinking and cursing [Barback]’s name. Every time the conversation would change topic, someone would bring it back with, “I can’t believe that motherf***er!”

As a bonus, a couple of weeks later, I was taking inventory in the beer walk-in — kegs and over a hundred different bottles and cans — and in a half-empty six-pack, I found a phone matching one that had gone missing from a server’s purse. [Barback] had been working the night the server’s phone went missing, and the stashing behavior matched up, too.

There’s no worse Karma in the restaurant industry than stealing from your coworkers.

I work for a bank a major high-street bank in the UK, specifically in the fraud department. In 2018, a customer called in because we wouldn’t let him access his account. Normally, we only restrict accounts if there are security concerns or if we think they’re a fraudster. I pulled up his account and notes, and I could tell something was off, mainly because of the twenty pages of notes, each with ten notes a page.

The more I read, the more gobsmacked I became. For the last three years, this customer had been under the impression that he was in a relationship with Rita Ora. That’s right — the actual singer-songwriter Rita Ora. At every opportunity, this customer had sent money to numerous destinations at the request of his “girlfriend”, and no matter what he had been told by staff or police, he still did not believe that he was a victim of a scam and was being robbed. (We had to get the police involved because we could only assume a person so duped had to be a danger to themselves.)

He told us that he had met her family and been to their houses. Unfortunately, he had never met Rita personally because she had such a busy timetable.

As I’m sure anyone would, I felt pity that someone was so deep in an illusion and being taken advantage of. Surely, you’d think, this person was vulnerable, perhaps a low-income gent late in life, and this was the only joy to which he clung.

No, this man was twenty-six. I have no idea what his job was, but it pulled in a cool £8,000 (around 9,900 USD) a month after tax. Granted, most of that was sent to “Rita”. He started trying to hide his dealings when people tried to stop him, but as far as we could confirm, in total, he had sent her over £250,000 (over 300,000 USD) over these years.

I later found out that we had no choice but to close his account down; even after the highest head of my department physically went to this person with all our evidence of him being robbed, he still wouldn’t see the light.