Not too long ago, my wife thought she’d lost her driver’s license while visiting friends. We searched and searched with no luck, so we decided to visit the state’s driver’s license site to find out what we needed to do to get a replacement.

The instructions were to log onto the site or visit a local office, provide the driver’s license number and the accounting code on the license…

…and bring two forms of picture ID, including the driver’s license.

Fortunately, we found the license, so there was no need to get a replacement (as if we could, given those requirements).

I work at a sign and vinyl application franchise. We do a lot of corporate signage, but occasionally, we get unique orders for use of our vinyl stock.

I answered the phone one day for a client whose business was in glass installation. He explained that he needed a reorder of a product he’d gotten in June: a three-by-five-foot protective vinyl application to a matching-sized pane of glass. 

We went through a few details and he mentioned that this time, the glass they’d bring in for production would be nearly an inch thick.

He explained that the client to whom he’d be supplying the glass had the pane as part of a glass coffee table. And three months after they’d installed the first one, an employee sat on top of it and completely cracked it, completely ruining it.

I kept my voice steady for the rest of the call — the poor guy sounded so dejected — but I couldn’t stop giggling at the thought of some poor employee finding out the hard way that you shouldn’t sit on glass coffee tables.

When I was a young child, my parents would always be invited to a Fourth Of July party held at a private beach on the bay by a friend of my father’s. The beach did not happen to have a restroom; we had to walk a little ways away to find the porta-potties.

One holiday, I needed to pee, but both my parents were busy talking to other grown-ups. I knew they wouldn’t want me going on my own, but I decided I was big enough to manage the trek, and I figured they wouldn’t even notice I had gone. I found the potties just as I planned, but on my way back, I missed my turn and soon was hopelessly lost.

Eventually, a man came out to find out why I was walking through his yard. I didn’t have shoes since I had been playing in the bay, and the road was hurting my bare feet. I tried to explain where the party was, but my limited explanation wasn’t enough for the man to figure out where to take me, so he instead offered to walk with me for a while until I found my way back.

Once it became clear that I must be walking in the wrong direction, he took me to a neighbor who he hoped could drive me around to look for them. Sadly, both that neighbor’s car and boat were not available at the moment, so I briefly had two escorts walking with me until they could find a third volunteer with a functional car to drive me around to look for the party.

By this point, I’d figured out where I had gone wrong and asked to be taken back to the porta-potties. I’m pretty sure I would have found the turn this time, but I didn’t need to, as the flashing lights of a police car in a nearby lot gave away where the turn was. It seemed my parents had noticed I’d gone missing and the police had been called.

The man dropped me off with my parents and got many thanks in return. I was scared, and exhausted from all the walking and worrying, but I was thankful I’d had numerous volunteers to help me find my way back.

It’s a small thing, but when everyone tries to make it sound like the world is falling apart, I try to remember that there are still decent people who will give up their afternoon to make sure a lost child finds his way home.

We had two cats. The older one was pretty mellow. The younger one tended to startle really easily; the term “scaredy cat” could have been coined for him.

They both loved to crawl into bags and boxes, as all cats do, and if we had a paper shopping bag, we would often leave it on the floor for a day or two for them to indulge their “cave instinct”.

One day, I was in the kitchen when Scaredy Cat came tearing into the kitchen, followed closely by one of the paper bags we’d left out the day before. My first thought was that he and Mellow Cat had squabbled and Mellow Cat was chasing him, but I immediately realized that Mellow Cat could hardly be running while inside the bag.

Apparently, Scaredy Cat had been hanging out in the bag, tried to leave, and got a leg caught in the bag’s twine handle. As he moved, the bag moved, which, of course, terrorized him into running — and the bag chased him.

I was laughing too hard to even attempt to catch the cat (or the Bag From Hell). Scaredy Cat finally tore loose from the bag, ran into another room, and hid for hours. I’m surprised that the poor cat didn’t have a heart attack.

We never again left out a bag with a handle.

In my second year of college, I was living with the roommate I’d had in the dorms the year prior. The first year, our schedules were the complete opposite, so I didn’t run into this issue.

[Roommate] had a terrible time getting up in the morning and asked if I could help wake her up as I was a chipper morning person. The first morning I did it, I woke her up about half an hour before I was leaving, and there was my first mistake.

She was not a morning person. Until I left, she kept grumbling and cursing at me and generally being mad.

From then on, I would wait until I was walking out the door, flick her lights on and off leaving them on, and yell for her to wake up before running out the door to escape her wrath.