At a used bookstore, I am in charge of the donations for a local children’s hospital. People can bring in all kinds of kids’ books for the library at the hospital, but we ask that they be new or in perfect or like-new condition. They can’t have any writing inside, stickers, or anything like that. I have to go through all the crap people drop off. It is usually stuff their kids have drawn all over, has ripped pages, or smells like cat pee, which I don’t understand. It doesn’t seem very charitable.

There is this one guy who comes in all the time and just browses for hours. He never really spends any money. He brings a stack of children’s books to our “buy” counter one day, and all of them have stickers on the front that say, “Donated from the Library of [Customer].”

I get called up to explain to the guy that not only can we not accept his donations (because he’s put big stickers right on the front with his name), but he also isn’t going to get to write this off on his taxes; he also wants us to make him up a receipt for charitable donations.

He starts to get angrier and angrier as I explain that our bookstore isn’t like a 501(c)(3) organization, that the library service we do is really just for sick kids at the hospital to have something to read, and his “donation” is kind of offensive because the children don’t need to be reminded that they’re being given charity.

He ends up literally red-faced, spit flying out of his mouth while he fumes and screams at us for “screwing [him] around,” as well as his “elderly, wealthy mother” who, he claims, spends tons of money at our store and will no longer be coming in.

I was driving down a road without much traffic, just humming along at the speed limit, when suddenly, a car zipped by and pulled in front of me, cutting me off. I avoided a crash, but there was definitely less than a car length of space between the two of us.

Immediately, a police car appeared from some ways back, somehow managed to squeeze into the space between my car and the one that cut me off, and pulled that driver over.

I was grinning for the rest of my commute.

My wife orders a couple of drinks from a restaurant using a delivery service. The drinks arrive, and… they’re right in front of the door of the house, on the little step at the threshold.

I try to open the door gently so I can get the drinks, but it’s absolutely impossible. The drinks fall down on the porch and spill everywhere. They go in the garbage; they’re completely useless now.

How can you be so stupid as to not realize that if you put the drinks there, there’s no way to get to them without knocking them over?!

As I was driving around on a Friday, my truck repeatedly warned me that my windshield washer fluid was low, so I decided I would top up the fluid as soon as I got home.

Now, the windshield washer fluid reservoir in this thing is huge. In the six years of driving this truck, I think we’ve had to add fluid about six times. So, cue me looking in the manual for how to open the flipping hood (the release is hidden on the bottom of the steering column), opening the hood, digging out the jug of washer fluid, and getting ready to add it — just as the garage opener light times out, making the garage a lot darker.

Undaunted, I spotted something that looked like a windshield washer reservoir, took off the cap, and poured the fluid in… only to have it splash over my hands. It was already full! Cue WTF moment, turning on the garage light switch, and looking at the truck manual once more.

I had just added windshield washer fluid to the brake fluid reservoir! Yikes!

Long story short, the auto club towed my truck to the garage, where the mechanic flushed the brake fluid completely. Fortunately, everyone had time in their schedules, so I was back on the road by the end of the day (at a price, of course).

Lesson learned. Don’t do a task like this when: 1) you haven’t done it in over a year; 2) you’re tired; 3) you’re hurrying (when there is no good reason to hurry); 4) you can’t actually see properly.

I was glad that I had a regular, trusted mechanic who I could call to check just how bad my mistake was. Otherwise, I might have risked driving the 20 km (at highway speeds) to the garage, which would have pumped the washer fluid through the brake lines.

One day, my partner and I had some time to kill in the city center of Hereford. We didn’t really know [Shop], so we decided to go inside just to see what kind of shop it was.

It turned out that the shop was fundraising for Sports Relief. Sports Relief supports the most vulnerable people in the UK and Africa, such as children who have to act as carers for their parents, women’s shelters, cancer patients, etc. The charity has much support in Britain, and as such, we had already donated through our children’s schools. Also, the fundraising in the shop was a lottery where you could win sports-related prizes, and I had no interest whatsoever in winning tickets for football, rugby, basket, or tennis matches.

However, the young female clerk who was selling the lottery tickets had not only been forced into (I didn’t ask, but nobody would do that voluntarily) a Bananas In Pyjamas outfit that must have been unpleasantly hot, but when there were no customers who wanted to buy lottery tickets, she had to be on an exercise bike. I felt sorry for her, so I decided to buy one single lottery ticket. Then, I asked a lot of questions about the charity, even though I already knew most of the answers, just so that she could get a nice, long break from that d*** bike.

Weeks passed. Of course, I forgot all about the lottery ticket. Then, somebody called me to tell me I had won a prize. When they told me it was from the Sports Relief lottery, I sort of sighed inside, but I had won a half-day canoe trip on the river Wye, which is something we usually try to do every year, anyway.

Sometimes Karma does work. We had a great day on the river.