I taught for an American school in Mexico in 2000. Most people did not have Internet in their homes at the time, and email was the easiest way to communicate with friends and family in other countries. My school decided to help us by offering us Internet at school.

Internet usage process:

1. Have your email contacts begin emailing you at an email address shared by every school employee, with your name as the subject.
2. Log on to the school’s one computer. Find the emails addressed to you. Copy and paste the email bodies into a Word document and save them to a floppy disc. Delete your emails. Log off.
3. Read your emails offline. Compose your responses in a Word document.
4. Log back on. Copy and paste your responses into the bodies of your emails. Log off again.

Oddly, I found I’d rather spend about a dollar for an hour of time at an Internet cafe.

I manage the stock of a mid-sized downtown hospital. The delivery entrance was built long before healthcare products were delivered with 35-ton trucks. Entering this narrow path from the street is not easy; to get out in reverse is a challenge. Since we have another hospital, a stadium, the justice hall, and three schools within a 200-meter radius, all streets in the vicinity are filled with cars parked along the boardwalk… which complicates delivery trucks’ manoeuvres.

One day, we find a Mini-Cooper parked along the delivery quay, right in front of the 8000-liter air-liquid tank. It is not only explicitly prohibited, but it is plain stupid. No one want to see a manoeuvring truck crush a giant air-liquid tank; the explosion could snuff the whole neighbourhood.

Supposing it is a hospital visitor who didn’t find a parking place in the streets around, we ask the front desk to make a general announcement, but no one came to move the Mini. It stays until after six pm, well after visiting time is over. By sheer luck, only lorries with low loads have come this day. The case seems closed.

The day after, the Mini-Cooper is back in an even more dangerous position. Several general announcements give no result. Towing companies cannot take out the car without a police commission, and the police cannot give the commission since it’s a private area.

A coworker crosses the delivery quay on a forklift loaded with a full pallet of plaster bags. It hits us all at the same time: there is no way the Mini-Cooper could be heavier than this stack of plaster.

Our coworker puts an empty pallet on the forks, delicately lifts the Mini-Cooper and loads it out onto the public street. It takes less than ten minutes for the local precinct to commission the towing of the car.

The day after, we are informed that the car belonged to the General Manager’s wife!

I had a car that I was selling, and no longer had it insured. When my regular car had some issues, I took the for-sale car to pick up my then boyfriend for lunch, not thinking about the lack of insurance. While in the parking lot, a teen in a large truck hit the side of my car. The teen was charged with reckless driving and a few other things, but the policeman had to give me a ticket, as well, for not having insurance. He apologized and said he’d rather give me a warning, but they were required to write the ticket, and I was required to make a court appearance and not just mail in the fine.

Fast forward to the court date. The girl ahead of me was there for driving without insurance, as well. She got up and told her story, which involved driving while high, and crashing her car into someone’s fence and a tree. She then left the scene and didn’t go back until the police called her, because she was still too high to remember where she left the car. She also stated that she shouldn’t get in trouble for it since she was too out of it to really be in control; therefore, it wasn’t her fault. The judge handed down a fine for driving without insurance, completely ignoring the rest. Then, it came my turn; I apologized, explained the accident, and so forth. Without blinking, the judge handed me the exact same fine as he did to the girl that came before me. In fact, he handed down the exact same fine to everyone there, regardless of the situation.

So glad that we all had to spend a day in court to get handed that fine, at the hands of that judge who took time to listen to everyone, instead of just mailing in a set fine. (Sarcasm here.)

This is a story from a few years back, when fad veganism was starting to gain traction.

At our college we had this one girl who would always hop onto whatever fad she could when they were gaining popularity. A lot of students disliked her because of her preachiness, and because it was extremely obvious that she was doing it purely for the holier-than-thou feeling, and didn’t actually believe in any of the causes she pledged to support or be into.

So, enter her vegan phase, where, day one of fall classes, she was in the cafeteria making this giant grandstand about all the positive of veganism and how it had changed her life, and so on. Everyone just kind of ignored her until she singled out a college freshmen eating a burger and proceeded to roundly mock his size — never mind that he was maybe 200 pounds — and blame it on his diet. He looked really annoyed, and a lot of the other people were really uncomfortable at her doing that to him.

Cue the day immediately after, where she did it again, but this time went up to him and started angrily reprimanding him for daring to eat meat in her presence, making her uncomfortable, and being insensitive to her diet. Without missing a single beat, he pulled the bun off and flung the meat patty dead center at her forehead, leaving a nice greasy stain for everyone to see. She paused for a minute, shrieked like a banshee, and ran out of the cafeteria crying. Campus security showed up a few minutes later, responding to a report of an “assault,” trying to stifle their laughter. They gave him a verbal slap on the wrist for it because he really didn’t do any harm and they were tired of her, too. She didn’t bother him again.

As an aside: a month afterward she was back to eating meat and processed food. Turns out she hopped into veganism without doing even the slightest bit of research, and malnourished herself into the hospital.

My sister has never been a good cook; this has simply become a fact of life. These are a few of the stories that have come up over the years.

When I was about seven and she was around eleven, we decided to do something nice for our parents. We grabbed the cook book and found dinner and drink recipes to make one night: chicken pot pie and quality punch. My parents bought the supplies for us, and we got to work. Halfway through preparing the punch, we started to realize there was a lot of it. We looked at the recipe a little closer… It read, “quantity punch.”

My sister made brownies, but switched the oil with high fructose corn syrup. When we ate them, they were extra chewy, and she wouldn’t eat them because the eggs were questionable.

She tried to boil water, and a fire started. She calmly went to our parents’ room and woke Mom up, saying, “Fire,” as if nothing was wrong. My mom, dazed from just being woken up, had to have my sister repeat the statement three times, and only on the third did my sister emphasize it as if something was horribly wrong. The house didn’t burn down, though!

My sister went off to college, and in her second year, she was made an RA (resident advisor). They put her through all sorts of training, including what to do in case of fire. Halfway through the year, we got a call from her about how she was microwaving a cookie at the dorm, and it caught fire. She panicked, and her neighbor had to come over and put the fire out because she knew what to do when a fire happened with someone else, but not for her own room.