I’m for hire via a temp agency for day jobs which are mostly cleaning jobs. I’m sent to a holiday park one town over for the day, along with several others, and I am told I will be given a ride by someone from the temp agency, since it’s a bit too long of a road for me to bike there.

The workers gather at the agency office to be picked up and my ride turns out to be one of the workers. The woman herself is… a character, to say the least. The few teeth she still has in her mouth are disgustingly yellow, her hair is a mess, and the thick and greasy layers of makeup that she smeared on her face still can’t conceal all the bruises she has underneath. She leads me to her tiny old car, which is so filled with trash that I literally have no place to sit. She shoves some off the passenger seat, leaving my feet in a pool of plastic bottles, used tissues, cigarette butts, and I don’t wanna know what else. 

We get on the road. It’s scorching hot outside, about thirty degrees Celsius, and she leaves all the windows closed while she’s smoking cigarettes behind the wheel and swaying like a drunk.

She manages to drive right past the holiday park that is situated on the outskirts and drives all the way into town about fifteen minutes away.

Her reasoning? “They said it was at [Town] so that’s where I’m going!”

We pass a local theme park that has advertisements up for a Halloween event and she happily states that she should apply as a scare actor. “I look a fright anyway by myself!” No s***!

We end up arriving at the holiday park half an hour late. We don’t know where we are supposed to report in, so she calls the agency to ask. Halfway through the phone call, she hands her phone over to me and lights another cigarette. I’m trying to keep the makeup-smeared phone as far away from my face as possible. The conversation I try to make with the temp agency is constantly interrupted by loud and gross coughs from the woman and her yanking her phone back to her so she can listen in, continuously coughing loudly near my face.

Finally, we get sent to our duties to clean the bungalows. I end up with another lady who explains what needs to be done with the greatest haste and impatience.

She leaves me alone to clean the bungalow. At this point, it should be noted I have slight autism and anxiety issues. I’m left behind with little to no instructions, and the hellish ride to get here has made my emotions pile up and the result is a giant panic attack.

I go back to the front office to call in sick and fetch a bus back home.

Just another day in the life of working temp jobs, leaving me to wonder how on earth people can be so gross.

I was visiting my brother for our weekly get-together, and I called a new restaurant to place a to-go order as I do every week so we have something to munch on as we visit. The message on the restaurant’s machine asked that calls only relate to existing orders and that they wanted orders to be made online.

I hung up, pulled the website up on my phone, and went through the order process, but when I got to the payment option, I stopped. I had the intention of paying with debit upon pickup and, even though it seemed as if that were an option, the information they demanded about me was far too much.

I tried to place the order without filling in all the boxes but couldn’t get to the next step without telling them everything about me.

Frustrated, I called the restaurant back and asked to place the order over the phone. The woman who picked up the phone was a bit miffed, but I was clear that I wasn’t about to give all my information for some pizza.

Looking back, I guess I could have lied on the form, but it was just such a ridiculous ask that I wasn’t going to play along.

I work in EMS. I got off work after 2:00 am due to a late call, and I am headed back in to work for my 10:00 am shift after less than five hours of sleep.

I stop at the nearby superstore to get a few odds and ends and a farewell card for a coworker whose last day is coming up soon. While checking out at the self-checkout, I request $20 cash-back to use to purchase lunch later. 

Two and a half hours later, I am thinking of getting lunch and I reach for my wallet to make sure I have the $20 to use to pay… but it isn’t there. I left it in the self-checkout register. I realize my mistake, tell my coworkers, who good-naturedly laugh at me as I call myself an idiot, and promptly drive down the road to the store hoping there is any chance of getting my cash back. 

When I arrive at the store, receipt in hand, and tell the girl at the self-checkout my story, she apologizes and says she wasn’t there earlier but will ask someone who was. Her coworker immediately walks over to the main self-checkout register and reaches under it to pull out my exact $20 bill, with a duplicate receipt to prove it is mine. Once he sees that my receipt matches, he gives me the $20!

Then, I am on my way, feeling like the luckiest person in the world because no one else swiped my cash and the earlier self-checkout worker caught my blunder and saved it. 

I cannot thank these employees enough; they really restored my faith in humanity. I’ve already submitted an absolutely glowing review on their company survey site, but I felt they needed a little more recognition here.

This story is part of our Feel Good roundup for February 2021!

Read the next Feel Good roundup for February 2021 story!

Read the Feel Good roundup for February 2021!

I’ve been the official photographer of a local racetrack for several years. Usually, a pilot can buy all the photos of his track day for thirty euros or a single picture for ten euros. This particular client has been very annoying, asking for his photos many times during the day, complaining about the quality, and being very rude to my coworkers.

After a long time in my shop, he selects five pictures out of eighty. We say that he could save twenty euros by buying the full service, but he refuses. He ends up buying five single pictures for fifty euros.

When he exits my office with the receipt, he realizes that he has done a very stupid thing. He asks me if he can talk with my boss about that.

My boss just says, “You’ve just done it, and I’m sorry. We can’t do anything.”

Karma feels good.

It’s my dad’s birthday. Every year, during normal circumstances, my mum will pay for dinner at a restaurant of my dad’s choice as a present. As the restaurants are currently closed because of the crisis, this is, of course, impossible. Instead, my dad searches for restaurants that deliver. After quite a bit of bad reading skills on my dad’s part, which is a whole different story, he decides on a restaurant.

Immediately when we get the box, we realize something is off. The restaurant did not deliver fully-finished hot dishes, but what I can only call a puzzle box. There are vacuum-sealed bags, plastic boxes in different shapes and sizes, and one set of plastic plates taped together. With this come instructions on how to piece everything together and how long to heat these things. My dad, disappointed by what he got, slinks off and leaves my mum and I to piece together what we have to do.

And that’s when the second problem comes to light. While the instructions are fairly easy, the ingredients are not clearly marked and the pictures are discoloured and a bit blurry. On top of that, one of the pieces does not match what’s shown on the picture at all, though the restaurant assures us it is the same.

And that’s not the worst of it. There are pieces missing. And not just small pieces. My mum’s entire appetizer is missing apart from one tube of goat cheese cream, and her main course is missing the thing which structures it all and a tube of its own flavoured creamy stuff.

My mum calls the restaurant and they send us more food, but they send two pieces of something we already had, another double, and also most of the abovementioned stuff, apart from the watercress for my mum’s appetizer. On top of that, while preparing, we realize there are more pieces missing — the apple slices for my crepes and the truffle sauce for my mum’s main dish — but by that point, we are done with the restaurant and just want to eat.

I do look on the website to see if they mention anything of the meal being pieced together like that and they do, all the way at the bottom, under the header “Allergies and food restrictions.”

I get that restaurants have to find a way to survive in this troublesome time, but this was very poorly executed. This was a fairly high-class restaurant, too, and the food wasn’t cheap. We ordered food for only three people and this much was messed up. Even though my dad enjoyed that restaurant before, I doubt he’ll ever want to do business with them again.