About twenty-one years ago, I was making my bi-monthly drive from Duluth back to the Twin Cities. The drive up and down I-35 is boring. At the time, the speed limit was sixty-five miles per hour, and it was a solid three-hour drive from Duluth to the Twin Cities driving at this speed. My car at the time was a 1989 Ford Tempo and the color was called “almond,” but it was really an off-white/tan looking color. The car wasn’t fast, but it was awesome with getting high miles per gallon, and it got me from A to B without issues. The speedometer only went to eighty-five, but on a few occasions I buried the needle and I’m sure I was flirting with 100, but I didn’t make a habit of it.

It was Sunday, early morning, and I was about halfway home from Duluth. The speed limit was sixty-five miles per hour, but I was cruising at eighty-five. As I came around a bend in the highway, about a good mile down the road on the straightaway I saw the glimmering of a car sitting in the median.

I thought to myself, “Crap, a state trooper is sitting there.”

I killed the cruise control and let my car slow down closer to the speed limit, and I continued on. As I passed the trooper, he was not moving, and I impatiently watched in the rearview mirror to see if he’d come out. I got maybe half a mile past him and started to feel relieved that he didn’t follow me, but that feeling of relief soon vanished as I watched him pulling out of the median.

I thought to myself, “Son of a b****. I’m screwed.”

I rounded a bend in the highway, and the trooper was far enough behind that he was no longer in direct line of sight in the rearview mirror. I was in the right lane, and I was coming up on an exit off the highway. I passed it, and a car was coming up the onramp. I got in the left lane to allow this car to merge onto the highway.

The car merging onto the highway was the exact same make, model, and color as my car, had Minnesota license plates on it, and had a single male driving the car — just like mine.

I’d been checking the rearview mirror this whole time and the trooper hadn’t come into view yet, so the trooper never saw this other car merge onto the highway.

About ten seconds later, the trooper came into view, and he had picked up speed to catch up to me. About thirty seconds later, he was right on the tail of the guy driving my cloned car in the right lane, and I was driving along next to him in the left lane. The trooper hung back behind both of us for a couple of minutes, and then he dropped back and went into a cross point in the median on the highway.

My best guess is that the trooper didn’t know which of us had been speeding, and after pulling up our license plates in his system, nothing came back to give him a reason to pull either of us over.

The rest of my drive home was much closer to the speed limit.

Roughly two years before the health crisis, I worked for a company with a fairly lenient alcohol policy; in fact, at some company events, even on company property, they served alcohol. It was not uncommon for executives and managers to have a drink at lunch on a Friday and finish out the day.

One day, one of my employees went to lunch on his twenty-first birthday and had a couple of beers, and I drove him back to work to finish out his shift. He does basic computer input, and he has no contact with customers or operating machinery or anything dangerous.

I got a note from Human Resources saying that I needed to give the employee a formal warning for what he did when they heard about it. I pointed out that there wasn’t a policy to enforce, and they decided to create a zero-tolerance alcohol policy based on this event. What they didn’t understand was that they had two other policies in effect that we exploited.

In order to make sure that people didn’t infect the workforce, there was an “infection reduction policy” that allowed for people who called in sick after working part of the day to go home and get paid for the whole day. We could use this once per paycheck, every two weeks. There was another Work From Home policy that allowed for employees to work from home for half a day without needing a reason. We could also use this once per paycheck, every two weeks.

After hearing about this zero-tolerance alcohol policy, I instructed all of my employees that if they were going to have a drink at lunch that they should either call in sick for the rest of the day or work from home for the rest of the day. Eventually, it got to the point where we would have a drink at lunch every Friday and alternate working from home or calling in sick. Drunkenness, after all, counted as a sickness to the letter of the policy.

We called it “F*** It Friday.”

My brother used to have a full-sized teepee he lived in on my parents’ large corner block. He rang a pizza place to get some food delivered, but he had to explain to them not to deliver it to the house but to drive around the corner and deliver it to the teepee.

They weren’t so sure about this. However, forty-five minutes later, the driver arrived. We asked him to come in, but he was petrified that we were a cult or something and wouldn’t set foot inside.

He took the money and a tip and virtually ran in the pitch black back to his car without tripping over anything.

I’m a middle school teacher in an area where about half of the students come from socio-economically challenged families.

One of my coworkers moved into his parents’ house when they became too elderly to care for it. He had no interest in the massive amounts of apples that he could enjoy every fall from his mom’s orchard. So, every morning, he picked two bags full of apples and put the bags next to the door in the teachers’ lounge. The students were welcome to get free apples as long as the core ended up in a trash can. If a single apple core was thrown in the wrong place, there would be no more apples. Not a single core ever ended up outside a trash can since no one wanted to be the reason for ending the apple bonanza. 

As the final two classes of the day began, most teachers brought with them a supply of apples and handed them out to the students to munch on in class.

Some days, we still had plenty of apples left at the end of the day, and my coworker then convinced some student we knew came from a struggling home to bring home the leftover apples. Almost every time, the students dropped by the next day and told us in great detail how their moms had used the apples for all sorts of goodies.

When the students in more well-to-do families told their parents of our apple bonanza, several parents brought in bags of apples from their own gardens. That was incredibly sweet, but we struggled a little with getting through up to eight huge bags of apples per day.

We noticed that during the weeks when the students got these free apple snacks, in the afternoon, they were a lot more alert and active in these last classes of the day. It was almost like they were somehow energized.

I work in a behavioral health facility. New hires go through about a week or two of training with all sorts of different classes, the most rigorous of which is a three-day course that teaches us when and how to physically hold a client that is becoming aggressive to the point of being a threat of harm to themselves or others.

Working in a facility like this requires a LOT of patience and understanding because you deal with people with all sorts of different backgrounds and traumas, and compassion is one of the key unstated requirements, even when you have to physically hold back a client trying to gnaw your face off.

We had a new hire several years back that seemed fine for the start. She would always wear a hoodie to her training classes, which was fine. There’s nothing suspicious about that.

She got to the three-day training about the holds. This training requires us to be physically active and go through the different holds we are allowed to use. She finally took off her hoodie… to reveal a large swastika tattoo on the back of her neck.

That quickly got her into a meeting with Human Resources, where it was learned that she was a White Supremacist. She was promptly let go after that.