I was on a business trip to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and one morning I was down in the hotel restaurant having breakfast. I was sitting at a table by myself when this group of four or five little old ladies came in and sat down nearby.

One of them came over to me and started asking me something, but she was speaking Chinese, which I don’t understand. She was gesturing at one of the chairs, so at first, I assumed she was asking if she could take it over to her table, and I tried to gesture back and say, “Please go ahead.”

But then she brought out her cell phone and started miming taking a photo, and I realized she must want me to take a picture of her and her friends!

I nodded yes and was about to get up and go over to their table when, suddenly, the lady handed her phone to her friend, pulled out a chair to sit down next to me, and started posing for the camera! And she and all her friends proceeded to take turns getting a photo with me. 

I was incredibly confused but just smiled and went along with it. Then they thanked me and went back to their table. 

I’ve never been told I look particularly like any celebrity, and I’m definitely not the kind of exotic “foreign”-looking white person that might get a lot of attention in Asia — I was certainly not the only non-Asian person in that hotel! — but I can only assume they must have mistaken me for… someone.

I definitely got a kick out of the thought that, for whatever reason, meeting me made these little old ladies’ day!

One summer, a friend of mine is going to the Jersey shore one day with his family and is driving along a highway that New Jersey state police are well known to patrol heavily. He makes sure to do the speed limit. Sure enough, a state police cruiser does eventually end up behind him. My friend thinks nothing of it. After a mile with the state cop behind him, a sports car suddenly passes on the left, doing at least ninety. The state cop lights up, of course, and my friend pulls over to let the cruiser pass. To his shock, however, the cruiser pulls over behind him instead, and after a short discussion, the officer hands my friend a ticket for speeding.

My friend fights the ticket, but despite his dashcam footage proving he was doing the limit the whole time and the officer even admitting my friend was doing the speed limit, the court sides with the officer and forces my friend to pay the speeding fine. Naturally, he is frustrated at first, but he then decides that if the State of New Jersey is going to be petty, then so is he. When he writes the check to pay the fine and court costs, he writes it for exactly two cents more than the total amount of the fine.

A month later, my friend receives a check in the mail from the State of New Jersey… for two cents. He gleefully puts the check through the shredder, knowing that the state’s checkbooks are going to no longer be balanced — or at least further unbalanced since other drivers have undoubtedly overpaid the state before him. He has also started taking a different, less heavily-patrolled highway to the shore, and hasn’t gotten another ticket since. The state continues to send him two-cent checks, which continue to go right through my friend’s shredder until the state stops sending them about a year later.

I was surprised to be fired. I had done nothing wrong, my performance was good, I was always on time, and I got along with everyone. Even my manager didn’t know about it until he called me to ask where I was.

After a few weeks, I got a phone call asking me to come back. They also reluctantly agreed to pay for the time “off” I had. It took a lot of pushing and favours to find out what had happened.

Turns out the owner’s daughter, who worked on site from time to time, slept with a guy at the office. For whatever reason, he fell out of favour with her and she gave my name and description. It was only when she came on site and asked why he was still there that they realised the wrong person was sacked.

I started to look for another job as soon as I got my backpay. I’ve never looked back.

A lot of people have left bibles, bible-related CDs and pamphlets as tips. We let management know but they don’t do much. Therefore we decided we would start leaving all our “tips” on their desk.

We get so many we start flooding their drawers. They finally had to put up a sign that said cash only!

I am certainly not athletic and I am on the chubby side so I can’t even fake the appearance of someone athletic. I am also not particularly coordinated in general, and it is relevant to know that I am left-handed.

I was a casual (substitute) primary school teacher a few years back. While I didn’t want to be the kids’ friend per se, it doesn’t hurt to be known as the fun casual so long as they respect you and you can still get the work done. What I didn’t realise is that being the cool casual was even better. 

I was on lunch duty, strolling the sports field where kids of all ages were busy playing various games. Across came many of the “cool kids” from the class I was teaching for the day, about ten eleven-year-olds. They were chatting to me about various pleasantries when the notorious “bully” of the year shouted, “Heads!”

This all happened in a millisecond. The girls screamed. A couple of the boys shouted, “Miss, look out!”

I looked up. A tennis ball was hurtling towards my head, incredibly fast.

I lifted my right arm. I caught the ball right before my face.

Ten or so jaws dropped to the ground and then immediately burst into chatter. Everyone was congratulating me and asking if I used to be in the Olympics and so on. One of them asked, “How on earth did you do that?”

Being in some sort of twilight zone where I was actually cool, not to mention witty enough to say the right thing at the right time — which I really am not normally — I turned to them with a serious face and said, “That’s nothing. I’m actually left-handed.”

And that’s the story of how I accidentally became the cool teacher who held the best record for keeping the difficult class on task.