I work at a grocery store and sometimes find these odd things out of place. The worst one was when someone put a bottle of root beer in our ice cream freezer. A glass bottle. Of course, it broke.

Have you ever tried to pick shards of glass out of frozen root beer? The process took long enough that by the end, the root beer had turned to slush, making the extraction process easier.

Fortunately, no ice cream was lost.

My high school was in a three-story building in the middle of downtown, and one side of the school faced an old apartment complex. I was admittedly zoning out when I noticed someone coming onto the balcony with a huge trash bag. This immediately caught my attention as I thought that was weird.

The woman glanced down and then dropped the bag over the side. Ah, she was throwing the bag into a dumpster on the ground. She went back in.

Then, she came out with a TV; it was a CRT, so probably about fifty pounds at minimum. She surely wasn’t going to…

She was.

Down it went.

CLANG!

BAM!

Then, the wailing of a car alarm caught the attention of everyone in class as the woman hurriedly ran back inside and slammed the door. Everyone ran to the window to see what had caused the noise. There was a dumpster, and in front of the dumpster was a car, with the TV making a big dent in the trunk of the car.

The teacher managed to somehow corral a bunch of rubbernecking teenagers to finish what was left of the class before sending us on our way.

I never saw the woman on the balcony for the rest of the semester.

The East Coast of the US is currently getting hit by a very bad tropical storm, so all of our flights to and from a certain large airport on said coast have been canceling for obvious reasons.

A couple who were booked on one of the canceled flights from the East Coast to my airport decided to drive instead, which is smart. They proceeded to drive approximately fifteen hours to our airport, paid ridiculous airport parking prices, and came into our baggage office to pick up their bags. 

Their bags that they checked in at the East Coast airport that canceled all of their flights.

Their bags that were still at the East Coast airport.

They were very confused when we explained that we didn’t have their bags because the flight was canceled, and they were even more confused when we explained that we absolutely could not get their bags until future flights weren’t canceled because the bags also arrive on the plane. I still don’t understand how they thought their bags were going to get to us.

This is a story my mom told me about my grandfather that happened in the late 1950s. Keep in mind that it was a different time back then.

My grandfather worked as a milkman his whole life. His company’s brand of milk was considered one of the better brands available, and for a very long time, it was only available via milkman. It was not in any grocery store — much to the grocery store’s dismay. The local grocery store kept asking — and then begging — the dairy company to please let them sell the milk in their store.

Finally, an agreement was made. The milk would be sold in the store, but with a small markup compared to the cost of delivery, so people would have an incentive to keep using the milkmen.

Where the dairy company went wrong was that the agreement on price was not in writing. So, while the price of milk started with a markup, that markup soon went away. The dairy company complained, but nothing changed. The grocery store kept the price at a lower amount.

The milkmen in particular were not happy with this; this was threatening their livelihoods. So, they all talked amongst themselves and made a plan. Throughout the next day, they gathered up their wives and kids and all headed over to the grocery store. Every adult grabbed a cart and started filling it with anything and everything nonperishable they could think of, from as many different aisles and shelves as possible. As each one finished piling their cart as high as humanly possible, they’d wheel it to the front, leave it there, and simply walk out. Soon, half of the store’s items were now go-backs, piled in a ton of carts, with the shelves looking bare and ragged. 

The next day, the milkmen checked the price of their milk in the store. No change. Their little demonstration hadn’t worked. So, they felt they had no choice. They stepped it up a notch. 

They now started taking all the perishables and anything that was supposed to be kept cool, cold, or hot and started “redistributing” these items for the grocery store. The ice cream belongs behind all the cereal boxes, right? And this fish should be put behind the cans of peas. The leaking steak goes on the top shelf behind the chips. And so on.

By the end of the day, the grocery store was looking at a ton of wastage while praying that they’d found all the starting-to-rot meat and fermenting dairy before things started to smell too much. 

The next day, the milkmen went back to check the price of milk again. The markup had, for some reason, been added back to the price. Nothing more was ever said about it from workers of either company. But that markup stayed on the milk from then on.

When I was probably six years old, I was playing “kick the crackerbox” in the kitchen with my older sister. I had my socks on, and I slipped and fell chin-first into a stool. I was taken to the emergency room and had seven stitches put in.

As this was the late 1980s, there were still cigarette vending machines in the hospitals. A guy had bought himself a pack of smokes, and with his change, he had gotten a pack of Reese’s Pieces. He gave them to me and told me he hoped I would feel better soon. Thirty-five years later, I still remember that moment.

I also remember my grandmother pouring the candy into a bowl for me the next day and how painful it was to eat them with my wound — but they were all the more pleasant because of it.

I seriously doubt that man remembers that day, but I will never forget that random act of kindness that a stranger gave to a little kid in a lot of pain.