I have an identical twin sister. People often ask if we ever experienced sympathy pain or anything like that, but I’ve had something a bit more literal.

Despite being identical physically, we had completely different personalities that growing up, most people could tell us apart by our clothing (I was more feminine), or that my glasses were purple and my sister’s were blue, or how my sister was often getting injured. My sister was outgoing and very sporty and would often make impulsive decisions that ended with her getting hurt somehow.

Despite being very different people, we’ve always been very close. We’d often joke around with each other and with others about classic twin tropes, including sympathy – the idea that twins can viscerally feel each other’s emotions and pain.

This was April in 4th grade (for non-Americans, we had just had our 10th birthday). I was home reading on the couch when my mom got a call from the soccer coach. My sister had had an accident during practice – a clean, minor fracture through her left tibia. She was in a lot of pain. I remember hugging her and comforting her a lot the next day, and we joked a little bit about how I could almost feel the pain too.

Then, two days later, I was, rather stupidly, walking downstairs at the same time as taking my glasses off to rub my eyes. I predictably tripped, fell, and tumbled. I don’t remember the number of steps I fell, but it was enough that I had serious fractures. I broke several bones in my right leg, the same bone in my left leg as my sister, as well as having a minor fracture in my right wrist. My leg took five months to recover.

Before that week, neither of us had ever had a serious injury. Then, within 48 hours, both of us had. We joke about it still, that she got injured throughout her childhood, but I saved it all up for that one “special” day.

A bank I once worked at had a customer who had more money than sense. He had a debit card, but VERY rarely used it. Every time he did, the usage would get flagged by our fraud monitoring software, and he’d have to call in and verify the attempted activity.

At one point, he decided the three or four times a year he had to do this was a “major inconvenience” and requested to have his account removed from fraud monitoring. Our fraud department basically said, “h*** to the no,” but some executive officer decided it was okay because he was “such a good customer” (aka has a lot of money on deposit).

The fraud department finally agreed, with the requirement that the customer sign a document stating that he was fully liable for any fraud that occurred on the account after removal from fraud monitoring. Which he did.

About a year later, he called in wanting to dispute about four months of fraudulent transactions on his debit card. (In addition to having a lot of money, he also apparently never looked at his account.)

The executive officer reminded him of the document he signed and stated that the bank would not be reimbursing him.

The total cost of the customer’s FAFO moment? $27,000

I am fifteen years old and work as a soccer referee. I will normally arrive ten to fifteen minutes early to a game, which is plenty of time to check in players from both teams and make sure the field is in proper playing condition.

One game, I showed up as an assistant referee. My center referee, eighteen years old, told me that all refs have to arrive thirty minutes early to every game. I know this is not true, and I stayed silent.

We reffed the game as usual, and returned to where we put our stuff at the end of the game. [Center Ref] told me that because I didn’t arrive thirty minutes early, he would mark that I didn’t show up, basically telling me that I wouldn’t get paid for the game we had just worked. I complained that this was a rule that he made up. He left the game without saying anything else, figuring that would be all.

If you referee without any assistant referees, you get paid like $5 more. I think this was his plan.

When I got home, I made sure to sign up to be a center referee at every game where this guy was an assistant referee. Poor him, he showed up to his next game fifteen minutes early, which is absolutely unacceptable. I said nothing the whole game, but only marked him absent, which means he wouldn’t get paid.

This went on for a week and a half until his paycheck came in, and he was about $120 off of what his total should’ve been.

He emails the main referee boss (who runs everything) to see what the problem was. He’s told that he wasn’t there, so he wouldn’t get paid.

He put two and two together and realized what I did. Emails were sent between him, the boss, and me until the boss had the full story. He was fired for making up rules, and I got paid for that first game where I’d lost my pay.

I worked at a cell phone company over a summer while in college. We had a few large TVs that displayed our stuff. A younger guy, probably eighteen or nineteen, not a customer of ours, came in and asked if he could use the WiFi.

I said sure, and he sat down for a few minutes, then said he’d “be right back.” He came back with pizza and some drinks and sat back down.

I saw he was watching something on his phone and asked him what it was. He said he was watching the E3 press conferences, starting today (This was back when E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) was still a thing).

I remember our display TV had that screen mirror stuff. I asked him to pop it on the TV, and I’ll turn it up.

It was a slow day, so I mostly spent it with this guy, watching E3, and having pizza. A few customers came in, I’d help them, not try to upsell them, and just watch E3.

The dude was freaking awesome; he came back the next few days for each press conference and brought pizza.

A few weeks later, he came in and wanted to buy a screen protector for his phone. Ever bought a screen protector from a cell phone store? It can get expensive.

I could give up to 20% discounts, but I felt like giving him more. I have a habit of remembering SKU numbers, so I typed in the SKU for SIM cards. They did give us the power to change SIM cards for just one cent, and we always had pennies lying around. It was mostly to give SIM cards to customers who needed them, and we didn’t want to charge extra.

So basically, I gave that guy a free screen protector. Was a nice thing to do before going back to college for my final year.

One of my previous roles was as a database administrator for an e-commerce company. One day, I was plugging along, turning coffee into code when all Hell broke loose. Our marketing team decided to launch a “personalized” email campaign without consulting IT first, or even consulting anyone, really.

Out of nowhere, suddenly our servers started screaming at a pitch I don’t ever want to hear again in my life. CPU usage spiked to 100%, and queries slowed down to zero. My first thought was that we were being hit by a DDOS attack. What I found was far more facepalm-worthy.

The marketing team had written a query to send personalized emails to our entire customer base, almost five million of them.

Their query pulled data from nearly every table in our database, joining them in the most inefficient way possible. The icing of the cake was that they had set it to run every five minutes. It was later described by my senior to the bosses as like watching someone try to empty the ocean with a teaspoon, only to refill it with a fire hose every few seconds.

After some frantic calls and a lot of explaining (with technical terms I’m sure they didn’t bother even trying to understand), we managed to get them to pause the campaign. It took three days of optimization, index creation, and query rewriting to get their personalization working without bringing our entire infrastructure to a standstill.

The silver lining? Management finally approved our long-standing and often-denied request for a separate analytics database. Sometimes, it takes a near-catastrophe to get the resources you need.