I used to work in a smoke shop. We had shelves sitting in the middle of the worker area, holding dip and chew and cigarettes. They went nearly to the ceiling. Those things were rickety, and a stiff breeze would have toppled them.

So, you can guess what had happened when I came in one day and saw that the shelves were all gone. Someone told me the details of what happened, and it was an “OMG!” moment, to be sure.

The shelf decided to let go at the least opportune moment and fell over onto [Coworker]. It slammed her into the register and actually pinned her head there.

Bless the customer she had been waiting on; he got a rush of adrenaline, jumped clean over the counter into the worker-only area, and lifted it off of her.

A couple of big, burly security officers had to come in, pull everything off the shelves, and drag those menaces out of the building one at a time.

This was decades ago before the world got more lawsuit-savvy. Sadly, not much else was done, not even to check out other displays to make sure they were safe. To this day, [Coworker] STILL has back problems from the incident. 

Management didn’t even close the store. They just kind of shrugged with a blank face and a “Meh. Oh, well,” attitude. Oh, wait. I nearly forgot. They did do something: they griped for weeks about losing a display and having to pay for another one.

I’m so very, very glad I don’t work there anymore.

I’ve just finished a weeklong stint of house-sitting for a neighbor. Most of my duties had to do with taking care of their pets, so their three dogs love me. I go over to their house after they get home to give them back their garage door opener.

The dogs go crazy when I ring the doorbell, and when my neighbor opens the door, two of them get out. One of them merely sits next to me and begs for pats and ear scratches, which I am happy to give him, while the other begins running around the front yard.

I give my neighbor the garage door opener back and we discuss payment for a minute before she goes to call the dogs back inside. The affectionate dog obliges, but the other one is not listening to her, no matter how many times she calls.

In an effort to help, I call, “[Dog]! Go inside! Come on inside!”

The dog immediately comes back, goes inside, and doesn’t try to run back out. My neighbor laughs and gripes about how of course they listen to the girl who fed and loved them for a week but not her.

When I’m nineteen, I am hired on to open a new restaurant in our area. We go through the process of training in hotels while it’s being built, and I am going to start out as a hostess to get the feel of the inner workings at this particular place.

On our second night of cold opening, where you basically have to be invited — food is free, half charge on the bar, and tipping is required — it happens.

I have seated a table of a well-to-do man and a couple of his equally well-off buddies in their late forties or early fifties. It’s a lovely interaction; I expect nothing else through their visit. I get them squared away and walk back up to the host stand to snag my laminated copy of the table chart.

I walk back by this table after running through and checking on open and soon-to-be-open tables. This man slaps my a** as I walk by.

In a sheer, shocked reaction, I turn around and frisbee the chart into this clown’s neck. You know how sharp those new laminated edges are. I draw blood. The whole place just goes quiet.

Then, from every corner, nook, and cranny of that building, everyone — I mean everyone — starts uproariously laughing, even the proprietor. I’m still s***ting bricks, thinking I just slashed this guy’s jugular and now I’m going to jail.

I try to pull myself together as quickly as possible and leap to his table, just spewing apologies. (I’m nineteen, it’s 2000, and I don’t know better.) He and his bros are laughing so hard, the only noise is their wheezing. They have tears rolling down their faces.

The proprietor is now running to the table, still giggling like a toddler. Before he can even get out a response, the man starts talking, reaches into his back pocket, and pulls out his wallet. He apologizes profusely to me, saying he “didn’t know what came over him” and he wasn’t hurt by anything but “his actions”.

The guy puts five $20 bills in my hand and apologizes so many more times throughout the whole evening.

After he and his crew waddle on out, I am doing my thing with the chart again — more aware now — and random tables keep handing me money. “We haven’t laughed that hard in ages!” “You made our night!” And so on.

Forget the fact that he just basically assaulted me in front of all you. Thanks for the cash.

I profited off a booty slap, was not written up or fired, and took down a grown-a** man down with a laminated chart. I will never forget that night.

When it comes to cleaning, I much prefer to leave these matters to my dad. My mom means well, of course, but she is utterly incompetent when it comes to housekeeping and can’t seem to acknowledge it.

She and my dad came over to help me out for a bit, as I was a bit sick after a vaccination. Mom asked if she could use my bathroom while she was here, and, being the polite host I was expected to be, I said yes.

While dad was helping me feel a little better, I noticed she was taking a while in there. After she left, I had to use the bathroom myself. That was when I noticed the smell of cleaning solution. She’d taken it upon herself to clean my toilet while she was in there. Still, I didn’t suspect anything was wrong.

It wasn’t until the next day that I noticed that the smell was as strong as it had been when she visited, when it should’ve disappeared by that point. That’s when I discovered what she did.

She didn’t know what I used to wipe the toilet down after cleaning whenever I did it, so instead of doing the logical thing and asking me — if she had, I would’ve pointed out where my cleaning cloths were — she just assumed the appropriate solution was to use paper towels. And of course, since those can’t be flushed, she just dumped them in my garbage can right next to the toilet and left them there.

To make matters worse, the instructions on the bottle she used clearly said, “Do not breathe in fumes.” Because she just left them there, I ended up inhaling the fumes every time I had to go until I noticed the paper towels and disposed of them in the outdoor garbage can. I ended up feeling sicker than I had been before their visit all because my mother’s well-meaning efforts accidentally poisoned me.

There are two things you should know about [Coworker]. One, he enjoys ruining other people’s vacations by texting and calling them constantly for sheer and utter nonsense like talking about his workday; and two, he likes to blame all of his shortcomings on me.

We have a grand total of five new interns starting on June first. I sent [Coworker] a budget report back in early March for interns at the insistence of his boss because he wasn’t showing any progress toward making one himself. Really, he didn’t know how and didn’t want to admit it.

In this report, I included the price for an external network license per person. I also laid out how many licenses we already had and who had each of these licenses to justify this expenditure. Several times, [Coworker] said he read it and it was “good stuff” but then asked me questions that were laid out clearly in charts and tables in the report.

I explained to him several times through March and April that he needed to send in a purchase order for every person he wished to hire, but I wasn’t about to hound him for it as these were not my interns and, therefore, not my problem. 

He decided to go on vacation the week that they started thrusting all their training and hiring paperwork onto me. No problem; we got it all sorted out and it was no issue… until we tried to start running the software that is essential to our company. That external software that he was supposed to buy seats for. None of them could do anything.

It felt so good sending him an email and a text message informing him that in the future he needed to purchase a new license for every person. And you bet that I copied his boss on both.