I am the minister of a city-centre church in the UK. This means that we have a good number of down-and-outs and other needy people come to us, and we rarely turn people away. Unfortunately, this also means that we are often targeted by scammers trying to get money out of us.

Some years ago, we had a rash of men claiming to be oil rig workers from Northern Ireland who needed money to get back home due to an emergency. These were scammers. One even pulled an elaborate scam on a generous couple in the congregation to get over £200 out of them. The tell-tale sign was that not only were the stories similar, but in many cases, they were verbatim the same, as if memorised.

After a morning service, a visitor asked to speak with me. I went into the back of the church with him, and to my horror, he began the whole, “I work on an oil rig, I’m from Northern Ireland…” spiel.

“Let me stop you there,” I said. “You are the tenth man to stand there and tell me the exact same story. Get out, now.”

He left in rather a hurry, and he was not only the tenth but also the last man to stand there and tell me that exact same story. It seemed there was a community of scammers, and once I had told one to get out, nobody else tried it. There are quite enough genuinely needy people in this city to help, without scammers taking the resources of a small church.

When I was born, my family made a bank account with a credit union in my name. I couldn’t sign for the account until I turned sixteen, but it was my account, with my mother on it as a guardian because of my age.

When I turned sixteen, this bank account became the bane of my existence. I gave them my signature card so I could start accessing the account, which my dad wanted me to do on a fairly regular basis.

The first time I go in after giving them my signature card, they tell me they can’t access it because I have no signature card on file. Confused, I call my dad, and he has my mom come in with me a little while later to give them a new signature card.

Rinse and repeat. And while we’re at it, let’s rinse and repeat again for good measure.

I ended up giving them several signature cards, but they never ended up in my file. It got to the point that I could only go to one location of the credit union because there was a woman who worked there who knew me enough and knew the situation enough that she would let me access the account without the signature card because there was basically no point in trying to get a signature card; she knew the card wouldn’t end up in the system.

The woman at the one location may have broken protocol, but being a kid with an undiagnosed social disorder, to this day, I still appreciate what she did for me.

Shortly after I turned eighteen, I closed the account because I hated the fact that I couldn’t go to just any location unless I wanted to fight for it.

When I was in high school, I had a lot of anxiety — like, panic attacks several times a week anxiety — and being in public was my biggest trigger. However, with only one other income in the house at the time, not having a job was out of the question.

So, when I quit my job as a cook at [National Pizza Chain] because the boss couldn’t keep his hands to himself, I took the first job that called me back… at one of the busiest [Multi-National Big Box Retailer]s in the state.

I told myself I needed the job, and that if everyone else could suck it up, I could, too. After all, I’d been working on my anxiety, I was in therapy and on medications now, and I hadn’t had a panic attack in weeks. What could go wrong?

My first day on the register, things were going well. I was managing small talk even though I was nervous, people seemed happy with my speed and were understanding when I made a couple of small mistakes, and I was starting to gain some confidence that I could do this.

And then, I got my first coupon that wouldn’t scan. “Great!” I thought to myself. “An easy problem that I know how to fix.” So, with all the confidence that an anxiety-addled teenage brain could muster, I grinned at the nice little old lady who handed me the coupon, promptly forgot my computer module training…

…and typed in the nine-digit coupon code at the bottom.

I don’t know how manual coupon entries work at every store, but at [Retailer], the way you typed in coupons was to type in the dollar amount. Say you have a coupon for $2 off; you would type in 200 since there was no period to separate the dollars and cents.

So, when I typed in said nine-digit code, imagine my surprise when my register popped open and sent out an automatic alert to my manager that I was about to give this little old lady over two hundred thousand dollars in change on a purchase worth maybe $50.

I was mortified. At the time, this was the worst screw-up I could imagine on my first solo shift. It took two managers several minutes to fix my mistake and get the line moving again, as I was shaking so hard I couldn’t work the keyboard.

One of those managers distrusted me for the rest of my eighteen-month stint at [Retailer] because of this one mistake, even though I went on to be the fastest cashier in the store’s history (thanks to my anxiety). The other became like a work mother figure and eventually figured out that I did much better if I got to do put-backs for half of my shift, which greatly reduced my chances of making a mistake on the register.

The bigger joke here, of course, is that I somehow lasted eighteen months in a public-facing position.

I briefly worked as a teacher in one of the worst schools in the country. There were all kinds of social problems, including rampant drug abuse. One of the pupils decided to smoke cannabis to calm himself down before an exam; unfortunately, he smoked a rather large amount, so he was barely conscious when he filed into the exam hall.

Some minutes in, the teacher invigilating the exam observed that the boy’s exam paper had fallen on the floor and he was busily writing on the table. There was some anxiety as to whether this might mean that the table would have to be sent in to be marked, but thankfully, on examination — pun definitely intended — it was ascertained that what he had written on the table had nothing whatsoever to do with the exam paper or even its subject.

That was good, because the exam board would not have appreciated having a tabletop sent in for marking.

I have a coworker who brags about never answering her phone if she doesn’t recognize the number. I’m not sure what the big deal is; if it’s a telemarketer just hang up. Also, she says she never listens to voicemails because if it’s important they’ll call back.

Recently, she went to her doctor on a Friday because she had been feeling terrible for a while. The doctor took bloodwork and she went home.

The doctor’s office then spent the rest of the weekend trying to call her and tell her to go to the emergency room based on her test results. However, she didn’t recognize the number so she didn’t answer it.

Finally, they were able to call her next of kin, and he called her to go to the ER.