I’m eating at a local restaurant that has a metal bucket with a roll of paper towels and condiments on every table. While we are enjoying our meal, I notice a woman moving quickly through the crowd toward the restrooms, dragging a small child by the hand. Just past my table, the kid puts on the brakes, looks up, and starts doing that thing people do when they are trying not to puke but are going to fail.

The man at the next table over shoves a bucket into the kid’s hands just in time. I didn’t even see him move, but judging by the condiments scattered around his table, he must have dumped his bucket and handed it to the kid, and just kept on eating like nothing had happened.

Several years ago, I was on the bus, playing on my original Nintendo DS and listening to music. 

Apparently, this older man started asking me what I was playing on and I couldn’t hear him because, you know, I was listening to music. 

Since I, a stranger, wasn’t paying attention to him, he decided to hit me in the shins with his cane!

He was amazed that I wasn’t receptive to answering his questions after this.

I was checking out customers at the registers and heard screaming from a couple of registers down. It turned out the customer was attempting to buy $100 worth of alcohol without a valid licence.

Her licence was expired by two whole years. When the cashier told her that he couldn’t sell her the booze, the woman called the man who gave her the money. Yes, it wasn’t even her money.

Then, she started filming the employee and screaming that she didn’t care about his job; she just wanted her booze. He didn’t back down even though he was scared and she left pretty fast.

I’m kicking myself now that I didn’t call the police on that woman.

I live in halls at university. Student diets being what they are, my friend group of six orders a takeaway at weekends with a rotation of who picks the place, always paid for collectively.

My girlfriend and I favour a Chinese place, and over time, as we become known as regulars, the service becomes faster, the quality gets better, and it eventually gets to the point that we even get extra little items thrown in as a thank-you. Stamped proudly on the receipts is the word “regular,” and we are more than happy to keep ordering.

Another member of the friend group favours a more generic takeaway that does a bit of everything, so when it is her turn to pick, she always goes for that one.

A couple of months roll by, and one evening, her receipt arrives with “regular” on it. Rather than be happy to be a valued customer, she has a minor freak-out and proceeds to never order from them again the entire three years our courses run for, instead ordering almost at random from whatever takeaway she’s seen a menu for last.

It blows my mind that she would be unhappy about being a regular; how can you get upset at being valued?

I’m eight months pregnant and have noticed throughout my pregnancy that my two dogs and my boyfriend have gotten progressively needier.

I was already in bed sleeping with the dogs when my boyfriend tried to sneak in without waking me up. Unfortunately for him, he had to move one of the dogs to make room to snuggle with me. And when he moved that dog, the other would just swoop in and take their place. This just kept going in a cycle and ended up waking me.

I got the luxury of seeing my boyfriend be outsmarted by two corgis until he just gave up, angrily whispering, “What the actual f***?”