My parents were visiting France; my father’s French was non-existent and my mother’s was weak at best. As they were moving through the airport, a woman approached them.

She said something in French my mother didn’t understand. My mom shrugged.

The woman started walking away and said in an exasperated voice, “I wish I could find someone who spoke English!”

My mother quickly chased her down and offered to help!

My company recently announced that it was shutting down one of our sister satellite locations. As a result, a few employees they wanted to keep were at my location getting set up so they could transfer over to our office. This required them to move as the satellite location was a couple of hours away.

One of the guys, who honestly was a delight to work with, asked me if I might be interested in hanging out more once he was settled in town. I gave him a noncommittal answer thinking it might be nice if we got to know each other better first. He smiled and said he understood, and we went about our work without any problems.

After his move, though, some very odd things happened. He became very distant, often skirting away from conversations or coming and going without much more than hellos and goodbyes. This was not just with me, but with everyone in the office, so I thought nothing much of it but I did find it odd since I thought he’d been trying to hit on me.

There were rude comments made about him, as well, when it became known that he’d tried to ask me out and I’d turned him down. I didn’t know the guy, though, so I couldn’t defend him, but they were all of the sort saying his behavior was that of a sociopath and that kind of thing. 

I tried to pay no attention to it, but a week later, while I was working out at the gym a walk from my apartment, I saw him walk in and a thought went through my head. “How could someone so nice be stalking me?” And I realized that’s exactly what people think about sociopaths. 

Frightened, I immediately got my stuff and went home, trying to make sure that I was not being followed. I felt relatively safe about it and tried to do things as normal, but later that night as I was taking out the trash, I found him standing at the corner across from my building staring at his phone and the panic set in. I immediately dropped the bag and ran inside and called the cops. 

The cops came, knocked on my door, and talked to me. I told them everything about what had happened and they said they’d seen a man standing on the corner and would go talk to him. They came back in not too long and told me that there was nothing they could do to stop the man. Outraged, I ask if they’d stay while I confronted him as he was my coworker and I didn’t feel safe going to work if he was stalking me. They agreed and I went out and, without getting too close, loudly said his name.

He looked up and sputtered my name in surprise. Not wanting to give him a chance to say anything else, I shouted, rather more loudly than I meant to, “Why are you stalking me?” Panic came across his face, and he started sputtering about how he was not stalking me when I saw the lightbulb go off in his eyes. He turned toward my building, then toward the gym, then down to his phone, and then finally at the police, and he just started laughing.

As it turned out, by sheer chance, he had moved into the same apartment complex as me, albeit on the other side. Because of that and us working in the same place with identical hours, running into him at the gym was bound to happen. He was standing outside at the corner because, as he showed me on his phone, he was playing Pokemon Go and there was a gym there. Having never played, I never knew.

He had never even noticed me around, but acknowledged how it must have seemed. As for why he seemed distant all of a sudden? His cat had not taken well to the move or the new environment and he was worried about it. He was “distant” because he was trying to find time to call vets to get an appointment to bring him in ASAP. 

The whole thing just kind of washed over after that. We had a good laugh and agreed to be friends and workout buddies. I did meet his cat shortly after this, and it did seem to be coming back from being worse for wear. I don’t know if I’ll ever really take him up on an actual date, but maybe if I can stop feeling so embarrassed by this, I might!

I’m in Year 11, age 15, and I realise one Saturday night that I have an assignment for my Maths GCSE due on Monday morning. I’ve done the preliminary work for this but not much else. I spend all of Sunday doing it, working until mid-evening, and then I email it as an attachment to my school email address so that I can print it there, as we’re out of paper and ink at home.

It’s important to note that this is around 2005, when even emailing a simple Excel file was far less reliable than it is now. This means that when I get to school and sign in to my email, the attachment has failed to be included.

At the beginning of the class where I’m supposed to hand this assignment in, I approach the teacher and explain the situation. She’s sceptical and unsympathetic, since an email with no attachment is hardly overwhelming evidence of my innocence, and gives me a lunchtime detention, which will be escalated to after school if I don’t hand the work in at the lunchtime detention.

I’m fuming; I actually did the work, so feel it’s really unfair to be punished like this. I angrily rant about the situation to my friends as the class gets settled.

This class, as it turns out, involves something being projected onto the whiteboard. Or at least it was supposed to, but the projector isn’t working. After trying to get it working again, the teacher gives up and announces, “Sorry, guys, bit of a hiccup. We’ll do this another time”.

I respond, in what’s supposed to be an undertone: “Oh, so when technology fails on you, it’s just a hiccup, but when it fails on me, it’s a big deal.”

It’s only when the entire class turns around to look at me, and the teacher stares at me with unbridled fury, that I realise I said it extremely loudly.

There’s a very uncomfortable pause, which is broken when the teacher mutters, “Yes, well, make sure you bring your coursework tomorrow,” and continues with the lesson.

After school, I manage to get hold of whatever printing supplies I was missing and print the coursework at home. I arrive for my lunchtime detention and hand it to her, and she tells me that she had been planning to let me off the hook if I handed it in then, but my little outburst in class yesterday had changed her mind.

And so, I learned three lessons: keep your printing supplies stocked, always check that your attachment has sent, and be very aware of the volume of your voice.

Before I tell this story, I will admit that I knowingly took advantage of an employee’s mistake, in the form of a loophole I found completely by accident.

I pre-ordered tickets for a four-day-long outdoor festival, and naturally, I printed the receipt at home, with barcodes for all four days of the festival. These tickets were non-refundable if any day of the festival was cancelled due to poor weather. The pre-order tickets cost exactly the same as if you bought tickets at the gate on all four days of the festival, with the only difference being that the single-day tickets purchased at the gates could be refunded if that day of the festival was cancelled.

The first day of the festival ended up being cancelled about thirty minutes after the festivities started. Despite knowing that the pre-order tickets were non-refundable, I decided to ask a cashier for a refund since I had paid exactly the same price for my day-one ticket as everyone who had purchased their ticket at the gate that day. The cashier ended up agreeing with me and agreed to refund the cost of my day-one ticket.

When I looked at my bank account that night to see if the refund had actually gone through, I realized that I had been refunded the entire cost of my tickets for all four days of the festival. I tried calling the festival organizers the next morning to point out their mistake, but nobody answered the phone.

Day two, the weather was perfect. I went to the festival and decided to bring my pre-printed tickets along just to see what would happen if I tried to show them at the gate. To my surprise, the barcode still worked! The barcodes for days three and four also worked!

In the end, I got to go to all three remaining days of the festival for free by showing the pre-printed tickets that had been refunded but not invalidated. I do feel slightly guilty about it, but not enough to do anything more than write this story.

I’m the customer in this one.

My girlfriend and I notice a new Mexican restaurant that is not opened yet. As we are fans of this kind of food, we make a point to go there once it opens. Since we are in our car passing in front of the restaurant, we don’t see the opening date.

Two weeks later…

We’re near the restaurant, looking for a place to get some food and we notice the restaurant is full of people eating. We go in, order our things, and we go to the till to pay for our things. The guy that served us just tells us it’s on the house.

We find it weird. Weird enough to make us start noticing “small” details we hadn’t noticed before.

There are a lot of people that have no food in their hands that have been talking to each other since before we entered the restaurant, and there are an unusual number of employees to man the restaurant — I’d say twice too many. On one of the tables there is a small projector pointing to a white wall.

Little did we know, the restaurant has not really opened; this is a VIP pre-opening. We manage to get out of there just before they ask everyone to sit for a speech by the restaurant owner.

The embarrassment we’ve just avoided is huge. My girlfriend is too embarrassed to go there anymore.

I still don’t get why the doors were not closed or why there wasn’t anyone checking the door, though.

There wasn’t a big sign or whatever to warn us.