I was 21 when my Grandma died. I’d watched her slowly decline over the preceding two years, so I was not “grieving” publicly, which allowed me to keep my head.

My grandma, being the stubborn woman she was, had to die at 11:00 pm on a Friday. She wanted to be cremated, and this was about four or five days from the end of the month. By the time the cremation was done and we finally had the death certificate, her last Social Security payment had gone through.

Before her mind had gone too much, I’d had her put me on her bank account, as she lived with me and my dad and uncle, her two oldest sons. This made it easier if we needed something from the store with her card. On the first available day after we got the death certificate, I went to close out her account.

I was told that they were waiting for the SSA to pull the money, and I had to take them the death certificate, as it wasn’t our money.

I spent three months driving between my house, her bank, and the SSA across town before they pulled the money and I could get the last five dollars out of her account to close it.

A few years ago, I got a temp job in customer services for a large toy retailer. This company has pretty strict return policies and it’s standard procedure to ask for photos if a customer claims an item is damaged. 

I’ve only been there a few days when I get a customer email claiming some action figures broke into small pieces. I send our script response apologising and asking for photos. When I get a reply, I open the photo but something seems off and I call my colleague to take a look. The more we look, the more obvious it is; the photo is very clearly faked! It wasn’t even done well. 

In the end, my supervisor tells me to just follow our script and tell him to return it for a refund as we can’t accuse him outright of lying. The customer tries to claim that he has thrown away the figures as they were a choking hazard to his kid. He gives up once I say there is nothing we can do without returning the item. 

Out of curiosity, I look up how much the figures are worth. He went to all the trouble of faking the photos for the sake of £15 worth of action figures.

My company has a program where employees can buy products at a significant discount. One time they had an event at our site where we could try stuff out and then order what we wanted. The very next day the program changed to increase the discount so they refunded the difference in prices to all of us who had ordered at the event, which was quite nice.

My stuff all came except one part, which turned out to have been discontinued, so they canceled the order of that part and refunded the price to me — the original price I paid, not the lowered price. This netted me about an extra $12.

Being an honest guy, I asked how I could pay back the extra $12. After several weeks of back and forth, I ended up in a teleconference with my manager and two local site lawyers “live” and two lawyers at the corporate HQ via the phone. They discussed this for — I kid you not — almost a full hour before deciding I should make a payment of the $12 to the local finance people. Those people were quite confused when I made the payment to them and tried to explain why.

Later, my manager told me, “If anything like this happens again, just keep quiet.”

Working in a small military museum in London, I’m used to hearing a lot of stupid questions from tourists, but the crowning glory had to be from one little old American lady who asked me, “Does your museum have anything violent in it?”. She was clearly missing the point that members of the military, throughout their history, do tend to engage in a fair amount of violence!

Don’t quite know what she expected to find in a regimental museum of a British Army regiment that’s been fighting since the 1600s!

I work at a department store, and I am helping a teenage girl with her items. Suddenly, an old gentleman appears and snaps at me. I turn to him politely and say, “I’ll be right with you, sir; just a moment.”

He waits for about five seconds and then snaps at me again. I give him the same response. He waits about thirty seconds before snapping, and without seeing a reaction, does an ear-piercing taxi whistle. All the other people in the vicinity cringe except for the young girl I am helping.

Without missing a beat, she responds, “Sir, if you’re going to whistle at them like dogs, then you’d better be prepared to get b****y service.”

Everyone laughs, and the man slinks off, embarrassed.