There’s a guy at my gym who sometimes tries to chat me up. I’m polite but nothing more, as I’m not interested.

One night, I’m leaving the gym just as he’s arriving. We exchange greetings for a few seconds and I set off on my walk home without a second thought.

Halfway there, I stop to wait for a traffic light and just happen to look over my shoulder.

He’s right behind me.

I scream, “Why are you following me?!”

He has the nerve to stand there smiling and ask, “Oh, did I scare you?” as if it’s perfectly normal to follow a woman late at night — or any time, for that matter.

I raise my fists into a fighting stance and scream again, “BACK OFF, MOTHERF*****!”

He takes off running. I’m so petrified that I can’t move until he’s out of sight.

I’ve never seen him again, but I’m always uneasy he’ll show up at the gym again.

Our English Setter has had surgery to repair an ACL injury. She chews on her stitches and manages to pop one. We load her in the car to make the 45-minute drive to the vet, calling ahead to make sure they know we’re coming, as we know we’ll be pushing closing time for them.

We get there a few minutes before close and our vet comes into the waiting room to greet us. He picks up our girl and proclaims dramatically, “What did you do that for, you b****?!”

His vet tech (and we) totally lost it.

And he replaced the stitches with staples for us!

I am picking up a small item at a well-known pharmacy chain and I use a self-checkout machine with a sign that says, “No cash, card only.” That’s fine because I don’t have any cash on me anyway; however, it is late, and in a moment of auto-pilot, I press the “cashback” button. 

“Is this amount correct?” the machine asks me, and I press the “no” button, but somehow it is too late and the machine has already processed my payment. One staff member comes over and gives me a huge eye roll and has to find a manager to fix it. 

The manager comes over and has to unlock the machine and manually take out the cash box to give me the cash. “I’m sorry,” I say, and offer to take a refund on the cashback but she says that’s not possible and makes a big show of how annoyed she is opening the machine. She says to me, “It’s a really big sign.”

Listen, I work in customer service, too. I’m sure these staff members deal with people who make this mistake all day and I’m certain that it is super annoying, but I’m human, okay? Save your snide comments for rude people instead of shaming the apologetic ones.

We are in the middle of a shop-fit; the front steps are being retiled, the counter is in pieces, the ceiling is being replaced, electrical cables are draped everywhere, and all the fryers are in the street outside.

A customer climbs through all this, weaves around all the workers, and tries to order a meal to go at the non-existent counter and is very surprised to learn that we are not open.

Following this experience, I have never again been surprised by customers’ inability to use common sense.

My wife, my sister-in-law, my young son, my young nephew, and I were at an amusement park that’s geared to the younger set. My nephew is nine months older than my son, but they were both about five or six years old. They were about to get on the bumper cars.

There was a big sign about safety so I yelled out to my son, “[Son], no head-on collisions… so just T-bone [Nephew].” My sister-in-law laughed and then scolded me.