I worked as a nurse in a coronary care unit. Medical professionals have their own language, and sometimes forget the average person doesn’t speak “medicalese.” One of my patients was newly diagnosed with myocardial infarction, the medical term for a heart attack. I accompanied his doctor in as he talked to the patient, telling him he had a myocardial infarction.

After we left the room, I asked the doctor if he thought the patient understood what he was told. He assured me he did. When I returned to the patient’s room a few minutes later, I asked him if he understood what the doctor told him.

He said, “Oh, yes. I’m so relieved. I thought I’d had a heart attack.”

I am around 11 years old and my siblings are a few years younger. My father’s boss and her husband are coming over and they also bring their ten-year-old daughter we have never met before. We go into my room to play. As I start taking a board game out, the girl asks as the very first thing, “Does your mother have gold jewellery and do you know where she keeps it?”

I excuse myself and go tell my mother so she knows to keep an eye on the bedroom door in case she tries to sneak in there. The girl still apparently plays with my mother’s makeup while visiting the bathroom, mixing all the colours together. Due to the short temper of the boss, my parents never confront her; they do manage to avoid hosting any other family dinners until my father gets a better job, though.

My friend is a great prankster. He was in the hospital one time and the nurse came in to leave a specimen cup so they could collect a urine sample. My friend had received apricot nectar with his breakfast. After the nurse left, he poured the apricot nectar into the specimen cup. When the nurse returned, she looked at and commented that it looked pretty bad. Picking up the cup, my friend drank it down, commenting, “Well, I’ll run it through again!”

Our new head of marketing suggested to the company CEO that some management training would be useful. The CEO — we rated him not as a Type A personality, but a Type AAAA personality — signed up for an “Interpersonal Skills” retreat.

The upshot was that he smiled more when he returned, but no other determinable change in his personality had occurred.

My office partner pegged it: “It’s the teeth! He went to ‘Congeniality Training for Sharks’!”

Some years ago I worked as a bookkeeper and accountant in a supermarket. We had the usual amount of “shrinkage” of our inventory, occasionally catching someone in the act but otherwise accepting the 1-2% loss.

In January 2005, we upgraded our inventory system, adding in self-checkout lanes. Things went along without a hitch for the first few months but then our shrinkage rate jumped. In terms of a gross percentage it was still low, but we operated on such a small margin that it pushed us closer to the red than we’d like. My boss asked me to figure it out.

Because of the new system, I could do data pulls any way I wanted. It took me a day to find that the principal loss came from the butcher shop. Prime cuts of meat were entered into the system with UPC barcodes on them but never showed up as being purchased or discarded. These were $20 to $40 (or more) items mysteriously vanishing.

At first, management suspected the butcher staff, but increased security and stern warnings did not slow the pilferage and it was clear that they were not the problem. We upgraded security near the checkouts, but no one was walking out with meat under their shirts.

Although it wasn’t my job, I put some time in on the problem. When I did more comparisons of inventory in and out I discovered that dried pinto beans were selling at a rate greater than we bought them. I thought about it and realized the problem was likely the self-checkout. I went to my boss and we added security camera and real-time monitoring of the system.

It turned out to be a family that ran a small BBQ place in town. Their trick was to use the pay station furthest from the observing cashier and cover the barcode, entering the item as weighed produce using the code for beans. They’d bag the meat and a few other small items and walk out with a valid receipt paid in cash.

We confronted them and ended up with a settlement to avoid court. Now that they had to buy their product at normal wholesale prices, they couldn’t make a go of it and went out of business a few months later. And I got a nice bonus.