A friend of mine is in a long-distance relationship. They are both extremely athletic and competitive. A local gym holds a 1-2-3-4 challenge each year. You swim one mile, run two miles, bike three miles, and then do a series of four exercises: 100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 pullups, and 100 squats. It’s a charity event, people can compete in teams or individually, and a lot of people dress up.

My friend and his girlfriend often exercise “together” by video chatting from their home gyms while working out, using Bluetooth headsets to call while running, and sharing their Fitbit data, etc. She says she’ll do the challenge “with him.”

Come the day of the challenge, my friend is frustrated when he can’t get hold of her, but he decides to still go as hard as he can, hoping to be the first to finish/win the challenge.

He ends up coming second to someone dressed as a chicken.

It’s the end of the challenge, and most people are lying around exhausted, my friend included. He’s also super frustrated that he still can’t get a hold of his girlfriend and that not only did he lose, but he lost to a chicken.

He tries calling his girlfriend again, and when he can’t get hold of her, he turns to me and loudly asks, “Why isn’t she answering?!”

At this point, the chicken pulls her head off and answers, “Because I was busy kicking your a**!”

I’ve never seen someone go from exhausted and frustrated to elated so quickly. He jumps up and hugs her, spinning her round.

He then grabs her hand and pulls her out of the gym, and I hear her giggle and say, “Told you I would do the work out with you!”

There are two small prisons on the outskirts of our little town; one sits right beside the road, and the other you have to drive a half-mile down a dead-end road to get to in the dense woods. Despite this, people will “accidentally” stumble upon the second prison and “lose” their drugs, phones, etc.

But these two guys take the cake.

In the middle of broad daylight, these two guys decide to play football in the woods and then “accidentally” throw their ball over the fence. Once the ball flies over the barbed wire, they take off running back into the woods while the guards call deputies to the scene.

The ball is intercepted by the guards who realize the ball is actually being held together by duct tape. When they open it up, it’s full to the brim with drugs, pills, and cellphones.

The guys are arrested, and to this day have been the most creative in doing a drop-off.

I took my teenage son on a tour of several colleges out of state. On a day when we had two tours scheduled, our rental car got a flat, so we had to have it towed and get another car. We missed one tour but made it to the second one, after a three-hour drive. Tired, grumpy, and discombobulated, I found the parking lot and managed to use the self-pay to pay for our parking before walking over to the visitor center.

Only when I went to buy my son a T-shirt did I realize that my credit card was missing. I had left it in the parking machine. Convinced that it would be stolen and used to buy thousands of dollars of stuff, I ran back to where we had parked. What did I find but another teenager there for the same tour, on her phone. She had found my card, Googled my name, found my office phone number, and was calling me to tell me she found my card. She was delighted that she got to give it back, and I was delighted that I didn’t have to cancel the card. I was even more delighted when I checked my voicemail later to find such an earnest and polite message telling me she that had found my card and would do her best to get it back to me.

Teenagers are the hope for the future, and I’m not being sarcastic. I hope she gets accepted.

I work at a dollar store. I once hired a girl who had a second job at a big box store. She seemed to have plenty of experience and was upset that her hours were drastically cut at the other store. I soon found out why. She was dumb as a brick.

Her first day of work, she shows up early, before I am there to unlock the door. I know this because my 12-year-old daughter gets a nasty call from her demanding someone unlock the door. No clue how she got the number or figured that was the one to call. Okay, moving on.

Once we are all inside and clocked in I start to explain what I want everyone doing before the store opens. I tell the new girl I want her to do some facing and start explaining what facing is. She interrupts me saying she works in retail and already knows what facing is. I’m taken aback, but I let it go and tell her to face the toy aisle for me and leave her to it. Fifteen minutes later, I come by to check her progress and find her in a different aisle trying to rearrange a section of hooks with product.

I ask her what she’s doing. She says she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to be doing. I remind her that she was meant to be facing the toy aisle. She tells me she doesn’t know what that means; it’s only her first day. I spend nearly ten minutes explaining to her how to pull items forward on the shelves, how to fill empty spots and reorganize messy spots. She spends most of her shift looking at the toys, and eventually, I send her home early.

Next shift, I try her on cash and promptly get reports from staff and other customers that she is skipping scanning certain items when she knows the person she is ringing out. I wait around the cash until I hear her greet a friend and stand back to watch. I can see the items she is scanning from the customer side on the screen, as does the customer. Immediately, she starts putting things in bags without scanning or only scanning an item once if they bought two or more. The customer actually mentions it first; my cashier winks and says she did, in fact, scan it. I chime in that no, she didn’t. I can clearly see her screen and what has been scanned. She apparently had no idea there was even a screen on the other side.

Next shift, she is late and I can’t find a single task she is capable of doing alone. By this point, I am ready to let her go, but my district manager is in town and thinks she is “young and charming” and says to “give her a chance.”

My DM decides I am not giving her the benefit of the doubt and takes me to where the employee is. My DM presents her with a shopping cart full of returns that need to go back and asks her sweetly to “empty the basket for us.” Not five minutes later, we are walking through the store looking at planograms when we see an empty shopping cart next to a shelf piled with random merchandise, the same merchandise that we asked her to put away. The new girl is standing nearby looking — yes, just looking — at a section of wall. My DM calls her over and asks if she put this merchandise there. She replies that, yes, she was told to “empty the cart.” She says this as though we are the dumb ones and walks away, shaking her head. My boss stands with her mouth open, at a loss for words. She tells me give her until the end of the week. If there is no improvement, I’m to let her go

The next day is Sunday. We are only open from noon to five pm on Sundays and have a skeleton staff. I am off that day but I advise my weekend supervisor to have the new girl do some cleaning around the store. Surely she can’t screw up cleaning, right? Boy, was I wrong.

I come in the next morning. My weekend supervisor can’t look at me. My other employees look like they are excitedly waiting for something to happen. I am personally running late this day and the store is due to open in about 15 minutes.

My supervisor takes me aside and says, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize I would have to babysit her through her shift.” I ask what happened. He tells me someone called out sick and he got caught up on cash and left the new girl alone from eleven am until the store closed at five. He then takes me to the toy aisle. Keep in mind, it is Christmas season and most of our sales are toy items from this huge section. I turn the corner and almost pass out.

The entire toy section is in shambles. My new girl apparently decided that the toy aisle was in need of rearranging. Toys are all over the floor. Hooks filled with merchandise are on the floors and sitting on shelves. Some shelves were removed and are either leaning against other shelves or simply laying on the floor. Merchandise was moved to all random spots, some shoved in too tight, others with massive gaps between them. Shelves are on crooked, and hooks are overfilled with heavy items and on the verge of snapping off. The floor is littered with hooks, shelf brackets, ladders, empty toy packages, and a ton of random toys.

This section is huge. It is two full aisles, as well as a quarter of the back wall. She has managed to disrupt the entire section.

Apparently, at five pm, she simply stopped what she was doing and clocked out. By the time they found her mess, it was too late and there was no way they were going to get it reset in time to clock out.

I end up having to take three employees off their duties for that day and shut down the section to customers due to safety concerns. From nine am to six pm, we work on resetting the section and get it pretty much back to a normal state. By this time, all the staff has heard about what happened and even those not working come in to shop so they can get a glimpse of the new girl’s work.

I send pictures to my DM so she can understand why I am not in the office, why our sales are down that day, and why other tasks aren’t done. She tells me to fire the girl and promises to never interfere again if I feel my staff isn’t working out.

Strangely, the new girl can’t understand what she did wrong, and really is surprised to be let go. Now I know why her hours were cut at her other job.

Worst week on the job I’ve ever had.

The regional manager of the national chain I worked at had just announced his retirement and was taking something of a final tour of his stores to close out his tenure. Even though I’d worked the night shift the day before, I decided to come in early on my day off to see him speak. I accidentally showed up late and ended up standing in the back, where I could barely see him, but overall his talk — more of a town hall Q and A session, really — was pretty good.

Just as I was heading out, though, I bumped into one of my supervisors who asked me to cover a morning callout. I hadn’t hit my hour cap for the week yet, so I said yes, and ended up covering the opening two hours of the day as a greeter, aka the guy who checks receipts. Since we’d only just opened and there were barely any customers, it was an incredibly boring job, and I was pretty sleep-deprived to boot.

At maybe the hour-and-a-half mark, an older gentleman wandered past me with a large [Store] bag. I could tell from his body language that he was just looking at the displays, so I let him go about five feet or so beyond the security gates. When he started approaching the doors, though, I got antsy. He reached T-minus three feet from the exit bar, and my sleep-deprived brain yelled out, “Excuse me, sir. Can I see your receipt for the bag real quick?”

He turned around, shooting me a look of bewildered amusement, and I heard what sounded like the entire store bursting into laughter. I turned around to find not one, not two, but all twelve department managers, RSMs, and the general manager absolutely losing it behind me. They’d been giving the regional manager a tour of the building — the same regional manager I’d just gone ahead and receipt-tagged.

He was very nice about the whole thing, and he, in fact, had not just blatantly stolen from his own company. And I got a commendation from Asset Protection for representing our store’s security. I’m still embarrassed about the whole thing, and I’ve never worked morning shifts since.