I studied abroad in Europe during college. After a group trip to Paris, we had a free week, and I chose to stay an extra day and explore the city some more. I booked a hostel based on positive reviews, and a few friends decided to stay in the same place before we went off on our individual travels.

I checked in and was given a bunk in a large, mixed-gender dorm room. Fair enough, it’s a hostel and that’s pretty standard. However, this was my first time sleeping in a larger dorm alone, and the other guests were mostly unfamiliar and older men. More of my friends showed up, and we had enough to book a private room together. 

The new room was just off the hostel’s main courtyard, where all the guests gathered outside the on-site bar. While the atmosphere in reviews had been described as fun and friendly, it was an older clientele than our group of young college kids and already very drunk and rowdy. We settled in but discovered that there was no way to lock the door from the inside; the mechanism on the interior was missing, and the bolt could only be turned using the outside keyhole.

A drunk guest we didn’t know jokingly offered to take our key, lock the door from the outside, and come unlock us in the morning. Shockingly, our group of nineteen-year-old girls declined that offer. 

We were bone tired and lying on our bunks, debating what to do about the door situation, when I noticed a shoelace threaded through the slats of the bunk over mine. We ended up using that shoelace to tie the latching pieces of the interior lock together, keeping the two halves of the swinging door shut. Since it opened inward, we piled our suitcases in front of the door, as well.

We eventually fell asleep while the party in the courtyard raged. Late, late at night, once things had finally quieted down, we heard the door start to swing inward. I was so exhausted that I barely lifted my head when I heard the door lightly thump to a stop. There were no more sounds, so I dropped my head back down and fell back to sleep.

The next morning, we discovered that the old, random shoelace was still tied through the lock but barely hanging by a single thread. One more push and the lace would have snapped, the suitcases pushed aside.

We all checked out with relief, after noting the graffiti in the bathroom stalls (toilets and sinks only, no showers) saying the writer would rather spend a night in the street than another night at that hostel. Where was that warning when I booked the hostel?!

My friends and I set off on our individual adventures. I was supposed to take an extremely budget flight to Ireland, but an air traffic strike meant that no flights would leave that day. I had another day to spend in Paris, all by myself, but I knew there was no way I’d go back to that hostel alone.

I ended up returning to the hotel our group had stayed in during the school excursion, paying six times the hostel rate for a room, locking the door, and taking an hour-long bubble bath to wash off the hostel.

I recently had a very… interesting experience with a postal service.

Having a sudden inspiration for my wife’s birthday present, I ordered an item from a webshop. I received an email that the item would be delivered the next evening. So far, so good.

The next day, a Thursday, I received an email with the timeslot. My package was to be delivered between 5:30 pm and 10:30 pm. In other words, “somewhere in the evening”. Yeah, it’s a big timeslot and I was not too happy with that, especially since 10:30 pm is the time I want to go to sleep. On the other hand, a big timeslot usually means it arrives earlier than the final minute, so I was not too worried.

By 8:00 pm, however, I received another email. It said that the timeslot had changed to “between 8:05 pm and 10:30 pm”. Wow, breaking news… I mean, the passing of time would imply that you’re not going to make it IN THE PAST. So, what is the point of this email?

10:30 rolled by. Still nothing. My wife and I decided to go to sleep, pondering whether we would open the door if they came in late. But nothing happened.

The next morning, I saw another email from the postal service. Apparently, they hadn’t “managed” to deliver it. No explanation why or how, but at least they didn’t claim delivery while this wasn’t the case. (You often hear these horror stories.) Now they were gonna try again this evening, same d*** timeslot. Sigh!

Friday evening, same scenario, except with no email for the shorter timeslot at 8:00. So again, nothing. Grmbl… Now, I’m getting really annoyed.

Saturday morning. Another email, now from the webshop. Apparently, the postal service had still “failed to deliver” and now they had sent the package back to the webshop. As soon as the return was processed, I would receive my money back.

Not showing up two nights in a row is probably something logistic, but what really bugs me is that this resulted in them just giving up on the delivery so quickly — no attempt to send it to a nearby package point, either. Just… nothing. All of this was just a complete waste of time for me and a waste of time, energy, and fuel to them. All for a small package.

Although I considered complaining to them, I soon realised that their websites are designed to make this difficult, with stupid chatbots instead of real people, etcetera, which would only make the situation more frustrating to me. Instead, I’d better just take my hands off the situation and find a different present somewhere else — preferably not from a webshop, and certainly not this one. I don’t want to risk any of them working with this same dreadful delivery service.

When I was a child (in the wild seventies), there were a lot of Jehovah’s Witnesses going around our neighborhood. Since my brothers and sisters and I were still small enough to sleep during the day, my mother didn’t want us to be woken or be bothered by unappreciated attempts to convert us, so she put a little sticker on the door that said, “Jehovah’s Witnesses, don’t ring the doorbell.”

And everything was peaceful. 

One afternoon, my mother was working in the house and heard a strange noise that she couldn’t place. It wasn’t loud, and as she was busy, she kept working.

After some time, she kept hearing the same sound, so she started an investigation. Soon, she found that the sound was coming from the front of the house — more specifically from the front door. The sound became a noticeable knock.

It turned out to be a Jehovah’s Witness obeying my mother’s sign not to ring the doorbell; he was knocking on the door to get attention.

My mother sent him off.

Forty years later, the sign is still there. Nobody ever knocked again.

I once contracted for a very large corporation that was extremely bureaucratic and slow when it came to things like issuing badges. This was particularly a pain because the corporation’s security doors required a badge going out, not just in. (Yes, you could get out without a badge — it would be a fire safety issue otherwise — but that would trigger an alarm, so that would be a truly last-ditch option.)

Normally, I would rely on my closest coworkers to let me both in and out, but I managed to social-engineer my way out at least once…

…but more interestingly, I once social-engineered my way IN once without even trying.

I was standing around outside the entrance trying to message someone to come let me in, and this woman I didn’t know but who evidently recognized me came by and was like, “Hey, I’ve seen you around! I’ll let you in.”

I was part of a fundraiser where we all dressed up like zombies and people had to run through a track in the park and buildings, collecting various tokens and staying “alive”. They stayed alive if they held on to three fabric tags attached to their waist that we tried to tear off.

There was one child zombie; her parents were involved, so she was, too. She had a new pink princess dress bought especially for it. She had fun ripping and painting that pretty pink dress.

Feedback from those partaking was that she was the scariest thing out there, the little girl standing at the far end of a corridor, cuddling a dismembered arm like a teddy bear. And if the runners paused and stared too long, she’d suddenly run at them, shrieking her head off. 

She had a ball!