In the video game store where I work, I have a couple of regular costumers that come once or twice a week: a mother and her son, about seven years old. I especially know them because they always ask for Lego games and the mom plays with her son… and they are fairly good, too.

Our store also has a special promotion with the receipts; for every hour you play, we put a seal on your receipt and when you get ten seals total, you get a free hour.

The mom and child couple have gathered the ten seals and ask for their game, though the kid’s mom tells me they have something important to do and to tell her in half an hour so they can go. She assumes once that half an hour is done and they leave, that means she can’t redeem the rest of the promotion.

I tell her to not worry; she can return when she’s done and she can play the half-hour she has left. She seems pretty happy about this.

So, they leave after the first half-hour and they return later in the day. As I promised, I’m honoring her deal and giving her the half-hour she missed. To my surprise, she’s come with a cup of coffee she gives me as thanks. It’s been a really cold day, so it really hits the spot. It was a simple gesture, but really made my day.

A few years ago, I came home from a New Year’s party, walked past my car and suddenly stopped. I did not have a convertible, but the roof looked quite, well, missing. It turns out that a huge slab of ice detached from the roof of the house I was parked under and hit my car squarely on the roof so it was lying basically flush on the back seats, essentially totaling it since it was about 20 years old and barely able to pass inspection anymore. The total worth of the car was, maybe, if I was lucky, 100 bucks. More likely, the worth was negative because it costs to take it to the dump.

I took pictures, got the police to record everything, and handed my claim for the replacement of the car to the owner of the apartment building. To my surprise, he refused to pay. I handed the whole mess to my lawyer, he said we’d win this, and off he went.

Come September, my lawyer called. We’d won, and got me 800 bucks for my car — worth, again, maybe 10). But, in his words, “those insane idiots” could not have done it worse. In the lawsuit, of course, the question arose about how could that ice slab even happen? After all, if there had a person in my car, an ice slab caving in a car roof could easily have killed them.

Turns out, the apartment building didn’t have certain gadgets on the roof that are mandatory for buildings taller than four stories to prevent such things from happening. Why didn’t it have those gadgets?

Because, according to what the town — and hence building inspectors — knew, the apartment was only two stories tall.

So, not only was the company owning it in violation of the building code — by itself something that is very expensive if you get found out — our tax guys were very interested in them suddenly having way more apartments to let than he “officially” had.

In the words of my lawyer, “Seriously, if I pulled that stunt, I’d hand you ten grand for your 20-year-old wreck of a car and tell you to shut the eff up about it.”

A few years ago I decided to get a job waitressing at a “diner” chain known to be very popular with drunks in the night hours. It wasn’t too bad; management was really fair and considered the fact that most of their customers were bats*** crazy.

Every other night, these older gentlemen always came in and demanded coffee and for their cups to never be empty. They always emptied them in two minutes flat. If they had to wait for any length of time, no matter how small, you got no tip. If you weren’t at the table by the time they took their last gulps to fill their cups, you got no tip.

Since they were so incredibly high-maintenance the manager would usually wait on them because the other servers were obviously too busy to wait on these a**holes hand and foot every two minutes. Forget about leaving the pot at the table. “We’re paying to be waited on,” as they always said. The coffee was less than three dollars and it was bottomless.

For some reason beyond anyone’s control, I had to wait on them one night. I thought I’d have a plan: always have a coffee pot reserved for myself so I could accommodate them. I told all the other servers to keep their mitts off of it. I even made an extra pot, just in case. That didn’t work out very well, as they all seemed to just think both pots of coffee were for them and took both of them, anyway.

The old men started complaining about me taking three minutes instead of two. I was still juggling my other tables on top of it all. One of the coffee pots was left unattended, so I snatched it and made a new pot. I decided to leave the d*** thing at their table and accept the fact I wasn’t going to be tipped.

These old men never bought anything else and sat there for at least three hours. I told my manager I would never wait on them if he happened to ask and, frankly, that we’re just losing money on servicing them. My manager never made anyone wait on them again.

I work at a restaurant that offers those “singing and cake” extras for birthdays. One day, I am approached by two teenage boys who pay for the birthday special for their female friend. I’m thinking, “Aw, that’s cute!”

We make the cake and we go sing “Happy Birthday” to their table… and it quickly becomes obvious that the girl is not into it. She’s death-glaring at the boys so hard I’m surprised they don’t burst into flames. They giggle the entire time. When it’s time to blow out the candle, she puts it out between her index and thumb, then smashes the cake against the face of the boy closest to her.

Turns out, she hated this kind of stuff and they got it anyway, just to mess with her. Good times.

I was only around for about half of this occurrence, but I later learned the full story from my manager. My manager received a call from a customer asking if we had a certain item. We did, so the customer requested that the manager ship it to her, which is a service we offer. Now here’s where things get tricky: the customer had a loyalty account with us, so we had her address in our system, but she wanted this item sent to a different address. We are located in Washington state; the address she wanted it shipped to was in California.

Normally, this would be no problem, but when the manager tried to enter the California address, she got an error message saying the address was wrong. She double- and triple-checked her spelling against the note she took when she was on the phone with the customer, but she was still not able to put the address through.

She switched registers, as we’d been having trouble with them on and off for the past week or so and usually any problems could be solved by starting over at a different register. No such luck this time.

She called the customer back, confirmed the address, and tried again. Three times. She spelled out every word in the address, enunciating as clearly as she possibly could, to make sure she’d written it all down correctly. The customer confirmed that it was correct. The register still didn’t take it, saying that it was incorrect. It had now been a good half-hour since my manager had taken the first call.

This is about where I come in, because she asks me for help. She has me watch her while she tries, yet again, to order the item and ship it to this person. She does everything exactly correctly; I have no idea what’s wrong. We try spelling out, “North,” instead of just typing, “N,” and we try spelling out, “Drive,” instead of abbreviating it. Nothing works.

I have to step away for a minute to help another customer, and by the time I’m done, my manager has just gotten off the phone with the customer yet again. In desperation, the customer has given my manager her daughter’s address and asked us to ship it there, instead. It still doesn’t work.

Finally, even though technically we’re not allowed to have our phones out on the sales floor with us, my manager goes and gets her phone and types the address into Google Maps, just to see what happens. That’s when we find the problem. She had written the city down as “Los Alpos,” when it is, in fact, “Los Altos.”

At this point, it has been at least 45 minutes of repeatedly calling the customer back, trying to figure out what was wrong with the address. Not once has the customer corrected the spelling of the city name.

When she finally finishes the transaction, my manager jokes, “That was my last transaction of the day. I’m not doing any more. I refuse.”