My friend and I are at a local coffee shop. We both just left school so we are wearing our backpacks, which are bulky and cumbersome. As my friend is walking past a table to leave, her backpack catches a spice shaker and knocks it onto the floor. The shaker is small and doesn’t make much noise when it lands. That, coupled with the background noise in the coffee shop causes her not to notice what happened.

She is already out the door, so I go to pick the shaker. Then, this woman, whom I have never seen before in my life, comes up to me ranting and raving about disrespectful teens and how we can’t just start destroying things and not picking up after ourselves. I point out that I am picking it up, that my friend knocked it over by accident, and that there is no harm done. This does not placate the rude woman. She then starts yelling at the barista that my friend and I are trying to destroy coffee shop property and should be banned. The barista, who was watching this whole insane situation, takes my side and tells the woman she cannot harass other customers.

I leave the coffee shop and my friend asks me what delayed me. As I am explaining, the rude woman comes out after me and starts screaming at my friend and I more. My friend’s dad pulls up in his car to drive us home; we hurry to the car as the woman is yelling incoherently behind us. He asks us what happened as the woman is literally banging on the car windows and yelling about how disrespectful and awful both my friend and I are.

I’m shaken but I explain the best I can. My friend’s dad isn’t amused; he rolls down his window enough to roar at the woman to keep her hands off his car. She pales, shuts up, and backs up. My friend’s dad then gets out of the car and marches into the coffee shop. A minute later he and barista appear, and the barista starts talking to the rude woman, who begins crying and storms off in the direction of the parking lot. My friend’s dad explains that the barista has banned the woman from the coffee shop.

About a week later, I am walking home. I am passing a crosswalk that a man is crossing when a convertible comes out of nowhere and screeches to a halt right in front of the man, nearly hitting him. The driver then starts screaming at the man for being in the middle of the road, saying it would have been his fault if she had hit him, and so on. Lo and behold, it is the same rude woman from the coffee shop. The man she nearly hit just flips her off and walks away.

The rude woman turns towards me for support, saying that you just can’t reason with some people. I tell her I agree completely and that I see she’s just as unreasonable and crazy wherever she goes. Her face first goes blank, then bright red as she recognizes me. She steps on the gas pedal and swerves off, tires screeching, towards a street corner that a cop usually stays by with a radar gun, waiting to catch people speeding. I walked away cackling as she was screaming at the police officer for pulling her over.

This takes place in the 50s. My grandma and her first husband didn’t work out. They legally separated and lived their own lives, but didn’t get a divorce. She met my grandpa and had my aunt while she was still married to her first husband.

When she went to register the birth certificate, the clerk put her husband’s name as my aunt’s father. When she said that her husband wasn’t the father, my grandpa was, and asked to change the name on the certificate, the clerk refused. She said that my grandma should have just “kept her legs closed and stayed faithful to her husband.”

My grandpa had to legally adopt his own daughter. My grandma divorced her first husband and married my grandpa before they had the rest of their kids.

This happened several years ago when PCs were relatively new and networking wasn’t really a thing. We connected to a mainframe computer for email and for other functions.

I needed a document from someone, preferably in electronic form. I called her and asked if she had an electronic copy. No, she didn’t, but she could give me a copy if I brought a disk for her to put it on.

It took me a while, but I finally realized that, to her, “electronic” meant that it was in her electronic mail. Having it stored on her PC and transferring it to a disk was something else.

I think…

I work at a busy retail location where we deal with literally hundreds of people per day. We recently started handing out customer surveys.

This was a customer response to why they were not satisfied with their experience in our store:

“I am only satisfied when I am greeted immediately upon entering the store and catered to by that person during my whole shopping experience. I also am only satisfied if I am paying a minimal amount — under $20 — or if the items are free.”

I’m still not sure where they got their expectations for shopping in a retail store, never mind one where the customer-to-worker ratio is at least 30:1.

The library I work at recently started a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that I decided to join outside of work. This particular incident happens during our second meeting. Because most of the group is new to playing, we are still in the process of creating our character sheets and learning a little about what the DM expects. We are meeting in the library’s main meeting space, which is the first room you come to from the side entrance; we’ve kept the door open in case anyone wishes to inquire and possibly join.

About 30 minutes into the meeting, a woman enters the library and stops in the doorway of the room. She’s wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap. She asks, “Is this the D & D class?”

Immediately, I’m suspicious, but as I am not working, I can’t officially do anything… yet. I tell her it is and ask if she would like to join us. Without a word, she storms into the room, lugging two giant suitcases behind her. Everyone is staring at her as she opens one of the suitcases and begins pulling out a bunched-up bed sheet. I ask her who she is, what she is doing and if she is planning on joining us. I also warn that if she’s planning on being a Dungeon Master, we already have one; we think maybe she has toys or figurines for us to play with.

As it turns out, the woman does want us to play… with blocks of Duplo Lego. Instead of answering our questions, she tells us to continue with our “meeting,” and that she will sit in the middle and play with the blocks. She begins handing out different colors to each of us, and I decide to try to ignore her enough to talk to the DM about something to do with my character. Sure enough, every time I try to talk, the woman loudly shuffles the blocks and then grows quieter when I stop.

I tell the woman that I work at the library and would like to know what she is doing, but I realize that she does not plan on leaving. I race out of the room to grab the assistant director, telling her that there is a woman who refuses to leave. The assistant director follows me back and tells the woman that she needs to leave if she does not wish to join our campaign. The woman asks if she can borrow a pair of headphones, pulling out a small radio covered in drawings of crosses and what I recognize to be Bible verses. The assistant director agrees and leaves the room only to come back with a copy of the library policy. She instructs us to pack up and go into her office while she talks to the woman. The woman immediately begins to clean up the Lego blocks and marches out of the building with suitcases in tow.

After a short discussion, the group decides that, despite being quite shaken up, we will continue to meet that day, but in the library’s locked basement to prevent a repeat of the event. As it turns out, the woman was super religious and was, in fact, protesting the Dungeons and Dragons campaign. While I’ve been aware that this happens everywhere, it was the first time it had happened directly to me. (Side note, our campaign is still going strong and our DM is amazing!)