I’m sitting at home on my computer when a text comes in from a random number. It just says, “Be A Man. Call me back.” I figure the spammers are trying out ways to get people to call them instead of vice versa, so I ignore it.

Fifteen minutes later, I get a call from a vaguely familiar number that turns out to be the same one that sent the text. A woman’s voice I don’t recognize, but which seems a bit antagonistic, asks, “Who is this?” Somewhat confused, I give my first name. She doesn’t seem to believe me and gets more agitated. She keeps asking who I am, and gets more and more upset as I tell her, basically, that I’m a middle-aged man who has no idea who she is or who her son is. Suspecting I’m talking with a crazy person due to how aggressive and upset she is, I don’t give out any specific details. She then segues into, “How do you think I got this number?” I have no idea and say so. “This showed up on my son’s phone. How did it get there?” Again, I have no idea.

She doesn’t believe me, starts ranting at me to leave her son alone, and gets quite worked up. I’m usually upset by confrontational situations, but I surprise myself by staying calm. She obviously made a mistake and is now yelling into the phone loud enough to make me pull it away from my ear, but this has nothing to do with me. My calm only makes her more agitated, since I’m not “taking her seriously.” Eventually, she slows down and ends with a short segment with the theme of, “I better not see your number on my son’s phone again!” I figure that is easy for me to agree to since I have no idea what her son’s phone number is. She then hangs up.

Five minutes later, a text from the same number: “I am SO SORRY! I mixed up your phone number with a punk kid my son has been hanging out with. I am only doing my best as a mom and sorry to bother you.”

Those two sentences explain more about the situation than all the ranting she did over the phone. To be polite, I reply, “That’s okay. Hope you can resolve your situation.” She replies, “Thank you. Sorry again,” and that is the last I hear from that phone number.  

I do hope she resolved the situation, but ten minutes of yelling and a lot of vocal cord stress could’ve been avoided if she’d double checked the number, or actually listened to me when I said I didn’t know who she or her son was.

It’s lunchtime and we arrive at a casual place. The menu, the combos, and the system are a little confusing but we manage to order. The woman on the register is clearly on a working holiday, so the language and our multiple accents add to the confusion.

My companion and I sit at an outside table and comment on how her attitude didn’t help but at least we got there. After a few minutes, she comes out from behind the counter and outside to our table and says, “Your food is ready. You need to come in and get it.”

Yes, she came out empty handed to tell us to come in and get it!

I work in a bowling alley. During our Saturday night rent-a-lane that started at 11:30 pm — when people tend to drink more — we had a guy apparently trying to impress his girlfriend. He took a running start from the bowling area… onto the approach and onto his lane.

As you know, bowling lanes are oiled. The customer did know this as he slid/skated down the lane on the oil.

What he didn’t know or realize is that the oil only goes about two-thirds of the way down. As soon as he reached the end of the oil, his shoes stuck to the dry part of the lane… and down he went… face first. He was okay, but a little shaken up as he walked back.

There were only about ten lanes going in the small center, but I wanted to warn everybody that this is why you do not go out onto the lanes. I got onto the microphone and said, “Just a reminder… Please do not walk out onto the lanes, as there is oil out there and we don’t want anyone to trip and fall like the guy just did on lane five.”

I got a few small laughs from it, but I think he’d already learned his lesson.

A few years ago my wife’s grandmother passed away. After the funeral, the family started getting her things closed out and moved out of her home, etc. One of the things to do was call all the utility companies and have her accounts closed. Upon calling the first one, and being told that she had a sizable — over $2,000 — credit on her account, we started investigating and found out something funny.

Each month she would get a bill for a utility, and let’s say the amount was $132.40. She would round up to the next $10 dollars and pay it, so $140, ending up with a credit. The next month the bill would be — let’s say, for easy storytelling — the same, but the amount owed would be minus the credit from the previous month. So, $132.40 minus $7.60. But she didn’t care about the balance, only the bill, so she rounded it up and paid $140 again.

Apparently, she did this for years and years and years. Going through all her papers — she kept everything — we found utilities dated back as far as seven or eight years with her doing this. We even saw a letter from one of the utilities that she filed that stated, paraphrasing, that her account had a serious credit and could she please stop sending money for a while to work it down.

When she passed on, she didn’t have much in the way of valuable assets. Most of her household goods were old and worn and not of any value. The house she lived in was an old mobile home, so very little value there.

But after we closed all her utility accounts, we ended up having far more money than everything else put together. Of course, that money went into her estate and the people mentioned in her will got a lot more than they had originally thought. And we all got a good memory to remember Grandma by.

Our company decided, for some odd reason, to have a training conference. Part of the conference was a session where they were trying to get us to “think outside the box.”

The exercise we were given was to drop an egg from a six-foot height without breaking it, using only a small number of straws, some tape, and a few other pointless and useless things.

I asked for very specific instructions on what constituted success and was told that we had to drop the egg without having it splatter.

The first group tried dropping the egg into a net of straws and failed. The second group wrapped the egg in tape, with a tape loop sticking out, stuck taped-together straws through the egg’s loop, and successfully slid the egg down the straws. The third group simply taped the straws together with the egg at the bottom, held the egg over six feet of the ground — with the top of the taped-together straws over twelve feet of the ground — and successfully managed to catch the top of the straws before the egg splattered.

Our group dropped the egg into a nest of straws… and it didn’t break, because we had gone into the bathroom, poked a couple of tiny holes in it, and blew the insides out.

We were disqualified. The lesson we learned? [Company] wants you to think outside the box, but only in a proper, company-approved fashion.