We rent out houses and, like everywhere in the world, we get complaints about neighbours. Most are about noise, damages, or antisocial behaviour, but this is one of the crazier examples.

[Client #1] sends three separate emails about how his neighbour [Client #2] stalks him, is evil and antisocial, and should be kicked out. Most is in caps, with no punctuation, and it’s just tiring to read.

[Client #2] sends one short email, with normal punctuation and use of words. He suspects [Client #1] has a crossbow, because he suddenly found an arrow stuck in his door. Picture included.

I’m so glad I do not have to deal with this feud.

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I work at a coffee shop, and the owners are terribly cheap. We have an air conditioning system that breaks down every year, and this year is no exception. We are in the middle of July and it’s blazing hot outside. Indoors, we only have two small fans set up on either side of the store as an attempt to keep things cool. Workers regularly dart to the back to get a drink of water, since we aren’t allowed to keep a drink on us in the front.

One of my coworkers who was on deli goes into the back for a drink; I agree to cover her while she is gone. Usually, people only take a minute for a drink of water, but after almost ten minutes she still isn’t back. Once there is a break in food orders, I go look for her. I search all over the place, including outside, in the washrooms, and even in the walk-in-freezer, and she is nowhere to be found. I have another food order, so I give up looking for the time being.

A little bit later, I need to grab some butter from the fridge, which is large, but not a walk-in. I open the door and find my coworker sitting in it, head between her knees.

Turns out, she was working deli, which has a toaster that was radiating heat. The heat from the toaster, combined with the already sweltering heat from the weather, overwhelmed her and gave her heat exhaustion. So, she went to “get a drink of water,” and sat in the fridge to try and cool herself down. While in the fridge, she felt nauseous and dizzy and put her head down to help herself get over the feeling.

However, when I open the door, I don’t realize any of that information and think I have just stumbled upon a corpse that was stuffed in the fridge. I let out such a loud shriek that all of my coworkers come sprinting over to see what is wrong. When we have all figured out what happened, they laugh their tails off at me for being scared.

They now frequently hide in the fridge and jump out at me. On the bright side, because of the incident, our owners have finally paid to fix the air conditioning, which has made working in the summer much more bearable.

Way back in the 1990s, when computers were new and floppy disks roamed the earth in great herds, my parents bought a new game for us all to play on the family PC.

We installed it, booted it up, and a happy little computer chip appeared on the screen, welcoming the player. Then, he dramatically announced the arrival of the game’s villain: his exact words were, “A Virus Has Been Detected!”

Cue my dad shutting down the game, uninstalling it, and running diagnostics on the family computer for the next several hours.

I’m the idiot here. I am in an art/music history class, and we are talking about Gregorian Chants. I knew full well that they were used long before any recording equipment was around, so I really have no excuse.

Somehow, something the professor said about, “We’re about to listen to a recording of a chant that was found very recently,” tripped up my brain. He meant, “The notes for this tune were found recently,” but I heard, “We found this recording recently.”

On my way out of class, I mentioned to the professor how interesting it was that the woman on the recording sounded like she had modern training, even back then. He gave me a very strange look, but didn’t say anything. It wasn’t until a while later that I realized what I had said.

One of our patients has a procedure in the morning for which he needs to not eat or drink anything for twelve hours prior. This isn’t uncommon before many procedures, and while it’s not pleasant, it’s doable for most people.

Not so with this patient. As soon as the twelve hours start, he rings his call light every fifteen minutes demanding we bring him something to eat. The first few times, his nurse goes in and explains to him why he can’t eat and what the dangers are, and tells him that if he really needs to eat, we can postpone or cancel the procedure — which is not an emergency, but not entirely unelective. He is adamant that he does not want to postpone or cancel, but he demands that we bring him something to eat.

Obviously, we can’t ignore call lights, and so I fall hours behind in my work going into his room every fifteen minutes to reiterate what he already knows: he can eat now and postpone the procedure, or not eat and have it in the morning. He refuses to accept this and insists we bring him something to eat and that we perform the procedure as scheduled.

Around 3:00 in the morning, the call lights finally stop, and we are all relieved, assuming that he has finally fallen asleep. However, while I am catching up on the work I am behind on, I turn the corner to find the stack of dinner trays waiting to be picked up by the cafeteria, and this patient eating off of a used dinner tray. Without saying anything to the patient, and with a certain amount of satisfaction, I call the nurse and tell her she should let the doctor know that his scheduled morning procedure will have to be cancelled.