My parents divorced when I was ten. For the rest of my childhood, I lived with my dad, but I moved in with my mom when I started attending college.

Not long after I started college, I turned eighteen and became eligible for jury duty. I got my first summons sent to my dad’s address. But there was a problem. My mom did not live in the same county, so I was not eligible to attend that jury duty as I no longer lived in the proper county.

Not long after, due to some issues with my mom, I had to move back in with my dad. Of course, that was when my mom’s county sent me a jury summons, which I was, of course, ineligible for.

Both counties gave up on me, believing I lived in the other county. It probably didn’t help that after I moved out on my own, I happened to bounce over the county line a couple more times, and at the moment, I live at a residence so close to the county line that the person at the DMV asked which county I lived in when I registered to vote.

I work in the kitchen of a pub. Because I’m autistic, I need earplugs to deal with the noise of the kitchen. My immediate boss informed me that is their responsibility as an employer to supply them.

Actually getting them has been a bit of a nightmare. 

The first type I was given didn’t work, but I was told (by the pub’s deputy manager) that there was another version they could order. 

On a Saturday several weeks ago, I had a small meltdown. The team lead let me know she had spoken to one of the managers, and one of the bar coworkers was being sent to [Store] to grab me some earplugs to use for today. They worked great! They were kept in the office, so I had to keep asking the manager on duty to get them, and not all of the managers knew the password for the safe they were kept in. When I had about a week’s supply left, I let managers know, “Hey, I’ve got [number] of these left until I’m out.”

The shift after I ran out, I asked where they were, and the manager on duty said that he didn’t know. I tried to power through my shifts without them until I was on at the same time as the deputy manager who was ordering them. When I was, I asked her and was told they were arriving “tomorrow”, a day when I wouldn’t be working. When I asked her what to do for today, she suggested I use blue roll (a harsh tissue-like paper) and complained that she couldn’t keep sending people to [Store] because their earplugs were too expensive. I tried to power through my shift, though she came up sometime later to give me some [Store] earplugs. She also told me to hold onto them myself.

That was two weeks ago.

On Monday, I asked a manager where they were. He looked around the office but couldn’t find any.

On Friday, I asked a manager I like better. He said he didn’t think they’d been ordered. I kind of had a bit of a freak-out because they were meant to have arrived a week or two ago (I couldn’t remember on the spot), and while I did still have the [Store] earplugs, I wanted to keep some as a backup in case these new ones don’t work like the first ones didn’t, and if I used up all the [Store] ones again and needed to ask the deputy manager for some, she’d sulk at me again. He reassured me that he’d look into it and sent a message in the manager chat asking about them.

Yesterday, the deputy manager came into the kitchen to say goodbye to people at the end of her shift. People were giving her hugs, which I thought was weird, but I was too focused on trying to ask her where these flipping earplugs were. I was told they’d arrive “tomorrow”. I gave her an eye-roll and said, “Whatever,” because I was getting a bit fed up.

This morning, I received a group text from the deputy manager about how she’s leaving for good (which explains the hugs) and she’ll miss us all.

On the one hand, I feel a little bad that I was kind of rude to her as she was leaving. On the other, she started the message with, “Morning, my work family :)”, so eff that. Hopefully, whoever’s replacing her is more competent.

I order some small items online — a magnet and a sticker — with home delivery through our national postal service, assuming they’ll just drop it through the mail slot in my door if I’m not home.

After I’ve forgotten about the whole thing, I arrive home one evening to find a notification that a package that has arrived and is waiting for me to pick it up. The notification says the package is being held until… that very same day. It also has some helpful instructions on how to pay for them to hold it even longer. Well, all right, then.

Since I cannot time travel, and at the moment I am so irked that I refuse to pay, the package gets sent back. The next day, I contact their customer service.

The representative helpfully informs me that yes, sometimes the notifications get sent late. I question this, and they claim that they have no control over when the post gets sent out. Maybe I’m uneducated, but I can’t understand how the postal service does not have control over this. The way I figure it is, they receive a package, they check the next time they send out the post, and they then keep the package until maybe two or three days after the notification gets sent out.

I end up writing a complaint, to which I get a very generic answer. You know, the “Sorry about your experience” one? I reply again outlining just what the problem is, but I don’t hear anything about it for a while.

About a month later, I get another reply — this time from someone who actually recognizes the problem and apologizes for what happened. They also tell me they have put the package back to be picked up. The last pick-up date? Two weeks ago. Well, that would have been nice to know a month ago when they first replied.

During this time, the seller contacts me about the returned package and agrees to send it again when I explain the situation to them.

Today, just around two weeks later, I finally got the package. And yes, they put it through the mail slot. I haven’t gotten a reply from the postal service yet, and I probably will never know why they didn’t just drop it through the mail slot the first time.

I got hired by a European governmental agency to do graphics on a video for them. They insisted I invoiced them before the job even started, so I did, and they paid in full in a matter of days.

And that’s the last I ever heard of them. I literally got paid to do nothing.

My guess is they had to spend money before the end of their budget year to justify their next year’s budget, but whatever, I got paid!

This happened when I was studying history and ethnology at the University of Iceland in 2011 or 2012. We had gotten some sort of task that demanded that we go to the university library to find different books to study to deal with the task.

Off I went and borrowed different books, some new and some quite old.

After I got back to my apartment and started reading, I quickly noticed that one of the books was not possible to read. Almost all the pages were still uncut!

For those who might not know, books — especially back in the day — used to be made up of double or more folded sheets of paper. After the binding was done, the pages would be physically cut on the edges in order to make it possible to read them. That’s why quite many old books might have some rough edges on them.

This book was at least fifty years old, yellow from age, and clearly not something the library had gotten recently — but I was apparently the very first one to actually open and read this book since it had been placed on the shelf.

In theory, I could just have cut the pages myself and the library would never have known the difference, but I decided to go back and show them at the library. None of the librarians had ever witnessed anything like this before, but it most definitely did amuse us.