Many years ago, I was living in a city in a small apartment building. One day, I was on my way home, and when I went to turn into my street, there were flashing lights all over near my building, so I didn’t turn there and went down the alley to park in the back of the building instead.

I took my stuff inside and put it away, looked out the front windows, and saw that the cops had “cuffed and stuffed” someone (in the back of a cruiser). Neighbors were standing all over, so I assumed (correctly) that the situation was under control. I went downstairs to get my mail and see what was going on.

I soon learned that the arrested driver lived across the street. He had run a stop sign several blocks away, and then he refused to stop for the police until he got home. When he finally got there, he unsuccessfully tried to run off on foot. When they caught him, he failed the field sobriety test and didn’t have a valid license.

Then, the police saw something that caused them to send for a drug dog. I was there in time to watch the dog alert on the car. In the course of searching the car to find the drugs, they found a pistol in the center console. Since they already knew who he was, that was felon-in-possession. Then, it turned out that he did not have the owner’s permission to take the car, so the owner had to have him charged.

The real joker was that if he had pulled over and stopped, the police likely would have written him a citation for blowing the stop sign and probably another for driving without a license, and ordered him to walk home and come back with a licensed driver! (An officer who heard me explaining this to someone confirmed that analysis!)

Many years ago, I worked for a multinational engineering company in the aerospace industry. At this point in my career, I was on secondment to the Health, Safety, and Environment department, writing procedures at the site and corporate levels. And as such, I would periodically meet up with a group of HS&E managers from other sites.

Before one particular meeting, the HS&E manager of one site was having a bit of a venting session about what had happened at his site. In addition to HS&E manager, he was also the facilities manager for that site. His site was getting ready to move to a brand new facility. One of the things that wasn’t going to be there was a heat treatment plant. The old site had one, but it wasn’t being moved.

Heat treatment is required for things like hardening steels. Being an aerospace company, there are extremely strict processes that have to be followed, and only facilities that have proper aerospace industry accreditation can be used. You can’t take a component that’s going onto an aircraft and have it heat-treated at just any old place; even if that place did it properly, if the place wasn’t certified, you’d be breaking the law to put the component on a plane.

Even with certification, a change of heat treatment plant would require full inspection of the first batch of each component that goes through it. It’s not a quick process. 

Hence the venting session. You see, this move had been known about for a couple of years. And everyone knew that the heat treatment plant at the old site would be switched off for decommissioning on a certain date — no ifs, no buts, no extensions. 

How did everyone know? Aside from the usual site-wide communications, there were regular start-of-the-week production meetings attended by managers at all levels. And this facility manager attended these meetings to remind everyone that on this particular date the heat treatment plant would be switched off. So, that was at least one reminder a week for over a year.

Our meeting happened a few days after The Big Switch-Off. 

He was venting about all the managers who rang him up on Big Switch-Off Day to complain that they couldn’t get their parts heat treated and to demand to know why they hadn’t been told.

One time, a woman I knew asked me (another woman) if I wanted to be friends and invited me to “hang out.”

It turned out that her definition of “hanging out” was for her to sit there in her apartment, smoking and ignoring both me and her toddler while she engaged in multiple — clearly social, not business — phone calls.

After about two and a half hours — way longer than I should’ve put up with it, I know — I finally got tired of it and left. Clearly, she just wanted me to watch her kid for free while she gossiped on the phone all day.

She glared at me as I left. Oh, well…

Fifteen years ago, I took a Safety At Sea course while working on a passenger ship. Our instructor was going over various codes that could be announced over the PA system in cases of emergency — not the ones aimed at the passengers, but the ones alerting the crew to assemble at their stations. One of these was the code for a ship-wide search. Usually, this meant a missing person, like a lost child, but it could be anything, including bombs. And then he told us this story, which I have never forgotten.

The instructor was doing a refresher course on safety on a large cruise ship which (obviously) was otherwise unidentified. This course featured a lot of practical exercises, including a bomb search. The crew was assembled at their stations and told they were to search for explosives, which in actuality was just a box with the word “bomb” written on it. And off they went to search every nook and cranny of their designated area.

What the crew didn’t know was that the instructor had decided to add a second, more realistic “bomb”, which he had made in his cabin. It was nothing dangerous, just some wooden rods held together with tape and some electrical wires sticking out on one side — your typical action movie bomb. It sat on his desk for several days once he’d assembled it, and he hid it in a completely different location than the other one. The intended lesson was that when searching for dangerous objects such as these, you can’t stop after finding just one.

When the first “bomb” was found and brought to him, he asked the crew to keep searching because they needed to be sure there was only one aboard. And so he waited for the second one to be found. And waited. And waited.

After the crew had all done a very thorough search of the ship, they reported that they were sure there was nothing more to be found. The instructor was confused but accepted it. He’d done the rounds during the searches, and there was no reason to believe they’d been anything but thorough. He headed back to his cabin, intending to collect his more realistic prop later.

It was sitting on his desk. It turned out that he’d hidden the prop in the section assigned to the housekeeper who vacuumed his room. She’d recognised it and promptly returned it to his room. It was certainly an unexpected outcome, but at least he knew it had been found!

My friend and his wife just moved into their first house about six months ago. Then, a strong windstorm came through and damaged their fence. And by “damaged their fence”, I mean the fence was now leaning slightly — about 70 degrees.

Because home insurance wouldn’t fix the fence and it was winter, my friend and his wife were going to wait until spring to hire someone to fix or replace their fence. Well, their backyard neighbor did not like that. The backyard neighbor wanted the fence fixed ASAP.

When [Neighbor] found out they were going to wait until spring, they called the city and complained that [Friend]’s fence was out of code. When the city inspector came out to inspect their fence, it was, in fact, out of code and needed to be corrected.

The reason [Neighbor] was so fixated on the fence being replaced is that [Neighbor] had a pool in their yard and needed to have a fence around their pool for safety.

[Friend] and his wife, now pissed off at [Neighbor], decided to only remove the fence and not replace it. This allowed them to be within city code, and now, when the spring hit, [Neighbor] would have to build a fence on the backside of their yard if they wanted to fill up their pool for the summer.

If [Neighbor] would have just been nice and not called the city, [Friend] would’ve built the fence up in the spring with no problem.