My daughter’s roommate has a noisy guest. My daughter heads to a drugstore.

Daughter: “Where are your earplugs?”

Clerk: *Directing* “On that shelf over there. Yes. Down. Bottom shelf. Pink boxes.”

Daughter: “Dude, these are tampons.”

The NAW caption probably writes itself.

I worked at this bookstore for over ten years. I loved it, honestly, but when I got an offer for a better job, I took it without any questions. My bosses and fellow coworkers were really happy for me, and since I still shop there weekly, they still see me.

I bought several books a few weeks ago, and when I went to read one of them, it was completely blank. The first few pages were printed but the rest looked like the printer ran out of ink.

I took it back to the store to just exchange it. The store has a policy that if it’s something like that, they can exchange it for free as long as it’s within a month of the receipt. I stood in line and let the cashier know what I needed to do. He was new, and instead of radioing to a manager to let them know what was going on, he told me that he couldn’t return a book in that condition.

I told him, politely, that he could and that it was part of the publishing return clause.

Employee: “This is in an unsellable condition.”

Me: “Right, it’s a publisher’s mistake, so you can exchange it for one that has all the printing and you guys will just return this book to the publisher and they will get you a replacement.”

Employee: “We can’t do that.”

Me: “Yeah, you can, and you will.”

Employee: “I am refusing you service! You need to get out of here now.”

Me: “Dude, you need to do two things: first, chill, and second, get a manager.”

Employee: “I’m not getting a manager. You are banned from the store.”

Me: “Okay.”

I stepped out of line with the book and texted one of the managers that I knew, asking if they were at the store. Turns out they were, and I asked if they could come up to the front to explain to the new cashier about the publishing return policy.

Not even three minutes later my old manager and the general manager came up. The cashier saw them and smirked at me.

Employee: “Now you’re going to get it.”

Both of them greeted me, asking about the new job and how I was doing, and then asked what was wrong. I showed them the book and let them know that the cashier told me that I couldn’t return it and that I was banned from the store. 

Needless to say, it was quite a lovely shade of whitish-green that he turned when both of them let him know that, yes, they could return it and that he had absolutely no power in banning people. 

I got my book exchanged, and when I went back there a few weeks later he was stocking and apparently not allowed to be on the cash register for a bit.

I have suffered two bad ingrown toenails, one on each big toe. The first was handled by my general practitioner with general anesthesia. I didn’t know better at the time, but this was serious overkill. I got the whole hospital gown and recovery room treatment. When my other toe needed the same treatment, I went to a podiatrist. I told him the story of my first toe.

Podiatrist: “Well, that’s a GP for you; they don’t know how to anesthetize a toe. Well, let’s get you all fixed up.”

At that point, he zaps my toe and we wait a bit. He starts to touch my toe with the scalpel.

Me: “Um, I can feel that.”

Podiatrist: “What? That should be completely numb by now.”

Wonderful. It turns out that I’m one of the very few people whose nerve for the tip of their toe grows on the opposite side of the toe. He got me properly numbed, but I still laugh at the irony of him fussing that my previous doctor couldn’t properly numb my toe.

Many years ago, my school system separated sixth, seventh, and eighth grades each into their own schools. The eighth-grade principal was still committed to maintaining the tradition of middle-school grades having the ridiculous and very specific school-system-wide dress code unforgivingly enforced upon them (and only them).

Early in the first full week of school, the principal announced that he was sick of students saying they didn’t know something was forbidden by the dress code that was in the handbooks he hadn’t given us yet. Because of this, we were to have an assembly where we’d be given the handbook as we walked in and he’d read the entire student handbook to us as we followed along, so we’d have no excuse.

He was so in control that, after we were seated, the other adults would leave. After all, since the bleachers couldn’t hold us all, it’d only be half the grade at a time — boys on the first day, girls on the second. Reading to the boys went just as planned, but on day two…

The principal had droned on through the handbook and was just getting started on the several pages devoted to the dress code.

“Sleeves must be no less than two inches wide. Students may not wear shirts or dresses in the style of tank tops, halter tops, or spaghetti straps. Students may not wear clothes, such as T-shirts, that display profanity or promote substances such as alcohol, tobacco, or any other illicit substance. All clothing must be hemmed and intact. Students may not wear clothes…”

We turned the page. The principal didn’t. He paused, longer and longer. We waited anxiously for him to go on — make a joke, retroactively ignore it, anything.

His eyes widened all, deer-in-the-headlights, as he started staring into the middle distance.

Please, man, clear your throat, cough, something. Don’t leave us here, we silently begged with small, excusable hand motions and urgent faces.

His jaw slowly dropped and his lips started quivering.

For the love of God, man! Bigger gestures, desperate faces.

The principal stood there, transfixed.

There was no changing it, so we gave up. Some of us started counting the seconds. How long could this go on? We all knew what the next words were supposed to be, but that didn’t change what happened — the words that came out of his mouth — and, by not continuing, he left us stuck, too. We resisted as long as we could.

Did the principal…

Five seconds. Scattered murmuring in the crowd. “Did he mean it?” “Couldn’t have.” “Yeah, but still…”

…just say that…

Ten seconds. Someone laughed and was quieted.

…we have to…

Fifteen seconds. A girl coughed from the stress.

…come to school…

Twenty seconds. Collective gulp.

…naked?!

Twenty-five seconds after the principal last changed — to say nothing of when he last made a sound — we couldn’t take it anymore and the gym of 250 thirteen-year-old girls burst into uncontrollable laughter.

The principal stood there like a terrified statue for several more minutes as we continued laughing. We couldn’t help it; we’d try to get a hold of ourselves but glance up at this art piece of a petrified man and find ourselves laughing harder than when we’d started. After a while, the principal went from “freeze” to “flight” and darted out of the gym, leaving us laughing girls unsupervised.

The whole lot of us laughed together for several minutes. It took another several minutes for spurts of laughter not to spread across the whole group. We had never considered that a school official might tell us we must go nude before abandoning us. But the laughter faded, scattered bursts lessened, and we went to quietly chatting with whoever happened to be around. We whispered about the principal, the page-break-o’-doom, and his eventual bolting, and began to talk about other things, waiting for the vice-principal to show up or the principal to return.

Eventually, word about the time started spreading: we’d been adult-less for over half an hour and we’d been gone longer than the boys were the previous day, yet nobody had come for us. We’d only been in that school a few days; we had no idea who we could go to when the principal flaked. We collectively decided the best time and way to leave — slowly, not long before the next bell to change classes — and that we should be super-good because this was bad enough without giving any reason for people to think we’d use this to break rules.

With five minutes to go, a teacher popped her head in and looked around.

“Where’s [Principal]?”

The room threw up its hands in a collective shrug. The cluster of girls nearest that door became our speakers. They told the teacher how long we’d been alone, that it all started because of an awkward page-break and failure to go on, and that none of us could talk about a further explanation. Everyone agreed. The teacher got some pencils and paper for us to write anonymous accounts if we wanted while school employees searched for the principal.

Ten minutes later, the principal shuffled in with downcast eyes, quickly read the rest of the handbook in a robotic monotone, and shuffled back out, never looking up. The teacher who’d come in earlier passed around a box to collect our consistent accounts of what happened and gave us excuses for being late as we left.

It was an awkward (but unifying) couple of weeks for us girls, nothing worse, as we never had to say anything more than we wanted to. But the principal… The display of power he’d intended instead led to him being caught in the worst page-break and led to all the girls in the school laughing their heads off, toward him, if not precisely at him. The man broke. It was weeks before he’d interact with a female student, and even then, he couldn’t do it empty-handed — he needed a school-office version of a blankie for this scary task — and he didn’t look a girl in the eye the whole first semester. Pitiable and also creepy. Creepier than the mistake that led to it all.

Thus ends the story of how hubris, a page-break, and inability to recover from a verbal flub broke a principal and the degree to which this brokenness prevented him from doing his job. What this broken man did to regain a sense of more and more power and the interesting places that led is another tale.

I tell every boss I’ve ever had that I am not a morning person. No one ever believes me as I seem upbeat and chipper in the mornings, usually due to tons of caffeine and my “work persona.” There’s also a huge disconnect with my brain in the morning because I sleep like I’m dead. I usually don’t answer my phone in the morning cause I don’t hear it

I somehow answer the phone when it rings early one morning on my day off.

Me: “’Ello?”

Receptionist: “Hey, [My Name], I know it’s your day off, but you have a client in here to talk to you.”

Me: “What?”

Receptionist: “You have a client in here. Do you want to come in?”

Me: “I don’t… Why?”

Receptionist: “Oh, hang on. Here’s your boss. He needs to talk to you.”

Me: “Uhh…”

Boss: “Hey, [My Name], I know it’s early and your day off, but one of your clients showed up. Would you be able to come in and help them out? If not, I can flip it to one of the other client advisors.”

Me: “Wait, who is this?”

I start to actually wake up.

Boss: “This is [Boss]. Do you want to come in?”

Me: “Why would I come in?”

Boss: “Because your client is here?”

Me: “Oh… Yeah, no, I just woke up.”

Boss: “I can tell. I’ll get someone to help them.”

Me: “Awesome, bye.”

I remembered literally the very last part of this conversation and ended up calling my boss after I actually woke up. He was laughing so hard at how I was and how I couldn’t remember anything that had happened. It was used as an illustration that I needed to have coffee or an adequate amount of time before having a conversation.