I’m ordering inside. I can hear an employee talking to the drive-thru through an intercom.

Employee: “Hi, welcome to [Chain]. What can I get you today?”

Intercom: *Quacking noise*

Employee: “Can you repeat that?”

Intercom: *Quacking noise*

Employee: “Hey, [Boss], intercom’s busted again. It’s just making duck noises.”

Boss: “It was just working fine. Let me see what’s—”

He leans his head all the way out the window.

Boss: “Hey, you! Quit holding up the line and let that duck go!”

Two kids ran away laughing, one holding a quacking duck under her arm.

This happened when I was a new high school teacher. Our school had close to 2,000 students and I’m guessing eighty or so teachers. There was one department (geography) that had two teachers: the head, who was a tall, gentlemanly Scandinavian fellow, and the other guy, who was a 5’5″ Scot with a short temper and a hugely inflated sense of his importance. [Scot] was what my own Scots parents would call a bumptious twit: smarter than everyone, loved the sound of his own voice and, what’s worse, treated the school secretaries like a lower form of life. When we had our bi-monthly staff meetings, he was one of those who insisted on dragging things out with stupid questions, points of order, and such, while not realizing that most everyone there just wanted to get out and go home. Not a good way to make friends.

It happened that the geography department head took a semester-long sabbatical to take a few courses, which left wee [Scot] as the acting department head. Everyone was going to know about this. In the main staff room, there was a wall of drawers where all our mail, memos, and so on were placed. Each was labelled with those old-style plastic labels — the ones where you spun the dial, clicked to emboss the plastic strip, and then did the peel and stick thing. Everyone had a blue label except for department heads; theirs were red. The first thing [Scot] did was go around the back and make himself a red label because he was now important.

I would usually arrive early, pick up any mail, and book it up to my department office — new guy always has to get the coffee ready. One day, an older teacher stopped me.

Teacher: “Hang on, take a seat. This will be fun.”

About ten minutes later, [Scot] came in, looked at the blue label on his drawer, and stood there vibrating like his head was about to explode. He tore the label off and ran out into the hall and through the door into the office area behind the mail drawers. We could all hear a frantic “click, click, click” as he made a new label. He stormed back in and put his new RED label on his drawer, stood back, gave it a nod, and then left.

There were some smug looks of satisfaction but nobody laughed out loud.

Teacher: “The first person in always puts a regular blue label on [Scot]’s drawer, and then we all sit back to enjoy the fireworks. We’ve been doing it for weeks just to get back at him for being a d**k for so many years.”

This was the time before smartphones. My dad had a really bad habit of getting up at the last minute to leave for work. You know the type: sets the alarm for a certain time just so they can hit the snooze button over and over, only to be running out the door with a Poptart in hand? That was my dad.

This was often a frustrating conversation my mother would have with him to fix. On top of the ridiculous amount of times she had to hear that alarm from four to five in the morning, a new baby (me!), and having to make breakfast and clean the mess, she would ask for his help on certain small house tasks that he was otherwise “too tired” to do once he came home.

Unfortunately, with his horrible morning routine, his excuse every morning would be, “Sorry, honey, I’m in a rush so I need to get to work.” It was so bad he’d sometimes have to skip breakfast altogether, so she’d barely even get to talk to him before he left.

My mother, having grown up as the oldest of six other boys, had developed a very petty, mean streak when it came to getting exactly what she wanted.

One particular morning, my dad woke up to find that he had slept in a little too late, and the military can be pretty unforgiving to those who miss formation, thus beginning his usual routine of scrambling to shower, get his uniform on, and rush out the door. Upon telling me this story, he did tell me that he found it odd that my mom wasn’t nagging him for once. She didn’t stop him to talk or complain or yell; she just sat at the table with a cup of coffee and watched him trip over himself to rush to work.

My dad got into his car, turned it on… and noticed the time on his car’s clock was about an hour and a half before he had to leave. He looked at his wristwatch; yep, that said he was late! He looked at his car’s clock and then looked at his watch again. Then, he looked out the window and realized… it was WAY too dark for it to have been the time he was supposed to leave.

And then it hit him. My mother, in all her glory, had changed all the clocks in the house — the oven time, the microwave, his alarm clock, and somehow even his wristwatch — while he was asleep!

Mind you, my mother is severely visually impaired. If text isn’t gigantic and/or outlined with a light or opposing color and her nose isn’t basically touching what she needs to read, she can’t see it. To this day, he doesn’t know how the heck she managed to pull off changing the time on his digital watch without waking him.

Resigned to her little game, he shut off his car and slunk his way into the house. And there was my mother, gleefully sipping her cup of coffee with a huge grin.

“Great!” she said. “Looks like you’ve got time to help me now.

Suffice to say, he stopped hitting the snooze button.

This story is part of our Best Of October 2021 roundup!

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In the early aughts, I worked at directory enquiries for the entire country. There were several offices taking calls in several different cities. However, during the night, there were only two offices open to take calls, and on weekday nights, we were maybe ten people in total to service all the callers. For people who knew the system, it was pretty easy to keep calling until you reached the operator you wanted to talk to.

The movie “The Grudge” had just premiered in the theatre. I watched it with a friend and was scared senseless by it. On the way home, he kept joking about how scary it would be to hear the ghost noise out of nowhere. I agreed and didn’t think more about it. 

A few days later, it was my turn to work a night shift, and just after midnight, I got this call.

Me: “Welcome to Directory Enquiries. How can I help you?”

There was silence on the other end.

Me: “Hello? You’ve reached Directory Enquiries. I’m [My Name]. How can I help you?”

Caller: “Aaaaarrrrrrggggghhhhhh….”

Me: “God d*** it, [Friend]!”

I’m living with some friends in a shared house situation. We have a landline that the married couple living here had installed for cheaper call rates. We are experiencing a rather sudden and heavy influx of telemarketers and scam calls, so we are taking it in turns to answer the phone and mess with them to tie up their time. 

There is one caller who is especially persistent, and with the husband at work for the fortnight — long-distance family macadamia farm — and the caller requesting to speak with him; his wife, our remaining housemate, and I are the only ones answering the landline and holding down the fort.

Most of the scammers request the husband when they call, and as none of us recognise the company calling, we are messing with them, upping the ante each time, making more and more wild tales of where the husband is and why he can’t come to the phone.

Eventually, the novelty wears off and we start getting irritated with the near-daily calls. So, the wife and I decide on one last big hurrah in an effort to get them to stop. She answers the phone with fake sniffles, and when the caller predictably asks for her husband, she breaks into some of the best fake sobbing I’ve ever seen.

Her voice is breaking, she has the quivering lip going, and she even lets a couple of real tears out to REALLY get into the role. Truly, it’s a shame the caller can’t see her at that moment because she… is… selling it!

Wife: “This is a terrible time to call. I’m sorry, but… I just can’t continue to speak with you. I’m passing the phone to someone else.”

As the phone is passed to me, she bursts into fake heavy sobbing and even wails in sorrow as she takes off down the hall, opening and closing a door loudly to really sell the lie I am about to spin.

I take over the call and when the caller asks what was going on I explain that, on the way back from work, her husband had a car accident. He didn’t make it, and the caller has unfortunately called in the middle of his wake ceremony. The caller is aghast and apologises profusely for calling and quickly hangs up.

The wife and I high-five and laugh like a pair of hyenas, bursting into fresh gales of laughter, when our other housemate walks in and asks what we are doing. We explain, and he starts laughing, too. The calls stop and blessed silence descends for a couple of days.

When the husband returns from the farm, we are bouncing with excitement to tell him our escapade of brilliance and are rather dejected when he doesn’t burst into laughter like we are expecting and hoping for. 

Husband: “It wasn’t someone from [Company] calling, was it, by any chance?”

Wife: “It was, actually! Wait…”

She looks at me.

Me: “We didn’t…”

We look back to her husband.

Wife: “How do you know the name of the company when we forgot to… even mention…”

Me: “Oh, s***.”

It turned out to be a call [Husband] was actually expecting, and he had been wondering why they hadn’t given him a call on his mobile all fortnight. The company only had the landline listed and had forgotten to note down his mobile number, apparently.

Oooooh, boy, was THAT an interesting call-back! The girl who answered his call was beside herself, crying down the phone line, saying over and over how glad she was to hear he wasn’t dead, and then crying more. We were banned from answering the landline for a month following that one.