I am a cashier at a big retailer. It’s my day off and I get a phone call from work.

Me: “Hello?”

Voice: “YOU’RE FIRED!” *Click*

I’m completely baffled. I have no write-ups on my record and have always shown up on time. I call the store back and ask to speak to my boss.

Boss: “Hi there, [Boss] speaking. How may I help you?”

Me: “It’s [My Name]. I want to know what’s going on, like why am I fired?”

Boss: “Fired? You’re not fired! Why would you be fired?”

Me: “I don’t know! Didn’t you just call me and tell me I was fired?”

Boss: “I— I never called you, and I most definitely didn’t fire you. Wait, when did you receive this call?”

Me: “A couple of minutes ago.”

Boss: “Okay, I’m gonna need to check something. I’ll call you back in about ten or fifteen minutes.”

As it turns out, one of my coworkers had called me using a voice changer to sound like my boss and pretended to fire me as a prank. He ended up fired for real.

In art class, my younger brother drew a portrait of someone he assured me was Albert Einstein, a claim I found… dubious. Our mother called it a masterpiece and insisted on framing it up on the wall in our room.

It was utterly creepy, with horrid nostrils and mismatched eyes that I could swear followed me wherever I went. It was also right above our beds, which meant I got to wake up to a creepy old man staring down at me every day.

Unfortunately, I was naive enough to mention it to my brother, who then gleefully insisted on keeping it there for the next decade. Eventually, we both moved out, and I threw the portrait out during the confusion of packing and moving out.

My brother found out eventually and vowed vengeance, promising that I’d one day regret tossing Einstein out. Nevertheless, those were six happy years spent away from that horrid portrait.

When the recent health crisis got worse, we moved back in to help our mother. The next morning, I woke up to find the portrait staring right down at me once again and freaked out.

Apparently, at some point, my brother had drawn another portrait of Einstein and deliberately made it even creepier than the last — warty nose, mismatched nostrils and eyes, moustache and expression that just screamed “pervert,” and wormy eyebrows. He hung it in the same spot as its predecessor after I went to bed.

I literally had it burned, but the damage was done. As promised, I regret tossing Einstein out. It wasn’t worth being traumatised by its successor.

I was in an advanced class in high school; we were supposed to be the “smart” guys.

The new teacher had the habit of stomping into the classroom for every lesson. He would noisily stomp onto the short podium and forcefully throw his books on the teacher’s desk. I assume he did that to assure he got our attention.

The class quickly became fed up with the teacher’s repeated displays. Some of the students moved the teacher’s desk so the front legs were just barely on the front portion of the podium.

When the teacher next arrived, he did his usual attention-getter, making plenty of noise and throwing his books on the desk. The front of the desk fell off the podium, and the angle caused his books to slide off to the floor. None of the students laughed. All stared at the teacher.

The expression on the teacher’s face was priceless. He looked at the staring faces and shouted, “Who did that?”

There was no answer, just more stares. He then raised the desk back to its proper position and went on with the lesson. He never tried the stomping and throwing again.

After totaling my step-mother’s old car, I’m given an old Ford Escort hatchback that was donated to her church by a sweet little old lady who had absolutely no idea how to drive with a standard transmission. The gears were ground completely smooth because, by her own instructions she’d left on how to drive the car, she’d never used the clutch to change gears and maybe didn’t even know what the third pedal was for.

The car turned out to be a money sink, for various reasons, but it was mine and I loved it and would often volunteer to chauffeur any number of friends around. This became all the more fun for me when, after taking a particularly hard turn one day, the keys went flying out of the ignition and across the cab. After my initial panic and a bit of experimentation, I learned that the keys could be pulled straight out of the ignition after starting the car and the car would remain running. How exciting!

From then on, whenever I had someone new in the passenger’s seat, I would wait until we were cruising along and then casually pull my keys out and say, “Can you hold this?”

It turns out that a lot of people will just take whatever you hand them without looking first. I got reactions ranging from laughter, to surprised swears, to asking if I had a set of dummy keys, to everything in between, all without crashing — as I learned only just recently that you can actually turn the car off like this if you accidentally turn the key, and say goodbye to power steering.

That old boat of a car had plenty of — often very costly — quirks, but the key trick was by far my favorite. You were a good ol’ car, Polly. I hope you’re still running and accidentally scaring the bejesus out of people wherever you ended up after I finally sold you.

I have applied to a work-from-home customer service position and they email me to schedule an interview. I schedule and promptly forget about it. I have also been receiving numerous scammer calls a day and am getting fed up. So, after quite a bit of reading on Not Always Right, I decide to use one of the bits I find there to answer the next scammer calls I receive.

The first time it happens, the scammer promptly hangs up and I happily go about my day. Then, the next number that I don’t recognize calls, and I happily answer.

Me: “Dirty Dan’s House of Hookers! You have the dough and we have the blow!”

Interviewer: “Um… Oh… Um… I need to speak to [My Name]?”

Me: “Sorry, who am I speaking with?”

Interviewer: “This is [Interviewer] from [Company], calling for a phone interview?”

Me: *Stunned* “Oh, my God, I’m so, so, so sorry. I’ve been getting so many scammer calls that I’ve been trying to make them hang up.”

Interviewer: *Laughing* “No worries! If you want to proceed with the interview, we can. Just please repeat that line to me at the end of the interview. I could really use something for those scammer calls, too!”

I aced the interview and was offered a job a week later. So glad I didn’t scare her off!