We are extremely busy as it is Thanksgiving week. We are always busy with orders, and lines are insane. We get a small lull in the busyness. A customer is standing in a line that is going to the bathroom.

Customer: *Shouting* “There should be another register open!”

Meanwhile, available cashiers are standing in front of their spots.

Me: “Ma’am, that’s the line for the bathroom.” 

Customer: “How am I supposed to know how a line works?!”

When I was in theater design, we were working on a set for the school play in the auditorium. The dressing rooms and bathrooms were being redone, so there wasn’t a doorknob on the one I was using.

One of my classmates pulled the door shut on his way out, so I had no way to open the door. I yelled for a while. Eventually, my classmate heard me and ran off to find the maintenance guy.

I stared at the door for a bit, and then I noticed all the coat hangers in the room. I thought, “Who do I think I am, MacGuyver?”

Close enough, I guess. I hooked the hanger hook around the latch, pulled it, and got the door opened.

Then, I had to go find my classmate… who proceeded to get me to lock myself in again to show him how I had gotten out!

After that and an incident where my friend was babysitting a kid who locked herself in the bathroom, I learned how to pick indoor locks. I always get a little perplexed when people end up cutting open doors with basic indoor knobs. All you need is a small flathead screwdriver.

An angry customer comes up to me in the cinema’s lobby.

Customer: “I just went to the toilets and ended up outside!”

I just must look confused, because she adds:

Customer: “The toilets in the screen!”

Me: “Madam, there are no toilets in the screen.”

Customer: “The ones down at the front!”

Me: “Did you go through the door that says Emergency Exit?”

Customer: “Yes. I’m not happy about this. I’ll be back after the film to speak to the manager!”

I’m guessing one of her friends probably explained what she’d done because she never came back!

I stopped at a rest stop to use the restroom and stretch my legs a bit. I had my purse with me. I walked into the restroom and found an empty stall, but there was no coat hook to hang up my purse. I set my purse on the floor by my feet and proceeded to do my business.

Like a lot of public restrooms in the USA, there was little privacy in the stall. The bottom of the stall was about a foot off the ground, and there were half-inch gaps between all the different panels. I heard another person enter the restroom and, through the gaps between panels, saw a woman kind of peeking in at me. I was in the first stall and as covered up as I could be given the situation, so I thought nothing of it; she was probably just looking to see if the stall was really occupied or if the door had just swung shut by itself.

The woman entered the stall next to mine, and then, with no real warning at all, I saw her hand dart under the wall between our stalls. She grabbed my purse before I could react, pulled it back to her stall, and took off running out of the restroom.

I yelled and shouted, but I was obviously not in a position to immediately do anything about it. I finished my business as quickly as possible, rushed through a quick hand wash, and walked out of the restroom to find an attendant.

The attendant offered to call the police for me — my phone was in my purse, along with my car keys, wallet, and everything else — and get the security camera footage ready for the police.

The rest of the story took about two hours, so I won’t go into every detail. An officer arrived shortly after the attendant’s call and took my statement, and a statement from the attendant to verify the security camera footage. About an hour later, the officer reported that a woman matching the purse-snatcher’s description had been stopped for speeding and suspected DUI. Police matched her description to my report and searched her car, finding my purse on the passenger seat.

A second officer returned my purse to the rest stop and told me that the woman was drunk and had arrest warrants for previous crimes. I asked to press charges but was told that unless I could make it back to the area for a trial — about a six-hour drive from home — the charges would probably be dropped even with the security footage of her running out of the restroom with my purse.

Fortunately, everything was still in my purse, so after thanking the attendant and police officers one more time, I decided to just get in my car and get back on the road.

I just read this story about an employee who got trapped in the bathroom at work. I’ve been trapped twice — fortunately, not for as long as that story’s author.

The first time was in a restroom in a school theater. I had a film appreciation class on Friday afternoon, and I went to use the restroom after class. I was alone in there and the lights went out. The school had motion-activated lights in most areas. Some were more sensitive than others, so after a minute of no activity, the lights would turn off. Also, this restroom had no windows.

I was sitting there in the pitch dark, waving my arms around, trying to turn the lights back on, and then I heard a click at the door. At first, I thought someone was coming in. Then, I realized that was the sound of the door locking. I found my way out of the stall and to the door. It was locked from the outside, and there was no way to unlock it from the inside. I started screaming and pounding on the door.

The instructor finally heard me and let me out. Ours was the last class of the day, and there wasn’t anything scheduled in the theater until the following Monday. He had been in the process of locking up and didn’t think to check the restrooms before locking the doors. The whole thing probably lasted less than ten minutes, but it seemed a lot longer.

The second time, I got stuck in an elevator. My area was doing rolling blackouts. The company I worked for rented a giant generator. They would announce over the PA system that they were switching over to the generator and to stay off the elevator until they gave the all-clear.

I was coming back from lunch, and with my crappy timing, I missed the announcement. I was stuck between floors for about fifteen minutes.

Yeah, I am claustrophobic. Why do you ask?

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For Every Weird Thing At Your Workplace, There’s A Story Like This