The factory is a noisy, dirty environment. Thankfully, these days, companies understand the need for personal protective equipment. We use large over-the-ear ear defenders. You can still hear, but the sound is reduced. It does make working with others difficult at times.

I approach a coworker; we’re both wearing ear defenders.

Me: “Hey, [Coworker].”

He is completely oblivious.

Me: “[COWORKER]!”

He’s still somehow oblivious. I go over and quickly grab his arm, and he jumps. 

Me: “[Coworker], man, are you deaf? I was shouting at you.”

Coworker: “What?”

Me: “Your jacket was dancing over the mechanism; it could have gotten caught.”

Coworker: “Oh, thanks, man.”

He does his jacket up.

Me: “Have you got earplugs in, as well?”

Coworker: “I can’t hear you; let me turn this off.”

He reaches into his pocket and turns his music off. It’s then that I notice the black earphone cord running up inside his jacket.

Me: “What have you done there?”

Coworker: “Oh, I wanted to listen to music, but I couldn’t with these ear defenders on, so drilled a hole for the wire.”

He looks so pleased with himself.

Me: “That doesn’t seem smart. Doesn’t that stop them from working?”

Coworker: “Well, yeah, but I just turn the music up loud.”

In an effort to listen to music, he destroyed his hearing protection and then listened to music at a high volume for seven or eight hours a day, certainly damaging his hearing more than he would have without the protection. Not only that, but he couldn’t hear any warnings, vehicle horns, or fire alarms.

He wouldn’t listen to me, so I had to report it. They gave him a new pair of ear defenders, but he later ripped out the protection so he could wear wireless earphones.

Again, he got caught and was made to pay for the replacement and had a written warning for damaging protection equipment. In response, he did the most grownup thing and quit because he would rather be unemployed than not listen to music.

That was probably inadvertently a smart move on his part, as he was an accident waiting to happen.

I’m sitting at home watching TV when I hear sirens approaching, and it sounds like they’ve stopped quite close to my house. Curious, I head outside and see fire engines stopped at the house two doors down. My next-door neighbor has also headed outside to look.

Me: “What happened?”

Neighbor: “Oh, the people in that house, they’re idiots! Do you know what they put in the backyard? A Gilligan hut!”

Me: “Gilligan hut?”

Neighbor: “A straw-roofed hut, like on Gilligan’s Island! And do you know what else they put in the backyard?”

Me: “What?”

Neighbor: “A fire pit! How did they think that was gonna go?”

The fire brigade’s presence certainly provided enough of a clue as to how it went.

When I was twelve, my family moved to a new house. A few weeks in, I reached for the bathroom light switch and received a mild electric shock. My dad is a licensed electrician, so my mum told me to let him know when he came back from work that night.

Me: “Dad, I got an electric shock from the bathroom switch.”

Dad: “How many times have I told you not to touch the switch with wet hands?!”

Me: “No, my hands were dry.”

Dad: “Then you wouldn’t have gotten a shock.”

Me: “But I did; the switch must be faulty.”

Dad: “You never dry your hands properly. They must have been damp when you touched it.”

Over the next twenty-two years, I continued to receive random shocks from the same switch, as did the rest of my family members, including my mother. His response was always dismissive. We couldn’t bring in a third-party electrician as he considered it a waste of money, not to mention doubting his ability. I took to leaving a wooden pencil near the bathroom door so I could use it to turn on the switch.

A few days ago, I noticed that there was a piece of duct tape over the light switch. I asked my mother about it.

Mom: “Oh, that. Dad put the tape there to mark the switch and will change it later.”

Me: “He’s changing it?”

Mom: “Yeah, he got an electric shock when he touched it.”

Me: *Sarcastically* “His hands must have been wet.”

Mom: *Not getting my sarcasm* “No, the switch is faulty; that’s why he’s changing it.”

Me: “Didn’t we tell him this over the past twenty-two years? He always said that he had never gotten a shock, so there couldn’t be anything wrong with it.”

I can only say that it’s a good thing that it was a low-voltage shock all those times.

My school was overcrowded. We had around ten times as many students as the building was originally built for. This led to some issues.

One issue was that students were always late to class. The building was built in a cross shape. Students were continually funneled from one side of the building to another, and the only way through was a narrow four-way intersection hallway that was built when kids were skinnier; it was wide enough to fit two skinny kids, one and a half normal kids, or one big kid.

Worse, freshman lockers were on the top floor and our classes were all on the bottom floor. Senior lockers were on the bottom floor and their classes on the top floor. Regardless, everyone was going to the bottom floor because there was no intersection between the four lobes of the school on any floor but the first floor.

We used to be able to go through the library on the second floor, which was much wider, in my first year. They locked the “back” doors to the library to stop students from doing that, making the traffic jam much worse.

The administration’s solution was to increase time between classes. My first year, they gave us five minutes to get from one class to the next. By the time I graduated, we were given fifteen minutes.

Another side effect of this overcrowding was that the cafeteria was too small to fit all of us, and the lines were too long for all of us to get fed. To help with the fitting problem, they broke lunch into two different forty-five-minute lunches my first semester. They still couldn’t fit everyone in, so they broke it into three different thirty-minute lunches in my second semester. That didn’t work, either, so they broke it into four different fifteen-minute lunches, year two and on.

Remember the cross shape of our school? The cafeteria was in the basement, and the stairs into it were right by the four-way intersection.

The funniest, most hilarious result of this was the fire inspections.

We had more students per room than were allowed. We had more chairs per room than allowed. Each room had several folding chairs hidden in the storage closets that had to be taken down between classes and reopened when the students came.

Some students carried their own cloth folding chairs through the hall, like people use for fireworks or sporting events.

Fire inspection days were marked on the calendar. The whole student body came together the day before to empty most of the chairs out of the classrooms and get them to the chair storage room in the basement next to the cafeteria.

Then, on the actual fire inspection day, each classroom would have maybe twenty to thirty students instead of the seventy to ninety they usually had — the larger classrooms usually kept sixty of 200 or so — and a student-teacher or a temp would lecture the kids actually in the classroom, who were usually the highest-graded students.

The actual teachers and remaining kids from each class were taken to the bleachers around the football field, the bleachers in the gym around the basketball court and hockey rinks, the swimming pool bleachers, the wrestling bleachers, the bleachers around the track, the bleachers around the soccer field, and the baseball bleachers, and they would hold classes on those precarious structures. Even the tennis court bleachers would be filled with students and teachers!

I always wondered if we could get enough space to actually fit all our students if we got rid of the more than ten different sports complexes we had.

It’s in the very early hours of the morning and the entirety of my resident hall is outside thanks to the fire alarm going off.

Girl: “[Guy]! Did you really grab that f****** camera on your way out?!”

I look and there is indeed a guy in his pajamas holding nothing but a professional-looking camera.

Guy: “Yes! This thing cost me $800; it’s worth so much more than my d***ed soul!”