My dad told me this story about his grandmother, who lived to be over 100. I got to meet her, and so did several other great-grandchildren. She raised eleven kids — her husband died much younger and she never remarried — who all had kids when they grew up. Since none of her siblings had kids, Dad and his dozens of cousins joked she was making up for them.

Dad would do her grocery shopping once a week. One week, when he came to get her shopping list, she looked very concerned about something.

Dad: “Grandma, what’s wrong? You look so worried.”

Grandma: “I think I’m losing my mind.”

Dad: “You’ve always seemed sharp when we talk. I haven’t noticed anything wrong. What makes you think that?”

Grandma: “This morning, I was sitting here trying to name all my grandchildren, and I can’t do it.”

Dad: “Grandma, you have more than fifty grandkids. No one knows all their names! Your memory is fine.”

That reassured her! She lived about another fifteen years after this conversation, and her memory stayed intact the whole time. She even hosted big family dinners every Sunday well into her nineties.

This story is part of our Feel Good roundup for November 2020!

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Read the Feel Good roundup for November 2020!

My kids and I are in line at a grocery store. Ahead of me is a dad with two kids, one boy and one girl. They look the same age, both about a year old.

My Kids: “Look, Mom! Twins! One girl and one boy!”

Me: “Yes, I think they are twins. They’re cute, aren’t they?”

The dad overhears and smiles at us.

Dad: “Yep, twins!”

Me: “How often do people ask you if they’re identical?”

Dad: *Rolling eyes* “You might be the first person to not ask me that.”

I’m in line at the grocery checkout with my three daughters. The woman ahead of us also has three daughters. One, who’s maybe three years old, wraps her arms around her mom’s legs and starts licking her pants.

Mom: “What are you doing?!”

She peels her daughter away and catches my eye with an exasperated look on her face.

Me: “How often do people tell you, ‘Oh, all girls, must be so easy! Boys are such a handful!’”

Mom: “All the time! They’re still little kids, and they’re still insane!”

I work in internal IT for a retail company. A lot of our support is password resets. I had this conversation with a user the other day.

User: “I need my ID for [program].”

Me: “Are you looking for your username or a password?”

User: “My user ID. I can’t sign in.”

Me: “What are you using for the username right now?”

User: “My employee ID”

Me: “It doesn’t use your ID; it uses your company email.”

I read the user his email.

User: “Oh, let me try that.”

A few seconds pass.

User: “It’s still not letting me in.”

Me: “What are you using for the username?”

User: “My employee ID.”

Me: *Headdesk* “It doesn’t use your employee ID; it uses your company email.”

I read the email address again.

I ended up also needing to provide him with a temporary password because he’d forgotten it, but it took another five minutes because he kept trying to use his employee ID as the username instead of the company email. The page itself also says that the username is in this format: firstname.lastname@[Company Website].

I’m a substitute school bus driver. While most students behave well on the bus, there are a few who have some trouble.

One day, I have a thirteen-year-old student yelling and being disruptive. After a few warnings to keep conversations quieter, I pull the bus over onto the shoulder and walk back to him.

Me: “It’s getting awfully loud back here; I need you to come and sit closer to me. You can make sure I’m following the route correctly.”

Usually, giving disruptive students a “job” helps them behave better.

Student: “Okay, fine.”

He follows me to a seat near the front, but instead of having fun telling a grown-up what to do like most other students, he continues to annoy the other students around him. I decide to try distracting him.

Me: “[Student], do you know what the loudest animal in the world is?”

Student: “No, I give up.”

Me: “Blue whale. Do you know how long it takes light to travel from the sun to Earth?”

Student: “No, but do you know what a Deinonychus is?”

Me: “That’s my favorite dinosaur — a dromaeosaur discovered in the 1960s by John Ostrom that revolutionized the way we view dinosaurs as active, warm-blooded animals. I know what it is, yes. And it takes almost eight and a half minutes for sunlight to reach Earth.”

Student: “Um… What about Stygimoloch?”

Me: “A Cretaceous ornithopod that’s recently been thought to be a juvenile form of Pachycephalosaurus rather than a distinct species.”

[Student] is no longer disruptive, just curious.

Student: “How did you know that?”

Me: *Friendly tone* “I’m wearing Triceratops earrings and a Tyrannosaurus necklace. I like dinosaurs. You can’t out-dinosaur me, but you’re welcome to try.”

He was indeed unable to stump me on dinosaur facts, but trying kept him distracted until we got to his bus stop!

This story is part of our Best Of October 2020 roundup!

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Read the Best Of October 2020 roundup!