I’m a mechanic who specializes in alignments. Most alignments can be knocked out in about half an hour, if you include test drives and paperwork. While we have multiple people trained in doing alignments, we only have one alignment rack at our location. All of our other nine bays can potentially feed into that one rack, so it can become a major bottleneck. Between that and the chronic mismanagement of the front-end salespeople, I’ve developed the habit, at every clock-in, of printing out every work order that pertains to alignments, reading their deadlines, and arranging the printouts on my work order board so that I can know what’s due when, anticipate my appointments, and spot any potential trouble areas before they happen.

The assistant manager comes to my alignment bay at around 2:05 pm and tells me that there’s a customer who wants to get their alignment checked, and that the customer has a hard stop, 100% cannot stay late, needs to leave no later than 3:00 pm.

Immediately, I know that this work order didn’t exist an hour ago when I got back from lunch, and I indicate the nearly full work order board.

Me: “That’s not going to be possible. I’m going to be out of the store for the next twenty-ish minutes performing a calibration on this Ford, and the front counter staff announced a few minutes ago over the intercom that the 2:00 pm appointment was here and waiting. I’m already going to be late for that, thanks to this ADAS calibration added on at the last minute. Those two things will take up all the time between now and their 3:00 pm hard stop.”

Cue the blank stare from the assistant manager.

Assistant Manager: “But I told them it’d be done by three.”

Me: “Not with one alignment guy and one alignment rack. You want that alignment sale, you’re gonna have to either pull another alignment-trained employee in here and have them do that alignment while I’m calibrating the Ford, or they can do the calibration on the Ford while I do this other alignment, or you can talk to the customer and buy me until at least 4:00 pm since the 3:00 pm appointment is likely going to be on time, or they can come back another day and get the alignment done then. Those are your options. I’d recommend choosing one quickly.”

Cue another blank stare.

Assistant Manager: “Thank you for your communication. Carry on.”

I perform the calibration on the Ford, come back to the store, test-drive my 2:00 pm appointment, pull it into the alignment rack, and start hooking up the measurement equipment.

The car with the 3:00 pm hard stop has not moved. The keys and its work order are still on my board.

It is now 2:45. The manager on duty comes to the pit, points to the keys and work order on the board, and says:

Manager On Duty: “That has a hard stop at 3:00 pm. The customer is asking whether it will be done soon?”

Me: *Shaking my head* “Nope. It’ll need at least another hour, most likely, and I told [Assistant Manager] forty minutes ago that the hard stop at 3:00 wasn’t going to be possible. Did he talk to the customer and buy me time?”

Manager On Duty: “No.”

Me: “Did [Assistant Manager] grab one of the other alignment-trained employees and have them align that vehicle?”

Manager On Duty: “Obviously not.”

Me: “Those were our options to get this customer happy by 3:00 pm today, and I told [Assistant Manager] as much. It’s not happening by 3:00. The customer has now been waiting for almost an hour for an alignment that won’t be done, so if I were you, I’d try to either buy time or do damage control right about now.”

The customer left without her alignment, and I was left with another few stress-induced prematurely gray hairs. Thank God for the weekend.

We have a coworker from India who has not seen huge swathes of classic American movies, like “Star Wars”, “Jurassic Park”, etc. We give him a movie to watch each weekend, and on Monday, we ask for his review.

Coworker: “I don’t understand. The empire with infinite resources builds a space station the size of a moon and then allows a hole to exist at the end of a trench that blows up the whole thing if you shoot at it? So stupid.”

Us: “Yeah, that’s a classic plot hole in American cinema.”

The next week:

Coworker: “I don’t understand. This billionaire can genetically bring dinosaurs back from extinction, builds a huge park to show them to the world, and literally says he spared no expense several times in the film, but he hired one guy to do the coding for the computer system for the whole island? So stupid.”

Us: “Yeah, that seems stupid in hindsight.”

The next week:

Coworker: “So, this family lives silently in a world that’s been taken over by noise-sensitive aliens, but then they visit a noisy waterfall area where they can talk freely? Why didn’t they just live there?”

Us: “…huh.”

Friday rolls around, and [Coworker] approaches us.

Coworker: “So, what movie do you have for me this weekend?”

Us: “Uh, none. We’re scared of you ruining more of our favorite movies for us.”

It was all done in jest, of course.

The cinematic cultural exchange eventually went both ways, with some of us watching some Bollywood epics. When I saw a battle scene with soldiers being catapulted over a mile-tall wall from bending a tree back, flying IN PERFECT CIRCULAR FORMATION, and landing in the middle of a battle without so much as a broken bone, I made [Coworker] admit that movies from both countries are ridiculous, and we should just enjoy them all.

A few years ago, I helped my mom clean out what used to be my brother’s room. He moved out of state for college, fell in love, and stayed in the other state after he got married. He and my sister-in-law had gotten most of his things out of my parents’ house, and now my mom wanted it to be a craft room. I went to college nearby and fell in love with someone, too, and we stayed near my parents, so I was able and willing to help.

We moved furniture around, did a deep clean, and went through the last few boxes. Inside one was a large plastic bag, full of twenty-two smaller bags. Each contained one of my brother’s baby teeth and the dime the Tooth Fairy had given him. At this point, my brother was in his thirties.

I tried to convince my parents to mail them in a plain envelope with no return address, but they tossed the teeth and included the money in a normal package with the few things he’d forgotten. Boring.

Fast-forward to this past weekend. My mom’s craft room has grown to bursting at the seams, because when people hear that you sew, knit, crochet, embroider, quilt, and do paper crafts, they give you all their deceased relatives’ craft supplies. I joked that we might find more teeth.

But what do you know, one of the boxes (which had come from my late grandparents’ house) had a small package containing baby teeth from my aunt and uncle (Mom’s younger siblings). They’re in their sixties. We decided to give the box to them at Christmas, when they’d both be at the family holiday party, for them to sort out.

And for a bonus, in a box that had very old sewing supplies from my great-grandparents: a boar tusk! 

We still have half the room to go. At this point, I’ll be surprised if we don’t find more teeth.

I work at the Seattle Center.

Tourist: “Where’s the Space Needle?”

We are standing about thirty feet from it.

Me: “Look up.”

He looks directly up.

Me: *Pointing.* “No, I mean look there. That.”

Tourist: “All I can see is some UFO-looking thing.”

Me: “That’s the Space Needle.”

He looks at the Space Needle, then at me, then at the Space Needle, then back to me again.

Tourist: “That looks nothing like a needle!”

Then he storms off, probably to go complain that Pike Place Market looks nothing like a pike…

My daughter is small for her age — healthy, just tiny. She’s often mistaken for younger than she is. For example, people would often express surprise that she could “already” walk and talk when she was a year and a half old because they thought she was around nine or ten months old.

When [Daughter] was seven — and still wearing clothes sized for average four-year-olds or smaller — she had a first eye exam at a new office. The optometrist held up an instrument shaped like a pencil but with a picture where the eraser would be. He instructed [Daughter] to look at the picture while he did his observations.

Optometrist: *In a baby-talk voice* “Okay, look here! See where I’m pointing? Right here? Do you see the kitty? Meow?”

[Daughter] replied in a withering tone and with a deadpan expression.

Daughter: “I see the cat.”

The optometrist paused, collected himself, and looked at her chart. 

Optometrist: “That’s right; you’re seven. Sorry about that! Okay, look at the cat for me…”