In my ninth-grade physical science class, the teacher told us we could have one single-sided page of notes to use during the final exam. About a week before the exam, one enterprising kid wrote out a page of notes, made copies, and quietly started selling them in class for $5.

A girl in the class went over to [Kid]’s desk, grabbed one of the sheets, and walked to the teacher’s desk at the back of the class. She handed it to the teacher and very indignantly told him what [Kid] was doing. The teacher looked at the sheet, read it for a minute, looked at [Kid], and said:

Teacher: “Class, it has come to my attention that [Kid] is selling note sheets. If you didn’t know about it, these are very good notes. I suggest everyone buy one from him.”

The girl was furious but couldn’t do anything. The teacher kept [Kid]’s notes, however, and made the test based on what was not on the sheet. About 75% of the class got a C or worse.

My aunt was with her mom (aunt by marriage; her mom is not my grandmother) when her mom’s phone rang. My aunt overheard her mom’s side of the conversation — fortunate, as she quickly recognized that her mom was about to get scammed.

Aunt’s Mom: “What? You’re in jail? In Mexico?!”

Aunt: “Who’s in jail?”

Aunt’s Mom: “Yes, [Cousin], I’ll send over the bail. Let me get my bank card…”

My aunt grabbed her mom’s phone and hung it up.

Aunt: “Mom! That’s a classic scam. No one’s in jail; that thief was just trying to scare you into paying a bunch of money. Probably would have stolen more from your account after you gave the bank card number, too.”

Aunt’s Mom: “Are you sure? [Cousin] is safe? The young man on the phone said, ‘This is your grandson, and I’m in trouble.’”

Aunt: “Yes, I just saw [Cousin] this morning; there’s no way he’d be in Mexico a couple hours later— Wait, the caller just said ‘your grandson’?”

Aunt’s Mom: “That’s right. I was so worried about [Cousin]. You’re sure he’s all right?”

Aunt: “We can call him right now and confirm. But, Mom… you have five other grandsons. Why did you assume it was [Cousin]?”

Her mom had no answer for why she assumed it was one particular grandson who’d be in trouble over the others! I know two of those five grandsons; they’re my cousins, and I’m not sure why my aunt’s mom singled out the one cousin, either!

There’s a fast food burger chain in the Seattle area called Dick’s, named after its founder. It has good burgers for the price, the world’s greasiest fries, and delicious milkshakes — though opinions vary on how much of the like for the chain is nostalgia. Regardless, my preteen and teen kids and I like it because we’ve grown up with it being a nice treat when going to Seattle for a trip to the zoo, science center, etc.

One day, I took my three kids to a party and told them we could get Dick’s on the way back. One kid requested that we stop at a nearby craft store to pick up some supplies, so we ordered online for in-store pickup to make everything easy.

The party ended up being surprisingly boring, but my kids soldiered through well and were polite the whole time; they’d definitely earned a treat. We made our exit as quickly as we could and headed for the newest Dick’s location, conveniently between the party and the craft store.

But I couldn’t find it. It was supposed to be on a specific highway, and after driving five miles down it, we hadn’t found it. I knew we were getting close to the craft store that was on the same highway, so I told the kids that, sadly, if we hadn’t found Dick’s by the time we got to the craft store, we might have to find a different option. (My maps app was no help.)

We got to the craft store, grabbed our order, got back in the car, buckled our seatbelts, looked up, and—

There, right across the street from us, was a Dick’s.

A quick aside: I’m pretty straight-laced and boring. I rarely swear, I don’t do drugs or smoke, I barely drink, I don’t play video games, etc.

So, the looks on my kids’ faces were priceless when I told them, “Surprise Dick’s are the best Dick’s.”

My first job as a teenager was at a movie theater. I had a coworker who was my age (a senior in high school) and over the course of several months suddenly started flashing a lot of money. He was buying expensive clothes and watches, talking about how much he was spending, and after he turned eighteen, talking about going to strip clubs and spending money there. We all wondered about it because we had known him for a couple of years while working together and this was a sudden change. He didn’t say where the money came from, and since we all made less than $6 an hour at the movie theater (this was the late 1990s), it was pretty weird.

One slow summer morning while I was working in the box office, two guys in suits walked up and asked to see the general manager. I radioed the GM, who came downstairs from his office. They stepped away and talked for a few minutes, and then the guys in suits handcuffed [Coworker] and took him outside. We didn’t see him for several months, but he did eventually come back and tell us what happened.

It turned out that [Coworker] had been stealing a lot of money from customers at the theater. There was an ATM in the theater and a vending machine that sold CDs of movie soundtracks (again, it was the ‘90s). People would regularly forget their ATM and credit cards in either machine, at which point the card would go into a zippered bank bag that we kept in the box office as a lost and found.

[Coworker] started using these lost credit cards when he was working in the box office to buy $50 to $100 worth of gift certificates at a time. These were paper gift certificates with a face value of $5 each; they were not swipeable gift cards like you use now. When someone used a gift certificate to buy tickets, we would key it into the till as cash, since that was essentially what it was. After buying the gift certs with a lost credit card, [Coworker] would then cash the gift certificates into his till and pocket the cash. Since he just traded cash-value gift certificates for actual cash, there was no discrepancy in how much “money” was in his till when he cashed out at the end of the night; it just looked like a lot of people had paid with gift certificates.

This was where all of his money was coming from. It lasted a few months before people started noticing charges on their credit card statements for movie theater gift certificates they hadn’t bought. Enough people who used a local bank complained that the bank realized it was some kind of scheme, and they told the police. The police didn’t want to deal with credit card fraud, so they contacted the FBI. The FBI noticed that all the charges had been made at the same location, so they set up a sting.

The FBI purposely left several credit cards in the machines so they would go into the lost and found, and then they waited until gift certificates were purchased with those cards. When that happened, they contacted the movie theater and got the video from the cameras covering the box office. From there, they saw it was [Coworker] making all of the purchases, and they were able to look at old work schedules and confirm that he was always scheduled to work in the box office when gift certificate purchases were made.

[Coworker] didn’t go to jail, but he pled guilty and was put on a very long probation and ordered to repay thousands of dollars in restitution. The kid ruined his life with a federal credit card fraud conviction at eighteen years old.

I had a coworker who told me terrible jokes because she knew I loved them. They were jokes like, “What’s green, full of holes, and would kill you if it landed on you? A golf course,” and, “Did you know that a humpback whale is so big… that if they put one on a basketball court… they’d have to cancel the game?”

I recently got a new job, and on my last day, [Coworker] came up to me to say goodbye.

Coworker: “So, you’re going off to your amazing new job, and you’ll forget all about us?”

Me: “No! I’ll stop in to say hi, I promise! The new job has benefits I just can’t turn down, but I’ll never forget you!”

Coworker: “Well, all right. I do sincerely wish you all the best. One more joke before you go… Knock, knock.”

Me: “Who’s there?”

Coworker: *With mock outrage* “You said you’d never forget me!

Perfect send-off from her! My new job is going well, and I was even able to send [Coworker] some tips when she met someone else interested in my new field.