I’m volunteering as a referee for First Lego League, a competition for mostly middle-school-aged kids building Lego robots to complete various challenges on a table for points.

I try to make things fun for the kids as much as possible; I want the whole experience to be positive enough for the kids to come back next year even if they don’t have a perfect robot after all. We have to wait for all tables to set up before a match can begin, which gives me some time to talk with the kids.

Me: “I have a very important task for you all. They’re going to announce every team’s name before the match. When they say yours, I want you all to cheer louder than any of the other teams. Can you do that?”

Boy: “Yeah!”

The entire team is clearly the loudest and most energetic when their team name is called, with the first boy I talked to being the most energetic of his team.

Me: “You were definitely the loudest. Just for that, I’ll double your starting points.”

Boy: “Really?! He’s going to double it!”

Me: “Do you know what your starting points are?”

Boy: “No, but it’s double!”

Me: “You start with a zero…”

The boy doesn’t seem to hear me. He instead goes to try to tell one of the adults waiting back a little further back where we make coaches and parents wait that we are doubling their score.

Teammate: “I don’t think he’s listening anymore. At least he’s happy.”

We had to start the match about then, so I never did get to clarify things to the first kid. Hopefully, he wasn’t too disappointed when someone finally let him in on the joke.

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I’m an equestrian events photographer. My state doesn’t really have horse races, but we have a number of fairly large jumping competitions. (For those who speak Equinese, we have hunter/jumper derbies and grand prix.) Due to the nature of the sport, one of the first things a successful equestrian learns is how to land safely because falling off or being thrown is more or less inevitable. We keep photographing through a fall because they’re our best sellers: families buy them to embarrass the rider, and trainers buy them to show their rider exactly what went wrong that caused the fall. Fortunately, nine times out of ten, the only injury sustained is bruised pride.

I’m at a show doing my thing as usual when a rider gets thrown going over a jump. (It was a hunter class, so I believe it was at most a three-foot height.) I get the entire fall on camera, and I note that the rider cracked her head on the standard — translation: the tall frame of the jump — as she fell, striking the back of her helmet near where the base of the skull meets the neck.

EMTs quickly check her out and move her out of the ring. She’s really wobbly, so I offer her my camping chair. Both the rider and the EMTs thank me and sit her down while I move to keep shooting.

I’m not trying to eavesdrop, but I hear snippets of the conversation between the rider and the EMTs, which I would have politely ignored had I not heard the rider say the words:

Rider: “No, I didn’t hit my head.”

I whip my head around to face her.

Me: “Yes, you did.”

Rider: *Surprised* “I did?”

EMT #1: *Concerned* “She did?”

Me: “You absolutely did. I have pictures.”

EMT #2: *Very interested* “You got pictures of the fall? I’d love to see those if I could.”

I scroll back through my camera reel.

Me: “One hundred percent. Just let me find them real quick.” 

For that one time out of ten where injuries worse than ego are sustained, on-site EMTs will often ask my coworkers and me if we got pictures of the accident so they can see exactly what happened. Sometimes a rider will have a particularly painful injury that blocks out another, less severe injury that still needs treatment, or sometimes a rider will hit their head really, really hard, and they need to know exactly where.

Fortunately, my boss is freaking awesome and will gladly provide any pictures needed for medical reasons free of charge, so I make a note of the file numbers in case the rider or her doctor end up needing them later.

[EMT #2] looks at the pictures and gets a grim expression.

EMT #2: *To [Rider]* “Yeah, you’re going to the hospital for an X-ray right now.” *To me* “Thank you so much for these, and for saying something.”

Me: “No problem. If you need the pictures, just email my boss and she’ll give them to you.” 

I hand him a business card.

EMT #2: “Thank you. We might.”

The EMTs got the rider loaded up in a golf cart and took her back to the main building, where I surmise she was eventually put in an ambulance and taken to the hospital.

I texted my boss about the situation and the possibility that she might need to pull some files for medical; she thanked me for the heads-up and praised me for helping out.

The next day, [EMT #2] found me again and told me that, while he couldn’t disclose details for legal reasons, the rider had gotten her bells rung really good but hadn’t suffered any permanent damage. Wear your helmets, folks!

I am on the organising team for the London Marathon. A few weeks before the big event, I receive a call from one of our runners. After all the security checks:

Caller: “Hello. I’ll be going into London to run the marathon, but the hotel I like to stay in whenever I go down to London has booked out my favourite room.”

I wait for a follow-up statement, but there’s nothing.

Me: “Okay?”

Caller: “Well, I need to stay in my favourite room. I can’t stay anywhere else. But they do have the room available the day before.”

Me: “Is there a specific request you have for me, sir?”

Caller: “Well, isn’t it obvious? Can you bring the marathon forward a day?”

Me: “Pardon?”

Caller: “Bring the marathon forward a day. It would be very convenient for me!”

Me: “You’re asking me to change the date of the whole marathon because your favourite hotel room is already booked?”

There’s a moment’s pause.

Caller: “Yes, I can see that you wouldn’t be able to do that.”

I sigh, thinking they have finally seen reason, until…

Caller: “Could you get your manager to do it?”

This customer obviously thinks the whole world revolves around them, but they’re not the only ones. Check out these 15 Hilarious Stories About Customers Demanding The Impossible!

I’m a Brazilian graphic designer and as you may imagine, a lot of us take soccer (and the World Cup) very seriously. Our team games are like holidays around here.

I get a call from a client minutes before an important World Cup game, asking for a new design for some motion graphics.

Me: “Can this be delivered this evening?”

Client: “It absolutely cannot wait, since we absolutely have to post our video within the hour!”

I took my assistant from the bar and we ran to deliver a thirty-second, easy-to-do video in less than an hour. Okay, that’s fine, it happens; it is not an official holiday, after all.

The client wrote me five days later asking for some changes. At game time.

I am a Robot Design judge during a First Lego League (now called FLL Challenge) competition. This is a robotics competition for older elementary-schoolers and middle-schoolers. The teams of kids build and program Lego robots to run various challenges on a board for points. While the majority of robots struggle to semi-reliably do one to three of the easiest missions, every year I see a few really amazing robots doing truly impressive feats on the board.

While each team gets two or more adults to aid them, the actual building and programming of the robot are supposed to be done entirely by the kids. Adults are there to give general guidance and keep the kids on task. They can help the kids figure out the missions and how they’re scored, help kids learn how to program, help them figure out why things didn’t work, and maybe provide the occasion small suggestion, but the robots are supposed to be the kids’ work.

Me: “I’d like to talk to someone about the code. Which kids feel like they know the programs best to explain them to me?

Kid #2: “[Kid #1] and his dad did most of it.”

Me: “Okay, [Kid #1], I see you used a My Block. Can you explain how it works?”

“My Blocks” are what they call functions, basically small self-contained bits of code that can be called over and over again by other parts of the code.

Kid #1: “What’s that?”

Me: “This paper here. Can you explain this program?”

Kid #1: “Oh, is that the thing for following lines? Dad wouldn’t let me do that one.”

He turns to one of the coaches who are sitting in the room but have been asked to be quiet while we judge the kids.

Kid #1: “Dad, how does it work?”

Sadly, we had to give the team a failing score on programming due to adults clearly doing the work. “Luckily”, their robot still didn’t follow lines well and ultimately was nothing special — a bit better than the worst robots but not by much. That meant we could still allow them to compete; we knew they would score poorly enough that we wouldn’t need to worry about how to handle a potentially unfair advantage of an adult helping. We try not to punish the kids for the adults misbehaving if we can avoid it; the competition is supposed to be about celebrating their work first and foremost, regardless of how their robot does, not making them feel bad about it.

The extra irony is that very well-written, fully functional line-following programs are easily available online, and so long as you credit your source, you’re allowed to use a program like this. After all, we would hardly be preparing kids for a real programming job if we discouraged code reuse. If the dad had just suggested they look online, they could have legally gotten more reliable code than whatever he wrote.

Still, this is what I love about judging middle-schoolers, they are so shockingly honest. On the occasion that I judge Core Values, which is mostly focused on teamwork, I’ll always ask if the kids worked well as a team, and I’ll always have at least two teams flat-out tell me they didn’t, despite knowing this is the one thing we’re judging them on in that room. Got to love the forthrightness of kids.

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