(My mother is extremely sensitive to noxious gases. She is the proverbial canary in the mine. My father just installed a new gas stove.)

Dad: “[Mum], can you come to the kitchen, please?”

Mum: “Why?”

Dad: “Just come, will you?”

Mum: *entering the kitchen* “What?”

Dad: *pausing for a moment* “Do you feel well?”

Mum: *puzzled* “Yes, why?”

Dad: “No headache?”

Mum: “No, should I?”

Dad: “Nope, the stove is installed and ready for use…”

(It then dawned on Mum why she had to enter the kitchen and she left in a huff. For clarity, if my dad wasn’t sure it was installed properly, he would never have turned on the gas or risked my mother’s health. It was just to be 100% sure.)

(I overheard this conversation in my parents’ kitchen. My mother is 86 and my father is 90.)

Mother: “I can’t believe I spent $200 at the market. I can remember when it was around $60.”

Father: “I can remember when you were around 60.”

(I am a notoriously heavy sleeper, needing multiple cell phone alarms plus a digital alarm clock to help me wake up in the morning. My husband, on the other hand, wakes up well before his alarm and is often up an hour or two earlier than me due to his work schedule. One morning, I vaguely hear my alarms from the depth of my dreams and hear my husband stomping his way into the bedroom to turn them off. I bring it up with him later that day.)

Me: “Did me sleeping through my alarms this morning annoy you?”

Husband: “No, why?”

Me: “I heard you come stomping in the room like you were thinking, ‘All this f****** noise and she’s not even moving!’”

Husband: “No! I was rushing to turn them off because I didn’t want it to wake you up!”

Me: *staring at him in confusion* “You do… You do know what alarms are for, right?”

Male Customer: *browsing local-history book* “Look: in [Small Town] there used to be a one-bedroom schoolhouse!”

Me: “I hope you mean ‘one-room’ schoolhouse, unless your education was a lot more exciting than mine.”

Customer’s Wife: “Oh, you actually listened to what he said. I just ignore him!”

This awkward story was told to me by my grandfather.

Back when he was still working, a coworker of his unexpectedly died. Eventually, the widow came in to collect his belongings. Two employees accompanied her to his locker: the dead man’s supervisor and my grandfather to serve as a witness. The company policy was that neither of them could touch anything in the locker, just open it and visually confirm she took everything so they couldn’t be accused of stealing something.

The supervisor opened the locker, and they both stepped back to let the widow remove the stuff inside. The first thing she picked up was a stack of old pay stubs. At first, she stared at them, looking confused. As she flipped through them, she looked more and more disturbed. Eventually, she grew enraged and screamed in fury, “THAT B*****D! All these years, he told me he never got a raise and kept giving me the same money to take care of the kids and the house, and he’s been holding out on me all this time!”

Neither my grandfather nor the supervisor knew what to say, so they said nothing, just let her rant. I really can’t think of what I would have said, either!