(I’m going to the Austrian Alps with my parents to visit my brother. We’re checking in our luggage when I notice a sign by the check-in desk.)

Sign: ASSAULTS ON STAFF: While traveling through the airport, please be courteous when dealing with our staff. Any threats, verbal abuse or violence towards our staff will be taken seriously and you may be prosecuted. Photography and video recording of our staff is prohibited. Our staff is trying to help you with your journey. Thank you for your cooperation.

(It’s a sad world we live in where this needs to be spelled out to people. And even sadder that the sign probably doesn’t help all that much.)

Customer: “Hello, I’ve driven quite far to get some prints from my old digital camera, and I’d like to pick them up today if possible.”

Me: “Absolutely, sir. Where’s the memory card?”

Customer: “Right here.”

(The customers unwraps a plastic bag and tries to hand me the contents. I just give him a knowing look that he quickly notices, he takes a look at the thing in his hand, and it dawns on him.)

Customer: “This is the battery, isn’t it?”

In the early 1990s, I was part of a Star Trek reenacting of the Khitomer Peace Treaty between Humans and Klingons.

The guy playing Chancellor Gorkon, a Klingon, essential for the play, never turned up. “Surely, it is his new girlfriend; no respect for the fleet,” somebody accused. “He drank too much blood-wine,” somebody else suggested.

He never turned up… until the next day.

What had happened was the following: on the subway, two police officers asked him who he was; he said he was a Klingon. They thought this was a gang. They asked him what he intended to do with his big knife, and he replied that it was no big knife; it was a Bat’leth. And what are you going to do with this thingy? ”Kill puny humans.”

The police put him in the overnight arrest for planned manslaughter.

I work as a cashier in a convenience store and am helping a woman who is buying some magazines.
Customer: Can I just ask, how old are you?
Me: I’m 21.
Customer: (very surprised) Oh, really?! I didn’t think THAT!
Me: How old did ypu think I was?
Customer: Oh, I don’t know, 22 maybe!

(My mother can definitely be described as cheeky, but she does have her heart in the right place, and she hates bullying and strong people picking on the weak. This happens in her late teens, in the early 80s. My mother sits on a bus, close to an older woman with her leg in a cast. A younger boy — around three or four years old — and his mother step onto the bus and take the seats opposite the older women. The young boy starts kicking his legs, each kick lands on the cast of the older women.)

Old Woman: “Dear, could you please stop doing that? Do you see this cast? I fell and hurt my foot, so when you kick the cast, it hurts.”

(The little boy ignores the woman and keeps kicking.)

Old Woman: *turns to the mother* “Excuse me. Can you make your child stop kicking my cast?”

Boy’s Mother: *turns her nose in the air* “Absolutely not! I believe in a free upbringing.”

(My mother’s blood starts to boil at this point. As the bus is closing in on her stop, she gets up from her seat and taps on the shoulder of the boy’s mother. She looks up, and my mother spits her right in the face.)

My Mother: “I could not help myself… I was raised with a free upbringing.”

(And before anyone had time to react, she got off of the bus.)