I am traveling across southern Colorado, and I stop at a campground. It is morning and people are in line to take showers. A girl goes into the shower, and about ten minutes go by. Some more time passes. We are all wondering what is taking so long.

Me: “Hey! There are fourteen people in line here waiting for you to finish your shower.”

Another five minutes go by, and the girl finally comes out

Girl: “Now there’re thirteen waiting.”

Me: “No, now there are twenty-one people waiting.”

She didn’t apologize.

I’m heading home from my college summer job, and a traffic light changes before I expect it to; I’ve never come this way before. I fumble the clutch and stall the engine.

The guy behind me nearly plows into me and leans on the horn until I get the car restarted. In fact, he whips around me, nearly hitting me as I move off, and he flips me a bird as he does.

At the next light, I’m right behind him… where he proves that he is also driving a manual transmission by stalling his engine!

I tap my horn — just a warbly little “toot!” — and laugh as he flinches.

Karma is seldom so obliging!

I’m at the amusement park with my family. My mom and a few of my family members decide to sit this ride out since they’re not a huge fan of water rides, so my two little sisters, my cousin, my best friend, and I decide to ride the Water Rapids. The line for the ride is around an hour or so long, and we think it won’t be too bad since wait times at amusement parks tend to be overestimated to give guests buffer time.

We get in line, and around five minutes in, one guy decides to go ahead of the line because a group of his friends went ahead and saved the spot in line for the rest of their group. As he passes by the family of four in front of us, the mom and dad immediately complain.

Dad: “Hey, you can’t do that, man. That’s unfair.”

Guy #1: “Oh, no, my friends went ahead of the line for me, so I’m just meeting them.”

And he proceeds to bolt past them.

The mom and dad shake their heads and go back to talking to their kids. Two minutes later, another guy comes past everyone behind us and past us before being stopped by the mom and dad.

Mom: “Hey. No. This is not okay. You need to go to the back of the line.”

Guy #2: “My friends are at the front of the line. We got split up because I needed to use the restroom, so they said they’d go to save me a spot and I could meet up with them.”

Dad: “That’s not fair.”

Mom: “This is not okay. You’re making everyone wait longer now, and my daughter looks like she’s about to pass out from the heat.”

Daughter: *Embarrassed* “Mom, I’m fine.”

The guy tries to get through, and the mom begins to block him like it’s defense in basketball, so he doesn’t go past them in the line. His friend then calls him on his phone.

Guy #2: “Yeah, I’m still in the back of the line. Mr. and Mrs. Jerk here aren’t letting me through.”

My whole family starts laughing, and others around us even let out a laugh, as well.

He ends up standing with us.

Guy #2: “I’m sorry for cutting in front of you.”

Me: “No worries, it’s not a big deal.”

My sisters and everyone else agree with me since we really don’t think it’s something to argue about.

Me: “It’s really fine. I feel like everyone saves a spot in line when you have a big group at the amusement parks.”

The mom then turns around and looks at me.

Mom: “Oh, so you think it’s okay to cut people in line?”

I get heated because it wasn’t a conversation I was trying to have with her.

Me: “One, I wasn’t talking to you, and two, don’t tell me you’ve never cut anyone else in line in your entire life.”

Mom: “See, this is what’s wrong with this generation; they don’t know right from wrong.”

My sisters, who are seventeen and sixteen, jump in.

Sister #1: “Okay, I’m sorry, but when did this become a generational issue?”

Sister #2: “If you want to talk about generations, let’s mention how your generation basically left all the f***** up things to our generation to fix.”

Sister #1: “We can keep going if you’d like, because I would love to know who you voted for.”

The mom has no response to what we say, and the guy in line with us just keeps laughing and agreeing with the words we are throwing at her.

Sister #2: “This is about someone that is ‘cutting the line,’ and even if he was cutting, THIS WILL NOT MATTER IN THREE HOURS, LADY.”

The couple stays quiet for the time being.

Five minutes later, we see another group of people cutting the line, and, still heated over all of this, I yell out:

Me: “Oh, my gosh! Look at those people! They’re cutting the line and making it wayyyyy longer for you guys to get to the ride. Are you going to stop them?”

We get no response from the mom and dad, and we just sigh, finding it ridiculous how they handled an unnecessary situation.

We finally get to the front of the line, and everyone is able to go with their groups and ride the ride. At the end of the ride, the family’s boat is next to ours, and my little sister ends the whole ride experience with:

Sister #2: “SO, DID YOU GUYS ENJOY THE RIDE?”

When I was fresh out of college, I got called up for jury duty. It was actually a pretty fascinating experience and I highly recommend it. Some of the people I served with, though, were… interesting.

We’d agreed on most of the fourteen or so criminal charges in the case, including two of the three counts of child endangerment. Now, we were discussing the final of those. One of the criteria we were told for being guilty of this particular charge was that the child had to feel endangered. The child in this case was a baby. All but one of us concluded that, due to the particular circumstances, the baby had no idea what was going on and thus didn’t feel endangered and thus the person wasn’t guilty of this particular charge.

The holdout was a woman from the Caribbean — I forget where precisely. I point this out only to explain the sentence structure of her argument since English was her second language or perhaps even third. This is how the argument went, verbatim.

Woman: “When I was in my country, one day, I try to feed my baby. He wouldn’t take the breast! Wouldn’t take the breast!” *Pauses* “Lightning come down, set fire to the house!”

The Rest Of Us: “…”

Woman: “…”

The Rest Of Us: “…”

Me: *Grasping at straws* “Um…okay, so… you’re saying that babies have some kind of sixth sense about what is going on around them, so this baby knew that the man was threatening him even though the baby’s mother wasn’t really worried about the guy?”

Woman: “YES! Babies know!”

Everyone else proclaimed their disbelief.

Me: “Okay, why don’t we move on to the other charges and come back to this one later?”

Eventually, we were able to convince her that, in this case, lightning not come down, not set fire to the house, as far as this baby was concerned.

This story is part of our Best Of July 2021 roundup!

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I am waiting at a bus station/park-and-ride a ways out in the county. It is winter and rather cold, so I’m bundled up in a very puffy, hooded coat, and I’m also wearing a black balaclava/ski mask-type of thing but with my nose and mouth uncovered.

As I settle in to wait for my connecting bus, a man gets off another bus. We are the only two on the platform. I am a woman and I’m 5’1”, and at my best estimate, this man is maybe 5’10” — tall enough to make me feel kind of small, but I’m aware my short height makes that easy to do.

The man mutters something I can’t quite make out.

Half Of My Brain #1: “Did he just say the word ‘terrorist’?”

Half Of My Brain #2: “Stop being paranoid. See, he’s going down to the other end of the platform.”

Nevertheless, I move to a bench that puts my back against the wall. I’ve always preferred that, anyway. I kid you not, twenty minutes later, the man comes back and walks straight up to me.

Man: “Are you a terrorist?”

I’m internally short-circuiting because who ASKS THAT?

Me: “What?”

Man: “Are you a terrorist?”

Me: “I don’t understand.”

Man: “Well, you look like one.”

Me: *As confused as possible* “What— How do I look like a terrorist?”

Man: “Never mind. Forget it.” *Walks off again*

My bus wasn’t for another twenty minutes! Luckily for me, another bus arrived about five minutes later. More people got off it and the man got on, leaving me with a much more relaxed wait for my bus. My best guess is that my balaclava looked like a headscarf of some sort. Headscarf on a woman equals Muslim, and Muslim equals terrorist, obviously. HORRIBLE man.