(I’m a dental student. During our fourth year, all of us have to do a week-long rotation at the ICU to provide “dental healthcare” to comatose patients — basically brushing their teeth with an iodine scrub and calling it a day. One of the patients is conscious but intubated, and he speaks using a whiteboard. After I finish brushing his teeth, a nurse comes into the room and makes small talk.)

Nurse: “So, I heard that [Woman] visited you yesterday, huh?”

(The patient nods.)

Nurse: “That’s nice! Also, your daughters called this morning; they want to come a bit later.”

Patient: *on the whiteboard* “Did they say what time?”

Nurse: “During the afternoon. They were afraid you’d get bored and alone, though, so I told them not to worry since [Woman] came by.”

(I see the patient’s eyes widen and he starts furiously scribbling on his whiteboard.)

Patient: “THEY DON’T KNOW ABOUT [WOMAN]!”

(I had to leave the room and didn’t stop laughing for a good five minutes.)

(I am on a seven-and-a-half-hour bus ride in a tiny seat. There are two stops: a long one in the middle and a short one an hour away from my city. The seats are reclinable chairs, and there is very little room for your legs even if the person in front of you doesn’t recline theirs. If they do, it is less than comfortable, and if they recline it twice the room disappears. Most people just recline it once, knowing it wouldn’t be pleasant for the person behind if they did it twice. I never recline it. I’m a short female, about 1,60m or 5’3”. A couple about my age get on the bus on the long stop. The guy sits in front of me, both of us having window seats. He immediately reclines his seat twice, so it rests on my knees. I wait for about ten minutes and then try to talk to him.)

Me: “Hi, could you please–”

Guy: “No! The seat in front of me is reclined, so I’m doing the same!”

Me: “I understand, but you have reclined yours twice, so there isn’t–”

Guy: “I don’t care! They have reclined their seat, and so have I!”

(His poor girlfriend seems to be distressed about his tone. She looks like a quiet girl and obviously isn’t having fun.) 

Me: “All right, I’m just trying to be polite and not to disturb the person behind me.”

Guy: “I DON’T CARE!”

Me: *quietly* “Ooookay.”

(I spent the next hour and a half crossing and uncrossing my legs once a minute, perfectly aware that he was feeling every movement like I was pushing his back. We made the short stop, and when the guy returned to his seat, he adjusted it to the recline-once position without a word. I stopped crossing my legs, though it’d have been sooo easy to keep on doing it for the rest of the journey… I guess I’m not a vengeful spirit.)

(While coming home from work, I have a friendly dog literally follow me home from my bus stop. I don’t know what to do with him and he seems like he is relieved to have found me, so I assume he must have run away from his home and is now cold, hungry, and tired and wants me to help him. I bring him home and allow him into my house where he quickly makes friends with the cat and my youngest sister. He doesn’t have a collar on or any form of identification to indicate where he might have come from, so we decide to keep him until we can find his way home. He looks happy and well cared for, so I assume he must belong to someone, and he has to live nearby since dogs usually don’t wander that far from home when they get out. I post his photo on a Facebook group dedicated to helping people find lost pets in our area, contact local animal shelters to let them know we have him just in case someone calls them looking for him, and I’m in the process of making fliers to put up around the neighborhood in an attempt to locate his owner when this happens. He’s running out in our fenced-in yard where I can see him from the window when I get a knock on the door and find a woman standing on my porch.)

Me: “Can I help you?”

Woman: “Yes, you can help me! You can help by giving me back my dog that you stole from me!”

Me: “I beg your pardon?”

Woman: “I got a phone call from one of my friends that she saw my dog at this house! That dog running around your backyard with your collar on belongs to me!”

(We’ve bought him a collar so that we can leash him if we need to, but we haven’t put any tags on him since he isn’t ours.)

Me: “Oh! You’re the dog’s owner! I was actually trying to find you so we could give him back! He didn’t have a collar on and he wasn’t microchipped, so we didn’t know where he came from.”

Woman: “I’ll bet you were! I’ll bet you were trying to find me when you took him from my yard, too!”

Me: “Miss, that dog followed me home when I was walking home from the bus stop after dark. If someone took him out of your yard, it was not me.”

Woman: “You have five seconds to give me that dog before I call the police! He’s a purebred and I paid good money for him!”

(I almost laugh at this because the dog is clearly not a purebred and looks like a labrador mix.)

Me: “As I was trying to tell you, I’ve been trying to locate you for the past week. If he’s yours then you can have him back.”

(She continues to berate me and call me a thief even while I’m leading her to the backyard to get her dog. The dog seems to really belong to her because he grows excited and jumps all over her when he sees her. When I leash him and hand it to her, she snatches it so hard from my hand that I get a friction burn.)

Woman: “The nerve of you, thinking you can just go into someone’s yard and take their dog!”

(I thought that was the end of it until a few minutes later when the police arrived in front of my house and interrogated me about a “stolen purebred show dog” that I had apparently illegally acquired. I explained the situation to them and even showed them the Facebook post, as well as the fliers I was making and never got to put around the neighborhood. They seemed satisfied and left. I guess the moral of the story is that if you find a stray dog, you should just leave it there because trying to help it get back home would be stealing.)

(I overhear this conversation between a couple:)

Woman: “I wonder why Oktoberfest is always in October.”

Man: “Beats me.”

(I’m fourteen and I am a cat for Halloween but forget the tail.)

Stranger: “Hey, sexy kitty, where’s your tail?”

Mom: “Why are you looking at my daughter’s a**?”

Stranger: “…”

(They quickly left.)