My husband used to work as a maintenance man at a large university hospital before he took a better-paying job at a local military base. One of the most vexing parts of his job was dealing with the robots that the hospital uses to transport non-crucial items such as paperwork and supplies. The hospital policy was that the robots had priority use of the elevators over hourly service staff.

Once, my husband was trying to respond to an overflowing toilet in a hard to access part of the hospital and there were seven robots ahead of him for the elevator, thus rendering him unable to quickly reach the overflowing toilet. Apparently, the toilet had completely flooded the bathroom before my husband could reach the spill, which created a huge mess that took my husband and other maintenance team members half a day to clean up and put the bathroom back in service. My husband has had it out for the bots ever since.

It is worth noting that the bots are fairly stupid machines that are unable to easily move around objects in their path. My husband and the other maintenance workers love messing with the bots if they get a chance. They once placed a slalom path of cones set five feet apart to see if the bot would go around them. The bot stopped at the first cone and malfunctioned.

The following exchange happens when I have an appointment at the hospital and we decide to mess with one of the bots at the hospital.

Husband: *To me* “Jump in front of the bot and see what it does.”

I jump in front of the bot’s path and it stops dead in its tracks and starts beeping. My husband and I start laughing like hyenas at the bot as it recalibrates and moves on. As we are doing this, a nursing student walks by and starts yelling at us.

Nursing Student: “What did you do to the robot?! You are hindering hospital operations! I am going to call security and have you both arrested!”

Me: “Arrested for what? A practical joke that did no harm? My husband used to be a maintenance man for [Hospital] and those bots hindered the operations of his job all the time!”

The nursing student sees a member of security, literally grabs him by the arm, and pulls him over to us.

Nursing Student: “These people—” *pointing at us* “—are hindering hospital operations by messing with the robot! You need to arrest them and ban them from the hospital!”

My husband actually knows this security guard very well.

Security Guard: “Hi, [Husband]! How is the new job? What is this young lady mad at you for?”

We explain that we were just messing with the bot. The security guard relates that the bots frustrate him and all of the other blue-collar workers at the hospital due to the fact that the hospital values the bots more than their service workers.

Security Guard: *To the nursing student* “Miss, I can’t arrest these people for annoying the bot. They didn’t vandalize the bot or hinder operations. The bot took a minute to recalibrate and it moved on; the bot is fine! Leave these people alone!”

The nursing student starts sputtering and accusing the security guard of being in collusion with us.

Nursing Student: “But the robots are more important than you low-level workers! The robots cost more than your measly salaries!”

The security guard is obviously annoyed.

Security Guard: “Leave now or I will have you arrested for breach of peace!”

The nursing student begrudgingly moved on and the security guard asked my husband if there were any job openings for security at the military base that my husband works at. My husband contacted HR at the base and put in a good word for him, and within a month, our security guard friend has a much better job working as a security guard at the military base. Why [Hospital] thought that robots were more important than actual human workers is beyond me!

My eleventh grade — sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds — chemistry class starts out with some basic information about the periodic table and how it works. 

Teacher: “For example, this is lead. This symbol means it’s solid at room temperature. The melting point at surface pressure is a little more than 600F — 315C — so you won’t see liquid lead in your normal day-to-day scenario. And here—”

Student: *Interrupting* “If you inhale lead in its gas form, would you die of lead poisoning?”

Teacher: *Unfazed* “As I just said, the melting point is more than 600 degrees. The boiling point is over 3,000F — over 1,700 C. You wouldn’t have time to worry about lead poisoning at those temperatures. Moving on, this symbol…”

I volunteered to help with the Easter celebration at my grandson’s school. 

After the egg hunt, we herded the kids into their classroom. The teacher made an announcement that candy was not to be unwrapped until later.

While roaming around to help students, I came across the only child who had caused problems. Too late to stop him, I could only watch as he ate a piece of candy… still in its wrapper.

Technically, he didn’t disobey the teacher.

My friend’s dad is a lecturer at a medical school. He has a friend with a rare condition called situs inversus, meaning his internal organs are mirror images of the usual configuration. He likes to pull a prank on first-year students.

Lecturer: “Is it possible for a person to have their organs the wrong way around and still be alive and healthy?”

Students: “No, sir!”

At some point later he brings his friend in as a model patient and has a student try to find his heartbeat.

After muddling around with a stethoscope, one particularly confused student responded, “Sir, this man has no heart!”

When I am in high school, I get to go to France on a student ambassador program. One of the rules of this program is that, even though there might be multiple people to a room, everyone needs to have their own bed. Our first night there, we get our room assignments, and my two roommates and I head up to our room.

We get into the room and immediately find two of the beds: a regular queen in the bedroom and a sunseat-esque thing near one of the windows. My roommates snag the two visible beds and then we start searching the room for the other bed. We look in the closets in case it’s a murphy bed situation, tap the walls, again in case of a Murphy bed situation, and just look everywhere we can think of.

We have to call down to the front desk to get sheets for the second bed, so when the employee comes up with those, we ask him to show us where the third bed is because we are clearly dumb Americans.

He looks at me and [Roommate #2] and says, “There are only two of you.” We tell him that the other girl is in the bathroom. He looks at us like he doesn’t fully believe us — why in the heck would we lie about that?! — but tells us it is under the queen.

After he leaves, we go back and look at the queen bed; we initially dismissed it for having anything underneath because there wasn’t a ton of clearance. But I get down on my stomach and crawl around on the floor, tapping on the base, and there’s no bed; it’s definitely a solid base.

By this time, our leaders are doing room checks. They get to our room and I explain that I have no bed. One of the leaders goes down to see if there’s possibly a single room available while the other one comes and does a second glance over the room just to see if we have missed something. We haven’t, and the first leader comes back and lets us know that the hotel is full. 

It’s decided that I’ll room with one of the leaders for the night, so I get my stuff together and move up to her room. She tells me to shower if I want and then I get the sunseat bed. I get cleaned up and I’m all snuggled up in my bed, writing in this journal that the program requires us to keep — we get school credit for this trip — when one of the other leaders comes back and lets us know that they’ve found a bed.

So, I get all my stuff together and move again. Why they couldn’t let me sleep and then just move me in the morning, I’ll never know. This time, I’m in a room with my own bed and things are good and I get to go to sleep.

Before we leave, we have a picnic. There is a donation basket. Once stuff from the picnic has been covered, the leaders convert the leftover money to Franc and Euros give it out to those of us that have done something kind of above and beyond. So, because I moved around and was a good sport about all of it, I get a little extra money.

A few days later, I call home and talk with my mom about things, and I tell her what happened with the money. I find out after I get home that she almost gave my dad a heart attack telling him about it. Here’s what happened:

My mom tells my dad, “[My Name] found a way to make some extra money while on vacation.”

“Oh?”

“Yep! She’s sleeping around!”