My coworker today happens to be a good friend of mine, so we always have a blast when working together. I’m refilling the drinks machine when I overhear this conversation.

Customer: “Do you sell salad?”

Friend: “Yes, we do. We have four different kinds—”

Customer: “No, I don’t want salad. I hate salad. Do you sell sandwiches?”

Friend: “Yes, right here we have a lot of options for you.”

Customer: “But they have salad inside I see, so are you trying to sell me salad?”

He says it in a rather joking tone, not an angry one. I start to chuckle a bit. 

Friend: “Yes, they do have salad inside them, but only one leaf. You can either take it out or I can ask the kitchen to make you a sandwich without salad.” 

Customer: *Still jokingly* “No, I know you want to sell me salad.”

I have to go inside to get some more bottles for the machine, and when I get back outside, the customer is still there. The conversation has obviously been going on for the past several minutes. I proceed to refill the machine, not really listening to the conversation anymore, when I suddenly hear: 

Customer: “You know, I know you’re trying to sell me salad because I’m a secret detective! I’m detective Snuffles!”

I completely lose it and start laughing, trying not to make any noise. Since I’m still behind the customer, he doesn’t see me, but my friend does and has to keep herself together while still talking to the man. 

Friend: “But if you are a secret detective, maybe you shouldn’t tell me that?”

Customer: “Well, I wanted you to know.”

He then walked away happily without buying anything and my friend burst into laughter with me. To this day, I’m still very impressed by how she held herself together during the conversation. I couldn’t have done it. Detective Snuffles really made our day!

I work in a police dispatch department. This call happens during a night shift on a weekend at 3:00 am, when all the bars close in our city.

Caller: “Hey, I’m at [Bar]. I need you to pick me up and drive me home to [Town about four miles outside our city limits]. You brought me home last time.”

I ask his name and quickly look up why on earth we would have driven him home. It’s uncommon for us to even leave city limits when it’s not an emergency since we don’t have any jurisdiction outside the city. It turns out that this happened last weekend, and he had gotten in trouble for trying to walk out of a bar without paying for his drinks. By that point, he was drunk, but not massively so, but he didn’t have any money to pay the last couple of drinks and no means of getting any from an ATM. This obviously meant that he didn’t have the cash to pay for a taxi, either. 

The officers that were dispatched told the bartender what his options were while they took down the patron’s details and then they decided to take the patron home where he lives with his mother, since it was just a short drive and there were plenty of other officers on duty, so two guys driving out of town for ten minutes wasn’t problematic. He also wasn’t aggressive and didn’t seem to pose any danger to others or himself, so we couldn’t justify putting him into the drunk tank to spend the night.

Anyway, he somehow got it into his head that it’d be a brilliant idea to just call the cops himself in order to get a free ride home after a night of drinking, instead of provisioning some funds for the ride home.

Caller: “Come on, dude. I don’t have any money — I spent it all on drinks — so you gotta bring me home. You have to help people in need.”

Me: “I’m sorry, sir, but last time was a pretty big exception. We’re the police, not a taxi service so, unfortunately, I can’t help you. You’ll have to find another way to get home or maybe get some money from an ATM to pay for a cab.”

Caller: “Nah, in that case, I’ll just walk home.”

And with that, he ended the call. It’s not unusual for people to walk home after a night of drinking if they don’t want to pay for a taxi, which costs a flat rate of $20 for the nearest few towns. I did it myself in my younger years, and the town I live in was even farther away than his, so it’s doable. Still, I decided to call his mother and inform her that her son had called us about a ride home so if she wanted to pick him up herself, she’d at least know where he was.

Mother: “Oh, no, he’s an adult. If he can’t manage his funds in order to get home, that’s his problem.”

True to his word, the caller did end up walking home that night and he didn’t attempt to get us to be his private free taxi service anymore.

The last day of Christmas is a public holiday here in Switzerland.

Caller: “I tried to contact you yesterday, but nobody answered the phone.”

Me: “Yesterday was the last day of Christmas, so the office was closed.”

Caller: “I don’t celebrate Christmas; you should respect that!”

My boyfriend and I are having a mock-argument over a card game while cooking dinner. As he isn’t speaking to me, I go back to his room; he lives in student housing. When I turn the corner, I see someone INSIDE his room. Naturally, I run up and yell:

Me: “What do you think you are doing?!”

This makes the guy jump and turn round. He has on the ground a bag from a food delivery service, and he starts to tell me he has my food. I don’t speak German very well and cannot remember how to say, “Get out,” so it becomes a very agitated conversation in a mixture of English and very bad German on my part. I occasionally yell for my boyfriend (who can’t hear me from across the building) while we are talking, which is making the guy nervous.

He seems to think he has the answer and pulls out his phone to show the building on a map. I don’t care why he is there and am making gestures telling him to go. I keep telling him:

Me: “Nicht hier!” *Not here!*

But he is insistent it has to be my food. He isn’t even wearing a mask, which is making me more furious. I then mime for him to call the person who ordered the food, but apparently, he doesn’t get an answer.

Apparently, somehow, he managed to enter the building after not getting an answer, and instead of waiting in the entrance, he decided my boyfriend’s room must be the right one and knocked. When there was no answer, he let himself in, and then I turned up.

After about ten minutes of this, he finally turned around and left and I did a quick assessment to make sure everything valuable we had out was in place. Then, I ran back to the kitchen and told my boyfriend to lock his room as had I found someone in there. Luckily, everything was in place and we went back, confused and shaken as to what the h*** the guy was thinking.

I keep reminding my boyfriend it is a good thing I can beat him at cards as it meant I chased off a potential thief from his room.

We are a table of more than ten — half kids, half adults — on the restaurant’s terrace. The table next to us, all relatively young adults, keep smoking (which is allowed) and sending their smoke to us, and especially to the kids (which is not nice, but also not illegal), even after we ask twice of them to be more careful.

They leave before us, after having made a mess of the “how shall we pay” part, according to the faces their waiter is making once they’ve left.

Fifteen minutes later, our waiter comes to us and explains that yes, some coffees are missing from our bill, but it’s because the other table made such a mess that they paid for far too many coffees. And since they had been such a bother to us, the waiters subtracted those coffees from our bill.