My daughter’s roommate has a noisy guest. My daughter heads to a drugstore.

Daughter: “Where are your earplugs?”

Clerk: *Directing* “On that shelf over there. Yes. Down. Bottom shelf. Pink boxes.”

Daughter: “Dude, these are tampons.”

The NAW caption probably writes itself.

I have suffered two bad ingrown toenails, one on each big toe. The first was handled by my general practitioner with general anesthesia. I didn’t know better at the time, but this was serious overkill. I got the whole hospital gown and recovery room treatment. When my other toe needed the same treatment, I went to a podiatrist. I told him the story of my first toe.

Podiatrist: “Well, that’s a GP for you; they don’t know how to anesthetize a toe. Well, let’s get you all fixed up.”

At that point, he zaps my toe and we wait a bit. He starts to touch my toe with the scalpel.

Me: “Um, I can feel that.”

Podiatrist: “What? That should be completely numb by now.”

Wonderful. It turns out that I’m one of the very few people whose nerve for the tip of their toe grows on the opposite side of the toe. He got me properly numbed, but I still laugh at the irony of him fussing that my previous doctor couldn’t properly numb my toe.

When my wife and I were newlyweds, we got an invitation to check out a wholesale club. During the ninety-minute sales pitch, we were told about all the members they had, the monthly cost, the values of the deals, etc. — lots of nice numbers for a numbers guy like me. When the guy telling us about the program stepped away near the end of the whole thing, I had a hushed conversation with my wife. We could see the store area the whole time.

Me: “Okay. The way I figure it, to justify the monthly fees to this club, we’d have to be doing significant shopping here several days a week.”

Wife: “Yeah, I see that.”

Me: “And they say they have [number] members who would all have to be doing the same to even bother having the membership, right?”

Wife: “Um…?”

Me: “Considering their hours and all, we should have seen over eighty shoppers here since we’ve been here. How many have you noticed coming through?”

Wife: “Just two.”

Me: “Yeah, me, too. Their business is just getting people to cough up a monthly fee. I think we’re going to give this opportunity a miss.”

Of course, in retrospect, I suppose that they could have been lying about membership. But since that would be to falsely convince us that it was a good thing to spend money on, it remained a bad thing to join.

Sometime back in the 1990s, I still have a landline phone. I hear occasionally of people who have a home phone one digit off from some popular call destination like a radio station which, of course, gets annoying when some station offers prizes to the Nth caller. I don’t have that problem. I get wrong numbers, sure, but never the perpetual “off by one digit calls”… until one day:

The phone rings.

Me: “Hello?”

Caller: *Screaming* “WHAT NUMBER AM I?! WHAT NUMBER AM I?!”

Me: *Calmly* “I don’t know. What number are you?”

Caller: *Confused* “Is this [Radio Station]?”

Me: “No.”

Caller: *Screams and hangs up*

Me: “Well, wasn’t that special?”

For fun, I looked up the station’s number. It wasn’t even close.

I work at a restaurant that is half restaurant, half ice cream store. A drive-thru customer has placed an order and requested fresh fries.

There are four other cars behind her when she gets to the second window. My employee opens the window, hands her the drinks, and asks her to pull to the left to wait on her fries. A few seconds later, after the customer pulls around, my employee says:

Employee: “She asked for a free drink for waiting. I told her no.”

After three minutes, her fries are ready, and a different employee takes the order out. The customer asks her:

Customer: “Where is my sweet tea?”

Employee: “Did you pay for a sweet tea?”

Customer: “No.”

The employee walks off. A minute later, the lady sends her eight-or-so-year-old son in. He is trying to eat his sandwich, and he asks the person at the front counter for his mom’s sweet tea. They tell him his mom didn’t pay for a sweet tea. He walks out.

I sit there and watch as she speeds across the parking lot, barely missing a parking lot light, and pulls back into the drive-thru. She doesn’t even wait for someone to answer; she just starts screaming.

Customer: “I don’t understand this. You asked me to pull around to wait for my food, and you can’t even give me a f****** free drink! I should be compensated for pulling around! I want to speak to your manager now!“

I take a deep breath and hit the button on my headset.

Me: “Ma’am, you specifically requested an item cooked to order. The amount of time you waited would have been the same whether we pulled you around or not. Your request for a free drink just because of being pulled around is denied. We pulled you because the people behind you were not waiting on fries but had ordered ice cream. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

She screamed and drove off.