When I was in college, I worked at a supermarket. It was not the best place to work, and the pay was shoddy, but it gave me spending money.

We had a staff canteen which also had a vending machine. One day, I came into the canteen to find a lot of hushed excitement. One of the staff members had discovered that when the machine had been refilled, they had done something wrong and now every single item in it was one penny (instead of sixty to eighty pence).

Of course, we all made full use of this, getting our snacks for next to nothing. This carried on all day. When I came in for my next shift a day later, there was an out-of-order sign and a note from management berating us.

I asked a colleague what had happened. It turned out that one staff member — you know the kind; they argue every point and go out of their way to make any shift as annoying as possible — had tried to buy something (for one penny!) and it had stuck on the way out.

Did he write it off as a loss or buy another thing for a penny to dislodge it? Of course not. He went to the canteen and demanded the supervisor come get it for him. Then, the supervisor noticed that the machine was almost empty and clocked that something was wrong.

So ended the brief but highest point of that job. So glad they got you your stuck one-penny chocolate bar.

I was in a restaurant. I’d finished my meal and decided I wanted a brandy.

Me: “Could I have a brandy, please?” 

Waitress: *With a baffled look* “A bran… tea…?”

Me: “A brandy.” 

The waitress went away, had a discussion with a colleague, and returned with a menu.

Waitress: “Here are the teas we do.”

She pointed at the teas section on the menu.

Me: “Oh. Actually, I want this.”

I put my finger under a cognac.

Several minutes went by, and the waitress came back with a cup of tea. I just resigned myself to not getting my brandy, so I started to drink the tea.

The tea tasted funny, but even then, I didn’t want to cause a fuss, so I carried on sipping it. And then, I realised they’d poured cognac into the tea; they must have assumed it was some sort of flavouring. They only charged me for the tea, not the brandy they’d poured in.

My friends are also my neighbours; we live in a giant block of flats. I decide to pop up for a few beers.

Friend #1: “As you can see, we’ve just finished potting the new plants and have had to get rid of the sweet peas. Any suggestions on what we should plant in their place?”

Me: “Google image search ‘Morning Glory’ — my favourite flower!”

Suddenly, it dawned on me as it just did with my other friend.

Friend #2: “You… you might want to add ‘flowers’ onto the end of that search!”

I work for a mobile phone company in the UK. A customer calls me querying his bill, but he gives permission for me to talk to his girlfriend since he isn’t “good with financial stuff”.

Girlfriend: “Why did you take £75 out of [Customer]’s bank account this month?”

I pull up the bill.

Me: “There are no extra charges. Phone line [number #1] costs [amount #1], and phone line [number #2] costs [amount #2], and the two together total £75.”

Girlfriend: “What are you talking about? He only has one phone number with you.”

Me: “No, there are two numbers. He’s had them both for about eighteen months, and his bill has always been around this amount, so I am unsure why he’s only querying this now.”

Girlfriend: “Can you tell me what the second number is again?”

I tell her the last three digits. I hear rummaging on her side, and then she starts going off at the boyfriend. It turns out that number belongs to “the girl he told her she didn’t need to worry about”.

Girlfriend: *To me* “Can you email me the last couple of bills so I can check them?”

I know they will go to his email address, but it doesn’t seem to matter as the girlfriend seems to have access to his emails, and it doesn’t matter anyway since he authorized her to act on his behalf. I know s*** is really gonna hit the fan when she sees the bill since the itemized usage shows literally hundreds of texts and dozens of hours of phone calls between the boyfriend’s number and the number of “the other woman”.

He jumps on the line and tries to claim this woman is committing fraud by stealing his bank account details and taking out a second phone line on his account, but I patiently explain to him that would be impossible. We have very strict security measures and there’s no way we’d let someone take out a second line on a person’s account without going through a LOT of verification first. Also, all of the messages confirming the order for the second phone line would have gone to HIS phone number, as well as notification that we’d set up a direct debit on his bank account for the payments.

Me: “Sorry, but there’s no way you did not know about this for a year and a half.”

His girlfriend just screamed at him in the background.

Moral of the story: if you’re cheating on your girlfriend, don’t give her permission to go poking around in your phone records.

We are a small independent bookshop in a rather depressed UK city. With the rise of Internet shopping, we started selling books online a few years ago. We have only really had one bad customer.

We sent the book to this customer, and the following day we got an email from her along the lines of:

Customer: “I want a refund. Your delivery driver didn’t deliver the book after I paid for redelivery.”

That was odd. Not only did we send the book via Royal Mail, not a private service, but no delivery service charges for redelivery. I wasn’t in the shop at the time, but a worker was, and he called me, quite confused. I was equally confused.

Then, the penny dropped. There’s a scam where people send emails or text messages to people with the subject “redelivery of your parcel.” Clicking on the link, the victim is prompted to pay a redelivery charge. Because we were the last business she had ordered something from online, she thought the email was to do with her order from us.

By this time, we had received another email from her.

Customer: “I DEMAND A REFUND! YOUR DRIVER SCAMMED ME!”

I wrote politely back explaining that this had nothing to do with us at all, and having looked at our records and the date the book had been sent off, there was no way it could have reached her yet. I explained the scam, linking to a police website about it, and advised that she needed to cancel the card that she had used, as there was a possibility the scammer now had her card details and could use them to make purchases online.

She still demanded a refund from [Online Marketplace], which we gave. But seriously, the issue had nothing to do with us!