My late mother was notoriously bad with names. She would frequently call me by my sisters’ names — I’m male — and them by mine, but she was such a good mother and we loved her so much that nobody really minded; we just teased her for being eccentric. However, this one occasion beat them all.

I am most emphatically not a morning person. Never have been, never will be. Unfortunately, every other member of my family is, so this used to cause a few problems.

One morning, my mother was standing at the bottom of our stairs, screaming my name — or so she thought — getting angrier and angrier that I was not getting up or even responding to her, and getting more and more puzzled as to why the dog was sitting there, looking so upset at her.

Yes, folks. She’d been yelling the dog’s name. Not just the usual wrong gender, but the wrong [expletive deleted] species!

The lady who runs the ticket office at my parents’ local train station is infamous locally as a total grump. She’s snappy and impatient and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. My father used to commute by train every day and always said good morning to [Ticket Lady], even though he was usually ignored.

One year, shortly after Christmas, my dad went to renew his season ticket as usual and, as usual, was served by [Ticket Lady]. She was in a particularly foul mood that day and my dad asked her about it.

Ticket Lady: “My office heater broke, and the rail company can’t provide me with a new one for a few days.”

My dad commiserated with her and left it at that, wishing her a happy New Year as he left.

Unbeknownst to [Ticket Lady], my dad then walked to the café up the road and purchased a coffee and warm pastry to go. He then returned to the station and gave them to [Ticket Lady], who was shocked. When she could finally speak:

Ticket Lady: “Thank you. Nobody ever does nice things for me.” 

After that day, [Ticket Lady] was always much politer to my parents and me. She would always greet us with a cheery, “Here comes Trouble!” when she saw us, and she always had time for a chat with my dad between customers. 

When my dad’s health started deteriorating and he started working from home, we would go for a walk together at lunchtime and always drop into the station to go and see [Ticket Lady]. She was one of the few people outside of our family who didn’t start treating him differently because of his obvious disability. My dad and I used to look forward to our chats with [Ticket Lady], and the year my dad finally retired, he bought her and her colleague a huge box of chocolates and a bottle of wine each to thank them for their assistance over the years. 

I moved away a couple of years ago, but I still see [Ticket Lady] sometimes if I visit my parents by train. Seeing her always makes me smile, and she’s the only person who still gets away with calling me “Trouble”.

This story is part of our Feel Good roundup for December 2020!

Read the next Feel Good roundup for December 2020 story!

Read the Feel Good roundup for December 2020!

It’s early February, so the last of our Christmas stock is on clearance at very low prices in a clearance bin. A customer comes to the tills with a basket full of boxes of Christmas cards — usually £2 for a box of forty, discounted to 20p — and a particularly sour expression. Some of our grumpier-looking customers actually turn out to be pretty cheerful, though, so I try some cheery banter.

Me: “Stocking up for next year?”

Customer: *Mumbles incoherently*

Me: “Sorry? I didn’t—”

Customer: “You should be sorry! The prices on these are disgusting.”

She slams the basket onto the counter, causing the top boxes to fall out.

Me: “They’re actually heavily discounted to clear our stock—”

Customer: “I know! You shouldn’t do that; now they’ll be filling my cupboards all year, and then I’ll only forget I bought them by next Christmas, anyway.”

I’m tempted to point out that nobody is forcing her to buy them, but I figure that life will be easier without making conversation. I scan one of the boxes and then count them to enter the quantity.

Customer: “You should scan them all; they’re all different ones!”

Me: “It’s okay; they still use the same barcode for all of them even though it’s different pictures.”

Customer: *Grunts*

I can’t remember how many boxes she ended up buying, but it was the last of our stock; scanning them all one by one would have taken a lot longer. I really wish that we still had the confectionery at our tills; I’d have been tempted to offer this customer a humbug.

I am working in a small English village pub. We’re not the fanciest, but we do quite well.

I am serving a regular when I’m interrupted.

Man: “Excuse me! I was here before that man! I deserve to be served first.”

The man he is referring to has been sat at the bar for two hours, so his statement is unlikely.

Me: “Sorry, I didn’t see you there. What can I get you?”

Man: “What red wines do you have? Do you have rioja or chianti?”

Me: “Unfortunately, we don’t sell rioja, chianti, or pinot noir by the glass; we do sell it by the bottle. If you only want a glass, we do have merlot, shiraz, pinotage, and a malbec.”

Man: “I’ll have a pint of [Italian beer], and I’ll go and ask my wife about the wine.”

Me: “Sounds good!”

I pour his beer and he comes back a few minutes later.

Man: “I’ll have a glass of the pinot, please.”

Me: “We don’t sell pinot noir by the glass. Did you mean the pinot grigio?”

Man: “That’s what I said!”

Me: “Are you sure? If your wife wants a red wine, she might not be happy with—”

Man: “Just get me the sodding wine!”

I pour the wine and take his money. A few minutes later, a red-faced woman comes to the bar.

Woman: “What sort of idiot mixes up a pinot grigio and a pinot noir?!”

We are told that someone is joining the team, starting in just a few days, and it’s one of the ex-apprentices. This is very odd; normally, we have weeks of notice, and it tends to be people who have had many years in the company under their belt.

We get talking. Apparently, when this new hire was an apprentice, she did as little as possible, and she moved around the departments until no one wanted her. We are all pretty welcoming so we don’t want to judge; after all, she could have grown out of it by now.

She arrives in the department for her first day and seems interested. The first week goes well. She doesn’t know what she is doing, but everyone is happy to teach her and she slowly works her way around the jobs in the lab.

I’m pretty new in the lab myself, so I don’t end up training her, and it is a month before we work together.

Me: “Hey, I was going to do [job #1]. Did you want to do [job #2]?”

Ex-Apprentice: “No, [Coworker] will do that for me.”

Me: *Pause* “Okay. Oh, I won’t have time to write the report for [test]. Would you mind picking that up?”

Ex-Apprentice: “No, I don’t really want to. I think [Coworker] will do that.”

Me: “No disrespect, but I haven’t seen you do anything today. We work together here, and I need some support.” 

Ex-Apprentice: “You’re just pissed because everyone likes me more than you.”

Me: “No, I just think you should do some actual work, instead of fluttering your eyelashes and getting others to do it.”

She carries on in the same way for weeks, getting one of the older guys to do her work for her. Problems start when we have guys call in sick; suddenly, there is no one to cover her.

Rather than deal with the situation, my boss asks me to do her work for her. I refuse, so he eventually goes to speak with her. Forced to do some actual work, she makes a massive mess of everything and then disappears for the rest of the day, completely AWOL.

She lasted another month before being disciplined and had to re-sit all of her training. This took many more weeks, and she still couldn’t be bothered; she was caught trying to push her work onto others. She got transferred to yet another department and then suddenly didn’t work for the company at all.