Customer: “Excuse me. Could you show me where your lemons are?”
Me: “Of course.”
(I show her and she thanks me graciously. When she is finished shopping I am working on the registers. Remembering me, she decides to get in my line.)
Customer: “Thank you so much for earlier. I do love lemons!”
(She then unloaded her trolley. She had five crates of apples and not a lemon in sight. She paid and left happy. The apples aren’t even on the same aisle.)
(My bedroom window is over our back gardens and my neighbor has a very loud voice, so I unintentionally overhear several of his conversations.)
Neighbour: *on phone* “Yeah, he speaks one of those Chinese-y type languages, like Spanish…”
Neighbour: “Why do you need coal or gas to light the barbecue? Can you not just use fire?”
Neighbour: “Can you eat the fruit on that tree next door?”
(My garden has the only tree near his house and it’s a pine tree. Another time, he has a builder over to paint his conservatory.)
Builder: “Just have to take some outside measurements now, and we can order the optimum paint for this.”
Neighbour: “Why do you want a transformer for it?”
(I would love to have seen the builder’s reaction!)
Neighbour: “Does he worship Muslim, too?”
(Particularly strange, as he is of Middle-Eastern descent.)
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(My wife has always been pretty direct, but pregnancy seems to have amplified it. We’re standing outside the local pub one day chatting to some friends when a kid, between seven and nine years old I think, cycles past. We see this kid all the time and he always has one hand on the handlebars and with the other is holding and staring at his phone. He also doesn’t wear a helmet. On this occasion, my wife reaches out as he cycles past and nabs the phone out of his hand.)
Kid: “Hey!”
Wife: “If I see you cycling with this d*** thing in your hand and not looking at the road one more time it is going straight in the river.”
(The kid goes from startled to angry, but my beloved is too quick for him.)
Wife: “Just what the h*** are you thinking? You could hit someone. You could end up under a d*** car. You think your parents want to spend Christmas sat around your hospital bed, you idiot?”
(At this the kid seems to crumple a little. My wife holds out the phone to him.)
Wife: “Now switch it off. Put it in your pocket. Go home and ask Santa for a d*** helmet.”
(The kid takes the phone back and, very sensibly, does as my wife says. We figure that’s the end of it and go back to chatting to our friends. About ten minutes later a woman marches up to us and smacks my wife’s glass of lemonade out of her hand.)
Woman: “How dare you?! My son has just come home in floods of tears saying you yelled at him and scared him! You told him he was going to die! And now I see you drinking, probably trying to harm another precious baby! What kind of woman are you?”
Wife: “Lady, I told your son that if he didn’t stop looking at his d*** phone while cycling then, yes, he might end up dead or seriously injure someone else. Lady, I’m the kind of woman who drinks lemonade while she’s pregnant because, unlike you, I have some concern for my kids!”
Woman: “It’s no business of yours what my son was doing!”
Wife: “Not looking at the road and causing danger to the public? It is absolutely my business. And before you say one more thing, your son seems to be a h*** of a lot smarter than you and he got this pretty quick. How would you like to spend Christmas around your son’s hospital bed? Or in a lawyer’s office after whoever he hits sues for damages?”
(The woman has gone flame red and storms off. My wife turns to me.)
Wife: “Was I a little harsh?”
(I told her that I didn’t think so and that she’d said the right thing. A couple of days later the same kid saw my wife in the village and told her that he’d only been crying because he’d realised how dangerously he had been behaving and apologised for his mother. He even told my wife that she’ll be a great mum, and I agree.)
(After hitting a deer and writing off the car she’d had for a grand total of a month, my mum is now a not-so-proud owner of a third-hand, three-door car. The thing about this third-hand, three-door car is that the passenger door doesn’t open from the outside; you have to open it from the inside. Why, we have no idea, but it means Mum has to lean over from the driver’s seat and open the door for me. We are heading to work this cold and frosty winter morning. My dear old mum has started the ignition and whacked on the heating so the car can defrost and she can see whilst driving. She has not yet opened the passenger door, so I am stood outside waiting and not in the warming car, on this cold and frosty winter morning. She fiddles about with her bag, and uses her inhaler, and does not yet open the passenger door. I am thus still stood outside on this cold and frosty winter morning. She fiddles with something else; I don’t really know what as I am doing the “it’s cold and frosty and I’m stuck outside” jig. She then looks at me.)
Mum: *in her snotty, grumpy voice* “Why haven’t you got in the car?! We need to go!”
(I look at her, dead in the eye, and wordlessly remove my hand from where it is tucked into my armpits for warmth and slowly pull on the passenger door handle as one would do to open it. Naturally, since the passenger door handle doesn’t want to BE a door handle, it does nothing. I raise an eyebrow at her. We share a look, and she leans over and opens the door from the inside and I get into the nice toasty car)
Me: *completely deadpan* “It’s a tad chilly out there.”
Mum: *giggling* “Can I blame old age? I’m blaming old age.”
(I have been helping out on a Brownie holiday and we are on the bus on the way back to our home city. I am sat next to the Brownie leader. A couple of the girls in front of us are pointing out things excitedly and being quite loud and silly.)
Girl #1: “Look, look! There’s a monster cow.”
Me: “Uh-huh, sure.”
Leader: “Yep, that’s a monster all right.”
Girl #2: “Oh, and you could jump from that cliff and fly up like birds.”
Leader: “You think so, huh?”
(We drive past a mountain.)
Girl #1: “That’s Sugar Loaf Mountain!”
Leader: *trying very hard not to laugh* “Sugar loaf, eh? What kind of sugar loaf?”
Girl #2: “The mountain!”
Leader: “Sure. See them all the time, those sugar loaves climbing up their mountains. Go tell [Other Helper] all about the sugar loaves around here. Tell her we’re eating them tonight!”
Girls: “Okay!”
(They get up to go speak to the other helper.)
Leader: “Sugar Loaf Mountain, eh? What are they like?”
Me: “Er, that one was actually real.”
Leader: “What?”
Me: “Sugar Loaf Mountain is a real mountain and we did just pass it. I’ve climbed it before.”
Leader: “Oops. Oh, well. Wonder if [Other Leader] will guess that. What a wonderful name.”
