Recently, I have begun a dog walking and pet sitting business that I run out of my house with express permission from my landlord. I’ve worked with animals for years and I’m grateful to finally be able to do it for a halfway-decent living.

That being said, I’ve been MUCH busier than I anticipated, and as such, I’ve been a little stressed about over-extending myself. I even had a nightmare about forgetting that I had to watch a dog, and the dog was left alone at their house for several days. Even though it was just a nightmare, this prompted me to get more serious about my organization and scheduling so I wouldn’t miss ANYTHING. Nowadays, my schedule is rock solid and I’ve been super on top of it.

I only say that so you can understand the immense confusion I feel when my doorbell rings at 2:00 pm on Monday and I hear a dog barking outside. I get my dogs calmed down and answer the door. On my doorstep is an elderly woman, maybe eighty years old, holding a very cute West Highland Terrier.

I’m honestly so confused by her being there that my mouth does not form words. I just sort of stand there, opening and closing my mouth like a fish out of water, while my brain is just screaming, “YOU FORGOT! YOU FORGOT!”

After a moment, she graciously saves me from myself, and talks first.

Lady: “Hello, I’m [Lady], and I’m here to drop my dog off for boarding!”

At this point, I’m almost positive that my nightmares have literally come true and I have straight-up deleted a dog from my short-term memory. But as I’m racking my brain, I cannot remember EVER seeing this dog or woman before.

Me: “Hi… uh… Who is this little guy?”

Lady: “This is Chico. I was hoping to leave him with you for the weekend while I visit my grandson.”

Okay. “Hoping”. That’s an interesting word. Now I’m less anxious but more confused.

Me: “Okay? Have we spoken about Chico before?”

Lady: “Oh, no. But your neighbor, [Neighbor], said you watched dogs, so I just brought him over!”

OKAY. Now, this is making more sense. [Neighbor] was my previous neighbor who had recently moved out. I had watched her dogs dozens of times, and she was always very kind to give my name out to people who were looking for dog sitters. Sometimes, however, she did treat me as “on-call” in the sense that she would call me as she was pulling out of her driveway to tell me she was leaving for the weekend and I would need to watch the dogs. She would play it off like she was so frazzled and forgot, but it started to get old after the third or fourth time.

At this point, I have a little old lady with her energetic dog on my porch and still more questions than answers. I invite her in while I try to get to the bottom of it. Come to find out, the lady is a friend of [Neighbor]’s mother, whom I have never met. [Neighbor] had a couple of my business cards at her house, and apparently, the last time her mother was visiting, she took a couple of them to give to her friends. Apparently, [Neighbor] inherited her entitlement from her mother, as her mother told this lady I was available ANYTIME for dog sitting. Literally anytime.

Worse yet, because [Neighbor] was my next-door neighbor, her mom figured out my address and gave it to the lady. Because of that behavior, the lady had the impression that I was a dog boarding facility, and she was just as confused as I was to arrive at a normal-looking house.

After we got it all explained, the lady and I had a pretty big laugh about it. The lady was super apologetic and sweet, but I knew it really wasn’t her fault, so there was no harm done. She was just a sweet old lady who got a little confused.

Unfortunately, because I was already booked, I couldn’t watch Chico. But good news! The lady determined that she could just visit her grandson the next weekend, and I went ahead and booked her for it. Chico and my dogs had plenty of time to socialize while the lady and I were chatting, and they were becoming fast friends. I think I may have just fallen back into a great client.

Still, I was a little miffed, so I called [Neighbor] and told her to ask her mother to please not tell people that they can just come by “anytime”. [Neighbor] was legitimately confused as to why it was an issue. After a few minutes of going around in circles, I simply said I couldn’t watch any dogs that I didn’t know and left it at that.

While I wish that was the end of it, two days later, [Neighbor] called me.

Neighbor: “I’ve just left my house. Can you please watch the dogs?”

Me: *Gently* “You just moved three hours away. I’m no longer your neighbor.”

She just gave a half-hearted “Oh…” and hung up. God bless her.

I come walking into my office area one morning, and my supervisor and one of the other floor managers are talking. They chat with me around all the time, so I get to hear interesting things that happen around work.

The other floor manager tells my supervisor that he was up on the mezzanine early this morning because he’s trying to find some tools that he knows for sure are here, but he hasn’t been able to locate them. (There’s a rumor going around work that some folks have been stealing tools, but nothing definitive has been proven yet.) He said when he was up on the mezzanine he noticed a few shelves in the back corner that were sitting away from the wall, but there was no way to look behind them without actually moving one of the shelves.

So, he moved a shelf so he could see behind them. The area behind the shelves was maybe a five-foot-by-five-foot space — not very big — just enough room for a small desk, chair, and computer. To his surprise, he found a computer that was up and running, and connected to it was a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, and the computer was plugged into some kind of cable box — his words; what he was talking about was a twenty-four-port switch — that had a lot of cables in it.

He checked the computer by moving the mouse and the monitor woke up, and he was now looking at the CCTV software and a dozen different cameras that were currently active on the screen. He had some experience with the CCTV software and noticed that whoever had been using this computer had access to the drives that store all the video, along with access and control to all the cameras. He tells my supervisor that they’ve been having issues with some cameras “going out” in certain areas; they come back on by themselves sometimes or they have to reset the CCTV system to get them to reboot. He’s now thinking someone has been deliberately disabling cameras so you can’t see what’s happening and possibly even deleting footage.

My supervisor and the other manager call out to the IT guy. They relay all the information to him.

IT Guy: “So what? I don’t care. It’s not my job to secure that computer.”

My supervisor knows I have computer experience and that I’m fixing computer issues all the time because our IT guy sucks. She asks me what I think about the IT guy’s response and asks what we should do about the computer.

Me: “At the very least, the computer needs to be password locked, and only owners and management that normally have access to the CCTV system should know the password. Next, since the computer is plugged into the switch and I don’t know who okayed it to be put there, I wouldn’t move it, but I would at least take the mouse, keyboard, and monitor off of it. After that, let ownership decide what needs to be done.”

The next day, the IT guy came walking through my office area and he was pissed. He had to go up on the mezzanine to unhook the computer and remove it from the system. He was complaining to my supervisor about it and how it shouldn’t be his responsibility to handle this issue.

Surprisingly, once that computer was removed from the network, the cameras were no longer “going out,” and the issue with missing tools had dropped dramatically.

High school prom is an event all unto itself. My friends and I were not big into the dance as we were all outcasts and didn’t see what the big deal was. We were talking about how we didn’t want to go to prom but we still wanted to do something, so our boyfriends told us to get dressed up and they would take us out. 

My two friends and I got dressed in our “prom” best and waited for the guys to pick us up. Our guys showed up in tuxedo T-shirts with jackets and top hats, looking amazing and silly at the same time. 

They took us to the [Fast Food Chain] one of them worked at. They had one part of the dining room blocked off. The employee’s dad greeted us, also wearing a tux shirt and top hat, and seated us at individual tables with white table cloths, candles, actual china, silver flatware, cloth napkins, and roses in tiny vases. 

We had our “fine dining” experience where we had our courses of burgers and fries brought out to us by the guy’s older brother — in a tux shirt and top hat — with sparkling grape juice being poured like fine wine from an ice wine bucket in the corner.

We had excellent service from the dad and brother who were the utmost professionals the entire time, though we were laughing, giggling, and just cracking up at how beyond sweet and ridiculous this all was.

The boy that thought of everything and somehow talked his family into this magical date night is now married to my friend with three amazing kids. 

He was telling his oldest son about how he came up with it all at BBQ last weekend, which makes me wonder if another girl is going to be swept off her feet?

My first job was working at a call center doing fraud protection. I got a call from our customer service team asking to transfer a call one day.

Customer Service: “I think someone took over the customer’s account. Her address and phone are correct, but someone else’s social security number is on the account and there were charges in a completely different state than she lives in that she didn’t make.”

Me: “Yeah, this doesn’t seem like regular fraud, but something odd is happening. Go ahead and transfer her and I’ll see what I can do.”

After being transferred, I went through the preliminaries, validating the customer’s identity, confirming which charges she didn’t make, etc. I could have just closed the account as fraudulent and let another department figure it out, but there were too many things that didn’t add up, so I decided that, rather than having her go back and forth with our other department when they insisted this wasn’t fraudulent, I’d try to figure it out now and save her some hassle. My only concern was whether the customer would either yell at me or freak out if I implied this wasn’t actually fraud, so I was very paranoid about saying the wrong thing and angering her.

Me: “Well, ma’am, I understand that you didn’t make these charges, and I assure you that we will not charge you for anything you didn’t do. However, this doesn’t look like your usual fraudulent activity. People taking over accounts want to put your social on accounts they made; putting their social on your account wouldn’t make any sense. And usually, someone taking over an account will buy gift cards or expensive electronics, not maternity wear, and they would usually spend far more than was spent here. We still won’t charge you if you didn’t make the purchases, but if you are willing to bear with me for a little while longer, I’d like to try to figure out what happened here so we can get everything resolved correctly without their having to contact you for more information later. Would that be okay?”

Customer: “Oh, sure, that’s fine. What do you need?”

Me: “First, I’d like to get your social security number fixed on this account. Could I get your proper social please?”

After correcting her social, I asked a few questions and dug around for a bit trying to deduce what had happened. All the while, I kept assuring her that we wouldn’t charge her for anything, and she was very polite about it. Eventually, on a whim, I tried to check the old social security number and was surprised to find out that it was a valid social. I’ve never run into a mistyped social security number that was actually valid before.

Me: “Okay, ma’am, I may have a guess what happened here. I’ll just need a few more minutes to check some things in my system if you don’t mind staying on the line.”

Customer: “Sure, go ahead.”

I pulled up some accounts and verified that my suspicion was likely.

Me: “Okay, ma’am, I suspect I know what happened here. I believe I know who made those purchases, and I don’t think they were intentionally trying to steal your account. We will still get the charges removed, but if I can verify my suspicions, we should be able to do it without having to close your account or have you fill out any additional paperwork for us.”

Customer: “That’s good, but how did the charges get on my account, then?”

I was actually hoping she wouldn’t ask this, as I didn’t want to explain the many levels of screw-up on our part required for my suspicion to have happened, but since she asked, I had to answer.

Me: “Well, the social security number on the account was very close to your own. I think the representative who helped you open the account must have accidentally transposed some digits when she put in the request. However, by pure chance, the mistyped social happens to have been a valid social security number belonging to another customer of ours, one that lives in the same state the purchases were made in. I believe she was trying to make a purchase on her card, and it was accidentally placed on your card by mistake.”

Customer: “But how would that happen? She doesn’t have my card, does she?”

Me: “No, ma’am. The charges were all done electronically. If you want to make a purchase at our store and don’t have your card present, it’s possible for a representative to do an account lookup for you so you can still make a purchase using your card. I believe they were trying to do that, but since your account still had the other women’s social security number on it, they accidentally looked your card up instead of hers. I’m really sorry that this all happened.”

Customer: “Oh, I guess that makes sense. But how do I get the charges removed?”

Me: “The easiest way would be if we can get the woman to confirm she made these charges, so I’d like to try to contact her. If she does agree, they should be able to transfer them back to her card without any problem. But I’d have to get hold of her first. I’ll try calling her as soon as I get off the phone with you, but it may be a day or so before we manage to reach her. If it’s okay with you, I’ll leave a note asking them to call you back and let you know what happened once we get ahold of the other woman. In the meantime, your card is still open and can be used. I’ve fixed your social so this won’t happen again. You don’t need to make any payment for the things you didn’t purchase; any kind of late fee or interest caused by the purchases last week will be removed from your card when the charges are transferred.”

Customer: “Oh, okay. Just let me know what happens, I guess?”

After some more polite apologies from me, the customer hung up. I called the other woman.

Me: “Hello, I’m calling from the [Company] fraud department. Is [Callee] available?”

Callee: “That’s me. Is something wrong?”

This is where things got awkward. I’m not allowed to discuss someone else’s account with a stranger, so even though I strongly suspected this woman was the one that actually made the purchases, I was not allowed to directly discuss them.

Me: “Nothing is wrong. I just wanted to determine if you had recently made a purchase at one of our stores?”

Callee: “Oh, you mean for clothing? Yeah, the representative tried to look up my account but somehow she got someone else’s account. We were trying to get it fixed but weren’t sure if it was or not.”

Here I gave a sigh of relief. Her coming out and admitting all this saved me a lot of difficulties trying to confirm charges I couldn’t even reference.

Me: “Ah, yes, that is what this is about. It caused us a bit of confusion here, but I figured that was what happened. I’ve fixed the issue that caused them to look up the wrong account, so it won’t happen again. I assume we have your permission to transfer the charges back to your card?”

Callee: “Yes, of course. Sorry to cause trouble.”

Me: “No, no, this wasn’t your fault. We screwed up by letting this be possible, but I promise we’ve fixed the problem. I’m going to try to get this sorted out for you, but since the transfer is going to have to be done by another department, there is a chance someone from that department may need to contact you to get approval to do the transfer.”

Again, the woman was polite and agreed to everything. I thoroughly notated both accounts explaining what happened and passed it over to the department that could transfer the charges. Then, I called back the first woman and let her know everything was sorted out. She actually thanked me for sorting everything out!

Most customers being interrogated for fifteen minutes about charges they didn’t make, only to find out numerous mistakes were made to have them show up on your account at all, would have been a recipe for my getting screamed at, but in this case, both women were polite, courteous, and understanding. I was shocked at my good fortune to have gotten away without a verbal lashing.

Thank you, customers, for being so understanding!

This story is part of our Not Always Right Most-Epic Stories roundup!

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I live with my sister. She has [contagious illness] and can’t smell well. She’s cooking spaghetti and adds sauce, and she asks me to try it. I do, and the sauce is sour.

Sister: “I’ll ask someone else.”

Me: “Don’t eat that! It’s rotten!”

My sister checks the bottle and frowns.

Sister: “Oh, it expired.”

Me: “See? I told you so!”

Sister: “I just thought… since you have acid reflux disease, everything tastes sour to you.”

Me: “Are you nuts? Everything doesn’t taste sour to me even though I have acid reflux! Is [illness] eating your brain cells?”

She dumped the spaghetti in disappointment. I’m glad she didn’t eat that sour stuff and get sicker!