During my college years in the mid- to late 2000s, I enrolled at a well-known university that has a central campus and multiple smaller “satellite” campuses. Halfway through my four-year program, I moved to the central campus almost three hours from my home. Since I wanted to visit family and friends back home, I resolved to do it one Friday a month and make a long weekend of it. It was always a rush to get out of my last class in the early afternoon, ride the bus to the apartment, hop in my car with a heavy backpack, and get out of town before any early afternoon traffic picked up. Sometimes other people had the same idea.

On a particular chosen weekend to go home, I was a quarter of the way there while driving on a typical US highway where you have the left “passing” lane and the right “slower traffic” lane. Granted, in my experience circa 2015 and onward, these left and right lane designations are heavily blurred beyond recognition, but in the mid-2000s, that wasn’t always the case. At any rate, I had gotten far enough down the road to leave most heavy traffic behind; at most a handful of cars were in my vicinity.

I was traveling at a fair enough speed of 60 mph in a 55 mph zone when this red car came up behind me in one of those “out of nowhere” scenarios. A speed increase was coming up later, but as this area had “work zone” written all over it, I wanted to stay within the limit. I took note of the red car but mostly ignored the driver and kept on with my destination and plans for that weekend. Over the next few minutes, I’d glance every so often behind me and notice that the person was creeping up on me to a final distance of maybe two or three car lengths. Maybe another minute passed and still this person was at that distance, acting almost as if they were edging me to go faster. I did not make any sign that I was going to go faster and kept relatively consistent.

This continued for several more miles without me budging to accommodate their seeming want for me to go faster. As I had gotten my license to drive roughly two years prior and I didn’t have to drive far for classes until this point, I was still a greenhorn and very afraid of breaking speeding laws — not that I try to now but I was really anal about it then.

I’m not sure what was going through this person’s head as they continued to follow me, but they stayed on my tail for almost ten miles. I was on a relatively empty highway in the right lane and they never thought to pass me the entire time the road was empty around us. They had to be tailing me for at least ten minutes going at a “slow” speed before it dawned on them that they could pass me. Once they did this, the red car promptly zoomed down the road and out of sight, but not before making a show of sorts by gunning the engine while passing me doing up to 90 mph. Yeah, I was annoyed by their bizarre attitude, but I let it go and returned to my trip home, eventually forgetting about the red car.

Maybe half an hour later, though, I was reminded of them with wonderful Karmic justice. There is a point about halfway between the college town and my home where the highway is easily accessible by a side road and small town. Police cars tend to sit there in wait for passing cars going too fast. It just so happened that on this Friday a policeman was there. Guess who was parked on the side of the road in front of a police car with flashing lights?

Maybe my slower driving put them in a frenzy, but if that was really the case why did they take so long to just go around me for the miles that they had time to do it in? We were the only two cars going the same direction for that span of time.

Every year, residents receive a town census that they have to fill out and return. The department that receives these is located in the same office as us, but we have separate windows and counters separated by a wall.

Each window has the name of the department directly above where you stand, so there is one for “Town Clerk.” The census is mailed in an envelope with “Town Clerk” on it. There is a return envelope included addressed to “Town Clerk.” The census itself has a note that says, “Return to the Town Clerk,” on it in bold. I put a box on the counter in front of the “Town Clerk” window with a sign saying, “Place census in this box,” in large, 96-point, bold red font.

My window is not the “Town Clerk” window.

I still have at least twenty residents a day come to my window and give me their census. I don’t know how to make it clearer.

I have a manager who is a pathological liar; therefore, everyone else must be a pathological liar. Due to the health crisis, I spend a lot of the time in the office alone, but even prior to the crisis, my manager came in infrequently and only when she thought her boss would be there or when it would make her look good. It is worth noting that I don’t technically have to go into the office and can work from home, but I like how quiet it is with no one there.

On a day I know no one else is coming in, I take my car up the street to get its oil change. It is a five-minute walk so I drop it off before 8:00 am and go about my business.

Around 1:00 pm, my car is ready for pickup. No one else is in the parking lot at this time. I go to pick it up, and when I come back I see that my manager’s car is there, fifteen minutes later. Since she works upstairs while I work downstairs, I think nothing of it and go about my business.

Around 3:00 pm, my manager calls me.

Manager: “Are you in the office?”

Me: “Yes.”

Manager: “Oh. I’m not.”

The call lasts until 3:30 pm and she is gone by 3:45 pm when I go for an “air break.”

A few days later, my manager’s boss approaches me about this with my manager smirking in the background.

I reply calmly.

Me: “Oh, yeah. I went to [Car Shop] across the street to get my oil changed. That is why my car wasn’t there from 8:00 am to 1:30 pm. You can check the footage if you like?”

My manager’s face just dropped to the floor. I wish I could say that would teach her to stop trying to get others in trouble, but I doubt it.

I’m working the ticketing desk of a large museum. A family with two children approaches my desk.

Mother: “Hi, the ticket taker said there was something wrong with my ticket. Can you help me?”

Me: “Sure. That’s interesting; I’ve never seen this kind of ticket before… Uh, ma’am, these tickets are for a museum in Washington.”

We’re in Colorado.

Mother: “Really? I let my twelve-year-old buy them. They still work, though, right?”

Me: *Pauses* “No, sorry, they’re not for our museum.”

Mother: “But I already paid for them!”

Me: “But you didn’t pay us. We have no affiliation with that museum whatsoever.”

She stormed off to talk with the rest of her family. I don’t remember if she actually bought a ticket for our museum or not.

Many years ago, the water supply system in my hometown was privately owned. The city had granted a license to operate to a man who already owned a suitable reservoir built for a long-gone sawmill, and he operated the water system rather than everyone having to have a well.

While the streets were mostly paved, there were no sidewalks, and the water pipes ran under the unpaved areas to make it easier to work on the lines. Naturally, there were only a few places that had handholes to reach the valves. Also, there were few maps of the system, and it mostly relied on memory and local knowledge of where everything was.

Some years later, the system passes to another man, who has been assisting the owner for several years. [Owner] is getting on in years and is rather obstreperous. We joke that if you looked up “curmudgeon,” you’d find his picture.

It’s late summer and the reservoir is down lower than it should be, so the town is on watering restriction, and some of the industrial users are pumping from the river for their process water to reduce the load on the reservoir.

[Owner] drives down one of the streets, and finds a local resident watering his garden on a day when he shouldn’t be.

Owner: “Turn that sprinkler off!”

Resident: “Nope.”

Owner: “You turn it off or I will!”

Resident: “No, you won’t.”

So, [Owner] digs up the shutoff for [Resident]’s property and turns the valve off. And the sprinkler keeps going. [Owner] goes up to the head of the street, digs up the valve there, and turns the street off. The sprinkler’s still going. [Owner] figures this might be one of the strange places that are fed from the street behind, so he digs up that valve and turns that street off, too.

The spinkler’s still going.

Owner: “[Resident]! You got a well?!”

Resident: “A-yep.”

Owner: “Why didn’t you say so?!”

Resident: “You didn’t ask.”

The shutoff for [Resident]’s property did turn off the system’s supply… which fed only one faucet in the middle of the yard.

A few years later, the city got a loan from the federal government to buy the water system, which let [Owner] retire.