I have this recipe for molasses spice cookies that have always gotten (and still get to this day) rave reviews from every person who’s ever tried them. Family, classmates, professors, apartment office employees — they really greased the social wheels!

For a few years, I decided that I would make these cookies my main Christmas present to all of my various family and friends who lived several states away. When I went to a shipping store to mail out batches of them, I took along some extras and gave them to the girl working there. She shrugged and said thanks.

I then went next door to pick up some groceries. While I was browsing the produce, my phone rang from an unknown number.

Me: “Hello?”

Girl: “Hi, is this [My Name]?”

Me: “Yes, it is.”

Girl: “Hey, this is [Girl] at the [Shipping] store. You were just in here?”

Me: “Is everything okay? Did I make a mistake with something?”

Girl: “I just had to call and tell you these are the best cookies I have ever eaten! THANK YOU!”

A year later, she remembered me and gave me the employee discount, while standing over her coworker’s shoulders and telling him about the cookies.

My grandmother, as shown in these stories, is a total drama queen and also kind of insane. If we had the money, we would stick her in a home in a heartbeat.

One day, my brother and his girlfriend are in the living room and Grandma is in the kitchen. The girlfriend sneezes a grand total of once. A few days later, Grandma starts to feel sick. Grandma is convinced the girlfriend got her sick even though she and no one else in the house is sick. Her only symptom is a bit of diarrhea which, as far as we can tell only lasted a day or two, but that could’ve easily come from something she ate because she tends to put her food directly on the counters or on the microwave tray; she doesn’t believe in using napkins or plates when preparing her food. She’s also not the best at washing her hands properly. Either way, she doesn’t come downstairs for almost a week.

Once again, she fails to understand that just because Dad works from home, it does not mean he’s available. Dad starts work around 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning, and he’s done by 2:00 pm. Dad tells Grandma not to schedule any doctor visits, virtual or in person, before 2:00 pm. Twice, she “forgets” about this. The third time, she does actually manage to schedule a virtual visit for 4:30 pm, but the doctor never answers. When she does finally manage to get into a virtual appointment, she tells the doctor how awful her symptoms are and that she has a high fever despite never once taking her temperature.

Fast forward a few days to Christmas. My uncle and cousins come over to visit, so Grandma manages to drag her sick self downstairs because she’s suddenly feeling well enough for company. Now, Grandma calls one of my cousins on a near daily basis and tells her everything. This cousin had to learn the hard way to call us for the real story because of how badly Grandma spins everything.

Anyway, we’re talking, and my cousin asks my brother about his girlfriend.

Brother: “She’s spending Christmas with her family in Maryland. I’ll see her tomorrow.”

Cousin: “I hope she’s feeling better.”

Brother: “Huh?”

Cousin: “Grandma said she was sick.”

Brother: “No, she’s not sick. She was never sick.”

Grandma: “Yes, she was. She gave me whatever she had.”

Brother: “She was never sick! I don’t know how you got sick, but it wasn’t from [Girlfriend].”

Mom quickly changed the subject because she didn’t want to start a big argument in front of everyone. Later, my uncle — who swore he would never take her to another doctor’s appointment ever again — agreed to start taking her to doctor appointments again.

Related:
We Should Totally Just Drown Our Salads
We Should Totally Just Drug Grandma! (Not Really), Part 2
We Should Totally Just Drug Grandma! (Not Really)
We Should Totally Just Stab Caesar! (Salad), Part 2
We Should Totally Just Stab Caesar! (Salad)

I do not work in a bank, nor have I ever. I work in a pet store. I am a supervisor. My cashier came to get me saying a woman wanted change. I figured he had forgotten to give her some dollars. I am met with a woman asking to make change for her twenty-dollar bill. She hasn’t bought anything.

Customer: “I shop here all the time, and I want you to break this $20 for me so I can give my hairdresser a tip.”

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I don’t have change.”

Customer: “Back in my day of retail, we helped our customers. You’re not sorry.”

She walks out and then comes back in.

Customer: “I just wanted you to know that from now on, I’m going to be ordering my stuff online!”

She stormed out. I am not a hairdresser, either.

When I was seventeen or eighteen, one night, I was on my way home from an evening shift at a fast food place. Cop lights appeared behind me, so I pulled over. A town cop came up to my window and, after demanding my license and registration, said:

Cop: “Do you realize you pulled out right in front of me?”

Me: *Frowning, confused* “Where?”

He named a street whose intersection I had passed a mile or so back.

Me: *Frowning again* “If I pulled out right in front of you, why did it take you so long to catch up to me?”

He blinked, thought for a second, then handed me back my license and registration, and told me not to do it again.

When my office in the early 1990s first started using email, the process was a bit more involved. Instead of being connected constantly, we had to use a modem to call a server and exchange the new emails we’d authored with incoming emails from our customers. Since the program that did the connection and email interchange was DOS-based, it was the only program that could run at a time on a particular PC.

Our secretary who handled the email found that if she didn’t disconnect, she would get informed of any new emails in real-time. Unfortunately, she could only do this if she wasn’t planning on using her computer for anything else. (The office was still using typewriters, so she still could do work.)

One day, when she went to lunch, she kept the email program connected. An older engineer saw that her computer was still connected for email, so he decided to write a joke email chastising her for leaving her email program on. It was something along the lines of:

Email: “Oops! I goofed and left my email open so that anyone can write messages pretending to be me!”

When she got back from lunch, she was very upset about the intrusion and was worried about getting in trouble even though she’d done nothing wrong.

As the office “computer guy”, (no official IT team existed), I took it upon myself to address the issue. I wrote a reply to the message along the lines of:

Reply: “This is a professional office. If you see technology on that is not your responsibility, please leave it be. Do not pull juvenile pranks.”

Though the engineer didn’t get in any trouble, he later did with another incident. He was using email to write explicit love letters to a woman he was seeing at the US Navy office. He accidentally replied to one of her messages by clicking a checkbox that sent his reply to not only everyone in our office but to everyone in the US Navy office (several hundred people). Since our email access was through the Navy, he (and we) got into a bit of hot water because of his error.