My parents are very close friends with a couple they met in college, even though the couple relocated to the Washington, DC area over thirty years ago. I rarely met this couple growing up due to the roughly 450-mile distance, but I ended up getting a summer internship in DC during college, and my parents and brother decided to visit me that July. [Wife] owned a catering company, and she and her husband invited us all out to dinner at a nice restaurant opened by one of her former employees.

On the way there, my dad made a joke to my brother and me.

Dad: “At some point, ask [Husband] what he does for a living and see if he’ll actually tell you, because we’ve been trying to get a straight answer for thirty years. We think he might be a spy.”

We laughed.

Mom: “No, seriously! He used to travel a lot without [Wife], and he has all this military knowledge but always says he’s not in the military. And don’t they say all the intelligent people live in Virginia, not DC? We’re dying to find out!”

I asked [Husband] about his job during dinner, as requested. He gave me some vague answer about supply chains, then said he was semi-retired now anyway, and smoothly transitioned to a new topic. We had a lovely dinner, and the couple invited us to their house a few days later for the last day of my family’s visit.

Everyone chipped in to help cook and set the table, and at one point, I was the only one in kitchen when my mom opened a cabinet and gasped. She had found a shelf of cookbooks.

Mom: “Look at this! The C.I.A. Cookbook!”

We looked at each other gleefully. Was this it? Had we finally solved the mystery? Did [Husband] really give himself away by keeping a copy of the Central Intelligence Agency’s cookbook? (Why does the C.I.A. even have a cookbook?) Then, [Wife] came back in.

Wife: “You found my cookbook collection! I know, it’s a lot, right?”

[Wife], the high-end caterer, who had a Master’s degree from the Culinary Institute of America.

The mystery remains unsolved.

Many years ago, I was a delivery driver and trainer at a popular pizza delivery store. One of our general rules was to carry only enough money to make change from $20. We had lockboxes in the store where we’d drop money (cash or checks) after a delivery. We would get tips (usually) for our deliveries, and we’d put those into the boxes, as well. At the end of our shifts, we’d turn in the money for our deliveries. Any excess would be our tip money, plus the 6% commission from the orders. I would write down how much tip I got from each delivery, rounding to the nearest $0.25. This would usually be within a dollar of my actual tips, which greatly simplified the math.

One young driver I trained didn’t get the concept that you’d get your tips at the end of the shift after subtracting your delivery total from the lockbox receipts. He would meticulously figure his tip, count it out in his car after the delivery, and place it in his own personal lockbox in his car.

When I found out he was doing this, I made a strong suggestion.

Me: “You really should drop all your money at the store so you don’t have over $20 in your car at any time.”

New Driver: “The tips I get are mine. I’ll lose them if I put them in the store lockbox.”

It was simple subtraction to prove that this wasn’t the case, but he wouldn’t listen.

One evening, he took a delivery into one of the sketchier neighborhoods in our area. When he returned to the car and dug out his personal lockbox, a couple of teens ran up to him as he had his car door open and grabbed his lockbox. He gave chase, but they were faster. So, he lost his tips for the night.

He reported it to the manager, who called the police. Sadly, there was little they could do to track down the thieves. The manager gave him the rest of the night off, and I was assigned to check him out.

At the end, he was upset that he only had $6 more than what he started with, which was his commission.

New Driver: “What about my tips?”

Me: “Since the cash was in your car instead of in the store lockbox, management isn’t responsible for your loss.”

I then worked him through how putting his tip money in the store lockbox would not only keep it safe but he’d have that money consolidated in larger bills. I also showed him how I rounded the tips to the nearest quarter dollar, which gave me a reasonable estimate of what my nightly tips should be.

He finally got it, and it just cost him one night’s tips.

Content Warning: Death

My father was in a bad car accident on the thirteenth of February, and unfortunately, we had to take him off of life support on the fourteenth. As I lived closest and my family lived three hours away, I got to the hospital first and had to deal with answering the same questions over and over from my family.

I’ve taken off work, and so has my partner so that he can support me. He lost his grandfather last Saturday, so it’s not been the best of weeks. I haven’t eaten for most of the day as I’ve been too worried about my dad and too focused on what had to happen.

Finally, we head home from the hospital. I realize I need to eat something, so we stop at a popular gas station that makes good sandwiches to order. After placing our order, I kind of just stand there, full zombie mode engaged. I just want my sandwich, a good cry, and sleep.

The man behind the counter decides my face doesn’t look cheerful enough.

Employee: “You should smile! You’ll be much prettier if you smile!”

I absolutely hate this day and literally have no filter left.

Me: “I just took my father off life support and he died. I’m not in the mood to fricking smile.”

All color drained from the employee’s face, and he just shut his mouth and look back to what he had been working on. My partner thought this was hilarious and wouldn’t let me feel bad about ripping the guy a new one.

A lot of colleges have alarm boxes/phone boxes in less crowded areas of campus, particularly areas with cell signal gaps. At one point at my college, one of those alarm boxes was busted.

Unsurprisingly, there was a sign on it that read: “Phone broken.”

Right below that, someone had scrawled on said sign: “Keep running.”

In the 1980s, Virginia started their state lottery, where you’d select six numbers from one to forty-four for your ticket. This resulted in just over seven billion combinations.

My boss at my office was sure he had a system he could use to win. He asked me, as his computer and math expert, for help.

Boss: “I need you to print out a complete list of all the possible combinations of lottery numbers for me.”

Me: “That would actually take quite a while.”

Boss: “I’ll authorize overtime for you to come in on Saturday and do it.”

I calculated that if I printed 240 combinations per sheet of paper — one-sided; this was the 1990s — I’d use nearly 30,000 sheets, which is sixty reams of paper, or six standard boxes. Our office usually kept a ten-box supply on hand, and I thought the office vice president would blow a lid if I (under orders) used most of the week’s paper supply.

Instead, I figured I could use my CAD plotter, which could print 36-inch-by-180-inch drawings, for the task. Setting a font to a barely legible size would only use twenty-seven drawings at that maximum size. The trouble was that the plotter had to remember all the vectors to plot the numbers from over a quarter-million combinations per drawing before actually plotting. This was maxing out its memory, so plotting wasn’t working.

I then read the CAD manual and discovered how to create my own fonts. I created a font that used minimal vectors; basically, the digits looked like seven-segment LED characters. But it got the job done, and I plotted out twenty-seven drawings.

Monday morning, my boss came to see me. He couldn’t believe that all the combinations produced so much output.

Me: “It was either twenty-seven drawings or sixty reams of paper.”

I think he gave up on his “system” to beat the lottery.