My mom told me this story about getting the hospital bill after my brother was born, back in the early 1980s. The bill had the normal and expected charges, but many of them were doubled. Upon closer investigation, Mom realized the charges were for [Brother] and for “Baby.” She called the hospital’s billing office to clarify.

Mom: “I’m confused about why I have charges for two babies.”

Biller: “Yes, there are charges for both of your sons: [Brother] and Baby.”

Mom: “I only had one baby.”

Biller: “I show that you had twins.”

Mom: “I definitely didn’t.”

Biller: “My end shows two babies.”

Mom: “No. I would remember if I had twins. And if I did have two babies, I absolutely would have named the other one.”

The duplicate charges were corrected. And for the record, she never gave birth to any twins, and all of my siblings and I were given names promptly.

In my seventh-grade grammar class, I had an assignment to compare and contrast two animals; I chose whales and dogs.

Teacher: “You did the comparing and contrasting well, but I said two animals. Whales aren’t animals.”

Me: “How are they not animals?”

Teacher: “Only mammals are animals.”

Me: “But… whales are mammals.”

Teacher: “What?”

Me: “They breathe air, they nurse their young, they’re warm-blooded, and they even have a little bit of hair. And even if they were fish, fish are animals. And reptiles, and birds, and amphibians, and invertebrates.”

Teacher: “Well, I’ll have to talk to [Science Teacher]. The assignment is fine.”

I’m glad she taught grammar, not science, and that she was willing to learn.

I used to work for a third-party IT company. Due to the contract we had with this particular client, my role was actually onsite IT for them, so I was at one of the offices every day. Because this client had people going to the other offices and working from home frequently, everyone had laptops.

Whenever one particular employee would go work from home, she would come back complaining that her computer wasn’t working for whatever reason. I had variations on this conversation several times while I worked there.

Employee: “Yeah, I took it home and it stopped working.”

Me: “It just stopped working? Were there any error messages, or did it randomly shut down?”

I knew exactly what the issue was; we just needed her to say it so we could lecture her about it again. If we tried to call her on it before she actually said anything, we were in for a round of “I would never” and complaining.

Employee: “Well, it wouldn’t do [something random], so [Her Husband] got on and started trying to fix it. He’s also in IT, so I knew he could fix it, but it just made it worse.”

She had a couple of different “issues” that would always absolutely require her husband to get on and fix them. I don’t remember all of them, but for example: once, her Internet wasn’t working, which turned out to be an outage in their area, but her husband ended up disabling like half the adapters and managed to break the software she used for accounting. It was just a mess. And honestly, I have no idea how he even did it since, while that place wasn’t the best, I’ll admit, they still knew that giving everyone admin rights just because wasn’t the smartest move.

Me: “[Employee], your husband should not be troubleshooting our laptops. You shouldn’t be letting anyone other than one of us troubleshoot because we can access everything if needed.”

Employee: “Well, he’s in IT, so I figured it was fine. He’s fixed it before!”

Me: “Leave your laptop with me for a bit. I’ll see what we can do.”

We continued to get issues like that every time she worked from home. It was worse when she went on maternity leave because she just went to work from home instead of hybrid, and every time her husband would break something, she’d call us to complain.

It took longer than I felt it should, especially since this had been going on before I started, but it got to the point where my manager sent a letter to the employee’s manager that basically said, “If you’re not happy with your IT help, feel free to hire someone else.”

Surprisingly, her husband stopped not-fixing stuff after that.

When you use the voice-to-text feature on a phone, it usually gets some words wrong in an understandable way. This is the story of the best (and worst) voice-to-text error I’ve ever seen.

I used to take classes at the University of Washington, or UW. People would commonly pronounce the name “U-Dub” rather than saying the whole thing. One day, I was just leaving a class at a secondary campus in a smaller town called Bothell.

I texted my husband to tell him where to meet me. He was already driving, so his phone read out my text to him, and he replied using voice-to-text.

Husband: *To his phone* “Okay, I’m coming to pick you up at U-dub Bothell.”

Text I Received: “Okay, I’m coming to pick you up and you are awful.”

Fortunately, I knew right away it was a mistake, and we had a great laugh about it when he got there and I showed him how the text had turned out!

Back in the days when long-distance calling cards were common, I used one to make calls home from college. I sent in a check for a little over $30.00 one month and transferred enough cash from my savings account to cover the check.

A week later, my checking account was overdrawn. I called up the telephone banking line.

Me: “My account is overdrawn. Can you tell me what happened?”

Agent #1: “There’s a $100.00 check that we cashed.”

Me: “I didn’t write any checks for that amount.”

Agent #1: “You must have forgotten about it.”

Me: “The only outstanding check I had was for slightly over $30. I didn’t write a $100.00 check.”

Agent #1: “You must have forgotten about it.”

Me: “Okay. Send me a copy of this $100.00 check.”

A few days later, a letter arrived from my bank… with a copy of my check for the calling card. I called the bank again.

Me: “Hi. My checking account went into the red because of a $100.00 check. I asked for a copy of the check, and I got a check for slightly over $30. Can you explain what happened?”

Agent #2: “Um. That’s odd. Do you see some numbers printed in the lower right of the check?”

Me: “Yes. One, zero, zero, zero, zero.”

Agent #2: “Oh. Somebody must have entered your check as a $100.00 entry. I’ll arrange a refund of the excess charge and the overdraft charge.”

What I learned when I got my next calling card bill was that they couldn’t get the money back. I had a little over $60.00 in credit. Still, I wish the first agent had been a little more interested in finding out what happened and less interested in blaming me.