I am travelling on the bus from Vancouver to Seattle. As I am getting on the bus, I see another traveller rock up who immediately looks suspicious. He’s arrived with zero luggage and looks far too relaxed. Something about his body language and demeanour looks funny, and a couple of travellers even mention the fact he has no luggage. I put this down to me just being paranoid and decide that as long as he’s not causing trouble I’ll pay him no mind.

When we get to the US/Canada border, his demeanour immediately changes. He appears a little more jittery and nervous and begins to pace around. Immediately, one of the US border agents takes notice. 

Border Agent: “Hey, sir… Are you all right? Why are you pacing around so much?”

The guy tries to ignore him.

Border Agent: “Sir… why are you pacing around?”

The guy then gives him an extremely arrogant sneer and shrugs. Instantly, all of us can tell this was a dumb move! 

Border Agent: “Come with me, please, sir!”

He gestures for him to follow, but the guy remains rooted to the spot.

Border Agent: “Sir, come this way immediately!”

The guy very sheepishly followed him into the building. When we left the border, the guy wasn’t on the bus. I have no idea what he was doing, but I have a feeling it was illicit. The lesson here when dealing with border agents: don’t be that guy!

I turn in my notice to a retail job and am working my last two weeks. A lady comes through with a small child, maybe two years old, and is only buying diapers and garbage bags.

After going through SEVERAL cards and all of them getting declined, she is getting frustrated but remaining polite. She is digging through her purse yet again but can find no other method of payment.

I see no nearby supervisors and so I look at the lady.

Me: “Okay, this is what was going to happen. I am going to take $40 out of my wallet and hand it to you, and then you are going to hand it back to me and I am going to put it in the register.”

Before the lady can respond, I have my wallet out and hand her the money. She takes it rather hesitantly but then hands it back. I put it in my till, hand her what little change there is and the receipt, and wish her a wonderful evening.

Customer: *Starting to cry* “Thank you so much! I am going to tell your manager about you!”

I asked her not to. She did end up telling the supervisor that I was extremely helpful with her order, but thankfully, she left it vague which is fine. I just wasn’t going to let that kid go home without diapers.

Because I went to one of the top ten public colleges for computer science, I was used to numerous big tech firms showing up to try to recruit us, and often attended these events for the free food and swag. I was a poor college student; I would have done anything short of murder for some free pizza!

One of these events was with [Multinational Technology Corporation]. I got there early and the recruiter started talking to me. I was wearing a shirt given to me by a previous [Corporation] recruiter; I have two of the same shirt, both given to me by recruiters from this company.

Recruiter: “That’s an interesting shirt.”

Me: “Yeah, I like it. It says, ‘Geek,’ in binary.”

Recruiter: “Huh? How can it say anything?”

Me: “Well… each of these sets of numbers is a byte that can be converted to a letter. See, this one is a G, these two are E’s, and this is a K.”

Recruiter: “How do you get a letter from them?”

Me: “I looked up the number the binary represents in a table. Every possible number has some letter or other character it represents.”

Recruiter: “Oh, so it’s like a code?”

Me: “Umm, yeah. That’s literally the code computers use to store words.”

Recruiter: “That’s cool.”

The recruiter wandered off shortly after. I don’t expect a layman to know everything about a computer. I wouldn’t blame someone for not knowing what my shirt said. Still, I have trouble fathoming how someone whose job is literally recruiting programmers for one of the biggest tech firms in the world, who likely had to give out these very shirts before, wouldn’t at some point have learned that computers use binary.

For the record, I did intern with that corporation, where I received yet another copy of the binary geek shirt at one point, but ultimately, I chose to stick closer to home once I graduated.

I work for a popular video game shop where you can bring in games to trade for cash or store credit.

Our particular location is in a somewhat seedier part of town, so everyone that works here is very used to people bringing in bottom-of-the-barrel, often dirty stuff to get a couple of bucks. Thus, I’m not surprised to see a strung-out woman pace up to the counter with a heavy-looking paper bag. I put on my best customer service face and get started.

Customer: “Just seeing what I can get for this stuff. It’s mostly my boyfriend’s so I don’t really know what’s in there.”

Me: “No problem. Go ahead and set the bag up here and I’ll start sorting it out.”

She seems either too distracted or reluctant to hand the bag over, but she finally does so when she hears her boyfriend calling from the door. While she heads back over to talk with him, I start unloading the bag. Predictably, it’s mostly titles we barely pay a quarter for, as well as some DVD box sets and such that we don’t take.

She comes back about the time that I’m getting to the bottom of the bag, so I look up at her as I try to finish.

Customer: “He just wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything in there he wanted.”

Me: “Well, you’re free to take back the DVDs and any of the games so far he’d rather keep—”

I pause because my hand has touched a fairly large cylinder. I look into the bag. She looks into the bag. What I have touched looks like an old-style flashlight, just a little bigger, with the wider “light” end capped. The woman starts giggling hysterically and my stomach turns as I realize what I’ve just put my bare fingers on.

The customer turns to my coworker, who has seen none of this.

Customer: “Oh, she knows what that is! She knows what that is.” *To me* “Bet you didn’t expect to see that, huh?”

I am too shocked — and frankly nauseated — to even respond, so I just silently go to the register to ring up the offer we can make on the games, which is only a couple of dollars in the first place. She accepts cheerfully enough, stuffs the DVDs back in the bag, and then heads out laughing. I IMMEDIATELY run to the restroom to wash my hands, and believe me, there is no water in the world hot enough to make them feel clean again. 

When I come back, my coworker is still agog. 

Coworker: “Was that a prank or did she seriously think we’d be interested in her boyfriend’s sex toy?!”

I STILL don’t know the answer to that question.

I’m trying to clean out my closet and am going around the block to whatever secondhand shops are buying, and when none of it sells, I donate the rest to the thrift stores. One of the secondhand shops has a bulldog that pops in on occasion.

I’m sitting in the back waiting to be seen by the cashier and the dog is curled up by my feet. A man walks in with a pizza. He immediately dumps the box on the floor and starts feeding it to the dog.

Customer: “Here, take this. Eat this.”

I’m wondering whether I should step in when one of the staff walks into the back.

Staff: “Hey, sir, please don’t leave that all over the rugs. And don’t feed your pizza to the dog.”

Customer: “All right, all right.”

Despite this, the man keeps trying to feed it to the dog. The staff member comes back.

Staff: “I already told you, don’t do that. The last thing we want is to make him sick; he’s on a special diet.”

Customer: “Okay, I gotcha. Just gimme a moment.”

Still no dice. He’s still trying to feed the pizza to the dog. After a moment, the staff member comes back.

Staff: “We’ve told you, and we’re not gonna tell you again. As a matter of fact, we’re not gonna tell you at all. Get out of our store and don’t come back.”

The man started swearing and immediately booked it out of the store with pizza in hand. I overheard some staff members talking about him and asking each other if they knew the guy. Apparently, he pulls this kind of stunt on occasion and somehow managed to steal a whole pizza, so he was trying to get rid of the evidence by feeding it to the store’s dog. I’m still trying to wrap my head around how he got away with that one.