(I have been experiencing undiagnosed depression and severe anxiety caused by a serious accident while I was in the military. As such, after being let go from my job for something I didn’t do, I end up getting admitted into the psych ward at the Veterans hospital. Before admittance, you have to get your blood drawn to test for drugs.)

Screening Nurse: “Okay, hon, this is the nurse that is going to take your blood.”

(The nurse tries to insert the needle in the crook of my arm and misses.)

Nurse: “Oh, darn! Let me try again.”

(He tries again and misses.)

Nurse: “Let me try on the top of your wrist.”

Me: “Umm… Isn’t that going to be harder? I am a very easy stick; maybe you should try on my right arm.”

Nurse: “No, I can get the vein on the top of your wrist.”

Me: “Um, okay.”

(The nurse proceeded to miss twice more on the top of my wrist. The third try, he wiggled the needle around to try and catch the vein — don’t ask me why he thought that would work — and as a last-ditch effort and with no warning, he went vertical with the needle and rammed it straight down into my wrist. I darn near hauled off and punched him, but I settled for cursing. Miraculously, he did manage to get blood… which lead to another problem. He never put the cap on the end of the tube, so instead of the blood stopping at the end of the tube, it just spewed all over me, the chair, the nurse, and the floor. Once we stopped all that nonsense and got my test results back, which were clean, I finally was admitted into the psych ward where I had to explain to the nurses that, no, I did not try and cut my arm off, their nurse just sucks at blood draws, and that’s why my arm was covered in bandages. Welcome to the VA, folks.)

(I live in the state of Wisconsin and I have Internet friends all over, including one in North Carolina. The following is a conversation I once had with her.)

Friend: “Come give me a hug!”

Me: “Sure! I’ll be there in however long it takes me to get from Wisconsin to North Carolina.”

Friend: “Wisconsin?”

Me: “The state? Wisconsin?”

Friend: “Wisconsin is a state?”

(We get other Internet friends involved, most of them yelling at her that yes, Wisconsin is a state. I start trying to describe where it’s located to maybe get her to realize.)

Me: “Have you ever heard of the city Chicago?”

Friend: “Chicago? Yeah, isn’t it over by Idaho?”

Me: *deep sigh*

My eye doctor retired a couple of years ago, right around the time his practice stopped taking my insurance, anyway. As a result, I pushed my contact lenses to the limit, because finding a new eye doctor who would take my insurance was troublesome, and I initially wanted to go to a different practice. At last, however, my contacts are so old that I’m worried about damaging my eyes if I continue to wear them, or ripping them with no replacements, so I’m ready to bite the bullet and try a walk-in eye care center for the first time.

It’s late afternoon on Black Friday, and I’m desperate; this is the first time since the situation became dire that I have had any time to do this, and my mother agrees that we will go to the eye care center in the mall, since she has other shopping to do, anyway. We walk in. There are some other customers, but not a massive amount, and there is nobody at the reception desk in the middle of the room.

A young man in his late teens or early twenties comes by a minute later and greets us, but says he can’t do anything for us; he seems to be a low-level employee whose only job is cleaning. A woman stops by at last, and we explain that I need an eye exam to renew my prescription and will make an appointment if none are available for the rest of the day. She says she’ll be with us in a minute, tells us to take a seat, and proceeds to go over to a pair of customers who are looking at glasses and are extremely picky. That’s their prerogative, of course, but after waiting for fifteen minutes with every apparent employee focusing on various glasses customers when all we want is to make an appointment for later if the doctor can’t see us now, I insist that we leave, resigned to having to wait another few days until I had the time to try a different store on the other side of town.

As we are pulling out, I realize that there is a different eye care center in a strip mall right across the street! We walk in; there are three employees sitting behind the counter who greet us immediately, and have no problem squeezing me in for an appointment the next morning when they see how crestfallen I am that the first one they offer is too late in the afternoon, when I’ll already be at work. I have since had nothing but rapid, excellent, and affordable care from them.

If only the employees at the other eye care center had bothered to speak to us for two minutes, I’d be their new patient and customer, instead!

This story is part of the Eye Exam roundup!

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(I very occasionally lose my brain-to-mouth filter and interesting stuff happens. Most of the time when I lose my filter I’m around friends and family, but this time…)

Me: “All right, that will be [total].”

(A customer who is an elderly female first pulls out a large bill, then says:)

Customer: “Hold on. I think I have exact change!”

(She pulls out a couple of small bills and a LOT of singles.)

Customer: “You’d think with all these singles I’d have enough!”

Me: “Well, hey, at least you’ll be set if you need to go to a strip club.”

(The moment I’ve said it I want to scream in horror at what I’ve said, not just because of who I have said it to, but because one of my supervisors is standing four feet away! And the look he gives me is one of equal horror to my own. Thankfully:)

Customer: *laughing hysterically* “Oh, lord, that is the truth, though!”

(I’m working in a call center that pays above minimum wage, but not by much. I’m an extremely frugal person, which serves me well in this job. My coworkers sometimes have a harder time with it. The following describes several conversations with one such coworker.)

Coworker #1: “Ooh, that smells good! What are you eating?”

Me: “Tomato-basil bisque with cornbread muffins.”

Coworker #1: “Wait, from [Expensive Restaurant]? How the h*** can you afford that?!”

Me: “No, I made it, from some tomatoes I canned up last summer. Only about fifty cents worth of ingredients, and it made about three quarts worth!”

Coworker #1: “D***, girl, nobody has time for crap like that!” *eats her $10 takeout meal*

(Later:)

Coworker #1: “Hey, did you see [TV Show] last night?”

Me: “No, I don’t watch much TV, sorry.”

Coworker #1: “WHAT?! What the h*** do you do with your time?! I’d be bored out of my mind.”

(Another day, she overhears me talking with another coworker about a good-quality grain-grinder I bought.)

Coworker #1: “How the h*** can you even afford that?!”

Me: “I’ve been saving up for it for two years now. I have a ton of wild grains growing in my backyard. If I can—“

Coworker #1: “Just buy your food like everyone else does!”

(Another day, I catch part of a conversation happening near my desk:)

Coworker #1: *in tears* “How can they evict me? It’s not my fault I didn’t have money for the rent! Our fridge broke down. Do you know how much it costs to eat restaurant food three times a day? What am I supposed to tell my little boy?”

Coworker #2: “Wait, didn’t your fridge break down months ago?”

Coworker #1: “Yeah, I couldn’t afford a new one! If I had a fridge, I’d have a place to keep TV dinners, and then we wouldn’t have to eat out every meal.”