(My brother and I are both in high school. He has a few friends over and I’m camping out in my room, which has two windows. The teenage boys are all in the backyard when one of them, whom I actually know fairly well, knocks on my window. I open it.)

Boy: *jokingly* “Get off the property, peasant, I just bought it.”

Me: “This is my castle, and I am its queen.”

(I then shut the window and went back to listening to musical soundtracks. Royalty has its perks.)

(A few colleagues and I are at a bar. Note: one of them had a horrible accident with his bicycle and as a consequence took a nasty fall. As a consequence, he had some serious injuries, the most severe a broken ulna (that only very slowly healed) and lacerations on his leg. His specialty bike, used for triathlons, was also severly damaged. We are discussing drunk driving.)

Coworker 1: Yeah, well, I avoid driving my car when drunk.
(Other colleagues chime in approvingly)
Coworker 1: If it is not that far out, I just take my bike
Coworker 2: You know you shouldn’t ride your bike drunk either?
Coworker 1: I know it is against the law but better a bike than a car. You can’t cause that much damage when you ride a bike.
Coworker 3: Dude. Seriously?
Coworker 1: Yeah, what are you going to hit?
Coworker 3: well, me for instance. Remember last year, when I couldn’t come in to work for 3 months due to injuries because another DRUNK cyclist ran into me?
Coworker 1: Oh yeah, well, still the risk is smaller

(Needless to say, coworker 3 is dead against drunk driving. Any vehicle.)

In Italy, post offices are famous for their inefficiency and to be the slowest of our institutions.
I’m in a queue, there are a lot of people around me, all waiting for their turn. Among us, there’s a woman wearing a hijab who seems nervous.
Unfortunately, her turn arrives while the system is re-starting, which means that the system giving numbers for queue has to be reset in order to start again from 1. Usually, this process takes a minute.
Cashier: please wait while the system starts again
The monitor seems to have some problem showing only 00 (and not 01, the number of the first woman)
Old woman (almost shouting to the woman1): it’s your turn, you have to go!
Woman 1 moves around, more nervous then ever, trying to understand what she has to do
Old woman: it’s YOUR TURN!! (Speaking slower) your – turn! (also indicating first the woman, then the counter)
Me: She said that we have to wait for the system to restart, we’re all here waiting, there’s no need to shout like that!
The woman thanked me with her eyes, and FINALLY it was her turn!

(I’m incontinent and wear absorbent undergarments as protection.

While shopping in a grocery store, I need to get something from a bottom shelf. Unbeknownst to me, my shirt rides up, exposing my “underwear”.

As a mother with a small child in her cart passes by, I hear him say: Look mom! He has a diaper too!

I’m not sure who was more embarrassed, me or the mother.

My sixth-grade teacher was definitely not someone who should be teaching kids. She seemed to have a fascination with death and gore. For instance, for people’s birthdays, instead of the usual birthday song, she had what she referred to as a “birthday dirge”, the words of which are still burned into my brain seven years later:

“It’s your birthday, happy birthday,
Blood and famine and despair,
People dying everywhere,
But it’s your birthday, happy birthday.”

In another incident, she described the effects of scurvy in extremely graphic detail; I remember trying not to throw up. My parents were outraged by this, but as her class was the only home room that our small school used for students in the Gifted program, and there wasn’t any proof, there wasn’t much they could do. I believe they may have reported these incidents to the administration, but if they did, nothing came of it.

The final straw was when my teacher showed us eleven and twelve year olds a documentary on the American Civil War that contained, amongst other things, very graphic images of a soldier getting his eye shot out. When my mom came to pick me up from school (this class was at the end of the school day), I burst into tears. My mom parked the car, marched right into that teacher’s classroom and demand to know why something like that was shown to a classroom of pre-teens. In response, the teacher let my mother borrow the three DVDs she planned to show us so that she could watch it herself.

One of the DVDs was so graphic that my mother later said she couldn’t stomach more than fifteen minutes of it, and the others were also the type of videos that high schools usually send out permission slips for. My mother ended up handing the DVDs to the assistant principal, who was very interested that these were being shown to kids. The teacher ended up being forced into retirement at the end of the year, never to inflict her gory fascinations on schoolchildren again.