A story here about an ultrasound tech and testicles reminded me of my story. I was having pain in my testicles, which, after all, is sort of embarrassing to talk about! Finally I broke down and called my doctor and got an appointment. He wrote an order for a testicular ultrasound and gave me the number to call to schedule it. When I got home I called the number and told the woman on the other end that I had an order for an ultrasound of my testicles. She went off on me, insisting it wasn’t possible for me to have such an order, and if I remember correctly, hung up on me.

When I told my doctor what had happened, he didn’t believe me.

Eventually the pain went away. Hope it wasn’t anything important…

(My company is hosting a customer event in a pub. As it coincides with an important soccer game – it had to do with the World Cup – the theme was football with a viewing of the match on a large screen, just because otherwise nobody would have turned up. There is also a fuss ball game. Important for the story is that I cannot see a moving ball nor predict where it would land. I can see where it starts of and were it landed but in between… no matter how large the ball. I once managed to get hit three times with a ball that had a 1m diameter. We formed teams, first our company against two clients and we just switched team members so that we had two teams with one person from each company.)

Me (in the heat of the game): Offense! Offense! Your defense is crap.
(Cue the client letting go of the bars and watching me while the other team takes the opportunity to score.)
Client: But you are my defense.
Me: I know. That is how I know it is crap.

(I’ve written a children’s book, which features fictional stories about my cat. I’m asked to do an event at a local library, including a signing. Since I obviously can’t bring the cat with me, I bring a framed photo of her to have on the signing desk. A parent brings their daughter up with a copy of my book.)
Me: Hi there!
Parent: Why is there a picture of a cat here?!
(I’m too stunned to reply. Luckily, her daughter speaks up.)
Daughter: Mommy, that’s [cat’s name]! She’s the one the book is about! See?
(She holds up her copy of the book. Her mom goes silent as I sign it and high-five the daughter.)

This happened on Valentine’s day, this year. My boyfriend and I decided instead of going out we would treat ourselves and order food in and watch a couple of movies. We were worried that the burrito place we like ordering from would close down their delivery early (as has happened before), so when we order through a popular third party delivery service, we order early and set the delivery time for 9:30 pm.
9:30 comes, and I get a phone call that my food is here. I go out, collect the food from the delivery driver, and head back inside, grabbing some plates to join my boyfriend on the couch with. I hand him the bag, and he goes to open it. Then we discover that instead of two burritos and chips, the bag only contains one burrito and chips. Thankfully, it’s his burrito so he starts eating and I call up the third party delivery company, after trying to contact the closest store, but they never picked up.
Customer Service: Hi thank you for calling [third party company]. What can I do for you?
Me: Hi, I placed an order for delivery from [burrito place], but only one of our burritos came.
The customer service rep goes through and confirms some details with me so he can pull up my order.
Customer Service rep: okay, I see you ordered two burritos, a pulled pork and a chicken one, and tortilla chips. Did you receive all the items?
Me: No, that’s why I’m calling, I never received the chicken burrito. I would like the item I paid for to be delivered, please.
Customer service rep: Okay ma’am. Unfortunately, normally I can offer to resend your order, but since its Valentine’s day, I’ve been informed we are not able to send replacement deliveries, so all I can offer is a refund or credit.
Me: Why can’t you send my food? I wouldn’t have ordered if I was only getting a single burrito and all the shops near me are closed, I won’t get dinner now.
Customer Service rep: I’m sorry ma’am, unfortunately, those are my only options this evening, it’s too busy to send corrections out.
Me: Fine, I’ll take a refund.
The customer service rep confirms my refund and we hang up. I end up having all the tortilla chips, and thankfully had planned dessert for the evening already so my boyfriend gives me most of that.
I watch my bank account for the next few days, waiting for a refund. On Tuesday, I realize that there are now two charges from the third party company. One charge is for €18.09, the second for €26.84. The 18.09 is the price of the meal with a refund of €8.75 (the price of the second burrito), so it’s obvious to me someone messed up putting my refund through and accidentally just charged me twice. I call up the service again to contest this charge.
Me: Hi, I have a second charge on my card from last Friday, for the full price of the meal. It seems something went wrong when sending my refund through.
Customer service rep: Unfortunately I have no authorization to deal with this, I will send you an email that will escalate the situation to my manager and she will assist.
At this point, I’m getting annoyed, but I wait for the email. When the email comes in, it asks me for some details about the charges, which I answer. A few hours later, I have a response from the manager, via email. this is copied directly:
Manager email:
My name is [manager name] and I work with the Customer Accounts team at [third party company].
Thank you for your patience while we have reviewed this issue for you.
We have managed to locate the payments unauthorized by you on our system.

[Third party company] believes that you may know the person who placed the transaction(s) in question without your authorization. Are you aware of, or do you have any affiliation to, an individual under the name of [Strangers name] in Dublin who may have had access to your card details? We believe therefore this charge was not done without your knowledge, and we would, therefore, be unable to refund it. Thank you.
I immediately email back:
Hi [Manager’s name] thank you for your response. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any person by this name. However, as I explained to your customer service rep, I am quite certain someone put my refund through wrong and accidentally charged me twice for my meal. As you can clearly see in your records, and by my bank statement attached and the confirmation email from the delivery, the full charge for my meal was €26.84, which was charged to my card, and the second charge was for €18.09, which was the price of my meal minus the refund. If you can check your records and confirm this for me and issue me a refund, I would appreciate.
A few days go by and yesterday morning I received another email:
Manager:
Thank you for contacting us. As stated above, we believe that this charge was done with your knowledge, by a person you are affiliated with, and as such [third party company] holds no responsibility to refund you for these charges. If there are any other questions, please don’t hesitate to respond.
At this point, I’m pissed off. My bank statement clearly shows both charges came on the same day from this company, but my confirmation page on the app only says one charge went through. It should be clear to anyone by the exact costs of each charge that this was a mistake of the company. At this point, I sent off another email, detailing the same explanation of where I thought the problem was. It’s now been over a day and I still haven’t received any response. If I don’t hear soon I will be calling up and complaining again, but due to other issues I’ve had with this company, I don’t have a lot of hope of getting my money back.

I work as an afternoon caretaker in a school – grades are 1-9. We do all kinds of stuff with the kids, mainly their homework, but also playing boardgames, crafts etc.
This story happend on a very hot and sunny afternoon in the summer. We were handing out sunscreen to the kids or asked them to stay in the shade and got into a conversation about sunscreen, sunburns and the like.

Me: “I usually dont get a sunburn. I’m just turning brown.” (Common way to say that your skin is getting darker in german)
A little boy, maybe about 6 years old, looks at me for a while, contemplating what I said.
Then he says: “So just like an old banana!”