I’m walking down a school hallway with a guy friend, since we’re coming from the same class and heading in the same general direction. Despite being several years older than him, we are the same height.
Random Guy: “[Friend], you have a girlfriend?”
Friend: “No.”
Me: “But I do!”
Random Guy: “Nice!”
My girlfriend thought that it was funny too!
When I was about twelve, it was my cousin’s eighth birthday, and we all went to her house for a party. I immediately went up to my aunt, who looked extremely frazzled and was cooking on the stove. This is what happened after.
Aunt: (looks at me)
Me: Can I help!
Aunt: OH!
(she immediately wraps me in a big, bone-crushing hug)
Aunt: (My Name) is my favorite child just so everyone knooooows!
Brother: That’s mean.
Nana: That is mean.
Aunt: She was the only one who asked if she could help, plus, she didn’t start bitching to me about what to do.
I am at work and the phone rings. I greet the customer and the call starts off in the normal fashion: he bought a product the company I work for sells and wants a discount. I explain to him that we don’t have any promotions going on right now and the call starts to slowly spiral out of control. The customer begins to drag me down a very deep, self aggrandizing rabbit hole.
Customer: You see I’m actually a rocket scientist, you know, a real one. I’m also an inventor, a writer, well I’m many things. I hold a lot of patents and I wrote many books. I have developed a new item and I need your product, it’s just perfect!
The customer begins to prattle on about an invention he has for a breathing apparatus and tries to convince me to go to his kickstarter webpage. During the tirade he keeps peppering in all of his very many accomplishments and how he quit his very high paying job to make this company that many very smart and rich people support him with. He says he convinced several other people to join him and they all make no money because it is a start-up venture. I’m giving him some passive responses as I begin to realize this person is just bored and ready to waste my time and after 15 minutes I think I’m almost free.
Customer: So anyway, I guess I’ll let you go. It’s such a shame your product is expensive. By the way do you read? Are you a reader? What kinds of books do you read? You see I’m also a writer, you should check out my books, they are very smart, very sophisticated. I work with a lot of publishing companies and well they love my books. I did a reading once in Paris.
The customer continues on and attempts to urge me to go to a website and buy his books. He insists they are great and tells me one is medical massacre mystery, one is about a famous event that happened in NY in 2001 that he predicted would happen before it occurred and that when it happened he was in fact a first responder because he is a cave diver and dives in highly dangerous places with professionals and doctors so they called him specifically to help. At this point when he pauses I’m making a non committal ‘mhm’ sound to try to get the onslaught to end.
Customer: Well anyway, thanks again, you’ve been great. Make sure you check out my books, you sound like the kind of person who would like them. Oh yeah and that product … it’s a (size) bottle right? You know that reminds me, it really makes me upset that people can no longer do basic arithmetic, don’t you agree?
Surprise, we aren’t done yet! The customer goes on to tell me a story about a time when he encountered a person who couldn’t do math the way he can do it because he is a very smart engineer and that he also wrote a book about that. We are going on 30 minutes and I’m not saying anything back to him at this point figuring that would encourage him to take a hint.
Customer: Anyway, thanks again. Your know, I’m going to help a lot of people and your product is going to be saving lives. So check out my kickstarter and my books, you know I didn’t even tell you about the best one…
Well, he saved the best for last folks. The customer launches into a story about how he knows a lot of doctors and one time he went in for a medical procedure, a colonoscopy, and that was how he got an idea for his greatest novel yet. According to the customer, he was in the procedure and was not under anesthesia and decided to ask the doctor if he could look in the scope that was …. in his rectum.
Customer (triumphantly) : So I’m probably quite literally the only person who could say they looked up their own ass! And in that moment, you know, that split second, it came to me. A rush of inspiration!
After a slightly graphic description he says looking in his butt gave him the inspiration to pen a novel about his ex-landlord who was a hypocritical, ego inflated person. While he was writing it he insists that he was laughing so hard he went into cardiac arrest because it was so funny and tons of people said it’s the best book they ever read. At this point I am so frustrated and disgusted that I could cry.
Customer (45 minutes after the call started) : Okay, well, thanks again. If I need anything else, I’ll call back! *hangs up*
I got a cup of tea, walked a lap around the building, and hoped to never hear from that guy again. For those interested, I did look at the free previews of his “books”, they were about as good as you could guess and all were 100+ chapters.
I am a librarian at a mid-size academic library in the midwest. Public patrons (not affiliated with the university) are allowed to use our computers. A patron who is banned from the nearby public library is using our computers like always. This happened pre-pandemic and I am sitting at our reference desk.
Patron: *walks up to me, a cross look on his face.* I need you to kick those hooligans out *points at a group of college kids sitting at a table*
Me: Are they being disruptive? Loud?
Patron: I hear them using swear words! I don’t come here to hear crass language
Me: Sorry, here at [library] we allow free speech so as long as they are not being loud or disruptive, I can’t ask them to leave
Patron: *walks away scowling and muttering* damn kids, no respect. Too vulgar.
About 15 minutes later, I walk past him to go use the restroom. He’s looking at scantily clad women’s Facebook profiles. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident as he uses our computers regularly to look up PG versions of porn, as explicit sites are obviously banned.
This was just before the current health crisis started shutting things down.
I’d been putting off going to the dentist for a few years, partially because of a lack of funds for dental work that I knew I needed to have, and partially because I lived too far from my old clinic and didn’t want to select a new one.
Finally, I ended up with an infected tooth and made an appointment at the closest dental clinic to me. It turned out I needed a root canal. The dentist also recommended a bit of other work for me, including wonky (but not dangerously so) wisdom teeth.
While all this was going on, my husband decided that, yeah, he should probably get a checkup as well – it had been even longer since he’d visited the dentist. He gave them his details to make a new patient appointment at the same time that he came by to pick me up from the root canal. We coordinated our insurance details with the receptionist and overall had a bit of a nice chat.
A couple of weeks later, my husband came home from his appointment laughing. He told me that, while he and the dentist had been talking, the fact that we were married had come up, and the dentist had told him that his teeth were boring and much less interesting than mine.
I like to think it’s one of the more confusing compliments I’ve ever gotten.
