My roommate comes out of his room, still in the middle of an online fantasy video gaming session.

Me: “Aren’t you still playing?”

Roommate: “Yeah, but our healer is from Trinidad. His neighbor’s monkey is currently spinning on his ceiling fan, peeing everywhere.”

Me: “That… is a decent excuse to take a break.”

Roommate: “Pee break!”

My roommate does his business and then walks back into his room. As he closes the door, I overhear:

Roommate: “Okay, has our white mage cleansed his soul of simian corruption yet?”

Our computers/network have gone down, so we can’t take any card payments. We’re putting up signs and announcing to all customers that we can only take cash.

I’m at the register with my manager, who is using an old-school calculator to keep up with the payments and logging them manually. Thankfully, we’re a small store that sells low quantity but high-quality items, so this isn’t too difficult to do.

Despite announcing we’re temporarily cash-only to customers as they enter the store, announcing on the speakers every five minutes in the store, as they enter the checkout lane, we still get guys like this:

Customer: *Hands over an Amex.*

Me: “Sir, our system is down. We can only accept cash.”

Customer: “My credit limit has six digits. You can take my card.”

Me: “No, sir, it’s not about that. The computers are down, so we can’t accept card payments.”

He takes his credit card away but then tries to hand me his debit card.

Customer: “Fine. Debit then.”

Me: “Sir, we can’t take any card payments, credit or debit.”

Customer: “I’ve got five digits in my bank account!”

Me: “Sir, it’s not about how much money is in the account. It could be ten bucks or ten million, the computers… are… down.”

Customer: “But there’s five digits in my bank account!”

Manager: “But apparently, your IQ is measured in only one. No card payments of any kind! Cash only!”

He stormed outside, saying we were being stupid for not accepting his money, and didn’t come back in.

Way back in the mid-1980s, when I was but a wee thing in third or fourth grade, I was being bullied pretty relentlessly by one of the larger and older boys in my neighborhood. The bullying primarily took place at our suburban school bus stop before and after school, which was more or less a lawless wasteland of no adult supervision whatsoever. 

This was waaay before the current practice of parents walking/driving their kids to the bus stop and waiting with them until they boarded the bus. And anyway, my parents left for work before I had to leave for the bus, so no solace for me there.

The incident that was the tipping point was when my bully decided that the fun thing to do one morning was scoop up a bunch of dog crap on the end of a stick and wipe it all over my new coat. Up until this point, my parents had been kind of half-heartedly reporting the bullying to the school in a “this is a problem” sort of way and hoping it would resolve itself. But for whatever reason, this time my parents flipped out and demanded a meeting with the teacher and principal. Only to be rather primly informed that since the bullying wasn’t taking place on school grounds or during school hours, there was nothing they could (would) do. 

So, my parents did what any reasonable parents did at that time; they signed me up for Karate classes so I could learn self-defense.

A couple of months after that, I ended up kicking the crap out of my bully when he tried to play keep-away with my backpack at the bus stop. To the best of my recollection, I kicked him really hard in the junk and then punched him in the face a couple of times when he went down. He ended up with a split lip and a bloody nose. 

I’ll never forget the meeting with the teacher and the principal that followed. My Dad quietly sat with his hands folded and listened to the teacher and principal rage on about how they were going to punish me; I was going to be suspended, this would go on my permanent record, etc.

Then when they were done, he quietly leaned forward…

Dad: “It is my understanding that you have no jurisdiction over anything that happens off school grounds and outside of school hours, and can’t punish students for anything they do that isn’t at school. Isn’t that correct? That’s certainly what you told me when I complained about how [My Name] was being bullied by [Bully’s Name] at the bus stop.”

Teacher/Principal: *Dead silence.*

Dad: “Yeah, I think that we’re done here. I certainly hope this is the last I hear about this.”

He took me to Baskin-Robbins for ice cream and told me that while he never ever, ever, ever wanted to hear about me starting a fight, he was proud of the way that I had finished that one.

I’m conducting a routine eye exam.

Me: “Okay, can you read the third line for me?”

Patient: “P… E… N… I… S.”

I glance at the chart.

Me: “Could you read that again?”

Patient: *More confidently.* “PENIS. That’s a bit of a rude word to have on an eye exam, isn’t it?”

Me: “It actually says ‘F E N L S’.”

Patient: “…Oh.”

Me: “At least we’ve conclusively established that we need to increase your lens strength!”

This brazen table had apparently tried the same “trick” to get a free, second plate of chicken wings on a previous visit.

They ordered a plate of SPICY wings, and after having eaten half of it, pretend that their mouths are on fire and that they actually ordered the MILD wings.

Of course, a couple people at the table are “okay” with the spicy and insist they’ll finish the wings if we have to dump it out anyway. Not a problem, usually, since restaurants can sometimes make mistakes, and it’s cool to reward unfortunate tables with something on the house.

But when it happens twice to the same people two visits apart? No dice, and my manager remembered them from the last time. While they went over the theatrics of saying the wings were too hot and they actually ordered mild, my manager walked over with a bus tub, started dumping all their plates into it, and coos:

Manager: “Don’t want to expose the table to any of the spicy heat flavor!”

Customer: “…isn’t that wasting food? We could have still eaten it.”

The manager says, scraping the plate of wings into the trash:

Manager: “It sure is! Maybe next time clarify what kind of wings you want so this doesn’t happen a third time.”

They still got their mild wings. But the look of suspicion and paranoia for the rest of their visit more than made up for it.