I work near a tourist bridge border between USA and Canada in Niagara Falls, on the Canadian side. It’s one of the few places you can cross conveniently between both countries as a pedestrian. A tourist family come over to ask me some questions.

Tourist: “Excuse me, we visit from Spain. We want to do day in America today. What day you… uh… do purge? We don’t want to be in America for that.”

Me: “Uh… purge what?”

Tourist: “That day you Americans have, you all try to kill each other for one day. When is that?”

Me: “Do you mean that movie The Purge? That’s just a movie! That’s not real.”

Tourist: “Yes, I saw the movie. It not real?”

Me: “No! It’s just a movie! Wait, did you think it was a real thing?!”

Tourist: “Well, I always see on news in America, always so much shooting. I thought it must be purge.”

Me: “No. I promise, that’s just a movie.”

Tourist: “So… America safe to go in?”

Me: “Well… that’s another conversation entirely…”

They still went in for their day trip! I hope they had lots of non-violent fun!

Related:
Gun Control Out Of Control, Part 4
Gun Control Out Of Control, Part 3
Gun Control Out Of Control, Part 2
Gun Control Out Of Control

I still remember in preschool when my friend and I were reading all the colors out loud on one of those Crayola super packs. I got straight-up yelled at and sent to the principal’s office for saying, “Orange Pizzazz,” because the teacher said I had called someone a “p*ss-a**” and “would not listen” despite having the crayon as evidence.

After a thirty-minute scolding and waiting for my mum to leave work to pick me up “for my suspension”, she came in all apologetic. When I explained to her the whole situation, not the school’s side, she went ape-s***.

Mum: “How about ‘c**t’?! Can he say ‘c**t’?! Because you’re all being c***s right now! This is f****** ridiculous!”

I’d heard her say “s***” once before; that was the only swear I had ever heard from her, and we had just been rear-ended in traffic.

She just went off while I was sitting there all shocked and the principal was turning deeper shades of red with every word.

I got unsuspended on the spot, but my mum pulled me out of school for the day anyway. We had a lovely day, and she explained very well how I shouldn’t swear like that unless it was absolutely necessary and I’d exhausted all civility.

Mum: “When being civil simply isn’t working, sometimes you might have to call someone a p*ss-a**.”

The next day at school, I learned that I now had the stigma of being the kid who got the Crayola super pack taken away.

As a young child, I was prone to accidents. One day, I managed to pull a dresser over on top of myself. My mom took me to the emergency room and told the triage nurse I had a concussion.

Now, my mom was and is a registered nurse. The idiot ignored her and said that as long as I wasn’t vomiting, I would be fine, and to take me home.

Guess what I did as soon as she opened her mouth?

I work in a high-end Italian restaurant. I walk up to introduce myself to a table of six.

Me: “Hi, my name is [My Name], and I’ll be your server this evening. Have any of you dined with us before?”

One of the customers at the table has been staring at me with a goofy smile.

Customer: “No. Have you?”

He laughs like he’s made the funniest joke in the world.

Me: “Of course, which means I can personally recommend our specials tonight, which are—”

Customer: “Aww, you think we’re special? How special? Are we extra special? Do we get a special price?”

He keeps interrupting me and just throwing out stupid questions while I’m telling them about specials and getting drink orders, and he has some serious attitude about it.

Customer: “Boy, I have one more question for you. What’s good that’s cheap?”

Me: “Seriously, that’s your last question?”

Customer: “Yeah.”

Me: “McDonald’s.”

I walk away as everyone at the table except him starts laughing.

Someone else pays the bill, and they approach me later and hand me a $20 on top of the tip they put on the card.

Other Customer: “That’s for putting that dude in his place. He was being an a** because he didn’t want to come to this restaurant and the rest of us wanted to try it.”

Me: “Well, I hope we helped him not want to try us again in the future!”

Customers like this, who leave items they’ve changed their minds about in weird places, were the bane of our existence at the store where I used to work. I didn’t even mind if abandoned items were put in roughly the right place, i.e., fridge stuff in a fridge, frozen stuff in one of the freezers. But no, the amount of wastage caused by dumping stuff wherever you felt like it! Heck, if they really couldn’t be bothered to spend ten seconds taking things back to the right aisles, there were staff they could hand them to. It is the height of laziness.

The worst one, though, was one day when there was a terrible smell coming from the sauce and soup aisle. We investigated and found that somebody had stuffed raw meat behind several rows of sauce jars. To get it in there, somebody would have had to remove a bunch of jars, put the meat back there, and replace the jars. Goodness knows how long it had been sitting there.

We had to throw away hundreds of pounds worth of stock, including some of the jars that were against the meat in case there was contamination.

Oh, and we had to strip the shelving unit and deep-clean it.

Why? Just why?

Related:
The Art Of The Steal