Even though you thought you were the only one who accidently seduced your boss, tripped up the stairs or spilled your lunch all over your dress at work, you’re totally not! These weird and funny summer employment bloopers will prove that you’re in good company.
Everybody is different…
While working at a hotel café, Nicole Meneveau, rising freshman at Cornell University, met a strange guest. The man asked her if he could get a ‘cod.’ Having worked there for over a year and never having heard of this item, Meneveau politely said, “Excuse me?” to which the man replied simply, “I want a cod.” Because she really had no idea what a cod was, Meneveau said again, “I’m sorry?” Meneveau says he looked at her like she was crazy, and loudly and rudely said, “Please get me a cod. A C.O.D., ‘cod.’” When she still did not know to what he was referring, he clarified and said, “A cod, you know, coffee of the day.”
Two degrees of separation…
Through his summer job, Ben Formisano, rising junior at the University of Delaware, learned that it really is a small world after all. When he was working on a boat that took public trips out to the Chesapeake Bay, he started chatting with a lady and her daughter about UD because the girl would be heading there in the fall. Turns out, she would be living in the exact dorm room that Formisano did the year before! Formisano says, “I thought it was pretty crazy that out of the thousands of people who applied and were accepted, after all of the dorm assignments, this girl visited Annapolis and decided to take a trip on the boat I worked on.”
Thinking outside of the box…
Mana Shaw, a rising junior at Dickinson College, met a very interesting character while working at a frozen yogurt shop. The customer found a hair in her yogurt with a topping of Andes Mints and exclaimed that she normally didn’t care about hair, “since, you know, it seems like people wash their hair nowadays.” When Shaw and her co-worker offered to make her a new one, she said, “Well, it looks like it’s not either of yours. I guess that’s a good idea; I mean, the hair could be from China, you know, from the Andes Mints.” What a farfetched thing to say!
Lost in transit…
Anna Band, rising junior at Oberlin College, had to unexpectedly get an old cavity re-filled after it chipped while studying abroad in Germany this summer. With her English-German dictionary in hand and her relatively new German skills, Band easily filled out her paperwork at the dentist’s office. Afterward, the dentist, a non-English speaker, came into the room before the procedure. He asked Band if she would like ‘spritze.’ Figuring it was a rinse or ‘spritz’ of water, she replied, “No, thank you.” A few moments later, screaming from the pain, Band soon figured out that ‘spritze’ actually means an anesthetic shot. Luckily, the dentist was nice enough to stop mid-procedure to numb her up, and her teeth have never looked better.
Scaredy dog…
Marci Norton, Senior Counsel at the Food and Drug Division, OGC of the Food and Drug Association remembers an encounter like no other when she worked for the Office of Residential Life one summer in college at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her job was to clean the dorms and on-campus apartments after the sports campers left. One day, when she finished cleaning a room, she began carrying a huge vacuum cleaner down the stairs when she saw a huge German shepherd on the landing. Norton says she remembers him “looking like he was going to charge up the steps and bark furiously at me. I was scared to death and perplexed about where this dog came from. I figured it must have been one of the K-9 dogs from the neighboring police headquarters, but I couldn’t figure out where its handler was or why it was there." She didn’t know what to do, so she locked the vacuum back in the dorm room to try and make a swifter exit. When the dog saw her without it, it happily trotted downstairs and left, says Norton.
