Bored Panda culled some entertaining stories from the subreddit I Don't Work Here Lady. They vary greatly, but all involve someone who completely misunderstood the role of a stranger. In one of them, redditor Billiam201 recalled how he got a new phone number in a new town and discovered it once belonged to a business. The business owner had dropped one phone line, but still had the number on the receipts he gave to customers. That led to many callers who thought Billiam201 worked for that business, so he found and confronted the owner.

"You guys are still giving out my home phone number on your receipts."
"Yeah. So?"
"Well, f*****g stop it. It's been at least a year since you haven't had that number. At least cross it out or something."
"That's a pain in the ass, I'm not making my employees do that."
"So you're the manager?"
"I'm the owner."
"So let me see if I have this right. You, what was your name again?"
Let's call him Fred.
"You, Fred have decided that it's too inconvenient to cross my home phone number off of your receipts, so you're just going to keep giving it out?"
"Yup. What are you gonna do? Sue me?"

He didn't sue, but what he did was much more satisfying. Most of the stories involve bullies getting their comeuppance, but a few are wholesomely sweet. Like the time redditor somethingwithatwo2 had a guy get in his car thinking it was a taxi. He was going that way anyway, so he played along.  

We drove off together and he peered out the window, smiling.

He said "You taxis are much quicker these days! Ah it's a beautiful day for a train ride, don't you think?"

He looked at me, still with this big smile and said:

"I'm Jerry, lovely to meet you. I'm meeting my friend for breakfast today! I'm so excited. I haven't been on the train in years. All my friends have passed on and I don't really need to go out of town. Well, not until I made a new friend recently. It's funny how life goes isn't it? An old codger like me with a breakfast date! Can you imagine."

You could easily spend an hour reading all thirty wonderful stories posted at Bored Panda, even if you have to bookmark it to get to all of them.

Baseball uniforms change over time, but they change rather gradually so that we always recognize a baseball player in uniform. Pants go up, pants reach lower, stripes are in or out, shirts button or they don't. One fashion that comes and goes is stirrup socks. How did those ever become part of a baseball uniform? It's not just because of fashion, although fashion begins the story of how they came about.

In the mid-1800s, ballplayers were prone to wearing uniforms that had pants extending all the way to the top of the shoe. Then, in 1868, the players of the Cincinnati Red Stockings decided to make a fashion statement by hiking their pants up to just under the knees, knickers-style. Other teams followed suit in the belief that a shapely calf might excite female fans attending the game. (Remember, this was the 1800s.)

This, of course, showed their red stockings. The rest of the story has to do with practicality and safety, which you can read about at Mental Floss.

The new movie F9 is in theaters now. It's a simple name for the ninth film in a series centered around a set of characters driving cars very fast. That's nine movies, and a few spinoffs. These characters -and their plots- have come a long way from that first film in 2001, The Fast and the Furious, which Screen Junkies is just now getting around to making an Honest Trailer for.

A “Potemkin village” is a neighborhood or town purposely made into an illusion, with a shiny facade that hides a not-so-shiny truth. Named after Russian military leader Gregory Potemkin, these villages look prosperous and inviting on the outside, while inside they may be empty, or poverty-stricken, or even full of nefarious activities.

The sole purpose of a Potemkin village is to make outsiders think that a situation is better than it really is, and perhaps no other country is better versed in this practice today than North Korea. Situated in the Demilitarized Zone is a village called Kijong-Dong, built in the 1950s in an attempt to encourage defection from people in South Korea.

From afar, the small town which directly faces its enemy, also known as the “Peace Village”, looks relatively normal. It has clean well-kept streets, a number of brightly-painted multi-storey buildings and identical low-rise apartments which all appear to have working electricity which would demonstrate North Korea’s prosperity and economic success following the split. The government claims that the village is home to some 200 residents, a farm, a hospital, and a school. Despite appearances however, the more likely reality is, KijongDong has no permanent residents.

Telescopic lenses have revealed that the village’s buildings are nothing more than empty concrete shells, lacking glass windows, interior rooms and even flooring. According to South Korea, caretakers flip light switches and sweep empty pavements, all to preserve a grand illusion. Photographs from inside the village, are non-existent and Western media know it better as ‘Propaganda Village’.

But Potemkin villages exist all over the world, and they aren't always government projects. Read about such villages in different parts of the world, including the US, at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: Don Sutherland, U.S. Air Force)

We mistakenly sent out an empty test email to a portion of our HBO Max mailing list this evening. We apologize for the inconvenience, and as the jokes pile in, yes, it was the intern. No, really. And we’re helping them through it. ❤️

— HBOMaxHelp (@HBOMaxHelp) June 18, 2021

Last week, thousands of HBO Max subscribers received a mysterious email from the company. The subject was Integration Test Email #1, which implied there would be more, but there was no information that made any sense, and no action requested. HBO Max posted an explanation on Twitter, which blamed an intern, but also appeared to be supportive. You can just imagine how embarrassed and frankly terrified an intern could be over such a public screwup. Twitter users were also supportive, and shared the huge mistakes they made when they were interns, just starting out in their careers.

Dear Intern, I was using my desktop calendar to make a monthly note of when I started my menstrual period, but after several months I realized I was making that note on a calendar I shared with all of my colleagues company wide. I was 37 years old.

— Caissie (@Caissie) June 18, 2021

Dear Intern, when I was 25 I made a PDF assigning each employee to the Muppet they reminded me of the most. I meant to send it to my work friend, but I accidentally sent it to the entire company. My supervisor (Beaker) wanted to fire me, but the owners (Bert & Ernie) intervened. https://t.co/zMKvQ6nxjj

— aerin. (@AerinChevyFord) June 18, 2021

Some were very public, while others were only terrifying until someone else fixed it. The upshot was that you haven't really arrived in a job until you've messed up big time.

HBO Intern, you are breathtaking! I mean it! Congrats on making your first big mistake. It's like a right of initiation for us developers
HT to @_workchronicles pic.twitter.com/8SsQNiXBBr

— Charles C. Pustejovsky III 👍 (@CCPustejovsky) June 18, 2021

See a ranked list of the top 30 responses at Bored Panda, or all of them at Twitter.

The phrase usually refers to something important that everyone is aware of, but no one wants to talk about. In this case, there's no ignoring the real-life elephant that crashed through Ratchadawan Puengprasoppon's kitchen wall in Chalermkiatpattana, Thailand, Saturday morning. The elephant, named Boonchuay, lives in Kaeng Krachan national park, and was likely just looking for something to eat. Read about the incident and see the video at The Guardian. - via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Ratchadawan Puengprasoppon via reddit)

Welsh miners used to make their own fireworks to celebrate important occasions, which mainly consisted of sticking gunpowder into holes. These were called rock cannons. Tom Scott shows us how they worked. What could possibly go wrong? Please don't try detonating a rock cannon yourself, unless you have a test range and an expert explosive engineer. Also, be sure not to surprise your local law enforcement agency, because they could easily surprise you back.

As kids, we learned that our solar system is made up of nine planets (now eight) and the sun. Oh yeah, there's the asteroid belt. And the moons of other planets. And solar winds, comets, and the Oort cloud. But even as we learn about exoplanets and other galaxies, our own solar system hides a lot more mysterious objects that are too small and far away to know much about. One such object, designated 2014 UN271, revolves in a manner that brings it close enough to study only once every 600,000 years! What's more, that time is coming soon. But what is it? Astronomers call it either a tiny planet or a really big comet.     

But by far the most intriguing thing about 2014 UN271 is its orbit around the Sun. This thing is extremely eccentric, journeying between the inner solar system and the Oort cloud that marks the boundary of interstellar space over a period of 612,190 years.

And it turns out, astronomers are about to witness the closest pass of this incredible round trip. Currently, 2014 UN271 is about 22 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun (for reference, Earth is 1 AU from the Sun). That means it’s already closer than Neptune, at 29.7 AU. And it’s not stopping there – it’s already traveled 7 AU in the last seven years, and at its closest in 2031, it’s expected to pass within 10.9 AU of the Sun, almost reaching the orbit of Saturn.

Considering the relatively short time that mankind has studied the stars with telescopes, you have to wonder how many other distant objects are orbiting the sun without us ever getting the chance to see them. Read more about 2014 UN271 at New Atlas.  -via Kottke

(Image credit: JPL Solar System Dynamics)

The tiny animal known as the hydra is the closest thing we've seen to an immortal being. They don't have a lot of organs, and the ones they have stay young because the cells are completely replenished regularly. Cut it in half, and it doesn't die -rather it reproduces. Put it in a blender and separate all its cells? It will just reform itself! The secret is stem cells, which the hydra has plenty of. -via Aeon 

When Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, Clark Gable was at the height of his Hollywood fame. He called Franklin Delano Roosevelt to offer his services for the war effort, which FDR took him up on, but it was to be in a Hollywood role. Gable was 41 and in a position to publicize whatever the president needed -safely in California. But that was to change.

Gable had success, Gable had power, and for the first time in his four decades on this earth, Gable had something approaching peace thanks to his marriage to Carole Lombard, the firecracker screwball star. Yet in less than a year, all of those things turned to ash following Lombard’s violent death. When her plane went down in a fiery blaze, it was treated as a national tragedy around the country, and for her husband it was the beginning of the end.

The King became broken, despondent, and finally disillusioned enough to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Corps. To this day, some say he went to Europe with a death wish, and on at least one bombing raid, Capt. Gable almost had it granted as a Luftwaffe shell passed right between his feet.

Lombard was decorated after her death, since she had been on a mission to raise war funds. Despite Gable's fear of flying, he became an officer and a gunner with the 351st Bombardment Group. It was rumored that he did not care whether or not he survived the war. Read about Clark Gable's military service at Den of Geek.

Highway 65 in Minnesota has a ditch with its own ducks. These aren't the kinds of ducks that come and go, though. They are decoys, in a rainbow of colors. Is it a joke, an art installation, a local tradition, or a crowdsourced project? It's kind of all the above. The story of how they came to be there is pretty neat. These ducks even have their own Facebook page. -via TYWKIWDBI

Namaqualand is an area that extends 600 miles along South Africa's western coast. It is a protected area, home to myriad species of flowers that draw visitors from around the world, despite the fact that there are no tourist accommodations. These flowers have evolved in unique ways because Namaqualand is quite arid, classified as a semidesert!  

There are more bulb flora here than in any other arid region on earth.  Over three and a half thousand plant species live here and it is thought that more than a thousand of those are found nowhere else on the planet. Little wonder that the insect life goes in to something of a breeding frenzy during the time of the daisies.

It certainly does not happen every year. The rains must not only fall but fall in the right way.  Soaking winter rains in early May and June are vital.  This must then be followed up with plenty of showers, at least one each week, through July and August. It is in the later part of that month that the explosion of life happens.

Namaqualand is in the Southern Hemisphere, so late August is at the end of winter. See more gorgeous photographs of the rare yet abundant blooms of Namaqualand at Kuriositas. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Flickr user Malcolm Manners)

As the US did, Canada also forced people of Japanese ancestry away from the west coast and put them in internment camps during World War II. These camps were isolated in the forests of British Columbia, where supply lines were few and unreliable, and the food rations were meager. Inmates in the know turned to a reliable plant called fuki, or Japanese butterbur. It wasn't easy to get, but once established, it's hard to kill.    

During the Second World War, it became crucial: In 1942, racist federal policies dispossessed thousands of Japanese Canadians of their homes, boats, and property and forced them into remote internment camps. Fuki seeds and roots were one of the few items sympathetic—and usually white—former neighbors could mail or deliver to the camps without government interception.

“A lot of [interned] Japanese Canadians wrote back to their [former] white neighbors and asked them: ‘Would you do us a huge favor and send fuki roots or fuki seeds?’ And neighbors or friends would [then] either drive up or ship out the fuki seeds,” says Ryan Ellan, curator at the Tashme Museum in Sunshine Valley, roughly 16 kilometers (about 10 miles) southeast of Hope, B.C., at the site of the former Tashme Internment Camp.

Almost 80 years later, the camps have crumbled, but fuki remains -and still grows as a testament to the history of the camps. The existence of the plant led to the founding of the Tashme Museum. Read that story at Atlas Obscura.

The SCAN-MED corridor runs the length of Europe, mostly in straight lines except for a sticky issue of getting traffic over the Alps. Trains must go slowly due to the inclines and necessary hairpin curves that accommodate those inclines. To save time, a lot of cargo is shipped by truck, which causes traffic jams along highway inclines and hairpins. But a 20-year project called the Brenner Base Tunnel is taking shape underneath the mountains. The tunnel will be 64 kilometers long when it's finished in 2028, and will cut travel time significantly. Watch the video to get an idea of how massive this project is, or read a transcript at The B1M. -via Laughing Squid

Finland's allegiance in the second world war was complicated, as they fought for both sides at one time or another, mainly because they opposed the incursions of the Soviet Union. During the time they were allied with the Nazis, a Finnish soldier named Aimo Koivunen was on ski patrol with his unit when they were attacked by Soviets. They escaped, and led the Red Army unit on a ski chase.

The patrol had been equipped with a stockpile of methamphetamine pills to keep their energy up in the heat of battle. Ironically, Koivunen had always strongly disapproved of these drugs, which was why he was considered trustworthy enough to carry the whole stash. Now, with his life on the line, he reached for the meth. Unfortunately, it proved impossible to get a lone pill out of the bottle with his clumsy winter mittens. And taking them off would have slowed him down, plus made his fingers cold. So he just dumped out the entire bottle and swallowed all 30 pills. Which was supposed to be enough to last an entire patrol for weeks. And that's when things got weird.

Weird indeed. Koivunen skied ahead so fast that he was separated from his unit and became lost. Over the next couple of weeks he suffered delusions, injuries, starvation, and the kind of bad luck you'd recognize from a Looney Tunes short. Yet remarkably, he survived it all. Read Koivunen's story told in the colorful hyperbolic language of Cracked.

(Image credit: Komischn)