The Maintenance Worker
Smart kids! You don’t have to be an adult to know something’s night right. These kids followed their instincts to stay out of danger.
“When I was about 13, I was on vacation with a friend and her parents. We stayed at a motel overnight en route to our destination. The parents went out for dinner/drinks, and me and my friend stayed in the room and watched a movie.
There was a knock at the door, and we could see a man through the peephole, but he was standing off to the side. He said he was a maintenance worker, who was sent to fix the AC. My friend said it was working fine, but he told us to let him in so he could check. There was something that seemed off about the way he was talking, so we called the front desk to verify. Sure enough, they said that no maintenance worker had been sent to the room.”
The Bank Robber
This Reddit user tells of a time when she knew what was going to happen and no amount of stalling could stop it.
“I was a bank teller when I was in my early 20s. In NYC (and I assume other big cities) the tellers are behind “glass” walls and completely separated from the lobby. It was a normal day, and as I glanced over at the queue one guy caught my eye. He wasn’t a regular customer, he was dressed normally, but there was something about him that got my attention. I remember thinking he was probably a bank robber, so I took a mental note of his clothing and I tried to stall the customer at my window because I didn’t want to help the robber. Naturally, my customer walked away and the robber came to me. He passed me a note and a paper bag. The note said, “Give me all the 50s and 100s and no tricks or I will shoot” but didn’t show a gun.
Now, the way it worked in my bank was that the “glass” (plastic, really) started about mid-chest height, maybe 4 feet off the ground, so that if someone really had a gun they would have to raise it up over the counter for the teller (and everyone else) to see it and couldn’t intimidate us with the ol’ finger-gun in the pocket move.
The rule was that if they had a visible gun then to just hand them the cash and nobody gets hurt (the cash in that situation would also include a packet of exploding red dye that would detonate once it passed through the door to outside. (Don’t rob banks, guys, you won’t get away with it).
If there was no visible gun we were supposed to say a code word and then duck down under the counter and press the silent alarm. The dummy I sat next to started laughing and asking why in the world I was on the floor, and all I could do was say the code word and mash the alarm. The robber got spooked and ran out empty-handed.
I don’t know what exactly it was about the guy that told me he was a robber. He was obviously giving off subtle clues, possibly body language, but I saw him for just a couple of seconds and I knew what he was up to.”
