Oh man.. I can relate to the first story especially. I was also making $4.25 an hour working at a Dairy Queen as a teenager. There was a woman working there who must have been around 50ish at the time. She had feathered back hair which used to flap in the wind and we'd make jokes about it. She would always smile but you could tell she didn't like it.
I was super insensitive to people back then. I never stopped to think what a jackass I was being. She had a really strong southern accent (we were in Kentucky at the time) and use to pronounce the word "spatula" as "Spatch-ler"... One day I turned around to her and said:
Me: "Hey, can you say Spatch?"
Her: "Spatch"
me: "you"
her "you"
me: "luh"
her "luh"
me "Now say it all together: spatula"
her: "Spaaatchlerrr"
Everyone in the whole store died laughing, including the customers. She just waved her hand at me and giggled, but in hindsight I know I really embarrassed her. After that day, everyone kept calling her spatchler. I always wished I could apologize to her.
yeah, it's a shame that you have to think that you were the source of someone's pain, especially if they were kind enough to laugh it off. I have tried to find multiple people that I have wronged in the past and some of them, like the woman in your story likely is, were no longer alive.
I guess the best thing we can do is try to learn from it and not repeat the mistakes in the future.
For sure.. That's all you can really do!