I work for a home installation company. Like a lot of businesses, we belong to the Better Business Bureau, and we have an A+!

We have a couple who wants a bay window and some new siding. Great! That is just what we do, and we do it well. The job is slated to take two weeks. During installation, the customer calls and wants to have us look at their patio door; we do that, too!

Well, the boss arrives at the appointed time to discuss the new door, only to find that the customer is drunk at 3:00 pm and raring to fight with anyone.

My boss is not to be messed with. He will be professional and courteous, but the minute someone gets abusive, he will shut it down hard. So, drunk hubby starts by putting down the boss, stating we’re overcharging them, telling us that he could have done the job by himself, etc. My boss tries to reason with the customer’s wife while she is trying to get her husband to shut up but to no avail.

Finally, the boss tells the man to sober the h*** up and excuses himself, stating that he can come back at a better time.

The next day is when the bay window is set for installation. The bay window comes with an unfinished (not stained or painted) seat; the entire area of the seat is maybe three square feet.

The customer instantly pitches a major fit when they see it. We hear everything in the book: we promised we would do it, we never mentioned it, we offered to have the factory do it, etc.

None of this is true; in fact, on the customer’s contract, directly above where they sign, it states that we do not do any staining or painting. On this particular contract, the salesman even starred it when they were signing.

This is our inter-office signal that they did in fact review the paint/stain clause with the customer. This type of situation is exactly why we started doing this, and it has saved our butts before.

The customer will not be mollified! We must stain it and stain it now or she is not paying!

Again, the boss really hates to be pushed and he counters with, “If you don’t pay, we’ll exercise our lien rights.” We simply file a single piece of paper with the courthouse and then the lien is on file. Then, both sides have thirty days to come to an agreement.

Well, the customer stains the seat, and the installer collects the balance when he is done. The project is complete, and the customer never has to deal with the boss again. Or so I think.

Then, we receive the Better Business Bureau complaint this morning. No dispute on the price, no dispute on the product, no real dispute at all. The wife is just unhappy with the boss and wants an apology.

IT’S BEEN THREE MONTHS since the incident! Three months and they are still stewing? I treated them extremely well, and the installer treated them above and beyond, as well. But because my boss stood up for himself and told your husband to knock it off, we owe you an apology?

My answer to the BBB is to give them the entire scenario. I state that this job has been complete for three whole months now, and there is no dispute over the product. The account has been paid, and I also attach the original contract with the customer’s signature next to the starred No-Stain clause. I detail the abuse, and the boss’s response, backed by me and a fellow installer as witnesses.

Now, this lady claims she is going to go all over the Internet to tarnish our name. So now we’re building a case of libel against them. All this over a boss refusing to take abuse.

I rent a small house with my family. There is a stray cat in the neighborhood.

My landlord recently took pictures of the stray cat sitting in our yard and started using it as an excuse to charge us a $350 pet fee and to up our rent by $35 a month as a “pet monthly rental charge”.

Despite our efforts to prove that the feline was not ours, including affidavits from our neighbors who were actually feeding the stray, the landlord continued to insist that we pay this additional fee.

We took it to court, and we won… only for the landlord to send us a letter saying he was forced to increase rent across all of his properties due to an increase in expenses related to unexpected court costs.

We’ve had it. We’re moving out.

A while back, I was approached by a coworker, and sort of friend, who wanted to know if my being a programmer meant I could break into a password-protected laptop. Apparently, she noticed that someone accidentally left his laptop behind when leaving a train, and it was a little too late to catch him before the train doors closed. She tried asking at the train station how to return it, but they were no help, so now she had a locked laptop in her possession and no clue what to do with it. She figured she might as well make use of it if she couldn’t return it.

I believed her story. She was a very kind and well-meaning person, and I had every confidence that she had made a sincere effort to return the laptop before coming to me. Still, I wasn’t all that comfortable with the idea of breaking into someone else’s laptop, and I originally argued that I didn’t know how to unlock it anyway.

But even as I was trying to point out that being a programmer didn’t make me a master hacker, the geek part of my brain couldn’t help but tackle the problem, and I quickly realized that not only could I probably unlock it, but I didn’t expect it to be all that difficult to do. Now I found myself tempted to help just so I could later joke that I broke into a computer with my 1337 H4x0r skills.

In the end, I agreed to try to do what my coworker wanted, but only on the condition that the first priority would be to return the laptop to the rightful owner and she would only get the laptop back if I couldn’t do so. My original plan for unlocking the machine involved a Linux boot disk, but I was saved from having to burn one by the fact that a quick Google search returned a straightforward step-by-step guide for how to get past Windows passwords.

It involved intentionally shutting the machine down wrong so it would offer to do a full scan of the hard drive when rebooted. When that scan was completed, it would give a message in Notepad about the results of the scan. If I then chose to save that message, the screen that would pop up to pick where I wanted to save the file also allowed me to do some other things, like renaming existing files, and because it opened in admin mode, I could even change files that were usually protected.

So, I replaced the “sticky keys” file that runs when you hit Tab five times in rapid succession with the program that would open a command line prompt. After another reboot, when I was prompted to enter a password I instead hit Tab until the computer tried to run “sticky keys”, and instead, it opened up a command line running in admin mode, at which point I effectively could do anything I wanted on the machine by typing the appropriate commands.

For those who are screaming, “How could Microsoft be so sloppy that you could just Google how to unlock their machines?!” I should first mention that this was a much older version of Windows, nothing you are likely to be running on your computer at home.  

More importantly, the truth is that no matter what operating system you are using, your data really isn’t secure; if this exploit hadn’t existed, I could have fallen back to my original plan to use a boot disk, after all.

I’m sure the folks at Microsoft looked at their password protection as a way to keep non-computer-savvy people away and to slow down savvy folks enough that they couldn’t break in while you were away at the bathroom. Since the exploit I used required waiting for a long hard disk scan first, the password protection still did its job of slowing hackers down, and that’s all they really could hope for.

Anyway, now that I had full access to the laptop, my goal was to try to figure out how to contact its owner with minimal invasion of privacy. I got lucky there when I almost immediately found a resume saved in his documents with a phone number and email address at the top.

Now I had a new problem: the minor detail that I’d just broken the law. At the time, the “anti-hacking” laws we had were excessively open-ended. There was no doubt that my intentional breaking into a laptop qualified, even if I had the best of intentions when doing it. So, I had to figure out how to return the thing without confessing to my evil criminal ways.

In the end, I created a dummy email account to message the person who owned the laptop about returning it. He was quite thankful. Apparently, he hadn’t backed up his computer and thought he had lost some valuable files. He asked me how I managed to contact him, but in my reply, I explained only how I had come by the laptop and glossed over how I’d figured out his email address, and he thankfully didn’t ask about the omission.

I politely declined to have him come pick up the laptop at my house — we master criminals have to hide our addresses, after all — so we settled on my dropping it off at the nearby rental office for the complex he lived in so he could pick it up there later.

My friend was a bit disappointed to discover she wasn’t getting a new laptop any time soon but admitted she couldn’t be too angry at me for managing to return it to its rightful owner.

I work in an ambulance. I pick up an underage drunk teen. He’s misbehaving and making a mess of my ambulance.

Me: “Knock it off, kid.”

Teen: “I can say whatever I want and do whatever I want. My dad is the police chief, and he can have you fired!”

Me: “Okay, then let’s call your dad and tell him that his underage son was caught with a fake ID, was drunk as h***, pissed all over the inside of my ambulance, and then spit a snot ball at me.”

We took his drunk a** to the hospital and let them call his dad.

When I am getting my driver’s license in 2010, I witness this conversation while waiting for my turn to take my test.

The Wahiawa Police Station functions as a DMV and a satellite city hall, as is common in Hawaii. There are about forty-five or fifty people sitting in an open outdoor seating area relaxing in the crispy December air.

One of the instructors walks out with a clipboard.

Driving Instructor: “[Man]? I’m looking for [Man]!”

An individual runs over happily.

Driving Instructor: “All right, I need your paperwork.”

The man hands over multiple papers — a few more than normal. As the conversation between them progresses, it becomes clear that this man is from out of the country and has just moved to America. He is in the process of getting situated, and evidently, the license he has from back home is not recognized in the US.

Driving Instructor: “Okay, this all looks good. Now, where is your licensed driver?”

Man: “I drive here.”

Driving Instructor: “Okay, but where is the licensed driver that came with you?”

Man: “No, no, I drive here.”

Driving Instructor: “You drove here by yourself?”

Man: “Yes, I drive here. Car is in the back row; we can use. Toyota Camry, very good car. Very cheap, very few problems.”

Driving Instructor: “Oh, God…”

Man: “You don’t like Toyota? Very good car, very few problems to fix. 1995, only 22,000 miles.”

Driving Instructor: “No, sir, this.” *Holds up the man’s permit* “This is a permit. You can’t drive without a licensed driver with you in the car.”

Man: “I am licensed; I have this.” *Points at the permit* 

Driving Instructor: “No, this, you… Did no one… Who did you talk to when you were here getting this card?”

Man: “No, no talk, just paper and test. Take test, turn in to lady with yellow hair. She take picture, say congratulations.”

Driving Instructor: “No one explained what this card is?”

Man: “Limited driver’s license. Can only have one passenger?”

Driving Instructor: “No, that’s a provisional lic… You know what? Come with me. We’re going to go yell at someone.”

Man: “Do we still do test?”

Driving Instructor: “If you find a licensed driver willing to sign for you, then yes, we will take the road test.”

Man: “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

The man separates from the driving instructor and approaches a large Samoan man who is taller than the ATM he is standing next to.

Man: “Friend! You sign paper so I can take license test, yes?”

As he finishes his sentence, he produces $200 from his pocket and holds it out to the guy.

ATM Guy: “…Yeah, he’s with me, boss!”

Driving Instructor: “Excellent, sign these while I go inside and talk to [Employee].” 

The man passed his driving test and drove off in a very nice blue ’95 Toyota.