I’m a woman who races motocross as a semi-professional. Most of my free time and money go into racing, building, and repairing bikes and traveling to races.

At work one day, a new coworker starts up. He’s an attractive man and we get along well. We talk at work whenever we’re on break or lunch together, and soon, we start texting outside of work. After a few months, he gets a job offer at another business and leaves our employer, and now that we’re not coworkers, we start casually dating. Our relationship starts during the motocross off-season, so although I’ve told him everything about my hobby, it doesn’t take too much time away from our relationship.

Then, race season starts. I’m back to working on my bikes every night, traveling for races every weekend, and generally living the life of my dreams. My boyfriend, however, is not so thrilled with the amount of time apart, even though I invite him to travel with me every weekend. Eventually, he gives me an ultimatum: him or motocross. I choose motocross and we split up. I know he’s not happy, but his reaction goes way farther than I ever would have imagined.

I get home from a race weekend and the door to my race shop is hanging off the hinges. I open the door as quietly as possible, turn on the overhead floodlights, and fall to pieces when I see that everything in my shop has been destroyed.

Unfortunately for the guilty party, I have quite a few security cameras in and around my shop because, with that much valuable equipment, I didn’t want to take any chances. The video shows my ex-boyfriend and two of his friends smashing in the shop door with a sledgehammer and then going nuts in my shop with the hammer and two axes.

I take the footage to the police and file a lawsuit against the three culprits. I win my case easily, and while the money isn’t enough to replace everything in my shop, it is a nice addition to the insurance payout. My ex and his friends are also charged with breaking and entering and vandalism and are eventually found guilty by a jury and sentenced to a few months in prison.

On the bad side, I end up having to take the rest of the race season off to focus on rebuilding my shop, and I end up losing a few sponsors because I’m not racing.

Back when I was in university, twenty years ago, the college I attended had a student laundrette in the basement of one of the buildings. There were prominent notices stating that the laundrette was monitored by CCTV, and indeed a campus urban legend that the porters sold tapes of couples who got rather too close there on weekends.

This didn’t stop one enterprising young man who blew through his student loan in record time and found himself out of money a few weeks into his first term. He hit upon the brilliant idea of using what little funds he had left to buy a crowbar and then going down one evening to force the coin boxes on the machines.

This played out precisely how you’d expect: he was spotted almost immediately, and one of the porters locked the one access door of the laundrette while another called the police. When the criminal less-than-mastermind tried to leave, he found the door locked against him, and before he could resort to more drastic action, the police arrived to let him out and take him somewhere nice and quiet for the night.

He was, of course, expelled for his actions, and for the rest of the term, the main beneficiary of the bungled robbery was a nearby private laundrette that was more than happy to take students’ washing while the college laundrette was closed for repairs.

When I was fresh out of college, I got called up for jury duty. It was actually a pretty fascinating experience and I highly recommend it. Some of the people I served with, though, were… interesting.

We’d agreed on most of the fourteen or so criminal charges in the case, including two of the three counts of child endangerment. Now, we were discussing the final of those. One of the criteria we were told for being guilty of this particular charge was that the child had to feel endangered. The child in this case was a baby. All but one of us concluded that, due to the particular circumstances, the baby had no idea what was going on and thus didn’t feel endangered and thus the person wasn’t guilty of this particular charge.

The holdout was a woman from the Caribbean — I forget where precisely. I point this out only to explain the sentence structure of her argument since English was her second language or perhaps even third. This is how the argument went, verbatim.

Woman: “When I was in my country, one day, I try to feed my baby. He wouldn’t take the breast! Wouldn’t take the breast!” *Pauses* “Lightning come down, set fire to the house!”

The Rest Of Us: “…”

Woman: “…”

The Rest Of Us: “…”

Me: *Grasping at straws* “Um…okay, so… you’re saying that babies have some kind of sixth sense about what is going on around them, so this baby knew that the man was threatening him even though the baby’s mother wasn’t really worried about the guy?”

Woman: “YES! Babies know!”

Everyone else proclaimed their disbelief.

Me: “Okay, why don’t we move on to the other charges and come back to this one later?”

Eventually, we were able to convince her that, in this case, lightning not come down, not set fire to the house, as far as this baby was concerned.

This story is part of our Best Of July 2021 roundup!

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My spouse and I are traveling in San Francisco. We decide to use a car rental service that lets people rent out their personal or spare car. Since I’m most familiar with a particular kind of car, we pick that kind to rent. We buy the optional extra insurance on our vehicle, just in case. One of the things I’ve noticed with [Car]s is that there’s a tendency for the back latch to fall off.

So, we use the app and rent someone’s old used [Car]. The back latch is loose, and I know it’s going to fall off. I warn my spouse and mark it in the damages. No problem.

Sure enough, the latch falls off partway through the trip.

This story, though, isn’t actually about the latch. It’s about what we discover when we are cleaning up the car to return it. In the driver’s side pocket, there is a glass tube with brown residue in it, wrapped in tin foil. And underneath the driver’s seat is a mysterious triangular hole cut in the floor of the car for no readily apparent reason.

My spouse and I figure that it is probably a crack pipe and that the car is probably used in some sort of drug smuggling, hence the triangular hole in the floor.

We debate reporting it to the cops. Ultimately, we decide not to because we are on vacation and we are afraid of what would happen if they got involved.

When we get home, they don’t charge us for the latch… but we charge the insurance we got for the hole in the floor.

Despite being illegal to use on paths in many parts of the country, electric scooters are really popular, especially with children. They are a bit of a hazard. Kids being kids have limited control, the brakes aren’t great, and they can go pretty quickly and are mostly made from un-padded steel.

I recently found out how dangerous they can be, as a child hit me at full speed, breaking several bones in my foot. The kid was unhurt but ran off when he saw me on the ground, leaving his precious scooter behind.

The police didn’t have the power to help me, and the school didn’t seem to want to help, so I took to social media with a picture of the scooter.

Me: “Are you a parent of a child that goes to [School]? Has your child come home missing this scooter? Then please let me know, as I have several broken bones and would love how you intend to apologise.”

I got a lot of comments, many from people who thought I was in the wrong, that I had somehow stolen this kid’s property — he left it behind and the police wouldn’t take it — that I was being dramatic — I couldn’t walk properly for months — and generally that I should get over it.

Eventually, I got a direct message from someone that could be the kid’s mother.

Kid’s Mother: “I think you have my son’s scooter. When can I collect it?”

Me: “I need to make sure it’s his. Why don’t you bring him down and he can apologise when he collects it?”

Kid’s Mother: “I’m not doing anything. Give me the scooter.”

Me: “Sorry, I need to be sure that it’s his. I will hand it in to the police if no one collects it this week.”

This led to several increasingly threatening and aggressive messages. I copied them down and handed them to the police. Now, with evidence, they could do something: they paid her a visit and warned her that if she contacted me again, it could mean jail time!

As for the scooter, I handed it in as “lost,” but no one collected it and it legally came back to me. It turned out to be worth a bit of money. I sold it and took the family on a short holiday once I finally healed.