I have a coworker who has to be the center of attention and has to make things about him. For instance, our boss asked me one weekend how my 10k race went and if I was tired after. My coworker immediately then diverted the conversation to himself and said that he got tired from cutting the grass that weekend, so we’d both put in the same amount of effort. Like, no, dude.

One day, my boss asked me what I did that weekend and I said I had just bought a new car. Later, when our other boss came in, my coworker immediately began talking so I couldn’t say anything to him first.

Coworker: “I was here for the momentous news this morning that you would love to hear. [My Name]—”

Me: “Wait, are you seriously trying to share my news?”

Coworker: “Well, I thought that everyone should hear it and be a part of the celebration.”

Me: “But it’s my accomplishment. You had absolutely nothing to do with it, and it’s not like I even told you. I told [Boss], and you just happened to hear it. Stop trying to steal my thunder.”

Coworker: “Well, I wasn’t trying to steal anyone’s thunder, but if you think you should be the one to say it, then go ahead. I won’t step on your toes.”

Back in the 1980s, I bought an old secondhand Skoda. At the time, they were very unfashionable and the butt of many, many jokes. But they were cheap, tough, and reliable.

My neighbour across the road bought a Mercedes at around the same time and thought he was the bee’s knees. He crowed about how expensive and exclusive his car was, all the executive options it had, and what a shame it was that I was stuck with just a Skoda. We both left for work at about the same time every morning, and he constantly sneered at my ugly, cheap car. He would jump in his smart shiny Merc and rev the engine, asking me, “Hear that? Doesn’t it sound good?” while my valiant little Skoda chugged away. 

Then, winter arrived, and the temperature overnight dropped way below freezing for the first time. At 6:00 am, I went out, started my car, and started scraping ice off the windows. My neighbour came out and laughed at me.

Neighbour: “I bet you wish your car had heated seats like mine!”

He got in his car. I had the glorious opportunity to listen to his car completely fail to start, over and over. He kept turning the key, and there was just that whirring noise of the car failing to start over and over until the battery started to fade, too. All the time, his face was getting redder and redder and angrier and angrier. Finally, he got out, slammed the door, and stamped back into his house.

This happened three mornings in a row. He wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t even catch my eye as I got my car going and drove off. I even gave him a cheery wave.

He had to buy some electric thing that ran from the house under the bonnet. I’m not sure what, maybe an engine warmer or something — I’m not remotely technical. I waved to him every day from my cheap, ugly, super-reliable Skoda.

My mother and I have shared an apartment for several years now, and we like it like that. For the last several years, I’ve become completely disabled. We decided to get rid of my mother’s car because it had the higher payment and she’d just drive mine. It just needed a battery and tires.

It had to be towed to the shop. Being chatty as she is, my mother was talking to these guys (including some other drivers and customers) about my situation, how I’d just had brain surgery that messed up my arm, hand, and leg, and my other issues.

Without telling her, one driver paid for the battery for our car, and when my mother got home she told me this.

Mother: “The guy at the shop said we didn’t need tires, but I’ve determined that he did, in fact, put brand-new tires on the car without charging me!”

It was crazy. Things like that don’t happen to me. I’m the person who gets screwed over by the world. I help people and always pay a price for it, so for people to do that for us was absolutely amazing to me. I was so grateful I cried.

I will try to sum this up but there is a lot of backlog to this story. In general, my younger brother (a fully grown and capable adult) has all but alienated himself from my wife and me. We will only see him on birthdays or holidays, if at all going forward. We have dubbed him as a “dementor” (i.e. one who sucks the joy out of life and yes to those who know, we are fans of that wizard franchise).

He is one of those people who are only happy complaining and no matter how you try to put a positive spin on things it’s always “Well they said this” or “I did that and it didn’t…” Every time we have met up, the conversation always steers toward him having a negative experience that we know didn’t happen or didn’t happen as badly as he made it out to be (i.e. he seems to always have a run-in with our local cops).

There may have been more I am forgetting but I think started around our wedding day several years ago. My brother was tasked with being the videographer at that time and while we appreciated his help, it turned out that a couple years later he had posted a video of our wedding on his youtube channel. He told me via text.

Me in response: “Could you please remove that video? [Wife] and I didn’t want that available for the world to see.”

Brother: “Why? It’s my video and I can do what I want with it!”

Me: “It was our wedding and you posted it without our permission. Please take it down!”

Brother: “I don’t want to and I won’t! It’s my video!”

Cue us getting nowhere and being frustrated. We didn’t speak to him until sometime later and he assured us begrudginly that he “supposedly” took it down.

After a while we forgive and forget and find out that he is struggling with depression issues much like us. He’s stuck at home with Mom and Dad and can’t find a job (on disability in the meantime) and my dad can be aggravating at times so we are initially sympathetic.

We invite him to an Easter Sunday Sunrise event for our church in 2019 and to spend most of the day with us while we make plans to host dinner that evening for the family. Then the next issue happens.

We share a backyard with neighbors who have young kids and family over for similar reasons. My brother decides he wants to record birds in the trees and take a panoramic view of everything, which captures our neighbors in the recording. They seem a little uncomfortable so we talk to him about it.

Wife to Brother: “Hey [Brother], could you avoid recording the neighbors? They don’t seem to like that you’re getting them in your pictures.”

Brother getting all defensive: “I’m being careful! I won’t post it online or anything! Maybe I should just stop recording then!”

Wife taken aback by his sudden outburst: “I didn’t say don’t record the birds, just don’t get our neighbors in the shots is all.”

Brother acting sour: “Whatever!”

He continued to be sulky the rest of the day and in our attempts to be forgiving and get on with life, we chock it up as him being him and let it go after a while.

Fast forward to summer and fall timeframe of 2019 and my wife and I become foster parents. To keep it short, it was hard work and we barely had time for anything aside from taking care of the young brother and sister duo. We both have full-time jobs, had little to no help from our agency at the time, and had ever increasing demands to transport the kids to their required visits several times a week at least a two-hour roundtrip. On school nights no less!

We sadly had them sent to another family who was closer and had a stay-at-home mom. We felt sick nearly all the time and barely got much more than a few hours of sleep each night. I could say so much more to the issues we had and why foster parents are treated terribly, but that sums up our adventure in a nutshell.

So, where does this come into play with my brother? Well, as I mentioned he was living at home with Mom and Dad. He did finally get another job by that point which is good, but they wanted me to check-up on him during a week they were on vacation.

This was about a month into our stressful time as foster parents and I had decided to text him one day when I had time at work.

Me trying to joke and be good natured: “Hey [Brother]! Just checking up on you! Must be nice to have the house to yourself now that Mom and Dad are gone for a while!”

He responds minutes later with: “You know Mom and Dad told you to CALL me not TEXT me!”

Me a little offended and not expecting that kind of reaction but still trying to be nice: “I’m sorry. [Wife] and I have been really busy with the kids and taking them to school and visits with their parents. It’s a lot to handle.”

Brother: “It can’t be that hard to handle two kids like that.”

I’m more frustrated and reply again with an “I’m sorry” and explain the situation with a little more detail and get no response for several hours.

FInally I get this gem: “I don’t want anything to do with those kids! So long as you have them I am disowning you guys from the family!”

I lost it and sent a long winded text, sans swear words, back at him to let him how much effort we put into those kids daily, how we have no time for our personal life, how the agency we were working with was screwing us over, and so on.

He never replied back but in what should have been an unrelated issue, I had to call our grandfather who is a home remodeler, for some help staining our deck and my brother happened to be with him. My grandfather mentioned how I was angry at my brother but wasn’t sure why. I explained the issue briefly as I had cooled down a bit at that point and wanted to let it go. Then he tells me this:

Grandfather: “I’ll be over there in a couple of days to help you out. [Brother] thought you had told him he was the one for the job and could help you out with both gardening and staining the deck.”

(We never said that he could do anything of the sort).

Me getting angry inside but laughing over the phone: “Ah, ok. I see. There must have been some confusion. He could help if he wanted but we still wanted you to do it since you’re the professional!”

Because my brother had heard something entirely different in his head than what we had wanted for a completely unrelated issue, he filps at me and “disowns” us for fostering kids? Well, I wish that was all we had to deal with and it ended there but no.

There were other smaller issues during the pandemic in 2020 but the final straw came in January of this year.

My wife and I have been trying to make our own wine with some limited success in the last few years. In 2020, we finally had a crop of concord grapes blossom in our backyard and were able to make several bottles from it.

She sends out a massive text to my parents and my brother because we wanted him to feel included in sharing our success. We also were trying to make plans and meetup soon as the pandemic had kept us apart for a while.

My brother texts me, not her, and the following text conversation occurs:

Brother: “Please don’t tag me in your posts anymore!”

Me: “Do you mean the texts that [Wife] just sent?”

Brother: “Yes! Those!”

Me: “Uh, ok. But you should let her know since she was the one sending them out. She just wanted to ask about meeting up this weekend and share that we made some wine.”

Brother: “I’m busy then! Don’t include me on any group stuff or text me anything! I’m busy all the way through March!”

Turns out he wasn’t and showed up in a grumpy mood. He wasn’t forced to come!

At this point, we’ve come to these conclusions: our existence annoys him unless he’s happy, the center of attention, or has nothing else going on and mooches off of us in one fashion or another; and he’s always grumpy at family get-togethers, complaining about work and life to all who are near, yet he posts his fun and happy outings with friends on Facebook all the time.

Why have I not discussed any of this with my parents? Because, I have learned over the years that I can’t tell them anything without them misunderstanding my problems or “poo-pooing” my brother’s behavior as being nothing more than “him being him.”

We are sick of this roller coaster ride and that coupled with other issues in work/life has prompted us to look for another state further away to live in.

Maybe he’ll appreciate us more with hundreds of miles between us, but until then the less we see him, the happier we’ll be.

I help another teacher run a program for seniors learning English. By this point, I’ve been helping for five years, so I can run classes by myself. The other teacher still prepares all the course materials, since I’m not formally trained. The teacher isn’t good with modern technology.

The day before a class, the teacher says she’s double-booked. I need to take over the class. That’s fine. I get the email with the day’s class materials in the afternoon — or most of them.

Me: “The main resource for your class is behind a paywall.”

Teacher: “I sent it to you!”

Me: “You sent me the link to the information page. I need the lesson plan document.”

Teacher: “Oh, right.”

The lesson is designed to work in person. On the morning of class, I get this email from the program manager.

Manager: “Our building’s air conditioning is not working. You should have your classes online. I’ll set up our online conference call.”

Me: “Thanks for the heads-up. I’ll rework the class materials for the new format.”

The students are on different devices; some are on phones, while others are on computers, and a few are on tablets. We take a quarter of the class time dealing with tech issues. Then, I start the class by having them look at a row of six images.

Student #1: “I can only see three pictures.”

Student #2: “I can see all six.”

Student #3: “They’re too small. Can you zoom in?”

I slide the screen around.

Me: “I physically can’t zoom it in more.”

It turned out that the conference call program only showed the top left corner of my screen to everybody, which completely broke the flow of the lesson plan. I struggled through the parts of the lesson that still worked. In the end, I only got through half of the material.

The screen sizing problem probably existed in 2020, as well. Nobody thought to tell me.