One of my closest friends since college is an absolute genius. He was at the top of his undergrad and business school courses and is now a high-flying consultant, etc.

At one point, when we were living together, I went for a three-week adventure holiday, so I was pretty much out of contact. I asked him to take care of my plants while I was gone. This seemed a simple ask for someone so intelligent. I gave him instructions to water them every couple of days and the rough amounts of water needed.

When I came back, the dear boy seemed very guilty.

Friend: “Sorry, but I think I may have killed some of your plants… I watered them as you said, but something may have gone wrong…”

I walk in and look around at my plants, figuring he might have forgotten a couple of days or something… Well, he had killed a couple of live plants. Fair enough, things happen, right?

But then I started smelling this godawful smell in a couple of places. Couldn’t figure it out.

Turns out he had watered all of my dried plants; think bundles of sculptural sticks, etc. This included a bit of fake ivy where I was trying to make an ugly window ledge look pretty. He’d watered them diligently every two days for three weeks.

There were pools of vile water in the bottom of their containers that absolutely reeked. Black mold was already creeping up the sides of the containers and on the bases of the plants that yielded clouds of spores when I pulled them out. I had to trash the plants and containers, etc., in case they would make us sick.

Turns out my dear, sweet, genius friend had noticed the dank smell, but thought that was “probably normal for plants at some point in their lives” and didn’t want to let me down by not watering. So… he lived in our veritable plague farm of a flat for all three weeks, suffering in silence.

I really had to struggle not to die laughing. He was so earnest and had tried so hard. But good lord, sometimes even geniuses can be complete idiots.

I woke up on Friday to find that my internet wasn’t working. At first, I thought it was a temporary outage, and I had errands to run, so I wasn’t worried too much, but when I got home, it still wasn’t working, and the broadband light on my modem was red.

I went through my internet’s companion app, but it couldn’t find anything and recommended sending a tech, but my Dad was coming into town, and he knows a thing or two about technology, so I figured I’d see if he knew what to do before calling one in. Dad arrives and agrees with the assessment that we need a tech, so we give the company a call. The AI isn’t very helpful, and there was a wait for a representative, so we set up a callback time. The callback comes around, and the conversation goes something like this:

Agent: “Hello, my name is Jason. Can I please have your name?”

Me: *Gives name.*

Agent: “Hello, my name is Jason. Can I please have your name?”

Me: *Gives name again.*

Agent: “If you are having trouble hearing me, please hang up.”

And that’s what we do (we’re not convinced he was a real person), but we call the number again and get an actual agent who sets us an appointment for Thursday.

Saturday rolls around, and I decide to take the modem up to the local internet company store to see if there is something wrong with the modem, but that ends up being a bust. However, when walking behind my apartment building, we notice a tech working on the box in the next building over. The tech tells us that the outage is due to a cut cable, and he was in the process of patching the wire into the next building, but he was on a tight schedule and didn’t have time to do ours. No worries, we now know what is causing the outage.

Sunday is pretty uneventful from the outage perspective, but we do call in to let the internet people know what is going on and manage to get my appointment moved to Wednesday.

Monday, I decided to go to my apartment complex’s office to let them know what’s going on. They promised to give the company a call to try to get things fixed before Wednesday. 

Tuesday rolls around, still no WiFi. I go to the office to get updates and am met with a visibly frustrated office manager who is also annoyed that my issue hadn’t been fixed. Apparently, a company truck had been in the complex, and she thought that they were there to fix things. She promises to keep writing them and asks me to update her as things go on.

Wednesday rolls around. The tech comes out and confirms what we already knew: a cut cable, and calls out a field tech (the same one who was there Saturday) to patch me in. The field tech arrives much sooner than I expected, and the problem is at least temporarily solved, although my internet is still a little jumpy.

My dad is on a fixed income, social security, and disability related to his military service. He goes through the VA for all of his healthcare. He has housing assistance from the state because his income isn’t sufficient to cover rent and everything else.

One day, I was trying to convince him that he should apply for SNAP so that he wouldn’t have to spend so much money on groceries. His reason for not wanting to do it was:

Dad: “The government doesn’t need to know what I buy.”

Me: *Astonished.* “All of your money and healthcare comes from the federal government, and the state pays your rent. They know everything they could possibly want to, and I doubt they care what kind of milk you buy.”

Roommate: “Want to come to my family gathering on Sunday?”

Me: “Meh, I was hoping to be lazy on Sunday.”

Roommate: “I know, but I also know one of your specific dopamine hits is making children cry by learning the ways of the world of bills and taxes via Monopoly.”

Me: “Go on…”

Roommate: “Two nieces, two nephews, all ages between nine and twelve, and they’ll be playing a shiny new version of the game for the first time.”

Me: “You just want me to be a babysitter, don’t you?”

Roommate: “So you don’t want to make four children cry as you force them to pay rent and luxury taxes.”

Me: “I mean, I’m sooooo in, but you should still admit to what you’re up to.”

My roommate is putting away trash. They have recently ordered an item that came in a large cardboard box.

Roommate: “The box doesn’t fit.”

Me: “Then make it smaller.”

Roommate: *Laughs.* “With what, a shrink ray?”

Me: “Uh… no, you just fold it.”

Roommate: “What do you mean?”

Me: “Wait, are you being serious?”

Roommate: “Are you?!”

I walk over, take the large cardboard box from her, and flatten it out. I then start folding it down.

Roommate: “You… you can do that?!”

Me: “You’re twenty-something years old and you’ve never folded a cardboard box down before?”

Roommate: “I… I didn’t know that was a thing!”

Me: “Wait, when you moved in, you had like twenty huge boxes. What happened to all those?”

Roommate: “I took them to the trash room downstairs.”

Me: “Without folding them down? So you walked them down… one at a time?”

Roommate: “…”

Me: “[Roommate], we live on the top floor and there’s no elevator. You did that twenty times?!”

Roommate: “At least I got my steps in!”

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