We’ve just hired a new bar employee. It’s her very first shift unsupervised ever, but she’s still working with me.

I see her walk up to the register — completely in view of me — take $100, write an IOU note, and put that in the register.

Me: “What are you doing?”

New Hire: “Oh, I just need this for rent.”

Me: “You can’t just take $100 from the register.”

New Hire: “I can’t?”

Me: “No!”

New Hire: “Why not?”

Me: “That’s stealing!”

New Hire: “How?”

Me: “You’re taking money that doesn’t belong to you!”

New Hire: “I’ll give it back! I wrote an IOU!”

Me: “It doesn’t work that way.”

New Hire: “That’s how it worked at my last place.”

Me: “What was your last place?”

New Hire: “My dad’s restaurant.”

Me: “Well, it might be different between family, but here, it’s— Wait. Weren’t you fired from your last place?”

New Hire: “Yeah. So?”

Customer: “Yo, what’s that stuff y’all sell that you can use to make meth, and how much of it can I buy before y’all gotta call the feds?”

Me: “For you, none!”

CONTENT WARNING: Child Neglect/Emotional Abuse, Nightmare Fuel

People seemed to believe this story I wrote was true, which is good because it is, so I think I can dredge up another story or two about my insane parents from those memories I try not to think about anymore. 

I’ll start with a cautionary tale about what NOT to say to young children. 

When I was three, I had that most common of afflictions for children: believing in monsters that hid in the dark — under the bed, in the wardrobe, peering in the window, or out in the hallway peeking in the door. At the time, I spent the days with a childminder who was a better mom to me than my mother ever was, as both my parents were working full-time, and her family treated me like their own.

Every so often, events conspired so that I’d stay the night with them, on weekends when my parents had to travel to go to some big meeting or wanted to go drinking. They had been working on getting me to sleep in the dark by providing me with a hot water bottle that was also a plush toy, sleeping in the same room as me with the lights off, or using a dim red bulb in the bedside lamp to acclimate me to it. That glorious woman did a lot more for me than that, and I credit her for my love of helping and comforting others, but this isn’t a story about good things happening. 

My father was a military man. He had left the army not too long before this and had carried a number of bad lessons from it. Discipline is all well and good, but you can’t expect a child to sit quietly through a six-hour car journey with nothing but classical music to listen to. Stoic self-reliance is commendable, but you can’t tell a child they’re too big to cry when they wander through a patch of nettles. And you absolutely cannot ever do this. 

I was crying in bed, begging him not to turn the lights off, begging him not to leave me alone in the dark, begging him to at least close the curtains, and begging for something to keep me safe so the monsters wouldn’t get me.

His response?

Father: “You’d better go to sleep quick; the monsters can’t get you while you’re sleeping.”

Then, he closed the door, turned off the hallway lights, and walked away, step, step, step against the wooden floorboards echoing up through the darkness, accompanied by his chuckling, celebrating a good practical joke. 

I didn’t sleep that Friday night. Nor the night that followed. Or the night that followed that.

That Monday, I spent all day asleep on a couch, listening to my childminder pottering about her kitchen, finally feeling something close to safe. I concluded that the only way I could sleep was if I had something to fight the monsters. 

And that is how I spent sixteen years sneaking kitchen knives into bed so I could sleep with a weapon under my pillow. I only recently shook off the rest of that trauma. I spent two and a half decades with my imagination running wild, seeing pale faces and long clawed fingers peering in or reaching around windows and doors, and having repeated pain-filled nightmares about being ripped to shreds by circling teeth as I fell through a pitch-black pit. 

Next time, if there is one, I should probably go into how I ended up paralyzed for three days because my parents were convinced that my illness wasn’t that bad or how they hid eighteen years of loving gifts and letters that my biological mother sent in a locked filing cabinet. Maybe those are a bit too much, though.

Related:
When The Tree Provides The Apple With The Resources To GET AWAY

I wear my insulin pump on the back of my arm. A customer comes up behind me, grabs my arm with one hand, and tries to pull the pump off with the other.

Me: “Excuse you. Do not touch me.”

Customer: “Is that a nicotine patch?”

Me: “No.”

Customer: “What is it?”

Me: “None of your business.”

Customer: “Excuse me? Get your manager.”

Me: “Sure.” *Into my headset* “Manager to clearance aisle to speak with a customer.”

Manager: “Why?”

Me: “He tried to take the device off my arm, I told him not to touch me and wouldn’t tell him what it was, and now he wants to talk to you.”

Manager: “Okay.”

Me: “He’ll be here soon.”

Customer: “You didn’t need to tell him all that!”

Me: “Was any of that a lie?”

Customer: “All I wanted to know was what it is!”

Me: “I would have told you if you had asked before you grabbed me and tried to take it off.”

Customer: “You’re just being a b****.”

Me: “Okay. You can talk to my manager when he gets here.”

I start to turn away but think better of it. As I turn back to the customer, he is reaching out again. He recoils.

Me: “Touch me again and I will drop you like a dead bug.”

Manager: “I can handle this, [My Name].”

Customer: “She threatened me! Did you hear her?”

Manager: “Yes, sir, I did hear my associate warn you not to touch her. And I saw the security video where you tried to remove the device from her arm without so much as greeting her, let alone asking to touch her.”

Customer: “You’re all full of s*** and shady a**holes!”

The man leaves. [Manager] gestures at my arm, and I turn so he can inspect it. We have known each other for years, even before we were coworkers, so he knows my medical history and we are comfortable talking about it.

Manager: “It looks good. Why didn’t you just tell him it was an insulin pump?”

Me: “I don’t owe strangers an explanation of my body. I’m tired of justifying how I look to people who have no impact or input.”

Manager: “Well… yes. But it would have been less stressful.”

Me: “And even less so if he had just asked first.”

Manager: *Sigh* “True. You are correct.”

[Customer] tried to go to corporate, claiming I had harassed him and taunted him with my “IV drug use”, but [Manager] had my back. He sent the CCTV and a written statement that I was under no obligation to explain my medical needs to anyone. 

Related:
What A Diabeetus, Part 12
What A Diabeetus, Part 11
What A Diabeetus, Part 10
What A Diabeetus, Part 9
What A Diabeetus, Part 8

During church service one day, after the tithes are collected, I notice that our pastor mutters something to one of the ushers and tries to continue as normal, though he seems somewhat annoyed through the entire sermon for reasons he doesn’t seem to want to talk about.

The next Sunday, though, he decides to be fairly blunt about what disrupted the sermon.

Pastor: “You all might wonder why I seemed so agitated last Sunday. I will be blunt: it’s because someone came in and put nearly $500 in those fake notes that are meant to trick waiters into thinking they’re being tipped well only to crush their spirits when they unfold them by having a Bible verse or a plea to attend Church in place of receiving money. This was not a singular large note, but multiple of them, gathered over a large amount of time.”

The audience murmurs a bit and looks about to see if anyone might be outing themselves with obvious guilt. A fair few of the members of the church, including me, are waitstaff and we would be completely beside ourselves if we ended up on the other end of this. Then, our pastor continues.

Pastor: “Now, I will only say a few things. We are now banned from [Restaurant we would often go to after service concluded] because someone either by accident or on purpose used one of these to pay their check, and not just to harass some poor person thinking they were seeing an example of human goodwill only to have it crushed. Doing that was the final straw for the owner to okay them dumping every single fake tip they’ve received on us. Whoever this is was arrogant enough to have our church’s name printed on it — and their name — which I will not say in public, though I am going to have a very stern talk with them afterward and urge them to go and pay the restaurant the owed money they failed to pay — I am being very charitable in assuming it was by accident — before the restaurant takes it into their own hands to call the police on them. The only reason they haven’t is because they’re giving the congregation as a whole the benefit of the doubt that we didn’t encourage this. Now then, on to the service.”

What followed was a very chastising lesson about Greed and how awful and cruel it can get, laced with especially harsh condemnations on how evil it was to disguise Greed under the veil of charity or kindness — like scamming workers out of the money they deserve and acting like it was being Godly because you were telling them to go to church.

Whoever it was either skipped that day or was very good at holding it together because nobody broke or stormed out. But, given that the following Sunday, the church “mean girls” (i.e., those hypocritical fifty-five-plus church women who say they’re good Christian women but gossip, look down on others, and generally treat the Golden Rule as more of a Golden Suggestion) were missing half of their number, it was kind of an open secret who the culprit(s) was/were. 

We did get unbanned from the restaurant eventually, but only after they moved to those smart devices that automatically add the tip to credit card payments and added a rule that if you’re paying cash, you include the intended tip with the meal payment, which I don’t blame them for.