This story takes place on Thanksgiving Day at my home. My husband’s maternal cousin, her husband, and their three children suddenly dropped into town from out of state two days before the holiday, and they wanted to have Thanksgiving with my husband, his parents, and me.

My husband hates his cousin and her family, but his mom pitched such a hissy fit that he gave in. His cousin’s children are QUITE poorly mannered and have a reputation for completely destroying the homes of people that they visit. I also ended up having to buy extra food at the last minute because our guest list went from four to nine. I also had to revise the menu because his cousin sent over a LONG list of foods that her children do not like.

We live on a small farm. Our house is over a hundred years old and is quite small by American standards. I am sitting on the couch grading assignments from the students in my Introduction To Supply Chain Management class at the local community college.

Husband: “My cousin and her spawn just pulled up the driveway. Hopefully, they don’t wreck the house! If they start running around the house, I am sending them back outside and they can run around the goat pasture!”

As soon as my husband opens the front door, his cousin’s children rush in and IMMEDIATELY start touching anything that they can get their hands on. The oldest daughter grabs the remote, turns off the program I was watching, and starts scrolling through channels.

Oldest Daughter: “Why don’t you have the Disney Channel?! I wanted to watch [Show] and you don’t have it. I can’t live without my Disney Channel!”

Me: “I think that you can for a few hours. If you want, I can find something on one of the streaming services for you guys to watch.”

Oldest Daughter: “BUT. I. WANT. THE. DISNEY. CHANNEL! You should have gotten satellite TV when you found out that we were coming!”

I am about to scold her when my husband realizes that the two youngest have grabbed my work laptop out of the office/guest room and are trying to crack my password. I go to stop them.

Then, I hear a smash and turn around to find that the oldest daughter has taken her shoes off and thrown them at my framed Master’s degree on the living room wall, shattering the glass and knocking it off the wall. This really sets me off because I worked really hard for that degree and the frame was a quite expensive custom job.

Me: “You are going to pay for that frame! It wasn’t cheap. And I think that you have also damaged the diploma. I have to get a new copy from the college, and that is going to set me back about $50. Go outside before I start to lose my temper further!”

My husband’s cousin jumps in.

Cousin: “You shouldn’t let [My Name] talk to my children that way! They’re good kids, so they should get everything they want!”

My husband used to be a drill sergeant in the Army. He gets this look on his face like he is about to really roast his cousin and her kids. He responds in the loudest drill sergeant voice he can muster.

Husband: “You shouldn’t allow them to be monsters about it, then! They have damaged property, been completely disrespectful to my wife and me, and created utter chaos from the second that they set foot in this house! GET THEM OUT OF MY HOUSE! You gave my wife two days’ notice that you are coming for Thanksgiving dinner and expected her to cater to all of your whims by giving her a laundry list of foods that she shouldn’t cook because your demon spawn don’t like them! You are outrageous people, and you are no longer welcome at my home!”

Cousin: “But what are we supposed to do for Thanksgiving dinner?”

Husband: “FIND A RESTAURANT! Good luck finding one, though, because I seriously doubt that the only restaurant open on Thanksgiving in this town is going to put up with your children!”

My husband’s cousin left with her kids in a huff. My mother-in-law was so mad at my husband and me for throwing them out that she didn’t talk to us for over five months! She was mad because she didn’t get to have Thanksgiving dinner with her niece and her great nieces and nephews. We held firm because her kids were in our house for less than five minutes and this was the chaos that they created. They probably would have destroyed my home if they had stayed for dinner!

This happened in the late 1990s. When I was younger, my mother rescued and rehomed animals as well as breeding for profit. We weren’t like a puppy mill. Most were purebred cats, dogs, and horses that had homes lined up before conception.

One of the dogs we rescued (when I was about seven or eight) was a pregnant Great Dane crossed with Bullmastiff. She delivered about five puppies not long after we rescued her. What we didn’t expect was parvo, a highly contagious illness that affects dogs and has a very high mortality rate. I can’t remember if the mother had parvo or if the puppies caught it after they were born, but out of all the puppies, only one survived: a boy that we named Tiger.

Anyone familiar with the temperament of a Great Dane will understand what sort of dog Tiger was. To call him a gentle giant is an understatement. He had the height of a Great Dane, standing at twenty-eight inches tall, with the shoulders, girth, and weight of a Bullmastiff — well over 100 pounds — with dark brown stripes all over him. To be totally honest, he looked terrifying but would sooner lick you to death than he would growl or even bark at you — not that I ever heard him bark or growl at anyone.

When I was nine, we moved to a small town with a church on every corner and a population of 2,000 narrow-minded people. We were a family of four — my younger sister, my older brother, our mother, and me — with our entourage of animals — eight dogs, two cats, three horses, and a few chickens which soon grew into a small zoo — and a family of atheists moving to a very churchy town. Needless to say, we didn’t fit in and stood out like a sore thumb.

A few days after moving there, I decided to take Tiger for a walk and have a look around the town. Tiger could be walked without a lead, but as this was a new environment for both of us, it was safer to put him on a lead. We lived just out of town along a highway — think “Pet Sematary” and the cat — so it was about a ten-minute walk to town, and after a five-minute walk up a hill, there was a turnoff to a long stretch of road that led into town.

I was halfway down the road when I heard someone shout:

Woman: “Hey! YOU! What do you think you’re doing with that dog?!”

There were only four or five houses along that road, with no traffic, so there was nobody else this person could have been yelling at. I looked around and saw a woman out the front of her house walking toward me.

Woman: “You deaf? I said, what do you think you’re doing with that dog?”

Me: “Walking him?”

Woman: “He’s dangerous! You’d better keep that mutt away from me and my family if you know what’s good for you!”

Me: “Okay.”

I continued walking. She muttered something as I walked away but I have no clue what it was. I didn’t see her on my walk back home, but we crossed paths about a week later, but this time, she was in her car and Tiger wasn’t on a lead.

I took the same path as the week before, only this time I was closer to town than our first encounter. I heard a car coming up behind me, so I went to the side and told Tiger to follow. We were walking on the side of the road as the woman came up beside us and rolled down her window.

Woman: “Put that dirty mutt on a lead right now or I’m calling the police!”

Me: “He’s fine to be off leash, and he’s not dangerous. I promise, he’s very well behaved.”

In my state and the area this happened in, it’s legal to have a dog off leash if the dog is well behaved and under control by the owner.

Woman: “He’s not fine. He’s scaring my kids!”

She was the only person in the car and I’d never seen her kids. I tried to calm her down and reassure her that he was a good dog.

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but he’s a good dog. Look. Tiger, sit. Good boy. Stay.”

I walked away while Tiger sat in the same spot until I called for him to follow.

But do you think this helped to settle this woman? Of course not.

Woman: “You’d better get that dog put down before he kills someone! He’s scaring my children!”

Me: “Your kids aren’t even in your car, lady. I’m sorry but I have to go.”

I continued walking to town in the hope that this woman would leave me alone, but the lunatic followed along beside us for most of the way to town until I somehow managed to lose her by turning into a small side street. I didn’t have a mobile phone, so I stopped at a shop to use their phone to call my mum to come to get me. The only way home was the road that this woman’s house was on, and I certainly didn’t want another encounter with her again.

I wish I could say that this was the only bad encounter I had with her and other entitled people in that town, but it’s not.

My fiancé and I bought a remote cabin up in the mountains earlier this year and decided to start renting it on Airbnb.

Overall, it’s been a pretty good experience, and my fiancé and I love trying to make memorable experiences for our guests, but what I don’t like is going out of my way to make an incredible experience while being lied to.

A guest from out of town reserved our place for the Thanksgiving week for their family — nothing out of the normal. She was polite and talked about her family wanting a mountain Thanksgiving.

All good. Knowing they were coming from out of town, we asked if we could buy them a turkey for Thanksgiving and some other things — always good to ask in case someone has allergies or maybe doesn’t eat meat.

So, we did that, made them a goodie bag of things, and left some champagne.

The house had beds for six people, was permitted for six, and had a well/septic system designed for — you guessed it — six.

Recently, we learned that it’s possible in the dry months (October to November) for the well to run dry and take a large amount of time to refill. If a guest runs it dry, they can risk burning out the pump (recently replaced).

I placed a large cistern in the crawlspace and engineered a system to automatically start the pump when the limit switch was tripped, and it would also turn the pump off if it detected a dry well and then restart a few hours later. In short, it could refill the tank asynchronously from the demand.

If the tank got too low, it would turn off the house pump and wait until the tank filled to a safe level. In total, there were around five hundred gallons of storage, and everything was full before they arrived.

Before the guest’s arrival, I let her know about this system and said that she should work to conserve water because if we went past the low point, that would mean no water for hours. I also put in a camera in the crawlspace so that I could visually monitor the tank level.

They were not the first guests who stayed with this system, and I also spent a week there with my fiancé and some friends before they checked in.

The guest checked in on Sunday, and by Tuesday evening the main tank was at 50% and holding; the well ran dry. I warned the guest.

At this point, I was getting nervous, thinking something had gone wrong. The cabin had one bathroom with a low-flow toilet, and the shower had a low-flow head and was connected to a thirty-five-gallon hot water tank — best-case ten- to fifteen-minute shower. How is it possible that two adults and three kids could burn through over four hundred gallons of water in twenty-four hours?

That seemed absurd, so I thought maybe the controller for the well died or maybe the well pump! 

I told myself if I couldn’t see a tank improvement level by Wednesday morning, I’d need to call a water truck because there was no way I was going to let a family with small kids have no running water on Thanksgiving. 

So, here I was freaking out. I drove to a tractor supply company, bought a 275-gallon tank and a transfer pump, and drove the two hours up to the mountains. Overall, it was $650 of equipment.

The guests told me they would be out of the house for the day and that I had permission to enter. I’d never had to visit my property during rental before; we do our best to ensure privacy.

Here is where things went downhill. I went into the house to check the breakers. They had two dogs caged up, who clearly should not have been left because of all the s*** and puke in their crate. Food was left out all over, and for a small family, there was a s***-ton of stuff.

It was certainly gross, but I wasn’t going to make a big deal of it.

I drove to a town nearby and spent about forty-five minutes getting the tank filled. I went back and — shocker — my new transfer pump was not working. I went back to town and got a submersible pump. Shocker, it didn’t fit through the opening in the tank. Back again for a more expensive transfer pump.

This area had no cell service. The house had Wi-Fi, so I could only get messages when I got there.

As I pulled back up, I saw the guests’ car pull up, introduced myself, and let them know they could just go about their day and ignore me. I didn’t need access to the inside of the house, and they could carry on.

It took about forty minutes to transfer the water. I knew they may need more, but I figured the 275 gallons would be a start and I could always come back in the morning.

The guests started acting cagey, and I was shocked that they didn’t want to just park and go in the house. So, I walked down to their cars with a flashlight (it was dark by then) and started seeing way more people.

The primary guest and her kids re-entered the house and others remained outside in their cars. It occurred to me that they knew they were doing something wrong, and I knocked on the door to ask how many people they had staying.

She said nine, but it was likely more.

At this point, I’ve literally gone out of my way to fix something that wasn’t broken — that water system was fine — and spent an entire day doing this and hundreds of dollars 

Her excuse? “Well, we didn’t know my in-laws would be coming.”

They asked if they could stay the night (seven pm at this point) and they would leave early in the morning.

I contacted Airbnb, and when asked, I just said they were in violation of the house rules and I’d like them to leave now.

I’m eating dinner in the staff room. There are some biscuits and cupcakes in a tub on the table that appeared sometime last week, but I’m ignoring them.

One of the managers and a coworker come in and chat about some things. As the manager is leaving, he grabs a cupcake and says to both of us:

Manager: “Feel free to have these.”

I think to myself, “Nice, I’ll have one after I’ve finished this.” But then he continues.

Manager: “I dunno whose they are, but I’ve been eating them.”

I’m never leaving my food unattended here again.

I worked as a lifeguard at a public pool last summer. We had a strict “No water wings” policy; those little f***ers are death traps.

A woman is putting water wings on her kid next to the pool, and I politely inform her:

Me: “Ma’am, we do not allow water wings, but we have life vests available for free.”

I point to them, literally five feet from where she’s standing.

Woman: *Infuriated* “How dare you dictate to me how I treat my child?!”

I can see this escalating, so I call my supervisor over. As he arrives and speaks to her, the kid jumps in the pool. The water wings slip up his arms, and he’s suspended underwater. I jump in and pull him out.

Woman: *Even more furious* “You have some nerve to touch my child! I’m gonna sue!”

She was banned from the pool.