My late grandfather was a dentist, and he told me about a particularly difficult patient he had back in the 1970s.

[Kid] was ten years old, and the entire practice dreaded his visits. When he appeared for an appointment to have some cavities filled, he entered the room with a look of defiance on his face, and my grandfather decided he just was not in the mood.

Dentist: “Get in the chair. I’m not going to play with you today.”

Kid: “No! And you can’t make me!”

Dentist: “Now!”

Kid: “I’m gonna take off all my clothes!”

Dentist: “Yeah, go right ahead.”

[Kid] stripped down to his underwear and folded his arms.

Dentist: “Now get in the chair!”

[Kid] grabbed the waistband of his underwear in a silent threat to pull them down.

Dentist: “I double-dare you!”

[Kid] stripped completely naked.

Dentist: “Now get in the chair!”

The kid quietly got in the chair and cooperated throughout the entire procedure. However, while [Dentist] was working on him, he quietly instructed his dental assistant to take the clothes elsewhere.

When it was over:

Kid: “Hey, where are my clothes?”

Dentist: “You can pick them up tomorrow. Goodbye.”

Kid: “YOU CAN’T—”

[Dentist] marched the kid out of the room and into the hallway and locked the door behind him.

Ten minutes later, he predictably got a phone call summoning him up to the front desk. He was met by [Kid]’s mother who was standing surprisingly calm and almost smug, despite the fact that she’d just witnessed the door opening and her son walking butt naked into a waiting room full of people.

Mom: “He blackmailed you with his clothes, didn’t he?”

Dentist: “Yep, and I called his bluff.”

Mom: “He’s been doing that to me forever. Any time we’re in public and I tell him no, he’ll threaten to strip naked in front of everyone, and I always find myself giving in. Thanks so much.” *To [Kid]* “LET’S GO!”

And [Kid]’s mom marched him right out, through the medical clinic full of people, through the elevators, and into the parking lot.

[Kid]’s mom came by the next day to pick up his clothes and told my grandfather that when they got home, she didn’t allow that brat to get dressed there, either, and made him spend the entire day at home walking around butt naked and enduring teasing and jeers from his siblings.

My grandfather never had a problem with him from then on, and according to his mom, it was the last time he ever blackmailed her with his clothes again.

My roommate and I (both women in our mid-twenties) lived together for three years. It was great the first couple of years, but this past year has been a nightmare.

In 2020, when [Roommate] was moving in, she talked me out of putting her on the lease. Honestly, I should’ve said no to her moving in just for that, but at the time, we were best friends, and I thought I could trust her.

At the beginning of 2023, [Roommate] went to some classes and met a guy there. They had a thing together, but there was a rule set in place stating you couldn’t date within the class. They decided to date on the down-low anyway, and then they got scared that they were going to get caught, so they ended things a couple of months into it.

Fast-forward to the time when they both graduated from this class. [Guy] had a new girlfriend who attended. [Roommate] was infuriated by this and kept saying he was doing it to get at her. Really, he had just gotten a new girlfriend, and she couldn’t cope with that.

Fast-forward a little bit more. [Roommate] and [Guy] continued to hang out behind his girlfriend’s back. It got to the point where they were drinking together one night at a bar, and on the way home, [Guy] got pulled over and got a DUI.

This is where it started affecting me. [Roommate] owed me rent right around the time this was going down. And instead of giving me rent, she spent $1,000 bailing [Guy] out so his girlfriend wouldn’t find out. I confronted [Roommate] about not paying rent.

Roommate: “You’re just throwing my mistakes back in my face!”

She never ended up paying me back for rent.

Then, [Roommate] got in a wreck at some point and still owed quite a bit on her totaled car. She had GAP (Guaranteed Asset Protection) insurance, but it was taking a while to go through. Instead of waiting, she decided to get into another car payment before the insurance company paid off her other car, so she was paying on both cars and still struggling to pay me rent. I said something about it to her.

Roommate: “But I need a car!”

Me: “You could ask your dad to use his since he works from home, and he uses your mom’s car most of the time, anyway.”

She got really mad over this and flipped out about how I thought she was privileged or whatever.

At some point while we were arguing, she suggested moving out.

Me: “Okay. The lease is up in a few months. We can revisit this then and see if anything has changed.”

She liked that, so we stayed until the end of the lease, and then we both decided this wasn’t working and to go our separate ways. [Roommate] told me she’d found an apartment in the same complex.

She also kept asking to get a dog this past year, and I kept saying no because I didn’t think she could afford it, and I wasn’t going to pay for her to get a dog to tear the place up more. A couple of days before her move-out date, [Roommate] posted on her Snapchat story that she had gotten a dog. She didn’t even tell me that she had this giant pitbull in the middle of our tiny apartment when I went to move some more of my stuff out. That infuriated me; she really couldn’t wait two more days or warn me about the dog?

I told her what we needed to replace to get my deposit back, to which she replied over and over again:

Roommate: “That’s what the security deposit is for!”

Since she moved in, she ruined all of the blinds somehow, broke my bedroom window by breaking in a couple of times when she locked herself out, tore up the floor in the kitchen and the entry moving the dryer in, tore up the washroom door because “it was in the way”, poked several holes in the walls hanging things, and so much more.

When she finally moved out, I went to clean the place up a bit and spent four hours alone cleaning trash out of her room and cleaning out the fridge, which she left packed full of gross food. I also spent a whole day scrubbing the tub, which she left full of gunk, and scrubbing all of the other surfaces. (I say “she” alone because it was getting so hard to live with her that I basically stayed with my boyfriend for most of this past year.)

I was going to put all of this behind me and move on, but I got a bill in the mail from our old apartment for $1,776.08, and my security deposit covered $820. So, I texted [Roommate].

Me: “They sent me a bill for $956.08. Are you able to send half?”

She replied with a bunch of questions asking everything they charged us for, and I answered and sent pictures of the documents with receipts for everything. I knew in my gut that she wasn’t gonna pay anything, but she straight-up said:

Roommate: “Okay, so, looking at what all the deposit covered, it looks like damages and cleaning expenses, other than the vinyl repair, which was $520.86. I don’t feel like I am responsible for the utility fee or the carpet cleaning because that was on the lease as your responsibility. You also told me you were going to get the carpets cleaned. So, I’m willing to send half of the $520.86 for the vinyl replacement. I don’t feel like I am responsible beyond that.”

Basically, she was saying, “Screw you,” to me because her name wasn’t on the lease. I also never told her I would get the carpets cleaned; I asked her to do it and she said, “That’s what the security deposits for.”

She sent me $260 and that’s it for all of this. She moved in after I was already living there, so that security deposit was mine alone, and it’s very frustrating that she just straight-up didn’t care about ruining this whole friendship over this.

After she sent that, I felt defeated, thinking I couldn’t do anything about it. Then, I remembered that we had a phone plan together. I looked up how much I owed on my phone; it was $400. In the policy, it said that if you cancel, you’re still responsible for any fees on the phone. So, I called them, canceled it, made sure to remove my card information and my autopay, and told them to bill [Roommate] for it. Since it was under her name and she doesn’t care, why should I? And that ensures that she can’t contact me anymore, either.

When I was in college, I worked in food service at a famous theme park that revolved around a particular mouse mascot. Back then, there was an annual event called “Night Of Joy”. Officially, it was an event where the park was closed early to the public, and Christian schools from all over came to the park for a mixture of fun and Christian music. 

In reality, it was just a bunch of horny teenagers running around banging in the darkest corners they could find in the happiest place on earth.

A coworker came up to me and just sighed.

Me: “That bad?”

Coworker: “It’s gotten to the point where [a certain dark and slow ride] had to be closed. The teens figured out it’s an eight-minute intimate, unsupervised ride.”

Me: “Well… I found a condom!”

Coworker: “Oh, my God! Gross! Have you called Custodial to come and remove it?”

Me: “I tried, but since they’re so occupied, they told me to wait. So, now, I have to babysit a condom under my table for the next twenty-five minutes while the organizers keep coming up to me commenting on how nice the park is now that the ‘worldly’ heathens aren’t around to ruin it.”

Coworker: “I’ll pray for both of us.”

In Ireland, we do a thing called “Transition Year”, a year in school where fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds do work experience rather than study for tests. When I was sixteen, I did my work experience in a childcare facility for a couple of weeks, and everyone was super nice, apart from one mother.

I had a suspicion that [Mother] didn’t really like me that much, and I didn’t know why. She did small, passive-aggressive actions toward me, like refusing to talk to me unless absolutely necessary — and even then she was rude — and going out of her way to make work harder for me.

Then, one day, [Mother] was collecting her daughter. As she was just about to leave the nursery, her daughter asked:

Daughter: “Mammy, why does [My Name] have a hand like a crab?”

I am slightly disabled in my left hand. I was born with no fingers but got two toes stitched onto it. I usually don’t mind when kids ask this; they’re very curious, and I just tell them that I was born with it, but it doesn’t affect me in any way. I’m still me.

Anyway, after her daughter asked, [Mother] proudly and snarkily replied in a louder tone so I could hear it at the other end of the hallway.

Mother: “That’s because [My Name] spent too long on his iPad and never ate his veggies!”

And she shut the door of the facility.

Unfortunately, it was my last day working, so I couldn’t do much, but I did tell the manager the whole story. (She already knew [Mother] didn’t like me.) I don’t know what happened to [Mother] or if she got kicked out of the nursery. Hopefully, she did, though.

Many years ago, my grandpa got fed up with some jerk driving through his fields to get to the guy’s hunting land. There was an access easement on the other side of the plot, but that would mean the jerk would have to cross a stream to get to his land. There was absolutely no access easement through my grandpa’s land.

One day, Grandpa saw [Jerk] drive his truck down the field lane, and he decided he was done with the bulls***. He got on the big Massey Ferguson tractor and drove it down the lane. He saw that [Jerk] was parked right up against a rock wall, so Grandpa dug the tractor’s bucket halfway into the ground immediately behind [Jerk]’s truck. He then disconnected the bucket and drove home. There was no way [Jerk] was going to get his truck out of there without either moving the rock wall or using a crane to get the half-buried bucket out of the way.

Grandpa and Grandma went out for dinner, went bowling, and went dancing after that. When they returned home, [Jerk] was sitting on their porch looking pissed off.

Grandpa wouldn’t even let him speak. He just walked into the house, grabbed his shotgun, and told the trespasser that he had five seconds to clear off his property before he got both barrels.

Grandpa ended up waiting two weeks before he went and removed the bucket from the ground. There was nothing the police or any other authorities could do to make him move it, and [Jerk] knew it. [Jerk] never came onto my grandparents’ property again.