High school was a difficult time for me. I was the “smart kid”: straight-A student, top of my class, the one everybody wanted for group projects. And I was the one everybody forgot was there when recess came. I wasn’t quite bullied, but I was ignored A LOT.

To make things worse, I was diagnosed with a tricky disability in my senior year and was extremely ill, in and out of hospitals all through that year. My grades naturally slipped a bit, and at that point, the few people who talked to me regularly dropped me like a hot potato. Obviously, now that I was only a B student and couldn’t do the whole group project on my own, I was no longer necessary. By the middle of the year, only the “weirdos” from two classes below me even acknowledged I existed. (Great guys. We’re still friends!)

Fast forward several years. My disability is well under control and my career is taking off. I am to be the project manager on a big project in a prestigious engineering firm and I’m involved in hiring more people to the team. We call in a guy whose resume looks promising, and this exchange happens as soon as he is introduced to the interviewing panel.

Candidate: “[My Name]?! Wow, it’s been so long I didn’t recognize you! How’s it going?”

Me: “I’m sorry, do we know each other?”

Candidate: “What, you don’t remember me? I’m [Candidate]! We went to high school together.”

I figure maybe he is someone from another class aiming for a leg up, but I still have no clue who he is.

Me: “Ah, well. That was almost ten years ago and was a difficult time. I’m afraid I don’t remember you. But anyway, your resume…”

Candidate: “Oh, come on! You have to remember me! [Candidate]? We were in the same class all the way through! I think you even had a crush on me!”

Me: “I beg your pardon?”

Candidate: “Yeah, you totally had a crush on me! You were always up for helping me with homework, and you were game to include me on group projects and then do my share. Pretty sure you did everyone’s share! Ha, no point risking your grade being lower, right? You were a weird little girl!”

I remember him now. I did have a crush on him for a while and “helped” him a lot with schoolwork (meaning I did it for him). It’s bad enough to bring that up in an interview, but… 

Me: “Ah, yes. [Candidate]. I remember you now. You were the one who started yelling out that the [ableist slur] was coming when my disability first started. And stepping back in corridors or crossing the street when I walked by. And telling people they should stay away from the [other ableist slur] or they’d become losers like me, too.”

Candidate: “Er… I… Well, I was young, and…”

Me: “Thank you for reminding me of all this. Turns out it saves us some time.”

Candidate: “But… my interview?”

My Boss: “I think we can all agree that we’re done here.”

He seemed sincerely shocked that he didn’t get the job!

This story is part of our Best Of April 2021 roundup!

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In the early 2010s, I was in high school taking a math course. It was the first class of the day and we had a really wonderful, punctual teacher. One day, she didn’t show up, no teachers came into the room, and after forty minutes — much to the anger of twenty other teenagers — I went to alert the office, worried something had happened to her.

The teacher was fine, but I became the center of horrific bullying in that class as a few of the students got in a lot of trouble for their actions while we were not supervised. Some of my favorites included shoving, spitting on my homework, and throwing plastic Easter eggs with slips of paper in them at me — the eggs were for a fun math game — hard enough to crack the plastic and bruise.

Most of this was led by this super senior; she was held back her senior year and was in her fifth year of high school. This bully went out of her way to make sure I was miserable that entire semester, and she was the reason I hated Easter eggs for years.

Fast forward to 2019, nearly a decade later. I am at a bar with two friends and my long-term boyfriend. The friends grew up around here but moved away years ago and are just in town to visit and catch up with people. A lot of people are coming to our booth to say hi and catch up with all of us. One of them is a woman a year or two older than me, covered in tattoos. She looks sort of familiar and is super thrilled to see [Friend].

I guess she thinks I look familiar, too, because she squints at me a little and finally asks if we used to go to high school together. After a few seconds of trying to remember where we know each other from, her face lights up with excitement. 

Woman: “Oh, yeah! We were in [Teacher]’s class together!”

Me: “Oh, yeah. You were the b**** who threw plastic Easter eggs at me.”

Cue deafening silence from the table. [Woman]’s face runs through a whole range of emotions, from shock, to remembrance, to horror, to complete embarrassment. [Friend] is glaring at her angrily; she’s heard the story before and is connecting the dots. My boyfriend looks like he might kick her out of the bar himself and our other friend is just shocked. 

Suddenly, [Woman], with all the charisma and emotions of a drunk woman, reaches out and takes my hands, her eyes tearing up.

Woman: “Oh. My. God! I have been trying to find out where you were for years! I am so, soooo sorry for everything! I was so unbelievably horrible to you and took out so many things on you, and it wasn’t until I got older that I realized how terrible I was! I was such a b**** to you and I’m so, so, so, so sorry!”

I don’t know what I expected, but it was not that. I just tell her it’s cool and it’s in the past; we were dumb kids and we can move forward now. Her whole face lights up again. 

Woman: “You are like, totally, seriously the best, Egg Girl! Besties! Can I put this on Insta?”

We never became friends, but I did let her take a selfie of us to “confess her crimes” online, and for the next year until the health crisis closed down the bars, we would occasionally run into each other out on the town. She would stop everything just to point me out to her friends and go, “That’s Egg Girl! I threw plastic Easter eggs at her in high school. I was suuuch a b**** to her!” 

Life is like a bunch of plastic Easter eggs; you never know what you’re going to get, I guess.

My kid’s school tells the students they are not allowed to take off sweaters and blazers on the way home, no matter the heat.

Me: “Why is this the rule?”

School: “Because  whilst in uniform they are representing the school.”

One day my son is set upon by several of his peers to steal his watch. Fortunately, my friend sees and lets me know. I go out there and read the riot act, get his watch back and complain to the school.

School: “We have no jurisdiction, as they are off school property and out of school hours.”

Me: “They were seen, by a friend whose son is about to start at the high school in a few months. If you have no control over these kids’ behaviour my son is going to remove his blazer, sweater, and tie for his two-mile walk home the second he leaves school property. You can’t have it both ways.”

My son didn’t wear his uniform home for the rest of the summer.

Related:
A Uniform Response, Part 3
A Uniform Response, Part 2
A Uniform Response

This happened during my uniform group camp when I was in my early teens. The uniform groups of about five schools were camping together in a school for four days and three days.

At the end of the first day, my groupmate’s shower cubicle couldn’t open, leaving him trapped inside. His response was to start pounding on the cubicle door and hollering, “I’m trapped in the toilet! I’m trapped in the toilet!” The boys all found the whole thing beyond hilarious and didn’t help the trapped boy, though he eventually got the lock open and escaped.

He was the butt of all the jokes that night. Thank goodness everyone was too busy laughing at him; I had accidentally packed my mother’s pyjamas and would not have lived it down if anyone noticed.

We expected the mockery to end by the next day, but there was this one schoolmate of mine that just insisted on rubbing it into my groupmate’s face. Every joke about being trapped in a toilet, he cracked, and he laughed non-stop. He was always a jerk, but this was on a whole new level.

And then, on the second night, guess who got trapped in that defective cubicle? My schoolmate, that same boy who kept mocking my groupmate, was now hopping behind the cubicle door, flapping his hands like a chicken and screaming, “Get me out of here! Get me out of here!”

I really couldn’t help myself. I burst out laughing until I started to cry before I ran off to get the teachers. I found them having a coffee break in the canteen, right as one of them said, “Ah, peace and quiet at last.”

I gleefully ruined their peace and quiet by telling them how [Schoolmate] got himself trapped in the toilet. The look on their faces was priceless. One of them actually said, “You just had to jinx us!” to Mr. Peace And Quiet.

The four of them followed me into the washroom, where all the boys were now out of their cubicles in varying states of nudity, laughing at [Schoolmate]’s chicken flapping and jumping. Seeing that nobody was showering, I snuck into one of the opened cubicles and began showering right as the teachers made themselves known.

There was a shriek of “Why are there girls here?” — one of the teachers was female — and then sudden pounding on the shower door as the guy I stole the place from tried to get in and get clothes on.

I ignored him, and he started angrily shouting that he’d kill me. It was about this point that the teachers realised that they couldn’t open the cubicle door no matter how they tried, so one of the teachers returned with an actual crowbar, which the four of them used to force [Schoolmate]’s cubicle open. While everyone was distracted by the crowbar, I snuck out before the guy I stole the shower from could notice.

The very first thing I proceeded to do was to find [Groupmate]. When [Schoolmate] finally stumbled out of the showers, the two of us stood there and threw every single toilet joke he made back in his face. [Schoolmate] then snarled at me, “I mocked [Groupmate] and then I was trapped. Tomorrow will be your turn.”

On day three, I didn’t get trapped. I wasn’t an idiot, and the teachers had declared that one cubicle off-limits anyway.

And to add insult to injury, someone made a play about the whole situation and had it performed in front of the entire uniform group the next year, forever preventing [Schoolmate] from living it down.

Moral of the story: karma is one h*** of a b****.

My mom and I look very much alike, to the point that my family often jokes I’m her clone with my dad’s health problems thrown in. Think Reese Witherspoon and her daughter — that level of similarity.

My mom is a substitute teacher, and she sometimes subs at my school or even for my class. I’ve long since gotten over the awkwardness of calling her “Mom” in class, since it’s obvious anyway. I’m somewhat new at my school, and this is the first time my mom has subbed for my class at this school. When she’s about to turn on a projector, I happen to be sitting closest to the light switch.

One boy in the class, also a new student, badly wants to be the class clown but is actually just a bully.

Mom: “[My Name], can you hit the lights?”

Me: “Sure, Mom.”

Bully: *Pointing at me and laughing* “Haha! You called the sub ‘Mom’!”

There’s a moment of silence as the entire class contemplates how stupid his comment was. The bully seems upset that he hasn’t gotten the whole class jeering at me.

Classmate #1: “Dude… that is her mom.”

Bully: “What? How would you know that?”

Classmate #1: “Just look at them.”

Bully: “But I— I didn’t know that!”

Classmate #2: “And do you really think we have two [Extremely Uncommon Last Name]s in the same room by chance?”

Classmate #1: “Seriously, [Bully], just sit down and shut up.”

He did sit down and shut up. Within a few months, he realized his mean attempts at being funny weren’t getting anywhere, and he started acting a lot nicer. I’m glad I attended a school where the students didn’t put up with things like that.