Two other people and I are a team that clean people’s houses for my maid service job in a very affluent neighborhood. The thing about The Help is that we overhear a lot of things because we’re often invisible.

I’m cleaning the place up. [Client] is home, puttering around while I dust the high places and such. [Client]’s husband calls her cell phone and she answers. The discussion is in a normal tone of voice.

Thirty seconds later, [Husband] calls the home phone. The discussion becomes heated, and from what I can overhear, [Husband] thinks [Client]’s cheating and was making sure she was at home where she claimed to be. [Client] slams the phone down and fumes.

I clean house basically every two days, so I come back. [Husband] is now on a “business trip” and I am asked to do a little straightening in the bedroom. My team and I strip the bed and then I go to take fresh sheets out of the linen closet… but the door won’t open. I can’t even turn the knob.

Me: “[Client], the closet door in the bedroom is jammed.”

Client: “Let me try it.”

She tries, but she can’t get it open, either.

We all ponder briefly, and then [Client] gets the idea to call [Husband] about the stuck door.

She hits the dial button… and the phone rings from inside the closet!

We all turn to look at each other, disbelief in our eyes, as we can actually hear fumbling sounds coming from inside the closet.

I try the doorknob and the door opens without resistance. [Husband] practically falls flat on his face, the now silent cell phone in hand, at my feet.

The whole lot of us, the wife, my team, and I, are just staring at him.

Husband: “Oh… Uh… Hi, honey.” 

There’s lots of awkward fumbling as he gets to his feet, and he won’t look any of us in the eyes.

From what I glean from the following nuclear explosion, [Husband] still thought [Client] was cheating on him and pretended to go on a business trip, when in reality he was hiding in random areas in the house where neither of them normally go to try to catch the supposed side boyfriend in the house.

Naturally, the maid service is invisible to this dude, so it never occurred to him that those clean sheets happen because the servants do go into those places, until like, the very last second. He’d panicked and grabbed and held the doorknob to keep me from opening it the first time.

[Client] basically chases him out of the house entirely and he flees for his life.

Her very next call is to a divorce lawyer.

Sometime later, I show up for another appointed house cleaning and find the woman seething while on the phone with her bank. She has apparently discovered that their joint bank account is $4,000 short and she’s trying to figure out where it went.

Where else? [Husband]. [Husband] apparently bought plane tickets to another country shortly after he fled the house and withdrew the rest for cash on hand. Not suspicious at all! I was left thinking about the husband, and about pots and kettles both being black.

Client: “I have plenty of money in my account, so I promise that I can still pay you, so your services can continue as normal.”

At this point, I shyly suggest she call my home office. She can ask for a referral from the cleaning company for some trustworthy house movers to remove [Husband]’s personal effects from her home.

The house movers and cleaning company sometimes share job requests and bounce off of each other; they often carefully pack up entire households and then leave the place to us to clean the carpets, clean shelves, etc., and prepare the house for new families moving in. It’s a very beneficial arrangement for both of us and we refer clients back and forth.

Less than half an hour later, four big guys arrive at the same time her lawyer does — when you have big bucks, response time can be measured with a hand timer, apparently — and they go room by room. The lawyer notes everything that is slated as [Husband]’s, which the movers take down and carefully pack. My team and I coordinate with the movers and clean up behind them so that there aren’t even dust rings left behind where the removed things used to be.

The lawyer makes careful inventory of everything and its condition when removed so [Husband] can’t complain about breakage. [Husband]’s things are then taken to a storage facility.

Details are sketchy from here on, but [Client] now has a different last name and is very happily living her life as a divorced woman.

I’m just left shaking my head. I’m used to some odd stuff that is accidentally discovered, overheard, or observed, but so far, this takes the cake.

On the plus side, with half the stuff gone, the house is much easier to clean!

This story is part of our Best Of October 2020 roundup!

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I’m playing a certain online game where one player is given the objective of killing the others in secret while the others have to figure out who the killer is and vote them off before it’s too late. Players are not allowed to communicate with each other during normal gameplay except during a meeting, and dead players are not allowed to communicate at all.

In this particular game, I get assigned as the killer. I get a few decent kills in, and then one player calls a meeting.

Player #1: “It’s [My Name]! They just killed my friend! He just texted me.”

Player #2: “Okay.”

All the remaining players immediately vote for me without regard to the blatant cheating. I hold off on my vote, though, so I can object.

Me: “Dude, that’s f****** cheating!”

Player #1: “[Player #5] is my friend. They said you killed them. RIP.”

Player #3: “How is it cheating?”

Player #4: “Yeah, [Player #1] figured out it was you.”

Me: “Only because their friend texted them.”

Player #3: “So?”

Me: “Communicating outside the game isn’t allowed.”

Player #1: “Says who?”

Me: “Says the creator.”

Player #2: “Show us where exactly it says we can’t text each other.”

At this point, the vote timer ran out and I got voted off before I could respond. I immediately left the lobby and searched for a new one. The next lobby wasn’t much better. After I got chosen as the killer again, the host banned me from the lobby out of spite just for killing them.

Not all my games have been this bad, but it still felt pretty sour to get two scummy lobbies in a row.

I’m fifteen, and I’m at a family dinner at my grandparents’ place. The conversation rolls around to my relatives’ time in the army. Every male in Singapore has to serve two years in the army when they turn eighteen, so I’m quite interested in finding out what I’ll have to go through. We call it National Service or NS.

Me: “So, what’s the scariest thing in NS?”

Cousin #1: “Live firing. You never realise how loud gunshots are until you’ve shot a gun.”

Cousin #2: “Don’t listen to him. He spent all his time on a desk job. What’s scarier is the explosives. However loud a gunshot is, they’re louder.”

Cousin #3: “Forget that. You’ve never left Singapore. There’s nothing scarier than camping in the Brunei jungle and waking up with a snake right beside you.”

Uncle #1: “Hey, I was part of the National Guards. Nothing is scarier than rappelling out of a helicopter.”

Uncle #2: “I was in NDU [Naval Diver Unit] in the eighties. Last time wasn’t as easy as now. Scariest is the drown-proof training. They tie you up and throw you into a pool.”

The conversation degenerates into my three cousins and two uncles bragging about their scariest exploits during their time in the army. My aunt decides she’s had enough of it.

Aunt: “Quit your d**k-measuring contest. I know what the scariest possible thing in NS is!”

Cousin #1: *Unconvinced* “What is it, Mom?”

Aunt: “Potong Jalan.”

There is an immediate and total silence among the male crowd.

All Five Of Them: “Yeah, that is the scariest.”

Me: “Potong Jalan? What’s that?”

Aunt: “It’s Singlish for your girlfriend getting stolen by another man while you are in the army.”

Me: “Pffft. Like that’ll happen to me.”

All Five Of Them: *Thousand-yard stare* “That’s what we thought.”

Cousin #2: “If you don’t believe me, you can ask around. Happens to ninety percent of the couples in NS.”

Uncle #1: “Yeah, trust me. By the end of BMT [Basic Military Training], half your section will have lost their girlfriends.”

Cousin #2: “Yeah. Like, in some places, they make the officers all go for training as breakup counsellors. My friend who signed on had to do that. It’s that prevalent.”

Cousin #3: “And depending on your unit, sometimes you can get compassionate leave if you have Potong Jalan.”

Uncle #2: “Yeah. All the sergeants bully you so much, like to make you suffer, but then when they see someone crying because of Potong Jalan, they stop shouting and actually treat you nicely.”

Cousin #1: “There are even marching songs about Potong Jalan. It’s that prevalent.”

Me: “Well, I won’t have to worry about that. I can’t even get a girlfriend.”

Everyone: “Don’t date until after NS!”

They were right. There were several breakups within the first week. By the end of the nine-week BMT, the number of intact couples was about two-thirds. By the end of the year, it was below half. It turns out that after seeing your girlfriend cheat on you, nothing the army throws at you is even remotely scary anymore.

I’m a teller at a bank. It’s near closing, and I’m working with one coworker, who I don’t like because she’s an aggressive flirt, and one manager is in his office seeing to paperwork. I see a customer come in and my coworker sneers at him and walks off.

When he gets up to my counter, the customer tells me he hasn’t been able to access his account. I look it up and see that his account was recently locked on one of the days I wasn’t working and is now pending closure, with a note that it was for being aggressive and threatening to shoot the teller — the other coworker — which got him removed from the premises.

I inform him of this fact and tell him to leave before he sets off again or decides to act on his threat and I have to hit the panic button, only for him to react in shock and panic and actually start crying. He has no idea what I am talking about and seems terrified of being arrested for something he seems to not remember doing. I’m not sure what to do at this point, so I tell him gently to leave and I’ll review the case.

After he obliges and departs, I ping my manager to come up and my coworker walks back up to the counters.

Coworker: “Is he gone? Did you threaten to call the cops on him?”

Me: “I was about to, but he seemed to have no idea what he was talking about. The poor guy walked off crying and terrified.”

Coworker: *Smugly* “Good. That’s what he gets for snubbing me.”

Me: “What?”

The manager walks up just in time to hear that sentence and looks at my coworker. Something about that comment seems off to him, too, so he goes to his office to review the video footage of the day and time the note said he made the threat.

An hour later, he calls my coworker into the office with him and she pales. She leaves about half an hour later in tears.

Me: “What’s going on?”

With very visible annoyance, he grabs [Coworker]’s nameplate off the desk and chucks it into the garbage.

Manager: “[Coworker] tried flirting with [Customer], but he’s married so he turned her down. Apparently, she was so offended by this that she fabricated this story to ruin his life by getting his finances locked out! The police weren’t even called, and it all happened silently! [Manager #2] was working with her so I need to do some looking into this. You got things covered?”

I nodded and went back to work until closing. Over the next couple of days, I got to watch a domino effect; [Manager #2] was having “after-hours involvement” with my now-ex-coworker, so he corroborated her fake story and allowed her to make the note because she had him wrapped around her little finger.

When my manager called to set things straight with the customer, he was, rightfully, less than generous because his rent situation was uncertain and we could have gotten him and his family kicked out onto the street, and it resulted in us being sued for wrongful termination of a contract, among other charges of financial and emotional damage. Naturally, he also zeroed out his account with us and went to find another bank.

I do have to give credit where it’s due, though; when word of all of this reached the bank owner, he fired [Manager #2] on the spot, gave a huge payout to the customer as an apology for his hardships when he was approached by his lawyers — more than his lawsuit was asking for in damages, even — and set out to see if there was any legal retribution he could advise the customer to take on my ex-coworker and ex-manager for their petty revenge scheme.

At the time of writing this, that hasn’t borne any fruit just yet.

I am a wedding photographer. Usually, my wife comes along and assists me, but for this wedding, she says she has plans to go home and visit with her parents. When I get there, the groom keeps looking at me with an odd expression. I figure he is just nervous, so I do my job without comment.

At the reception, he approaches me.

Groom: “Hey, thanks for coming out today.”

Me: “No problem. Thanks for the work!” *Laughs*

Groom: “So, your last name is [My Last Name], right?”

Me: “Yeah.”

Groom: “Do you know [Wife]?”

Me: “Yeah, she’s my wife.”

Groom: “Oh. I thought you might be related. Is she here?”

Me: “Oh. Um… She usually comes along but she was busy today. Did you guys go to school together?”

Groom: “No, no. We dated a few years ago, right before [Bride] and I got together.”

Me: *Awkwardly* “Oh, okay. I don’t think she’s ever mentioned you.”

Groom: “Yeah, it was, like, five years ago. No big deal.”

The DJ calls the groom to the dance floor.

Groom: “Anyway, thanks for coming out!”

I finish the reception and go home to find my wife sitting on the couch, watching TV.

Wife: “Hi, honey. How was the wedding?”

Me: “It went well. The bride was beautiful. The groom was [Groom].”

My wife goes very still.

Wife: “Oh, that’s nice.”

Me: “Yeah. You know, it’s so weird… He said you dated five years ago.”

Wife: *Laughs nervously* “He’s obviously confused. I wasn’t even there!”

Me: “He asked about you by name.”

Wife: “Well—”

Me: “Get the f*** out of my house.”

We had a long, loud argument about her affair. Apparently, the groom knew my name because they were still in touch, and my wife hadn’t really gone home to her parents; she just didn’t want to be at the wedding and risk seeing him. Our divorce was finalized as soon as legally possible and I have zero contact with her.