Working in the deli, you inevitably run into children. There are the cutesy ones who beg to be the one to place the order and then forget halfway into the second item, the shy ones you can coax a smile out of with a free sample, the ones learning about animals in school who’ll make all sorts of barnyard sounds with you while gleefully pointing out different meats in the case, and then there are the Glass Bandits.

Glass Bandits are the little buggers who paw the glass with sticky fingers, fog it up to draw on (personally, I liked some of those ones), wipe boogers on the glass and, more often than you might think, lick the glass.

I both despised and delighted in Glass Bandits. The ones whose parents were too far up their own backsides to care were the worst; their kids would often be emboldened and muss up the glass far more. After they finally left, most of these encounters would require a thorough cleaning of the entire front display windows. And this is where I took delight.

Sometimes, these bold variants of Glass Bandits came back to back. And rarer an occasion still, sometimes there would be time to clean before the next arrived. During those times, I got to enjoy watching the second offender go nuts. Then, when they hit overdrive and went in for the lick, they had two options to choose from:

1. Admit they had just done something stupid and now required water and a paper towel to remove glass cleaner and sanitiser from their mouth.
2. Pull a thoroughly disgusted face but power on so as to not show weakness, licking as much glass and chemicals as they could before calling it a victory.

The latter are my favourites; I respect the determination. I don’t envy the inevitable fart bubbles later, though.

Disclaimer: the cleaning chemicals used were food grade and 100% safe — just extremely ill-advised — to consume in tiny amounts. No children were harmed in this story, nor in any other instances of this occurring… that I know of.

My aunt has three kids under the age of ten. I’m twenty-three, and at every family gathering, I become the de facto babysitter despite not wanting to so the adults can drink.

Tonight is [Aunt]’s birthday dinner, and my mom has promised me that I won’t have to babysit and that the kids will be at a friend’s house.

The first step I take into their home is greeted by two earsplitting screams about how much the kids missed me and one toddler yodeling. I immediately realise that I might have been lied to.

Normally, I don’t drink — I’m a huge lightweight — but since this is a special occasion, I have made some plans.

[Aunt] enters the hall to greet my mom while I reach into my backpack, walk into the living room and crack one of the two 12% Viking beers I special-ordered for my uncle and myself — he likes weird beer — and we start drinking. About three minutes later, [Aunt] sees the can and starts screaming at me for drinking while watching the kids. (I’m not watching them; I only hear distant screaming.)

Me: “My mom told me the kids were going to be at a friend’s house tonight and promise me that I wouldn’t end up babysitting.”

Aunt: “They’re clearly staying here tonight, r****d!”

I reach out my hand.

Me: “Two hundred bucks for emergency babysitting, and I won’t finish this beer.”

Aunt: “H*** no!”

So, I chug the half-litre can to the loud cheers and laughs of my dad and my uncle.

Me: *With a burp* “Birth happy day, mommy sister!”

My mom just looked hugely embarrassed for [Aunt].

My dad, who was the designated driver for the night, ended up watching the kids for the entire night instead. I think he might schedule a vasectomy soon.

I was supposed to pick up my husband at a game store after a “Magic: The Gathering” tournament. Unfortunately, the competition ran long, and due to some confusion with the messaging, I didn’t get the notice until I had already arrived to pick him up and learned it would be another thirty minutes to an hour before he was done. I had my ten-month-old daughter with me.

The game store also does game nights where anyone can come in to play games, so the store was filled with people playing all kinds of board games that evening. In particular, there were three just sitting down at a table before me: a husband and wife and a third man.

Man: “We’re just starting a game that’s supposed to only be thirty minutes long, if you want to join us while you wait.”

Me: “Oh, thanks, but I don’t know the rules.”

Man: “It’s new to all of us, so you could learn with us.”

Me: “That’s a tempting offer, but I doubt [Daughter] would let me sit still that long.”

Wife: “Oh, I don’t think that would be a problem.”

The wife was grinning at her husband as she said this as if it were some inside joke.

Husband: “It would be fine if you just didn’t want to join us, but if you did, we wouldn’t mind your joining. We would all understand if you were a bit distracted because of your daughter; it wouldn’t be a problem.”

Man: “Worse case, if she gets really fussy, you could just drop out; the game still works with three players if you have to leave early.”

Me: “Okay, if you’re sure you don’t mind, I’ll take you up on that, though I doubt she’ll let me finish a game.”

Wife: “Please, we’d love to have you. Maybe I’ll have a better chance of winning now.”

At this, [Man] scooted over one seat, allowing me to sit down so my daughter’s stroller could sit against the empty side of the table where I could reach her. [Wife] was sitting opposite from me, and thus on the other side of my stroller. She turned to her husband and said in an amused-sounding voice:

Wife: “So, I’m guessing we’re trading seats, huh?”

Husband: *To me* “Would you mind if I played a little with your daughter in the stroller?”

Me: “Um, no, I guess not.”

Wife: “Seat swap it is. My master plan to defeat you all has begun!”

My daughter does NOT like being left alone in her stroller; I was certain I would get at best ten minutes before she was too fussy. What I hadn’t anticipated was [Husband] spending the entire game playing with her. Peekaboo, itsy-bitsy spider, tickling, you name it, he did all the baby classics, and my daughter was giggling along with every moment of it.

He seemed to treat the game as secondary to playing with my daughter. He ignored the game board until his turn, and then he would quickly glance at the board and make his play so that each of his turns was as long or slightly shorter than the turns of those who were paying attention to the game. For her part, my daughter seemed a little offended that her new playmate kept disappearing to take a turn every few minutes, but eventually, she caught on that he would be back to play with her soon enough and so tolerated the turn breaks.

The embarrassing part was that, despite his seeming to treat our board game as an afterthought, [Husband] still beat the three of us by a decent margin.

Wife: “Oh, come on! I go out of the way to set up the perfect distraction for you, and you still beat us! You really should let your poor wife win a game one of these days just for the novelty of it, you know!”

It seems [Husband] adored kids and volunteered with them, was a godfather, and was quite eager to start trying for their own kids in a year. Apparently, everyone at the table except me already anticipated that he would spend the entire game playing with and distracting my daughter for me.

Though, it is fairly embarrassing that even distracted he trounced the three of us.

CONTENT WARNING: Gross, Soiled Menstrual Products

When I was a teenager, I worked for a little over two years at a fast food place. There was a rich and entitled woman who came in almost every morning around 8:00 am to eat breakfast, drink coffee, and talk with her friends until past 10:00, or sometimes 11:00 am.

The whole time she was there, she had her grandson with her. At first, he was in a stroller. Months later, he was walking all over the place, but she would not watch over him. Quite a few times, I took the toddler’s hand and took him back to her because I found him eating things he found on the floor.

Another time, he got his hand caught in the door, trying to go outside when someone came in. Each time I took him back to her, she looked really mad at me but never said anything or even responded to me when I was telling her what happened.

I told my manager about her, and it turned out that she was a friend of the owner, so he would not do anything about it and would not tell her to watch the kid. He told me to just do my job and that it did not include babysitting and not to worry about it. Every day, the toddler was wandering around the restaurant by himself for a couple of hours.

One day, because of an early rush, my manager asked me to help out because one of the cashiers was on her break. After all the clients were served, I went back to my lobby duties and found the toddler in the ladies’ room. He was playing with the content of the trash can inside one of the stalls. This particular trash can is used for… dirty tampons and pads! I almost puked when I saw what he was doing.

I took him to the sink and washed his hands and face thoroughly before taking him to his grandmother. I did not care if she was mad at me and told her, in front of all her friends, where he had been and exactly what he had been doing. Everyone was shocked, and she looked in disgust at the little boy and did not want to touch him.

I told her I had cleaned him up and added that I needed to go clean up the mess left behind in the ladies’ room. I left and went back there. I did throw up when I was picking up the mess and putting it back in the trash can, but only because I kept seeing the little boy playing with it in my head. Toddlers at that age, unfortunately, like to put things in their mouths. 

When I was done cleaning, she had already left with her grandson. I did not see her that much and she did not bring him as often after this incident. She never stayed as long as she usually had and did not let the boy wander around like she’d used to, either. She also avoided eye contact with me.

I was a student in an international school in China when I was in grade seven. At the end of the school year, our school organized a field trip for us. This field trip was a week long, and Dragonfly, a third party that organizes outdoor experiential programs for children, was in charge of us during the trip.

For one part of the trip, we went to a place where we learned to paint Chinese fans and could buy some as souvenirs. I bought a 100-RMB fan that was almost one meter long and used for decoration. As a twelve-year-old child with not a lot of pocket money, this was a lot and a big gift for my mother.

During the trip, I lived with two of my best friends. The trip was all good and fun until the last day when we were moving out of our hotel rooms. I packed quickly and went into the lobby with some of my classmates. I noticed a member of Dragonfly, a man around twenty years old, was shouting.

Dragonfly Employee: “If you stayed in [my hotel room number], come over here!”

Me: *Walking over* “I stayed in that room.”

Dragonfly Employee: “There were bloodstains on the sheets on one of the beds. Give me 10 RMB.”

I realized that one of my friends probably had her period. Naive me just gave him the money without saying or asking anything. Naive me also thought the hotel would need to buy new sheets, so 10 RMB would not be enough, and combined with the fact he seemed to be finding all three of us, I thought he wanted 10 RMB from each of the three of us for a total of 30 RMB. 

Later, I saw one of my friends coming down to the lobby. I went up to the same employee.

Me: “My roommate is over there.”

Dragonfly Employee: *In a mocking tone* “Ten RMB is a really small amount. If it means so much to you, you should just tell your friend yourself. It’s not my job to deal with it.”

Then, he walked away before I could say anything. I was a shy person at that time and was shocked by what had happened. I realized that he just needed 10 RMB and probably thought I wanted him to ask my friend to reimburse me for the money.

If it had just ended there, it wouldn’t have been that bad.

Because the fan I’d bought earlier was so big and hard to carry, another Dragonfly employee had suggested that I leave it on a table in the lobby. The only problem was that another girl had also bought a large fan with the same packaging as mine and had also placed it on the same table later on. So, when I went to retrieve my fan, our fans were mixed up.

And guess who came to help us? The same employee who had asked me for 10 RMB. We told him the situation, and he decided we should open one of the packages to determine whose fan it was, put it back, and then label the two fans. We both agreed. By chance, the one he opened was mine.

And guess what he wrote as a label on the fan without asking me? “10 RMB”. So, now, my 100-RMB present had a label in ugly writing that said, “10 RMB” — very ideal for gifting purposes.

He asked the other girl what her name was, she told him, and he wrote her name on her fan’s packaging with much more care.

I was very upset, but at the same time, I was too shy and shocked to speak up for myself.

Later, as I was lining up to enter the bus, I looked back toward the hotel and saw the same employee coming up to me.

Dragonfly Employee: *Mockingly, with a smug smile* “Hey, 10 RMB. You know, 10 RMB is a very small amount. You shouldn’t care about it as much as you do.”

He continued to address me by the nickname “10 RMB”. I was holding back tears by then.

He finally left as I got onto the bus, and I spent my trip home in tears. 

Thinking back, I’m less upset for myself and more mad that someone like him was allowed to have a job that deals with children. A simple, “I only needed 10 RMB,” would have been fine, but no, he choose to bully someone instead.