I used to work as a librarian at a college. We were looking to hire a new librarian, and I went out to lunch with one of the candidates.

Candidate: “Who’s paying for lunch?”

Me: “The university.”

He ordered the most expensive thing on the menu. I told the Search Committee, “Don’t offer him the job. He won’t take it.”

They offered him the job. He turned it down. We lost the position.

Back in grad school, I ended up being the senior grad student. (This was largely because my professor was an incompetent idiot and all the other senior grad students had quit.) I was basically the lab manager in addition to handling my own research.

Eventually, the professor hired a new grad student. [Student] was one of those people whose default expression was slackjawed, gormless imbecility. When you talked to him or gave advice or instruction, he’d just stare at you with this vacant expression and then just turn away, never acknowledging a thing you’d said.

[Student] was a rolling disaster from pretty much day one. He constantly destroyed equipment. For example, he destroyed several hundred dollars worth of non-magnetic steel tweezers for TEM (Transmission Electron Microscopy) sample work by taking them all out of their custom carrying cases and just tossing them point-down into a glass beaker, destroying their tips. When he was called out on doing this, he just shrugged and wordlessly stared at me.

[Student] would also bring in his crappy evangelical Christian rock music and play it on the lab stereo until the other students and I just got rid of the stereo to not have to listen to the crap. It was crappy not just because it was evangelical Christian music. That’s not my thing at all, but I’ll grant that some of those bands can at least play well. This crap was just awful.

The final straw was one morning when I opened the lab up, walked in, and nearly ran right into an unsecured gas cylinder sitting in the middle of the lab aisleway.

For the uninitiated, gas cylinders must be secured when the heavy metal transport cap has been removed. The gas outlet at the top is fairly delicate, and if the cylinder falls over and that valve hits something, it will probably get torn off. This turns a heavy metal gas cylinder into an uncontrolled rocket capable of punching through six-inch concrete walls and turning people into red smears. It’s serious s***. You do not remove the heavy metal transport cap until the cylinder is firmly attached to a sturdy wall clamp or other safety device.

This gas cylinder was just sitting in the middle of a walkway with a gas regulator on it and a clear plastic tube trailing over to a bench — the perfect setup for a cylinder getting knocked over and causing a disaster. To add insult to this, the f****** thing was literally a foot away from a cylinder tiedown I had mounted to one of the lab benches.

After my heart started again, I carefully walked up to the cylinder, grabbed it in a bear hug, slowly walked it over to the clamp, and secured it. Once I’d made the cylinder safe, I examined it to try and figure out what was going on. That’s when I saw what gas was in it.

Hydrogen. The unsecured gas cylinder was full of hydrogen.

If it had fallen over and hit the regulator on any of the benches all around it, it would have turned into a rocket that would have started punching holes through walls, shooting through a busy building with over fifty scientists working in it, and leaving behind a trail of hundreds of cubic feet of explosive hydrogen gas. Any flame or spark would have then detonated the hydrogen gas like a fuel-air explosive bomb. This thing could easily have killed most of the people in the building.

At this point, I was on the warpath. I was seeing red. I stormed over to the neighboring building where some of the other grad students were and demanded to know who had done such a mind-bogglingly stupid thing. They were all pretty appalled and told me it wasn’t them. But one mentioned that good ol’ [Student] had been talking about needing hydrogen gas for some nanoparticle reduction experiments.

Keep in mind that this sort of experiment needs maybe a few cubic feet of hydrogen gas — a tiny fraction of the volume of the full-sized bomb cylinder that had been in the lab. He could have just ordered a tiny benchtop-sized lecture bottle that was far safer and had more than enough gas.

At that point, I wanted blood. I spent the next hour or so scouring the three buildings of my department, looking for [Student], ready to beat the living s*** out of him the minute I laid eyes on him. I’m pretty sure the other grad students warned him to make himself scarce.

After I couldn’t find him, I went to the professor and basically told him that it was either me or [Student]. [Student] “left” a week or so later, and I never saw him again.

Where I live, it takes twelve weeks of training to become a police officer and fourteen weeks of training to become a border officer. There is also an optional two-year college course for each to prepare you for the job, dive deeper into the criminal code, increase your fitness, and get your nonviolent crisis certificate. I am currently in the optional Border Services course, which shares a first year with the optional police course. I am required to wear a uniform (cargo pants and a button-up collared shirt with the program crest on the sleeves) three days a week.

The first day of classes was orientation, which meant we spent the day in one classroom and were introduced to the program and what it had to offer. I was fresh out of high school and was very nervous about my first day, so I packed everything I could imagine needing — a pencil case, a laptop, several notebooks, lined paper, and feminine hygiene products — and got ready for orientation. 

I sat at a table with five other girls who also looked my age and was surprised that they had all only brought their purses while I had packed a full backpack. At first, I was a bit embarrassed that I had misunderstood what was needed for the day.

Then, the orientation started. 

Professor: “All right, we are going to start by getting to know each other a bit, so I want you all to write your names on the cards in front of you so I know who I am calling on.” 

Nobody at my table had a single writing instrument, and they all needed to borrow a pen or pencil from me. 

Professor: “Next, I want you all to pull out your laptops. You are expected to have these; it was in the list of program requirements when you applied. I want you to open [Website]. I can’t show you the student version because I have a teacher’s account.”

She quickly realised that out of seventy students, only about twenty-five of us had brought our laptops. 

Professor: “Today, you can look this up on your phones, but in the future, you need to bring your laptops. I don’t want you pulling out your phones in class. This is the first day of college; you all need to be better prepared than this.”

We were then given an hour off and asked to meet in a different room for uniform fitting. I ate lunch and then found the room, arriving ten minutes early with about twenty classmates.

Uniform fitting ended up going by very slowly because they could only take three people at a time, but the email we had gotten the week before told us that we had two and a half hours blocked off for this, so I wasn’t concerned. After ten minutes of waiting past the time we were supposed to meet, people at the back of the line started loudly complaining, and several started to call the professor profanities behind her back for making them wait sooooo long. 

Things like this continued all semester. Our Sociology teacher started bringing a box of pencils to the tests because most of the class didn’t bring anything to write with for the test, or at least not a pencil for the scantron. Several people stopped showing up for Fitness because they thought the professor was a b**** for making us go for runs.

One girl got kicked out of Psychology because she screamed at the professor and called her several names when she was asked to put her phone away. (She was in her late twenties and angry that the “high schoolers” were taking up the back row so she couldn’t hide her phone as easily.)

Over twenty people asked for extensions the night before a major presentation was due because they hadn’t read the instructions and hadn’t started the project, thinking that we would be working on it in class that day.

Someone dropped out because she was concerned about how the homework was interfering with her bar-hopping with her fake ID. 

Thankfully, many of these people will not be returning next semester, but it still confuses me how many of these people somehow wanted to go into law enforcement without even being able to respect authority.

I always carry extra pens in case one dies. How do you show up for a final exam without even one?

I was in Italy for University and stayed in a dorm. We had a total of five people, and duties were immediately handed out. [Roommate #1] was told to handle the purchases of all cleaning supplies, and we all pitched in money.

A couple of hours later, we were treated to an impressive amount of cleaning supplies. We had, like, a vacuum, two brooms, two mops, a squeegee, a toilet brush, several buckets, multiple brushes, packets of cloths and sponges, wet wipes, at least fifteen different kinds of cleaning agents, and whatever else I forgot. Basically, way beyond budget.

This was partially our fault — we didn’t say exactly what to get, besides excluding laundry — but it was way overdoing it.

Roommate #2: “That’s a lot. How much did you spend?”

Roommate #1: “Yeah. I used my own money. You didn’t give me enough to cover it at all. I don’t mind. We can be very clean now.”

Me: “Right. Let’s have the receipts?”

Roommate #1: “Oh, I’m not sure I took them all. Never mind about the money; it’s on me. I hope that’s all we need.”

Roommate #3: *Poking through the supplies* “That’s way more than enough. What’s this? Tile cleaner… glass cleaner… drain cleaner…”

Roommate #1: “Well, they are all for different jobs, so I had to cover everything possible.”

Me: “This is like… neat freak, OCD type of cleaning. How do you clean at home?”

Roommate #1: “I never did. I have a maid who does everything.”

Roommate #3: “Oh. Well, most people don’t need this much.”

So, while we did get a rich roommate who had never cleaned nor done any household chores in her life, she was far from snobby or lazy and was keen to learn. She just goes overboard so we’re swamped with too many products.

This was when I was a high school student considering what college I wanted to attend. I had a narrowed-down list of colleges known for their programs for what I was interested in and was looking to see if any of them met the other criteria I was personally looking for. 

One of the main requirements I had for considering a school was that they have something along the lines of a Genders & Sexualities Alliance (GSA) club. I’m visibly queer and knew at this point there was a very high chance I was going somewhere out-of-state, and I figured this would be a good social “in” for wherever I went. This was also compounded by the fact that my high school and hometown were very conservative and I was sick of it. 

One of the schools on my list was a large Christian college in Texas (not that I knew it was Christian until I started looking into it more). One of the first things I found about them was that the school did have a GSA… sort of. The college essentially refused to acknowledge the club’s existence, so I already knew this wasn’t the place for me. 

Me: “Mom! I’m taking [Texas College] off my list.”

Mom: “What? Why?”

Me: “It’s 2019 and they’re still refusing to acknowledge their gay club, and I really don’t like that.”

Mom: “Yeah, okay, that’s fair. Just remember to email [High School Guidance Counselor] to let her know.”

A few hours later, I ended up relaying this to my father, as well.

Dad: *Genuinely baffled* “Why the h*** should that matter? You’re going there for an education, right?”

Me: “And why the h*** would I want to go to a school that refuses to acknowledge my existence? Do you really think they’d try to help me if I faced any discrimination? Absolutely not!”

He still wasn’t thrilled but ultimately relinquished. Today, literally my entire friend group is built from people I met at my chosen college’s GSA.