My wife’s grandmother is a very opinionated lady. The things she thinks she knows are the only facts there are. She is a lovely lady but hard to get along with.

Mother-In-Law: “Coffee, anyone?”

Me: “Yes, please.”

Mother-In-Law: “I forget, how do you take it?”

Me: “Black with a sweetener, please.”

Grandmother-In-Law: “Ha! Sweeteners. Like that will make a difference.”

Me: “What do you mean?”

Grandmother-In-Law: “How is not eating a little teaspoon of sugar going to do anything?”

Me: “Not a lot on its own, probably, but—”

Grandmother-In-Law: “Exactly! That’s my point. Waste of time.”

Me: “It won’t do much on its own, but sweetener instead of sugar, low-fat milk, low-fat butter, light cooking in oil instead of fat — they all add up.”

Grandmother-In-Law: “But you don’t need to lose any weight.”

Me: “No, but making little changes that barely impact the taste and are more healthy is an obvious choice for me.”

Grandmother-In-Law: “Well, you keep your ‘obvious choices’ for yourself. I will stick with what I know tastes good. Oh, is that my tea?”

Mother-In-Law: “Yes, Mom.”

Grandmother-In-Law: “Two sugars?”

Mother-In-Law: “Yes, Mom.”

Grandmother-In-Law: “Delicious, thank you.”

[Mother-In-Law] hadn’t had sugar in the house for a week, so that was definitely sweetener.

I have a horrible habit of bringing my glasses cloth into our living room and losing it. My wife finds it funny and likes to tease me about it.

I just received my new glasses and I’m cleaning them on the sofa, settling the cloth beside me. Unbeknownst to me, it’s started to slip between the cushions.

My wife, playing distraught, says loudly to the cloth:

Wife: “YOU WON’T LEAVE HERE!”

My mother has worked for many years as a special needs teacher. A teenage schoolgirl has been diagnosed with a condition that makes it hard for her to read black letters on white pages; she sees the letters dance about on the page. This is quite easily corrected by using transparent coloured overlays, so the girl is given a set of these. Unfortunately, many older people think that having special educational needs is somehow shameful, and the girl’s father is one of them. He calls the office in a rage and is put through to my mother, the girl’s teacher.

Father: “My little girl isn’t stupid!”

Teacher: *Calmly* “Of course not. She just has a condition that means that black letters on white pages seem to move around.”

Father: *Confused* “But… isn’t that just how it is?”

It turned out that the condition was hereditary, and the father was delighted to find that his daughter’s coloured overlays helped him, as well. He had no further complaints.

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Our school’s MFL (Modern Foreign Languages) department has signed up to [Website], which has lots of puzzles and vocabulary testing. [Website] is not particularly well made, and soon, people are finding bugs.

[Classmate #1] finishes a test and clicks “Submit.” The website buffers, and [Classmate #1] clicks repeatedly, at speed.

Website: “You have gained 1,000 out of 100 points on this test!”

This, of course, is shared loudly and excitedly with other students. For that entire lesson, nobody does any work, and instead, everyone utilises the easiest game on the website to gain hundreds of points in seconds.

My friend meanwhile does Computer Science for A-Level. Having recently completed a unit about websites and security, he decides to take a look at the code behind the website. He identifies how, at the end of the puzzle, the authentication key stops changing, letting the website send the points several times. He also identifies the exact request being sent to the website’s database, and writes a line in cURL, which sends a request to the website.

Website: “You now have 1,000 more points than before!”

My friend now sets up a while: True loop repeating the request. (A while loop repeats something while a condition is true, and True is always true, so it does it infinitely.) It runs overnight.

Teacher: “Wow, everyone, I’m impressed! You’ve all clearly done lots of homework; the school has over a million points!”

This would have taken rather longer than we had, but several other schools have several million points. Therefore, my friend declares his intention to reach a BILLION points!

Me: “I don’t think that’s wise. Ms. [Teacher] will notice your absurd score.”

Friend #1: “It’s fine. Everyone else has really high scores from that previous glitch. Besides, the scores reset every month [in about a week].”

Me: “Still, you might get in trouble with the [Website] technicians.”

Friend #1: “The whole website is bad; they probably don’t have much to do. And it isn’t as if I will hurt the server; they will have [technical stuff] in place to stop my requests from overloading the server.”

The program runs fine overnight, but the next day he is disappointed that he “only” earned several million points. Trusting in [Website]’s ability to withstand his onslaught, despite the fact that it has up until this point been coded mostly with Swiss cheese, he sets up a loop that will open his program in new windows. Within a few seconds, he has several thousand windows open and his program almost overloads his own computer, though he stops his program pretty quickly.

Friend #1: *Via text* “I’ve just DOSed [Website]. The police will come to my house now.”

Spoiler: they don’t.

After confirming that I am unable to do my own homework on the website:

Me: “I warned you about loops, bro. I told you about loops.”

However, about half an hour later, the server is back up again, and [Friend]’s own Wi-Fi is immediately destroyed by the server, which sends a reply to every packet [Friend] sent to it. In the meantime, however, he has shared the original loop, which did not crash the program, with a friend of ours with a better connection. It is at this point that a technician notices. Encoded in the replies to the packets the program sends is this message:

Technician: “Oi, matey, I see you. Stop that.”

The technician changes the authentication key which is being used by the program [Friend #1] wrote. Of course, [Friend #2] now knows what to look for and manages to get it running again.

The next morning, [Friend #1] and [Friend #2] find that the entire school has zero points on the accounts. During a lesson that day:

Teacher: “I’ve just received an email from [Website]. It says that several students have been messing with [Website] and that the school’s score has been reset to zero! It also says that [Friend #1] and [Friend #2] are clearly very clever and that they would like to talk to them?!”

[Website] corresponded with the school and my friends for a while; they seemed more impressed than annoyed. They managed to fix many of the bugs, and eventually, [Friend #1] was offered work experience with [Website]!

Parent and child spaces are vital; baby seats just cannot fit through the gap in a normal space. Even with older children, having a safe space for them to stand getting out of the car, reducing that risk of being hit by a parking car, makes so much sense.

I’m pulling into an outlet store car park. We drive down one of the car park aisles when a work van going the wrong way cuts us up and takes the last parent and child space. He gets out of the van alone, sees us, laughs, and flips us off. A real piece of work.

We drive around the car park and find a space on the far end. As we walk toward the store and pass the van, I get an idea. I take the baby back to the car and send my wife into the store ahead. I join her a few minutes later and we walk back to the car together.

Wife: “Oh, did the guy with the van drive off? He was in this spot before, wasn’t he?”

Me: “Yeah, he rushed off shortly after I got back to the car.”

Wife: “Hmm, how did you manage that?”

Me: “I don’t know what you mean. He probably had some urgent job on the other side of the city.”

Wife: “You didn’t?!”

Me: “Hey, if some elderly person calls you up and asks you to put ‘winter roof tiles’ on your house and you take advantage of them, you deserve it.”

Wife: “He is going to be annoyed at you.”

Me: “Yeah, especially when he gets there and realises there isn’t a house with that number on it.”

I got a lot of angry voicemails after that, but I blocked his number. It was childish, but maybe the lesson here is not to park like an idiot in your company van, especially when you have your work phone number on the side.