I work at an equestrian yard teaching beginners. Some of them know next to nothing about horses. The yard owns several horses of all sizes for the students’ lessons.

My own horse, which is a palomino (a golden “Barbie” horse) is stabled in the same place, and when I don’t have any riding lessons scheduled, I can tend to him.

I have a new student coming in a few minutes as I’m finishing off my own horse. The student — a nice girl around ten years old — and her mother arrive. I introduce myself.

Girl: “Is that your horse? It’s really pretty.”

Me: “Thank you, that’s very nice of you to say. Let me just put his blanket on, and then I will put him away and we can find a horse for you.”

Girl: “Can I pat him?”

Me: “Of course. He’s really nice.”

Girl: “I like him.”

It takes about thirty seconds for me to finish, and just when I’m about to lead my horse away, the mother enters the conversation.

Mother: “She likes that one. Can’t she get that one?”

I freeze. This is the thing I always read about on Not Always Right but have never encountered myself: the entitled mother.

Me: “This one is my private horse. The yard owns several nice horses. We can go take a look and find one that suits you. Besides, he’s not an easy ride and not suitable for beginners.”

Mother: “But she likes that one.”

Me: “Perhaps, but he is not available for the yard’s students. Your daughter will not get a good first-time experience on horseback with this one.”

The daughter seems totally okay with it, but as I finally lead my horse away, I hear the mother mumble:

Mother: “I still don’t understand why she can’t get it.”

The most entitled person I have ever met has to be my uncle. He is the oldest son of my grandparents, yet somehow, he was treated like the baby of the family. If he screwed up my grandparents bailed him out. Crashed a car, new car. In trouble at school, no not our angel. Ends up in jail because of a hit and run and he was drunk, they paid all his legal bills and supported him in prison.

He only lived out of my grandparents’ house for a couple of years before he burned every bridge in town and nobody would hire him.

He’s living with his parents and he’s around sixty years old. About eight years prior to this he convinced his father to stop leasing the farmland to a farmer who has consistently paid and leased that land for twenty years so that he could “farm”. He agreed to pay the lease fee for the land but wasn’t allowed to use the pole barns on the property.

He paid one year then stopped paying, and took over the pole barns with junk. I mean literal piles of junk everywhere. He also made it his mission to make everyone uncomfortable during visits to our grandparents. Glaring at people, screaming at everyone over imagined slights, running my dad’s equipment into the ground then not fixing it.

He also refused to help his parents or work with anyone to ensure they were cared for or that the farm didn’t end up in foreclosure.

Five years ago, the family farm went into foreclosure. He didn’t offer a single penny to his parents to try and save it even though he is the reason it was in foreclosure. My dad and I came up with $10,000 cash to save it.

Last year was the last straw. My grandma ended up in a serious accident. I stopped by the house to feed the cats and found an absolutely disgusting mess. The house reeked of urine, food expired by years, mold growing in the fridge, and holes in the floor.

At that point I had it. I threw a fit, I was ready to move my grandparents into my house that week. I calmed down and sat down with my dad and laid it out that either things started to get cleaned up or I was calling adult protective services.

We cleaned up the house, got care services arranged, and then we noticed bills piling up. They shouldn’t be as they received enough money to pay for their needs. We combed through the finances and found huge amounts of money just disappearing. Come to find out my uncle had been asking for money along with my aunt.

They were also forgetting to pay bills or paying them and not writing them down so accounts were over-drafting.

During all this, my uncle never checked on his parents even though he lived with them. We decided they couldn’t handle the farm anymore and it was causing too much strain on them to manage.

We found a buyer for the property and sat down with the entire family to discuss it. My uncle refused to listen and called us greedy. We decided to ignore him and go through with the sale.

During this time my grandpa had a heart attack. My uncle left him lying in bed and didn’t call an ambulance. My dad and I swung by to take them to dinner and found my grandpa in the bed literally dying. My uncle never called to check on him after he left with the ambulance.
We never took my grandparents back to the farm after that.

Unfortunately, the buyer didn’t work out for the farm, so my dad and I pooled our money together to purchase the farm.

We formally evicted my uncle, found an actual leaser for the land, and are building a new house where we will live with my grandparents.

We are also burning down the old farmhouse as my uncle destroyed it. He is claiming we stole the property, that he deserves his inheritance and that we didn’t do this legally. Our lawyer disagrees.

Karma does occasionally show up.

I house/pet-sit for a family that has a small farm; they have five dogs, six cats, three peacocks, twelve chickens, twelve ducks, four goats, and a donkey. I usually go up for the weekend if they decide they want to go up to their cabin in the mountains.

I get up there and they haven’t left yet. They are just finishing up lunch and the mom offers me some dessert; they are having apples and cinnamon. I accept the apples but not the cinnamon because I’m not a fan of that combo.

Mom: “Oh, it’s really good. I’m sure you’ll like it!”

Me: “I’m good with the apples. I’m not a big fan of apples and cinnamon; I prefer apples and peanut butter.”

Mom: *Straight-faced* “We don’t eat peanut butter because the ingredients can be used to make dynamite.”

Me: *Blinks in surprise* “Um… Well, I really like it more than the cinnamon. But I’ll just have the apples, then, thanks.”

We all ate our dessert and they left for the mountains. I never got her reasoning for telling me that. Why not just say, “We don’t have any,” or, “We don’t eat peanut butter.”? Honestly, I quickly grew to dislike staying at the house, and circumstances finally came together where they stopped calling me, but that always sticks out as one of the weirder interactions I had with them.

My dad witnessed this incident in the late 1960s. He had gone to see a neighbour (rural area, so about a mile away) to get some peaches for my mum to can. Ben, the neighbour, was an old guy who had a small peach orchard and grew the best peaches ever. It was a bit of a hobby, and like many small orchardists (for my parents it was cherries and pears) he sold the fruit at the roadside. Dad had loaded up the peaches and was just talking with Ben when a car pulled up. Big city folks.

The car was a white Caddy convertible with Washington, US plates. This took place in Canada, so they were obviously not from around here. The couple, in their fifties, were a stereotype. The woman had blonde beehive hair, snazzy sunglasses, tight capri pants, and a tiny poodle. The man had socks and sandals, plaid shorts, a patterned shirt, a weird hat, and some attitude. He told Ben he wanted a box of peaches and demanded to know the price.

Ben was an old guy who knew a thing or two — about peaches and about people. Though a funny man to his friends, he had the ability to be stone-faced when needed (think Buster Keaton). He told the man that each thirty-pound box was (some price I don’t know, but it was probably a couple of bucks or so back then). The box was handed over and money changed hands. If that was it, then there would be no story, but…

Mr. Big City suddenly accused Ben of selling him less than the agreed-upon thirty pounds. Ben, who knew d***ed well what a thirty-pound box felt like, quietly disagreed. Big City insisted, so Ben hauled out a scale, zeroed it with an empty box, and transferred all the peaches into it to get an accurate weight. It was more than thirty pounds.

Dad said it was magical as Ben looked the tourist in the eye, and with a laconic, deadpan delivery, held his hand out, palm up, and said, “You owe me fifteen cents.” And the hand remained out until the guy fished for change and paid before quietly slinking back to his car.

I grew up on a farm. In a freak accident when I was about thirteen, I ended up losing most of my left foot. By the time I reach twenty-five, I have gotten used to the amputation; I could still walk, even though I had a slight limp, and with shoes or boots on, it’s impossible for other people to see that half of my foot is missing. That said, I’ve always been a bit self-conscious about it, so I don’t take my shoes off around other people or tell the story very often.

Sometime around my twenty-fifth birthday, I meet a woman and we start dating. A few weeks later, I take her home to meet my family, and while helping out with the farm chores, another freak accident happens and the tip of my right middle finger gets cut off. My family and my girlfriend take me to the hospital, and when we get home, she admits that she was panicking.

Girlfriend: “Oh, my God, that was crazy. I know farming can be dangerous, but I’ve never actually seen anything like that. Are you sure you’re okay?”

Me: “Yeah, I’ll be okay. It hurts, but the meds help.”

Girlfriend: “How can you be so calm about this? I’m completely freaked out and I’m not even the one who lost a finger.”

Me: *Joking* “Well, I’ve done worse, so a finger isn’t too bad.”

Brother: “Yeah, [My Name] is getting kind of used to things going missing by now.”

Girlfriend: “What do you mean?”

Brother: “His foot, and now his finger.”

Girlfriend: “Your foot? What does that mean?”

Brother: “You never told her about your foot, [My Name]?”

Me: “You’ve seen me barefoot, haven’t you?”

Girlfriend: “Apparently not? I mean, I know you limp, but I always thought that was just how you walk.”

Me: “All right, then. Do you want me to tell you the story first and then show you my foot, or show you my foot first and then tell the story?”

She decided to hear the story first, so I told her and then showed her my feet. She ended up taking the whole thing really well, and we’re still together a year later, so I think she’s the one.