I am around twelve years old, and I have just gotten an NES (Nintendo Entertainment System). My friend and I love it so much that we are trying to convince [Friend]’s father to buy him one also.

Friend’s Father: “I don’t want to spend that kind of money on it.”

Me: “I understand; it’s not cheap.”

Friend’s Father: “Why can’t you just use the VCR to record your games and give the tapes to my son for him to play at home?!”

Me: “I… uh…”

Friend’s Father: “I’ll even offer to buy the tapes!”

I’m an avid player of “Dungeons & Dragons”, and among my group of online friends who play, we rotate who’s the Dungeon Master. It’s currently my turn, and I run a very “no holds barred” style of gameplay. I reward creative planning and encourage goofy roleplay, and when building characters, I allow complete min-max nonsense, with the understanding that threats will be scaled accordingly. Fortunately, they like “big numbers”, so it overall works out.

The current storyline isn’t all that complex; it involves their mercenary group being sent after some pirates. Nautical nonsense and high-seas adventure ensue, there’s some surprisingly clever use of character abilities, and a good time is had by all. At least until after one game, one of the players messages me.

Player: “You gotta stop with the political nonsense.”

Me: “Uh, there’s no politics going on right now? The Kraken you fought wasn’t even a registered voter.”

Player: “You know what I’m talking about! The captain!”

Me: “What’s wrong with them?”

Player: “THAT!”

Me: “…What?”

Player: “Stop saying ‘they’. Use ‘he’ or ‘she’!”

Me: “Oh, that’s going to be confusing in a hurry. You did notice they’re a Changeling, and they shapeshift into a new body basically every scene, half the time swapping genders?”

Player: “Look, I don’t play this to get some woke nonsense shoved down my throat. Just make it normal.”

Me: “Ha, okay! So, you’re okay with the two players whose characters are a gay couple, you’re okay with the ex-stripper-turned-Warlock, and you’re okay with a morally-gray matriarchy, but having a character that is both mentally and physically gender fluid by nature of their species is ‘woke nonsense’?”

Player: “Is this really the hill you’re gonna die on?”

Me: “I’ll tell you what. I’ll message the group and see if everyone else feels the same way. If it’s consensus that I’m being offensive, I’ll apologize and switch.”

Player: “Don’t do that. Just stop it.”

Me: “Oh? Do you think they’ll just call you a bigot?”

Player: “I’m not a bigot. I’m just saying I’m tired of people complaining about pronouns!”

Me: “Seems like you’re the only one complaining. Let me know before Saturday if you’re still playing or not.”

End result: he left the group. Then, it was revealed this person was not actually okay with the gay couple or the sexually-liberated-but-didn’t-screw-literally-everyone warlock; he’d just kept it to PMs. So, now, he’s completely blocked by all of us.

If you have an officially recognized club at my college, you have to participate in the Student Government Association’s (SGA’s) “Club Olympics” each year. It’s required, but it’s a fun way for clubs to compete and get (pretty decent-sized) cash prizes for their clubs.

My club was a newly created club designed for gaming — computer, console, competitive, board, etc. — and, as such, was small. However, we were officially recognized by the SGA, so we were fully intending on competing and winning.

My club walked up as a group to the signup desk, and the person at the desk asked for our name. We told them the group name, and we were prompted to make a team name to make things easier. We just blurted out “Gamers” as a joke, but they took it.

The Olympics were full of minute-to-win-it games, and we were frankly dominating the competition. Things took a turn for the worse when the prizes were announced.

Each game gave out a certain amount of points. You added up the points, and the most amount of points won, up to three winners. I had taken a peek at the scores and knew we had won second place. Not wanting to spoil the surprise, I kept it to myself, until:

Announcer: “For third place, we have the art club! For second place, we have the zoology club! And for first place, we have the Spanish club!”

I was confused. I was about to interject and ask what had happened to us when this announcement was made.

Announcer: “And for the honorary club that sort of just showed up but did really well, here’s an honorary prize!”

It was a small bucket of candy. I sort of sheepishly raised my hand (in front of about seventy-five people).

Me: “We’re not an honorary club… We’re recognized by the SGA.”

The announcer’s face went white since they knew we had gotten second place. Of course, we didn’t go because of the money — honestly, we went because it was required — but the fact that we had been cheesed out of it was kind of upsetting.

After the group disbanded, I went up to the administrator of the event and asked her if their thinking we were an honorary club had barred us from winning. She had a very distraught look on her face because she didn’t want to take the second-place prize from the club she had originally awarded it to.

Thankfully, the treasurer came out and told us not to worry, as they “had it in their budget” to also give us the second-place prize. Usually, these things end poorly, but after spending three hours in ninety-five-degree weather, we were glad that our sweat and tears (quite literally) paid off.

Back when the PlayStation 3 came out, I overheard someone at the local big box store.

Customer: “Why would I need to buy a PS3 to play PS3 games?”

Long-Suffering Employee: “Well, the games are only designed to be played on a PS3 and nothing else.”

Customer: “But I’ve been doing my reading, y’see, and I know that you can play PS2 games on the PS3, so I should be able to do it the other way around!”

I felt terrible for the electronics guy who tried to explain that one. The customer seemed really upset that she might have to buy a PS3.

When my kids were pretty young — the oldest was four, the middle three, and the youngest six months — I transferred jobs, and my husband and I purchased a used twenty-four-foot travel trailer to live in until we could financially afford to get into an apartment or house in the town near my work.

It was about a week before December, we had been living in the trailer since the beginning of October, and we had already found an apartment to move to but were waiting for December 1st to move in.

My sister (who I always thought had similar views on children and what they should and shouldn’t watch as I did) had allowed my kids to watch the movie “Tremors” while they were at her house, and my kids loved the movie. It made them afraid to go to sleep at night, but that is a different issue we had to work through.

On this particular day, the children couldn’t really play outside much since it was snowing for the first time that season and it had been very cold recently. To entertain themselves, my two oldest children were playing inside on the bed. Their favorite game at the time was one they called “dirt monsters”, which was their phrase for the creatures from the “Tremors” movies. The game consisted of one of the kids being on the bed and the other falling off it and clinging to the side calling the other for help to save them from the dirt monster. The child on the bed would then pull them to safety. Sometimes imaginary guns were involved to shoot the dirt monsters.

After they had played this for quite a while, we ate dinner and then got them ready for bed. We used to sing songs with the kids at bedtime. One song the kids always loved was “Jingle Bells”, but for my sanity, my rule was that we would only sing “Jingle Bells” when there was snow on the ground; otherwise, we would be singing it in the summertime, and that was always kind of weird. So, since there was snow that particular day, we sang a very, very rousing rendition of “Jingle Bells”, practically shouting the last part.

As we sang the very last bit there was a knock on our door. I thought perhaps we were bothering the neighbors with our singing and someone was there to complain. But it was much different. When we opened the door, there were two police officers standing outside. I then thought that we must have really annoyed our neighbors for them to call the police on us with a noise complaint, even though it wasn’t that late — only about 8:00 pm.

The officer was very polite but what he said kind of shocked us. Our neighbors in the RV park had called them, yes, not to report noise, but to report possible child endangerment.

One of our neighbors — we never knew who — heard our children playing dirt monsters and calling for help so they called and informed the police that they heard a child calling for help and that they sounded distressed.

We explained the kids’ game to the officers. I can’t remember all the questions they asked as this was about seventeen years ago now, but I remember that we explained to them that our living situation was temporary and that we were moving in around a week. The kids, who were thrilled that uniformed police officers were there, were crowded around them asking them questions and very much not looking like abused children. The officers then said that they didn’t see any problems and eventually left.

I don’t blame the neighbors that called, especially if they really thought that one of our kids was in danger, but I was confused about how they could hear the kids’ cries for help but not hear their laughter or excited squeals when they were playing. Mainly, I was just so embarrassed because we had five people at the time living in a twenty-four-foot trailer, so it was crowded, cluttered, and chaotic, not to mention that we had just eaten dinner so there were dishes still on the counter. Also, I knew the town newspaper had a police blotter section where they listed all the police calls of the week. It was a small town, and I wasn’t quite sure how extensively they reported the calls and whether our names would be mentioned. (They weren’t.)

It definitely made for a story we had to tell for years about when we got the police called on us. Thankfully, they didn’t decide we were unfit due to the clutter and mess.