While visiting my grandad’s side of the family, I’m voluntold to make tea for everyone. My aunt offered first, but my dad told her I was going to make it. I check who wants drinks and go to make them.

As I go to put sugar in the cups, I realise I’ve never made tea for my grandad’s wife before, so back I go to the living room to ask. I run into my dad on the way there.

Dad: “Where are you going?”

Me: “I forgot to ask [Grandad’s Wife] how much sugar she wants.”

Dad: “She has sixteen sugars.”

Me: “Sixteen? That’s a lot of sugar.”

Dad: “Yep. Oh, and she doesn’t have her tea stirred.”

I make her tea according to my dad’s specifications and bring them all through.

Grandad’s Wife: “Oh, this doesn’t taste right.”

Me: “Did I do it wrong? I tried not to stir it, but I had to use the spoon to take the teabag out. Did that stir it too much?”

Grandad’s Wife: “You didn’t stir it? Why not?”

Me: “Because Daddy said not to stir your tea?”

Grandad’s Wife: “What? That’s not—”

Dad: “Did you actually not stir it?”

Me: “But I thought you told me not to?”

Dad: “How much sugar did you put in it?”

Me: “Sixteen.”

Grandad’s Wife: “Sixteen?”

Me: “You said [Grandad’s Wife] wanted sixteen sugars in her tea.”

Aunt: “[Dad]!”

Dad: “I wasn’t expecting her to actually do it! No one has sixteen sugars in their tea, [My Name].”

Me: *Very confused* “But you said—”

Dad: “I can’t believe you actually put sixteen sugars in [Grandad’s Wife]’s tea.”

I asked my grandad’s wife what she actually wanted in her tea and remade it for her. 

I dunno why I even believed him in the first place. Maybe it had something to do with me being an autistic fourteen-year-old who trusted that her dad wouldn’t lie to her and had always taken his instructions literally? No, couldn’t be. (Heavy sarcasm.)

I’m kind of a pet peeve for Grandpa. He doesn’t like me. Like, at all.

You’d think it’s because I was born out of wedlock, but no. It’s because he insists that if it weren’t for my birth, Dad could have done way better in his A-levels and not have gone to what he calls a “garbage university”.

Back when they were teenagers in boarding school, Dad and Mom accidentally got pregnant with me. Mom didn’t find out she was pregnant until literally three weeks before my birthday. I’ve seen the photos, and yes, Mom really didn’t look like she was pregnant. Sure, she put on a bit of weight, but I was born in spring. It just looked like the regular Christmas and New Year weight gain.

As for the other symptoms — morning sickness, mood swings, and the like — both my parents were studying for their A-levels. They were way too stressed out to realise.

And thus, Mom gave birth to me, when she and Dad were both international students half a world away from home and their families — a pair of clueless nineteen-year-olds saddled with a newborn daughter to raise less than 100 days before the A-levels.

They both achieved straight As and got their courses of choice: medicine for Dad, computer science for Mom.

Both of them also raised me rather successfully (though not without their fair share of bumbling mishaps) while being full-time students in a foreign country three continents away from home.

Also, that “garbage university” they both went to? Birmingham University.

And Grandpa still claims that Dad could have done better if he “hadn’t wasted time looking after a kid.”

I swear, there just isn’t pleasing some people.

I work in a library. We set up an arts and crafts table during school breaks, and people have been inconsiderate.

Wise of past mistakes, we have a sign up asking that people who use the arts and crafts table clean up after themselves when they leave. People do not know how to read signs, so at closing time, we go around to remind them

A small child and their grandmother are sitting at the arts and crafts table at closing time, so I go up to them to warn them that the library will be closing soon.

Me: “Hello, we close in five minutes, so it’s time to start to clean up the table so it’ll be nice and tidy for the children who come by tomorrow. You can put the supplies back in the marked boxes over there.”

Child: “Noooo! I’m not finished yet. Can we stay a little longer?”

Me: “I’m sorry, but we who work here want to go home to our families, too. You can come back and finish tomorrow.”

Grandmother: “No, we won’t have time to come back tomorrow. We have other activities planned for the rest of the holidays and then he has to go back home.”

Me: “Okay, why don’t you grab the things you need to finish your project and take them home with you? You can grab a few stickers and some glitter and coloured paper if you want. Just clean up after yourselves after you leave, please.”

They agreed to do so, and I left to get the rest of the place in order for closing. When I got back to the information desk, I asked my coworker if everyone had left and she confirmed that they had. I did another round just to make sure and arrived at the arts and crafts table.

It had been picked completely clean. All the coloured pencils, the glitter glue, the crepe paper, the scissors, the sticker sheets, and the pipe cleaners meant for our visitors to use were gone.

Congratulations, Granny, for your creative interpretation of “grab the things you need to finish your project”. Thanks to you, the next day, the kids had to make do with mostly just plain copy paper and pencils until we could get more supplies in.

Related:
A Crafty Grandmother

My boyfriend is in town visiting me. My grandmother, who lives in a nursing home after several strokes, invites us to have tea with her so she can meet him. After several polite inquiries about his family, what he’s studying in grad school, etc…

Grandmother: “So, you’ve been seeing my granddaughter for how long?”

Boyfriend: “We’ve known each other for almost six months now.”

Grandmother: *Fixing him with a gimlet eye* “What are your intentions?”

Me: “Grandma!”

Boyfriend: “Well, ma’am, I think it may be too soon to have intentions, but I have hopes!” 

He smiles and takes my hand. My grandmother looks at me.

Grandmother: “Oh, he’ll do! Keep him!”

She was his staunchest family supporter from that day forth, and she was able to attend our wedding the following year before she passed away.

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.