I’m a DC fan and was always confused about the Superfamily. The only difference between Superman and Clark Kent is glasses. But no one knows his identity. I never understood it… until I switched from glasses to contacts. In the first class of the day, I was proven wrong about secret identities.

I walked up to my first-period teacher to ask a question.

Me: “[Teacher]? I have a question.”

Teacher: “Oh? Are you a new student? I wasn’t aware we were getting one.”

CONTENT WARNING: Animal Injury

I have a greyhound. She was trained to be a racer, but she wasn’t fast enough to actually be in any races. Luckily, an organisation rescued her and others before they were shot.

When I adopted her, I had to sign an agreement that she would always be muzzled and leashed unless in a secure area like our house or enclosed back garden. This should not be difficult to accomplish.

Unfortunately, my dad thinks that he needs to keep letting her into the not-enclosed front garden and this will teach her to ignore all the training she went through to not run off or chase anything. I have told him multiple times to not let her out and to hold her back if I’m nearby when the front door is opened. 

However, I don’t always get warning of when the door opens and he lets her out, so multiple times, she has run off to chase school kids or bikes or run into traffic. It is only due to luck that nothing bad has happened, until this day.

Today, my dad returns home while I am upstairs in the bathroom. I hear the front door open, and I hear him let my dog into the front garden, again. I’m finishing up and about to go downstairs when I hear my dad yell at her to come back.

I rush downstairs and look through the front door to see her jumping up at some school kids. I actually take the time to put shoes on — something I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive myself for — before running outside to find where she’s run off to next. When I see that she’s in our neighbour’s garden, my first thought is relief that she hasn’t run into traffic again. Then, I notice that she has found the neighbour’s cat.

My dad and I manage to pull her off the cat, who is rightfully fighting like his life depends on it, and I drag her back inside our house while my dad rings their doorbell. The cat runs through the cat flap, so we have no way to judge the extent of his injuries. There is blood, but we don’t know how much is the cat’s and how much is my dog’s.

He comes back inside and tries phoning the neighbour, who wasn’t home. She answers, though she is mostly inaudible.

Dad: “[Neighbour]! [Dog] caught [Cat]—”

I can hear her scream of anguish from the other side of the room.

Dad: “He’s alive! [Neighbour], it’s okay. He’s alive.”

It was going to take time for our neighbour to return to her house. Now it was just a matter of waiting. I did my best to clean my dog’s wounds, trying really hard to think about how some of this blood probably wasn’t even hers.

Eventually, the neighbour returned and was able to check on her cat. I found out later from my sister, who attends the nearby school, that the school kids had recognised the cat and rumours were spreading. The neighbour’s teenager was told that her cat had been attacked by a dog and she ran home in a panic, getting there first.

Thankfully, the cat was physically fine. From what the neighbour said, they didn’t even need to go to the vet. Mentally, however, he wouldn’t even enter the front garden of his house for months. 

My dad actually had the gall to blame me for letting him let our dog into the garden in the first place, and he decided I needed a lecture in the gruesome detail of what would have happened if we hadn’t been able to stop her hurting the cat, as well as telling me how to kill a dog if I ever needed to in self-defense.

The only good thing to come out of all of this is that now my dad won’t let our dog into the front garden anymore.

Back when I worked at an electronics store, I had a customer who had an extended warranty expire literally two days from the day he brought his VCR in for repair. I was working on getting an override from corporate because his VCR warranty expired on Thanksgiving Day, and you know how busy we are the two days after.

He got upset because it was taking so long, and he threw the VCR at me, causing thirteen stitches on my scalp.

Ironically, the override happened shortly afterward, and he lost it again when I told him we couldn’t repair a unit damaged by customer abuse.

The police were called. The guy was arrested and I went to hospital.

He got six weeks in jail, was instructed to attend anger management, and was court-ordered not to step into a [Store] in our county for an infinite period of time.

This story is part of the Thanksgiving 2022 roundup!

Read the next Thanksgiving 2022 roundup story!

Read the Thanksgiving 2022 roundup!

This takes place a few months into the health crisis. I have chronic medical issues, so I wear masks if I have to go out. A longtime friend — a nurse! — has picked up on every conspiracy theory with lightning speed and posted about it on social media. One day, after seeing a particularly vitriolic post about ”face diapers” and “sheeple,” I message her.

Me: “Hey, I’d like to remind you that you do have a friend with chronic illness. I wear a mask when I go out now because I don’t want to catch this. That doesn’t make me a sheep.”

Friend: “Oh, [My Name], I was just venting. I understand that you need to wear a mask, and if I were around you, I’d wear one, too. I know you have medical issues, so I want to protect you.”

Me: “I appreciate that. Until the crisis is over, maybe you could pretend everyone is like me and wear a mask to protect them, too.”

She hasn’t talked to me since.

Related:
An Ugly Side Of Society Has Been Unmasked, Part 18
An Ugly Side Of Society Has Been Unmasked, Part 17
An Ugly Side Of Society Has Been Unmasked, Part 16
An Ugly Side Of Society Has Been Unmasked, Part 15
An Ugly Side Of Society Has Been Unmasked, Part 14

I am a twenty-two-year-old woman who has always been unnaturally tall. I am currently 6’9” (2.05m), and when I was twelve I was 6’3” (1.95m)! Life is hard enough for a teenage girl, but in my case, it was worse because I was bullied for my height, and the teachers at my school (a middle-class all-girls grammar school) were generally never very good at dealing with issues like this.

As an example, when I was thirteen, my mother, unable to find shoes that fit me, had to buy boy’s shoes. Someone in my school found out about it and started calling me “Boyshoes”. This in turn led to the rumour that I was born male (I wasn’t), and of course, all the girls in my school had to see for themselves if this was true by touching my breasts (to “see if they were real”) and putting their hands up my skirt (to “see if I had a penis”). When my mother complained to the school, they said there was very little they could do. I guess they meant there was very little they were willing to do. My mother claimed that this was sexual harassment, but the school disagreed, saying it couldn’t be sexual harassment as it was an all-girls school and the perpetrators were girls. My mother went to a solicitor, who wrote to the school, and they finally did something.

On another occasion, my mother had been having trouble finding a uniform to fit me. I was tall, but I wasn’t skinny like some tall girls; I was curvy and heavyset, and buying a uniform sized for a girl my age was out of the question. She tried uniforms for seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds — I wasn’t even fourteen at this point — and although they did fit, the skirts were far too short.

The school’s uniform policy stated that the hem of the skirt should not come too far above the knee. This was measured by kneeling on the floor and measuring from hem to floor — the distance should not have been more than about two inches. In my case, it was closer to seven inches, and when I stood up, the skirt was well above my knee because my legs were so long! At this point, my mother gave up; the skirt fit, the jacket fit, and she’d found blouses that fit, so she was just going to send me to school, shorter skirt or not.

It wasn’t long before I got a detention for a “non-regulation uniform” and was told to come in the next day with a regulation-length skirt. The following day, I got another detention for “non-regulation uniform and failing to rectify this issue in a timely manner”. I also got a letter sent home with me, warning my mother that I would potentially be suspended if I turned up to school in non-regulation uniform again.

My mother was livid! She stormed up to the school and demanded to see the principal. She waved the letter in his face and demanded to know why the school was “picking on me”. The principal was uninterested and made some excuse about how “the school’s uniform policy is for everyone’s benefit”. My mother told the principal that the school’s official uniform supplier didn’t make uniforms for girls of my height and build, and that if I wasn’t left alone, she’d be taking further legal action.

The school never bothered me about my “non-regulation” uniform again.