My mom makes her infamous chicken stew all the time, which I have learned is her sticking chicken and vegetables in a huge boiling pot of water with a dash of salt and forgetting about it for an hour. It comes out like mixed sludge, and only my dad likes it. My sibling tolerates it, but I am sick of it at eight.

Me: “Mom, I can’t eat this. It’s gonna make me sick!”

Mom: “Eat it; it’s not feces!”

So, I ate it and later, after I went to bed, I was sick. My poor stomach had enough and barfed it up and it was all over me and my blanket; the smell made me barf again. I went and got Mom, who was shocked that her stew would make me sick. My family was, too. 

To this day, they think I went overboard by barfing it up, as she took it pretty hard. I don’t know why they’d think I’d make myself sick, but they do. I know moms work hard at making their families food, but they shouldn’t force it.

I work in a small clothing boutique. We’ve been doing online and curbside orders only for a month due to the lockdown measures but our state just reopened, despite cases multiplying and testing being nearly nonexistent, and my store’s owner decides we need to be open, as well.

I bring in my own mask and gloves since my owner thinks this is all “overblown.” Unfortunately, it seems the rest of our city agrees. I spend the day dodging customers who want to stand within a foot of me, won’t step back from the counter, insist on picking up and touching everything, and won’t use the hand sanitizer at the door, and NONE of them are wearing masks. 

At the end of the day, one of my customers looks at me in my own, correctly-fitted mask.

Customer: “You know you don’t need to wear that. I got one and tried but I didn’t like how it felt and I’m healthy enough anyway, so what’s the point?”

The point, dear customer, is to keep my asthmatic self safe. But apparently, that’s not good enough. And if I were to say that, I’d be fired. So, wonderful catch-22 here. If I get sick, then it’ll be nice to know that at least I didn’t make a customer feel mildly uncomfortable!

This story is part of our Anti-Masker roundup.

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Due to a certain illness outbreak, my work has created a secondary call-in phone line specifically for the illness, in addition to the regular associate call-in line. Thanks to worse-than-normal menstrual cramps, I call in one day through the regular line. I also specify that it’s nothing contagious, so I don’t have to worry about being cleared by HR to be allowed back into the building.

The next day I return with no problems from HR. Later that day, I’m confronted by a male coworker who likes to act like management, even though we’re at the same pay level, and he only has a month seniority on me.

Coworker: “Did you get cleared by HR to come back? I’m not getting sick just because you think you can cut corners.”

Me: “I wasn’t contagious, so I don’t need to be cleared for anything.”

Coworker: “Um, yes, you do! If I had to be cleared after my trip to Minnesota, so do you!”

Me: “You flew there, and when everything started up, we were told that everybody flying would have to be cleared by HR first. I didn’t have anything contagious, so I don’t have to be cleared.”

Coworker: “No! If you’re sick, you have to be cleared! You think, just because you’re a girl, that you can do whatever you want?!”

Me: “Nope. I think that, because I was bleeding due to my uterine lining flaking off and being evicted, more painfully than normal, I didn’t feel like standing for a nine-hour shift on a forklift. Any other complaints?”

His mouth flapped like a fish’s a couple of times and then he stalked off. He later whined to our immediate union steward, who has no issue with telling dummies off. Our steward told him that, even with our natural issues, each of the four female floor workers do twice as much work as he does.

He later told me that if the coworker really wanted to whine about the girls getting “special privileges,” he should get hooked up to one of those wired machines that lets you feel what a period feels like.

I have had small dizzy spells throughout the day. Thinking I am just tired, I push through them.

Me: “Here is your change, sir, your order should be…”

Things get fuzzy and dark around the edges.

Me: “…out… short—”

I pass out. I am out for a few minutes and knock over the cup holder and divider for the cash registers, and I have a large lump on my head from falling. I come to with my coworkers standing over me filling out orders.

Customer: “What a lazy lout! Sleeping on the job! I hope you fire her for holding everything up with her laziness!”

Coworker: “That’s my sister! She just collapsed and hit her head!”

Customer: “Don’t you cover for her! Lazy b****!”

My aunt refused to vaccinate her six kids because of fear of autism. She never changes her beliefs, no matter what evidence appears against it.

Although she didn’t vaccinate any of her kids, kid number five has autism anyway.

Shockingly, she not only continued claiming that vaccines cause autism, but she also began insisting that she actually did vaccinate her fifth child. My mom — her sister — tried to explain that it didn’t make sense that she vaccinated the fifth child but not the first four or the sixth one, and that until the fifth child was diagnosed with autism, she always said that she would never vaccinate any of her kids.

Unfortunately, nothing she said worked.