Around 2000 or so, I was living in a pretty sweet two-bedroom apartment right above where I was working at the time. My sister’s boyfriend had recently moved to town and needed a place to stay. We were already kind of friends, so I gave him a bedroom. The rent was split, but it was still my place overall.

[Sister’s Boyfriend] had a pretty annoying habit of making food and then eating it in his room and leaving the dirty dishes in there. I bugged him about it for a while until he finally started at least putting them in the sink — still dirty, but at least accessible.

Eventually, I got petty mad about this and basically told him to clean the f****** dishes. His reply?

Sister’s Boyfriend: “That’s not happening.”

Okay, then…

For the whole time he’d been living there, he was allowed to use my computer (a pretty bada** gaming rig I had built) to check his emails and such.

After he said that garbage about the dishes, I had a little idea. When he left for work that day, I hopped on the Internet and found a free tiny program called BootLocker. It basically locked the computer with a black screen with a password prompt. No password, no computer. It even had an option to lock the BIOS, so if the PC was rebooted, it would ask for the password before even booting.

There was also an option to include some words below the password prompt. I chose, “Clean dishes = checked email”.

Then, I went about my day.

[Sister’s Boyfriend] finished work and was home before me. Needless to say, when I got home, the dishes were clean, but he was not happy. Poor widdle baby.

Cue his revenge.

He had a pretty fancy television in the living room. I had it hooked up to the computer so movies could be watched, games played, etc., on the sweet big screen. (Thirty-two inches was way bigger than my monitor!) Plus, we had free cable from work downstairs.

After the BootLocker thing, [Sister’s Boyfriend] thought he would get me back by activating the parental controls on his TV. I got home after work — when he wasn’t home — and went to watch some TV. It was a no-go without the four-digit code.

It took me roughly two minutes online to find “What do I do if I forget my [Brand] TV code?”

The look on [Sister’s Boyfriend]’s face when he got home and I was watching TV was golden.

He moved out not too long afterward.

I know some think cats are untrainable, but I disagree. Back when I was a teen, living with my parents, I trained their cats with many commands. I had different calls to summon them for food, for offers to pet them, and for lap time, and one even came to her name. They knew what they were allowed to climb on and eat and listened when I told them to get down from something, and they generally were excellent cats.

One day, I had a small plate with some snack food sitting on the living room table. One cat walked up to it, which I didn’t think much about since I trusted him to obey the rules and leave the food alone. But then, he started batting at the edge of the plate.

Me: “What are you doing, you crazy cat?”

Dad: “Oh, you haven’t seen his new strategy yet?”

Me: “‘Strategy’?”

Dad: “Yep, he’s a smart one. Just watch and see.”

The cat continued to bat at the plate for a minute until he hit the raised outer edge hard enough to tilt the plate toward him, causing a piece of bologna to fall off the plate. The cat immediately grabbed it and ran off.

Me: “[Cat]! You know not to steal food!”

Dad: “Hey, don’t yell at him. He’s following the rules.”

Me: “How is that following rules?”

Dad: “You taught him that food that was on a plate was off-limits. He didn’t eat any food off of a plate, did he? He only ate food that had fallen to the ground, which has always been fair game.”

Me: “After he knocked it down!”

Dad: “Not his fault if you didn’t make rules about batting plates. He’s following the rules exactly as you taught them. [Cat] should have been a lawyer.”

I was skeptical of my father’s analysis at first, but I saw the cat try this trick a number of times later, and he really did seem to believe he was allowed to eat things only after he knocked them to the floor. Of course, now that I knew of his attempted loophole abuse, I made sure to teach him that it was not allowed. Eventually, we were back to being able to leave food unsupervised.

Or at least, we were until I left for college. Four years later when I visited my parents, two cats were begging for table scraps, a third was meowing incessantly for his daily tithe of wet cat food, and all three would climb onto anything they wanted and eat any food they could steal off of plates. Apparently, the man who cheered on a cat for bending the rules ended up with cats who didn’t feel they needed to obey the rules anymore. You get the behavior out of your pets that you encourage, good or bad.

I related a particular story to my then-twelve-year-old daughter to illustrate a point that I thought she would appreciate. A few months later, on her birthday, my mom called to wish her a happy birthday. After they were done talking, my daughter handed the phone to me so we could chat.

Mom: “I was telling [Daughter] about [same story]. She said she really liked that and hadn’t heard it before.”

Me: “But I told her that a couple of months ago…”

Mom: “Well, remember: you’re her mom, and she’s a teenager now, so you’re stupid.”

She instantly changed my demeanor from mild indignation to laughter. Now that I’m not a teenager anymore: thanks, Mom!

Way back when televisions were newer and color TVs were out of the price range of most people, scam calls were much less common. That didn’t stop my grandma.

When someone called and told her she’d won a color television, she hung up on them. They called back, she hung up.

Repeat several times until my grandfather got home. He answered the next call, asked a few questions, and realized she had entered a drawing at the department store and won.

She was convinced it was a scam up until they delivered the TV and left without asking for money.

CONTENT WARNING: Animal Neglect

My husband and I went away for a week. I agreed to pay my younger sister (age twenty-seven) $100 to drive fifteen minutes to my house once a day, make sure my two cats had food and water, and empty the collection bin on their automatic litter box. I checked in with her every day, and she assured me all was well.

When we came back, the cats had no food and no water, and their litter box was so full that it had stopped cleaning. But the $100 I’d left for [Sister] was gone. So, I called her. 

Me: “Uh, hey. What happened here? Did you not take care of my cats?”

Sister: “Well, [Her Husband] and I decided to go out of town, too.”

Me: “Okay… And the cats?”

Sister: “What about them?”

Me: “You were supposed to be taking care of them.”

Sister: “I did. I stopped by before we left.”

Me: “When were you here last?”

Sister: *Defensive* “I don’t know!”

Me: “What do you mean, you don’t know? I paid you to stop here every day. I want my money back.”

Sister: “Well, I would have, but we changed plans.”

Me: “And you should have told me that before, so I could arrange for someone to care for them. Are you f****** kidding me right now?”

Sister: “What? They’re fine. We came by the day after you left and did what you wanted. What’s the big deal?”

Me: “So, you came by for like fifteen minutes, took the $100, and that’s all you did?”

Sister: “They’re fine!”

I hung up. She tried calling back a few times, but I just kept picking up and hanging up so she couldn’t leave a voicemail. The cats are fine, overall, but my relationship with my sister is forever ruined.