My boyfriend and I offer sailing holidays. People book a berth in a cabin and live and sail with us for one week. This, of course, means that we actually live with our customers and spend A LOT of time with them in very limited space.

We had a good crew this time. Everyone was getting along fine and the weather was good. There was a married couple among the crew, and they had a very… special… dynamic between the two of them. The wife was very, very dominant and bossy, sometimes even demeaning, to her husband. To everyone else, she was friendly and polite, but she was definitely in charge of their marriage. No big deal; he didn’t seem to be bothered by it.

[Husband] seemed happy, and they gave the impression that they were really in love. [Husband] was in no way dependent on [Wife], and it never came off as abusive. [Wife] was just bossy and the decision maker, and sometimes she was a bit rude about it.

[Husband] did stand his ground on important issues, but he didn’t seem to care about the everyday nagging, and we had the impression that he found it convenient that [Wife] made all the decisions and he could tag along.

[Wife] was, supposedly, the one who liked sailing and she claimed to be pretty experienced. [Husband] tagged along; he’d never been on a boat before but liked the idea. [Wife] didn’t show any interest in partaking in the sailing when we were out. She was relaxing in a corner and enjoying the sun. This is not unusual, but we were surprised because of how she had claimed to love sailing and told us all about her previous trips. Still, it was her holiday and no one is forced to help if they don’t want to.

One day, at the end of the week, the weather was lovely and we were sailing downwind. At some point, we decided to sail wing-on-wing. This point of sail is a bit tricky; you don’t have a lot of leeway and the one at the helm has to concentrate. Of course, it was a bit wavey, making it even more difficult.

Still, the wind wasn’t that strong, and we trimmed the sail so our crew could practise and make mistakes without it becoming dangerous. You can only learn through practice, practice, practice, and this was a great opportunity. The crew all tried, made mistakes, learned, and had fun. [Husband] steered, too. He wasn’t better or worse than anyone else. All in all, he did a pretty good job. [Wife], who had been quiet when the others steered, started commenting and correcting [Husband] all the time with a pretty mean voice.

[Husband] reacted well enough to it; he sort of smirked it away and he really didn’t seem to be bothered by it. My boyfriend, however, decided that enough was enough.

Boyfriend: “[Wife], why don’t you take the helm?”

Wife: “No, I’m here to relax. I can’t be bothered.”

I don’t remember how, but we managed to convince her to try.

It took her thirty seconds to make the exact same mistakes that she had so naggingly commented on when [Husband] made them. We were all quiet, thinking our part… except for [Husband]. When the sails started to flap and wobble:

Husband: *Calmly and coolly* “HA-HA!”

He said it much like Nelson from “The Simpsons”.

You could’ve heard a pin drop. Then, everyone — except [Wife] — burst out laughing. After a week of listening to her boss him around and tell him how to do this and that, this was his small, subtle revenge.

I help my mother-in-law with her taxes every year. This year, we are looking for a specific paper but cannot find it. I know it looks like I’m staring into space, but I’m actually mentally retracing my steps to try to recall where and when I had the paper last. My mother-in-law is tearing apart everything she can get her hands on.

Mother-In-Law: “What are you doing?! Help me look!”

Me: “I’m thinking.” *Pauses* “We had it in the den when we did the state taxes, right?”

Mother-In-Law: “Yes!”

Me: “Okay, so—”

Mother-In-Law: “Help me look!”

Me: “I’m thinking!”

Mother-In-Law: “You’re just standing there!”

I walk away, not interested in arguing. She follows me.

Mother-In-Law: “Seriously, you just walked away and thought I wouldn’t notice you’re not helping?”

Me: “Did you check the closet in your office?”

Mother-In-Law: “Yes. It’s not there.”

Me: “I thought I remembered putting it on the top shelf.” *Sigh* “I don’t know. I’ll—”

Mother-In-Law: *Raising her voice* “You need to stop f****** around and help me!”

Me: *Matching her tone* “Acting like an a** isn’t going to make it appear.”

Mother-In-Law: “Okay. You just sit here and be useless. That’s great.”

She leaves, slamming the door.

A moment later, I get up, go to her office, and open the closet door. There on the top shelf is the folder we’ve been looking for. It’s the only thing up there, so there’s no way she missed it unless she didn’t even look. I grab it and go back to her.

Me: “Here.”

I drop it on the floor in front of her.

Mother-In-Law: “Finally!”

Me: “It was in the top of your closet where you said you already looked.”

Mother-In-Law: “Oh.” *Hesitates* “Well, now we—”

Me: “I’m done.”

Mother-In-Law: “Why?!”

Me: “You were a b**** while I was trying to help, you lied about where you searched, and just now, you couldn’t even apologize or thank me.”

I left and ignored her calls for several days. She ended up hiring a professional.

CONTENT WARNING: This story contains content of a medical nature. It is not intended as medical advice.

My wife has a rather large benign brain tumor successfully removed at [Medical Center]. About a week later, while still in the medical center, a staff doctor says a PEG (abdominal feeding tube) needs to be put in because when she goes for in-house rehab, they won’t want to be concerned with swallowing and eating.

To insert the PEG, the abdomen is inflated with air to find a good field. The PEG can’t be inserted and the surgeon has to abandon the attempt. Now my wife has an inflated abdomen such that it looks like she is pregnant with a fifty-pound kid. As long as she lies flat, she is fine.

Later in the day, in come the surgeon and another surgeon, and they commence to argue about who has dibs on exploratory.

Surgeon #1: *To me* “My equipment is too small to cause the air to leak out into the abdomen. This has to be a perforated bowel, and I need to find it.”

Surgeon #2: *To [Surgeon #1]* “This is out of your hands now. It’s my call.” *Turns to me* “I am an aggressive surgeon, and I need to go in and find the perforation. We need to get to this tonight.”

Me: “I have to sign off for any surgery, right? Well, I’m not signing off for any more surgery. This is not a perforated bowel.”

Surgeon #2: “And just where did you get your medical degree?”

Me: “That doesn’t matter. I’m not signing off for any surgery.”

An hour later, in comes yet another doctor. She tells me she has been told about my decision and asks me to explain.

Me: “I had a classmate in high school who had a perforated bowel. Within a few hours, he spiked an over 106 fever and was in so much pain he wanted to be run over by a bus. Look at the monitor. Her breathing is above the number set for her vent tube. Her temp is 98.8 and her blood pressure is 125 over 79. This is not a perforated bowel.”

New Doctor: “I agree with you. This can only be free air and, as such, it will take several days to leave her body, but she will be fine. She just won’t be very comfortable sitting up in a chair yet.”

Not long after, [Surgeon #1] comes in.

Surgeon #1: “We’re not sure yet if this is a perforated bowel, so we are going to put a twenty-four-hour watch on this.”

Me: “You can put a twenty-four-day watch on this for all I care. I’m not signing off.”

Surgeon #1: “Well, we will see about that.”

Me: *As he leaves her room* “No, we won’t.”

The next day, [Surgeon #1] proclaimed it to be free air and that was the end of the exploratory discussion.

I worked as a waitress when I was eighteen. One time, I had a whole sports team in. I was dodging swarms of kids while holding a huge pizza over my head.

A grown man threw his arms out at me, and when I stumbled and barely caught the pan, he yelled at me:

Customer: “You need to go get your glasses checked!”

I was fed up with a client for whom I sold magazine advertising. He was forever finding creative excuses to underpay me and had taken to asking for “little extras” — an hour or two of editing, for example — which were always expected to be free.

I quit, all properly and above board, and when I finished, I gave him my two final invoices. He underpaid the first by £300 and refused to pay anything at all for the second on the bizarre grounds that he hadn’t been able to bill the customers for those adverts until after I had left his company.

Emails went back and forth for a while and he tried everything — tying the figures in knots over and over again, retroactively changing my contract, and even threatening me with the police (for “fraud”) — to get out of paying.

Eventually, I sent him a final demand, with a screencap of a small claims form with his details filled in, offering him one last chance to pay the existing figure before I added court fees, etc.

Client: “Shame on you. After all these years, I thought we were friends.”

But he paid.