I live in a fairly rural area. Most of the houses here have about an acre of land attached to them.

A new guy, from the city, moves into the house across the gravel road from mine. I figure he’ll be a new neighbor, and gently attempt to introduce myself. Alas, I am rebuffed. The man moved out here to get away from people. He’s working remotely, and he’s a programmer.

Not a problem. Here in the country, we’re friendly, but we also understand how to give people space. So, I leave him alone, and he leaves me alone, and everything’s golden right?

Wrong. The man’s truck is one of those big pavement queen pickups that’s got more shine than mud, more horsepower than sense, and costs too much to actually use to do real work. And the truck is set up with one of those ‘car alarms’ I’ve heard so much about.

Now, I’m going to be honest: When someone first told me that people deliberately installed devices in their cars designed to randomly wake the neighbors in the middle of the night in the city, and thought this was sensible? I thought that f***er was lying to me.

Well, he wasn’t.

Pretty soon, I was woken up in the middle of the night by a car alarm going off. It’d go “Wooop wooop whoop, wedu wedu wedu, wooop wooop wooop” and then it would silence itself. And then, just when you were starting to fall back to sleep again, it’d start going off again! Took me a while to realize that it was always exactly ten minutes between repetitions; the whole d*** thing was automated! I’d initially thought my neighbor was shutting the devil-d***ed thing down, and it was waking up on its own. But no, he was just ignoring it. Hell, he was sleeping like the dead through it.

But I couldn’t. It would go off every night that my neighbor’s car was there. I tried to contact him about it, but he didn’t have a land line number in the phone book, he didn’t reply to my attempts to slip letters in his mail box, he was never willing to talk when he was outside the house, and he already made his opinion clear on how he felt about folks knocking on his door.

The only times I got reprieves to actually sleep were when he was away from home for whatever reason. I work very physical days, so this wasn’t good for my physical or mental health.

After a few months of this, I couldn’t take it anymore. In the dead of night, while his alarm was going off, I snuck across the street to his truck. Lords, the banshee wail of that thing got worse the closer I got to it. I was clutching at my ears. But I made it, and I used a mechanics tool to pop the hood. Then, having read the manual for this truck in advance, I pulled the fuse for the alarm.

Blessed silence. I slept like a small child who’d been run around the farm all day long and put to bed with a warm blanket.

The silence remained for several months until the guy brought his truck in for its regular checkup. The mechanics must have replaced the fuse, because that very night it went off again. This time, I didn’t wait; I just pulled the fuse. Each time I snuck over all careful like, but with how deeply my neighbor slept, I probably could have stampeded a herd of bison across his drive without him noticing.

This repeated a whole bunch. He’d go to the mechanic about twice a year, and I’d pull the fuse right after. After a couple of years of that, and eventually my neighbor stopped having his fuse replaced: I presume he’d decided the mechanics were just cheating him or some such.

That lasted until about five years later he bought a new truck. Back then, I was still using the same truck I’d had when I first met him, though it was getting a bit long in the tooth. But of course, this new truck came with a new alarm.

It took me three days to figure out how to disable this one. It was aftermarket. Had to play cat-and-mouse with the mechanics again for a bit, and finally we reached a sort of equilibrium once more.

All this without ever actually speaking to the guy past that first time when he told me he wasn’t interested in socializing at all.

This story doesn’t have much of a point, I’m afraid. My across-the-road neighbor is still my across-the-road neighbor, and neither of our behaviors has changed. The little war over his hideous alarms continues. But I hope it at least entertained you.

I’m involved in a summer program during the day, but one kid has been bullying me for the entire summer. None of the adults are willing to step in and put a stop to it, so by this point, I’m miserable.

Me: “Mom, can I not go back tomorrow?”

Mom: “Why? What’s going on?”

Me: “It’s [Bully] again. He won’t stop. I’ve had enough.”

Mom: “Well, suppose I go in tomorrow and have a little talk with him?”

Me: “What? No! Please don’t do that. It’ll probably just make things worse.”

Mom: “Just let me have a word with him. If it doesn’t work, you can quit.”

Me: *Reluctantly* “Well… all right.”

All I expected her to do was pull him to the side and just talk with him. What I didn’t expect was for her to chew him out to the point that he was cowering in fear.

What was funnier was that my mom is about 5’5” and very petite, and [Bully] was a little taller and three times as wide. By the time she was through, he was close to tears. Admittedly, I was a little scared, too, because I had never seen her that angry in my life. [Bully] never picked on me again.

I work at the front desk in a small hotel. We are right next to a convention center, and we’re full for the entire weekend.

One customer was due to leave that afternoon but was avoiding the desk in an attempt to stay another night, which was not cool considering his room was already reserved by another guest.  What these people don’t know is that Kentucky doesn’t have laws protecting squatters and that I can remove their things if I have to.

So, I do.

The customer storms up to me, room key card in hand. I know what’s coming.

Customer: “I can’t get into my room!”

Me: “That’s because it’s not your room anymore. You have been vacated from the room and your key card has been cancelled.”

Customer: “Where the f*** is all my stuff?!”

Me: “We put them into some plastic bags and placed those bags in our storage. We can return them to you.”

Customer: “Ooooh y’all done f***** up now! You broke the law by breaking into my room and stealing my stuff!”

Me: “We didn’t break into anything; we accessed a room on our own private premises.”

Customer: “Squatter’s rights, b****! I’m calling the police on you!”

He calls the police, loudly, while calling me every name in the book. His anger and volume are attracting a small crowd of other guests.

My local neighborhood police (who know me) answer the call. While one officer comes behind the desk to get my report, the other does damage control. I provide my report from inside the office, and we come out just in time to hear the other officer tell the customer:

Officer: “Put your cigar in your mouth and do not speak another word, or you’ll get arrested.”

He then proceeds to explain to all the guests in attendance (there is now a small crowd of ten or so people watching):

Officer: “Kentucky sides with hotels and businesses in cases of squatting. The customer getting kicked out is indeed kicked out, and everyone needs to clear the lobby and get some f****** sleep. Now.”

Once the (now very angry) customer is escorted out, all the other guests take the officer’s advice and vacate the lobby. This all went down around midnight. A half hour later the guest moving into the room checked in, blissfully unaware of the drama that had just unfolded regarding their bed.

Years ago, I was at the post office the day after Christmas to mail a package. When at the counter being helped, I was suddenly hit by an evil impulse. (Yes, I often give in to my evil impulses.)

Me: “Will this arrive by Christmas?”

The clerk looked at me like I was an idiot.

Clerk: “NO!”

Me: “My God! That’s 364 days!”

The clerk managed to smile.

This story is from when I was younger, but I remember it as though it happened yesterday. It was early December, and my friends and I went sledding down near the park. I was sledding for about an hour, and all of a sudden…

I heard a crunch and then a snap.

A man wearing a red shirt had jumped right on my sled. This man was not young; he was maybe in his late forties or early fifties. He had tried to stop my sled by stomping on it with one foot, and he’d broken it. 

That was my favorite sled at the time.

My friends and I later realized that he had done the same thing to about five or six other kids. Even some adults and parents had noticed it.

The man went up to other kids and me while yelling things like:

Man: “You little s***s! F*** y’all!”

The kids had done nothing wrong and were scared. Most of the kids went home, but my friends and I and some adults teamed up together and called the police on the man.

When the police got there, they went up to the man who had hidden in his car, and they asked him why he was doing the things he had done. 

Man: “Those kids were hurting my grandaughter and making fun of her.”

The man was alone with no granddaughter.

Police: “Even so, that does not give you the right to harass the kids and hurt them. We have gotten several complaints about you from kids and adults.”

The man was silent for a moment before he kept insisting that the kids were hurting his granddaughter while trying to roll up his window. 

In the end, the police let him go… and I went home with a broken sled.