I manage a plus-size women’s clothing store. We get a large number of guys who need dresses for charity shows, cross-dressers, genderfluid people, transgender women, and drag queens.

A drag queen comes into the store to pick up some shoes they ordered online. They must be either coming from or going to a show because they are still in full makeup. I get their name, and during our conversation, another customer walks in. I call out a greeting and say something like:

Me: “Hello! I’ll be right with you.”

I go to the back room, and it takes a minute to go through all the web orders. I find the one I need and am on my way back to the counter when the new customer throws her arm out to stop me from passing.

Customer: “I am a customer, and I’ve been here for twenty minutes, and no one has spoken to me.”

She has only been in the store for less than five minutes, but I resign myself to groveling.

Before I can say anything, the drag queen stomps over, glares at the customer, and says:

Drag Queen: “B****, she said hello to you!”

Complete with sassy finger snaps.

The Queen then made a big show of thanking me for getting her package. The other customer sheepishly paid for her purchase and didn’t make eye contact when I told her to have a good day.

I’m going to donate blood. For those that don’t know, this means getting dragged into a private room first for some testing to make sure I can donate and answering a whole lot of boring questions, most of which I’ve actually pre-answered on the app this time. However, they have one to ask that isn’t on the app.

Nurse: “And have you had a [contagious illness] vaccine?”

Me: “Yep, and the booster.”

Nurse: “And which vaccine did you get?”

Me: “It was… Oh, having a brain fart right now. Could you remind me the names of the vaccines?”

Nurse: “I can’t do that. You have to tell me.”

Me: “I was just asking for the names to jog my memory.”

Nurse: “If I tell you, then you could just lie and pick one of them when you didn’t really get the vaccine.”

For the record, I’ve had to jog my memory by asking for the names of the vaccines when donating blood at this exact same facility before and didn’t have any trouble with it.

Me: “Do you require a [contagious illness] vaccine to donate here?”

Nurse: “No, but I need to know what vaccine you got if you said you got one.”

Me: “But if I can donate blood without the vaccine, there is no incentive for me to lie about it.”

Nurse: “I need you to tell me a vaccine without my helping, or you can’t donate blood here.”

Me: “So, what? Do you want me to claim I got the [Company #1] one, even though I know that’s not the one I got, just to donate?”

This last question is asked in what I think is an obviously sarcastic tone, but she apparently doesn’t pick up on that.

Nurse: “Okay, fine. I’ll put that. We just need a name.”

Me: “But I didn’t get that one.”

Nurse: “It doesn’t really matter for an old vaccine.”

So, apparently, rather than my potentially lying when I have no incentive to do so, she would rather force me into an explicit known lie.

Once I was no longer distracted by how inane her request was, a little later, I remembered I had photos of my vaccination card on my phone, so I looked it up and tried telling [Nurse] that I actually got the [Company #2] vaccine, but she couldn’t be bothered to go back and correct the records that she had basically bullied me into falsifying.

[Nurse] also managed to stick me wrong when she drew blood — I could tell from the feeling — with what everyone agreed was a badly put-together bag. In her defense, though, I believe they grab already put-together bags, so she probably wasn’t the one to put it together wrong.

Then, [Nurse] told me that her shift was up and she was leaving and letting someone else handle the rest. Cue three separate people all huddled around me trying to figure out how to draw blood for the last tubes they collect for testing when, for whatever reason, they wouldn’t fill despite the main bag filling properly. Luckily, they called in an older man who was apparently their expert, and there wasn’t any real pain, just some pretty mild discomfort, as he fought with the needle to get the blood flowing. Suffice it to say, I was less than impressed with the first woman.

Despite my complaints, though, I really do recommend that everyone donate blood. I’ve been doing it like clockwork every two months for the last decade and a half, and this still ranks as one of my top five worst experiences, despite really not being that bad, so please don’t think you’re likely to have trouble if you donate.

I’ve sadly been struggling to conceive for a while now — my fault for waiting too long for Mr. Right before accepting that wasn’t happening and deciding to be a single mother by choice. It’s at the point where I’m going to have to do IVF to have any chance of becoming a mother.

I’ve decided I want my child to know something about his biological father, so I’ve asked a close personal friend to be my sperm donor for the IVF. He says he’s honored to help and can’t wait to babysit if I ever need it.

Since the clinic is a few hours away and I’m paranoid about getting stuck in traffic or something and missing my chance, I’ve insisted that my friend let me pay for a hotel room close to the clinic so we can drive up the night before.

I am talking with my friend/donor about the logistics when he says this.

Friend: “So, do you know what night I go to a sleazy hotel with you to get you pregnant yet?”

Me: *Laughing* “Could you say that any creepier?”

Friend: “Sure, if you insist. Are you ready to pay a bunch of money so you can sleep with a strange man you don’t love just to get pregnant yet?”

I have ADHD-inattentive variant, which use to be known as just ADD since it doesn’t include hyperactivity. My ADD doesn’t seem to be as severe as some I’ve spoken to, but it is bad enough that I still struggle with it at times. Unfortunately, my father almost certainly has ADHD himself, though he refuses to get an official diagnosis despite being certain he has it. My dad always seems convinced that since we both have ADD, that means I am doomed to face all the exact same struggles and failures he has.

However, ADD or not, we aren’t the same. I admit my homework track record was pretty terrible as a kid; between the ADD and the fact that the homework often felt like pointless busy work to demonstrate knowledge of a subject I’d already mastered, I regularly struggled to find the motivation to complete it. This alone often led to me settling for Bs — or very rarely even a C — when I should have gotten an A, due to incomplete homework dragging my grades down.

My father was constantly frustrated with the fact that I repeatedly got in trouble for trying to sneak time to read whatever personal fiction book I’d brought that day in the middle of a lesson if I felt the teacher was repeating a lesson I’d long since already mastered. But for all my faults, I honestly loved — and deeply valued the opportunity — to learn. I always, ALWAYS made sure I had learned the lesson being taught to me and usually aced my tests as a result.

By contrast, my father had told me about how he was the first in his family to graduate college at all and how he thought all he needed to do was to get barely-passing grades that would get him that diploma. He didn’t try hard enough to learn the material or excel in class at the time and only later learned that a barely-passing college diploma was not as useful as he had hoped. He always feared I’d make the same mistakes as him, never realizing that I was too driven to learn to ever write off my education as he did. He was always desperate to keep me from making his mistakes when that was never a real risk; I was happily making a whole new set of mistakes all my own, instead!

In my second year of high school, I went with my father to the “meet your teachers” event before the school year started. After the usual teacher introduction, my father dragged me up to speak to my future chemistry teacher.

He then proceeded to introduce me by explaining:

Father: “[My Name] doesn’t focus on class or do their homework. If you catch them not trying to learn, you should let me know.”

I was frankly both embarrassed and deeply offended by this. For starters, I did pay attention in class; despite my struggles with my ADD, I was never going to miss my chance to learn one of my favorite subjects. My father casually dismissing all the effort I put in to master my lessons, when my intellect and my actually learning and retaining what was taught to me was a major source of pride for me, left me feeling insulted and somehow diminished. There was, of course, the other issue: my father had just ensured that I had the worst possible first impression with a new teacher.

Back then, one of the “tricks” I used to help me stay focused in class was to try to find a question to ask whenever I felt my mind drifting, as both the act of thinking through the material enough to come up with an insightful question and the act of asking it and getting more engagement with a teacher tended to help me redirect my attention to where it should be. The only problem was that for the first few months, my chemistry teacher made it clear that he thought my questions were an attempt to stump him to show off. Every time this happened, I remembered my father’s casual dismissal of my learning and worried that my new teacher was expecting the worst in me.

I’d also find out that this teacher was notorious for his homework. He gave far more extensive work than any other teacher, save one (who I’d get next year). Of course, these two teachers also had students acing AP exams for college credit with so much consistency that the school district had actually sent someone to find out what their tricks were, so at least the hard work wasn’t pointless. Still, given how much I struggled to complete even relatively simple homework, such a massive course load didn’t bode well for me.

Except for one thing: after my teacher got to know me enough to realize I wasn’t just trying to stump him and was actually interested in learning, I came to realize that he really cared for his students. This teacher had a passion to teach and clearly wanted what was best for his students. I found myself, oddly enough, wanting to complete my homework, not for myself but instead for him; he just seemed to care enough that I didn’t want to disappoint him or be the cause of his next ulcer.

My homework track record still wasn’t perfect, but given how terrible it had been before and just how much this teacher overwhelmed us with work, it still represented a marked improvement over what I’d managed in the past. But what I remember most about his class was a moment near the end of the year when it was time for us to pick our courses for the subsequent year. He pulled me aside to talk.

Teacher: “I know you’re still working on getting all your homework done, but I really feel like you’ve learned a lot this year, and you’re doing your best. I’d love to have you join us in my AP chemistry course next year if you’re interested. It will be a lot of work, but I think you can definitely handle it.”

I hadn’t even considered AP courses so early in my high school career, but I knew this teacher wasn’t one to give out unearned praise, and him actually saying he thought I could handle the work really was a bit touching to me, so I couldn’t help but take him up on it.

Of course, the next semester, I found out that my physics teacher had a lot of similarities with my chemistry teacher, especially in the load of homework he assigned. Trying to handle both science teachers’ homework loads at once was a true challenge for me at the time. However, I managed to get the top scores — and full college credit — in my chemistry AP exam, and I did the same for the AP physics course the subsequent year.

To this day, I still think back with fond memories of the two science teachers that pushed me to do better than I had been.

Back in the past millennium, when dinosaurs roamed the face of the earth and I was still a little kid in elementary school, it was Friday and all of us kids were preparing for our weekly spelling test. I usually did well at these, if for no other reason than that my father would make sure to pound the words into my head through excessive repetition, but this week, I hadn’t gotten the normal practice with them.

We were allowed to look at our spelling lists immediately before the test, so I would always find whatever word I was least confident in remembering and read it off, repeating the letters in my head. Then, when test time came, I’d put away my spelling list, pull out the paper for the test, and immediately write the word I was trying to remember down in the corner. That way, I only had to be able to keep the word right in my head for half a minute and I’d be certain to get the hardest word correct on my test.

So, the test happened, we’d finished up, and I was handing in my paper when I heard a student next to me speak up.

Student #1: “Hey, he had his spelling list out the whole time!”

I looked down to my shock to see that I had. It had been under the sheet I was writing the words on where I couldn’t see it at the time, but it hadn’t been put away properly as it usually was. This was entirely an accident, of course, but I had little way to prove that.

Student #2: “Was he cheating?”

Me: “No, I mean to put it away. I didn’t know it was out!”

Student #1: “He should have to take the test again.”

Me: “No, that’s not fair. I forget all the words after the test.”

Student #2: “See, he did cheat.”

Yes, I realize that was about the most suspicious thing I could have said at the time. I was worried they wouldn’t let me memorize and write down a word like I usually do before a test if I was forced to retake it and, being a very little kid, I expressed that concern terribly.

Teacher: “No, it’s okay. He wasn’t cheating. It’s fine.”

Student #2: “How do you know?”

Teacher: “He got one of the words wrong.”

Sure enough, I had managed to get exactly one word misspelled. As a little kid, I had never been more thankful to have failed a test question in my life. I’m glad my teacher wasn’t too quick to leap to presumptions.