I was behind a woman and her son at a store waiting to pay. The son had a game in his hand he was clearly eager to buy, and looked to be somewhere between ten and eleven years old.

Son: “You get money for buying things on your card, right?”

Mom: “Yes.”

Son: “How much?”

Mom: “Depends on what I buy, gas and groceries get more back.”

Son: “For regular stuff like games.”

Mom: “I get one percent of it as rewards, but because I’m a preferred customer with their bank, I get, I think, another half a percent more when I cash it in, so effectively 1.5%. Why?”

Son: “I’m buying the game, but you’re using your card, so you’re making money from my game, right?”

Mom: *Sounding amused.* “Yeah, why? Don’t you think your beloved mother earned seventy-five cents’ worth of pay for driving you here to get a game?”

The son gave a sort of non-committal sound to this. It looked like the mom had clearly caught on to his point, and he was planning to make it, but he’s too afraid to bring it up now.

The mom’s tone of voice from here on out is clearly teasing.

Mom: “But you’re right, it’s your money and you should get every cent of it. So, tell you what, you give me the three dollars more I’m going to have to pay for sales tax, and I’ll give you the seventy-five cents I get from my card. That seems fair, right?”

Son: “But I don’t have any more money.”

Mom: “Oh well. We can come back next week to get the game once you’ve earned your allowance.”

Son: “If you get it now, I can pay you the rest next week.”

Mom: *Clearly enjoying herself now.* “Sure, that seems reasonable. Let’s see… I believe 10% interest is very reasonable for an unsecured loan like this; better than what my card would charge me for sure. That’s compounded continuously, of course, so I might need a calculator to figure out what that comes out to—”

Son: “—Mom!”

Mom: “Oh, relax. I’ll pay for it now, and you won’t owe me anything for the taxes as long as I get to keep those three quarters from the credit card company.”

Son: “Thanks!”

Mom: “You’re welcome. Nice try with the cash back, though. Maybe don’t rock the boat until you stand to earn at least a dollar next time, mi amor.”

It’s a hot-as-Hell summer’s day, and I’m a young teenager with no filter when I speak. My parents and I are doing our early-morning grocery shopping (think 7 AM or so), in hopes that it’ll be a bit cooler early in the day. We thought wrong; at 7 AM, it was already 90°F (32°C for the metric users).

It’s also crammed to the gills in there, and the AC must have decided to take a vacation because it was practically a sauna. We unanimously agreed to just get the bare essentials and come back another time so we wouldn’t melt into puddles of Overheated Marylanders.

We ended up getting only a couple of things, not even needing a cart. I was carrying two loaves of bread, my mom had a pack of eggs and a pack of cheese, and my dad had a gallon of milk. We get up to the line, and there’s another issue: there’s only one register, a mile-long line of overheated and cranky customers, and that register is apparently deciding that this would be the perfect moment to go on strike and periodically decide “nah, screw you, I’m not ringing this up”.

We sloooooowly shuffle forward as each customer is sloooooowly rung out, sweating enough to fill buckets. It’s making it quite hard to keep a grip on things; I almost dropped the bread a couple of times.

And then, it happens.

Dad loses his hold on the gallon of milk, since a plastic jug soaked in sweat and condensation gets very slippery, very fast.

It crashes to the floor and sprays milk everywhere, but the lid seemed spiteful enough to point directly at my dad, soaking his leg.

After a few beats of silence, the only thing I can say is “Did Dad just get milked?”

We all lost it. Perhaps it was the heat making us all delirious. Perhaps we were all just having a really crap day and just needed to break the tension. Either way, none of us could really stay mad after this point, and another associate who had come by to try to direct the line to another open register offered to run back and get another gallon for us.

To this day, my mom and I sometimes like to joke about the time Dad got milked at a Walmart.

I used to work as a cashier at a certain orange home-improvement store. Key words being “used to”, because they fired me for reasons that will be mentioned at the end of this story. This is a long story in which, apparently, emergencies are not an acceptable use of PTO.

One lovely September day, while I was waiting to head to work for my shift (part-time, random schedule that never lines up the same), my dad and I were chatting about random things. He mentioned he was thinking about heading out to wipe down the windows of our Jeep. I went upstairs to use the bathroom, and he went out to the kitchen to grab some paper towels and window cleaner.

While I’m in the bathroom, I hear the most god-awful cataclysmic crashing sound I’ve ever heard outside of a movie, and my dad screaming “WHAT THE F***!” as he ran outside. I hurried downstairs and outside, and the sight sent me directly into a panic attack; the footage that revealed the chain of events came from our neighbors across the street because they had a Ring camera.

A crackhead doing no less than 80MPH came blasting down our little one-way street, nodded out, swerved, and managed to plow into the rear end of our Jeep, smashing it and shoving it forward twelve feet into a tree. My dad was absolutely furious, to the point he smashed our house phone after calling my mom to tell her she needed to get a ride home from work, and the only reason he didn’t break this guy in half right then and there was probably because we didn’t have bail money.

When my mom came home, she nearly bludgeoned him with her cane and was screaming at him, not just because of him destroying our only vehicle, but because we have children who play on our street and like to run between the parked cars while playing; he could have killed someone.

Between all of this, and calling 911 to get the police down to write a report, I called work to let them know what was happening. I was hyperventilating and panicking, because we didn’t have another vehicle and we were in no position to buy a new one.

I explained to my manager that I couldn’t come in, my only transportation was just destroyed by a crackhead rear-ending it in front of my house, and I would be using my meager PTO for this shift.

The lack of sympathy was disgusting; all I was told was that I was at risk of getting written up for calling out on such short notice, as if I planned for someone to rear-end our vehicle. I ended up texting photos of the damage to my boss (in hindsight, I shouldn’t have had to prove a d*** thing to him) to emphasize that yes, this thing was a mess.

We ended up getting a rental vehicle from the other party’s insurance. There was no way to spin it as us being at fault because not only was the car parked in front of our house, but the car did not even belong to the driver. The owner let his buddy borrow it. This solved the transportation issue, at the very least, but there was no way to save our poor Jeep, so we had to shop around and pray.

In the middle of all of this, I’d been having a myriad of gastrointestinal problems, and the stress of the Jeep getting destroyed only made it worse. After a telehealth appointment, less than a week after the accident, I was given a last-second appointment to get an ultrasound done on my gallbladder, since gallbladder conditions run in my family. Because it was an afternoon slot, it overlapped with an afternoon shift I was scheduled for. I called my boss and explained to them that I needed that day off for it.

Nope. I was told, again, that I would be written up and that I wasn’t allowed to use my PTO on short notice.

My mom and I scrambled to contact the doctor. By luck, a morning slot was available. Someone else had canceled, so I would be able to get the ultrasound, shower to remove the ultrasound goo, and still make it to work. Fine by me, though I did not count on them jamming the thing under my ribs so roughly, which would have made that shift SOOOO much fun.

Key words, “would have”, because I didn’t go in.

While we were in the office getting the test done, my dad was in the rental looking around for used cars, since Glen Burnie has a stretch of road that is nothing but dealerships. We found a prospective site that had vehicles available–we would be able to get one same-day with very little fuss if we were approved–so after my appointment and a copious amount of baby wipes to get the ultrasound goo off, we went down to the dealership.

We still had about five hours before my shift, so we had time to look around a bit. Unfortunately, due to our financial situation, we only had a small handful of options, and the only one suitable for us required a down payment of $1000 that we just did not have, so we left and went back home to wait until my shift. I took a shower and relaxed for a while, and my mom shuffled off to their bedroom.

Fifteen minutes later, she comes out sobbing with joy. My grandfather, her father, had offered to give us the $1000 to get the vehicle we were looking at, so we made a beeline back down to the dealership.

We end up sitting there for…a while. It turns out in the hour we were gone, they ended up utterly swamped, so we were going to be stuck there for a while, and we would have to get the vehicle TODAY otherwise there was no guarantee we’d be able to get it, since another party was looking at it while we were waiting. There was no way I was going to make it for my shift, so I called my boss and explained the situation.

I was told that it was “awfully convenient” that the day I had my ultrasound, I still couldn’t come in. I texted a photo of the road where all the dealerships were to them with a cheeky little message consisting of an emoji with one finger pointing up, and told them I was using my PTO.

We ended up getting the new vehicle, another Jeep, which is still faithfully carrying us where we need to go, three years later, and ordered pizza for dinner because we didn’t get home until almost 7 PM.

Unfortunately, the third strike with my PTO ended up being the end of my time there. I ended up with a debilitating stomach virus that made me unable to do anything. I could barely eat, couldn’t even stomach water, and was on the toilet constantly. I received a doctor’s note clearing me for one week off of work; I had five days scheduled, and four days of PTO. I sent a message to my boss with the doctor’s note and everything, and focused on recovering.

When I finally got back to work, I went up to my register and worked my shift as usual, but as I was preparing to leave, my manager called me back to the main office, where I was told that I was being fired for missing time and not having PTO to cover it.

I lost my job because of one day of no PTO.

PTO that they were always trying to tell me I couldn’t use for emergencies, and could now not use for sick leave.

They tried to act sympathetic as they walked me to my locker. I told them they could shove it and stormed out.

I’ve lost jobs for bodily functions in the past (periods ruining my clothes, stomach bugs that made me quite literally soil myself, vomiting in the parking lot IN FULL VIEW of the managers). Never have I been told I was being let go for needing to use my PTO for something it was designed for, just because of ONE day not being covered.

I’m the author of “The Fire Can’t Get You if the Asthma Gets You First!“, this time with a very cute story from after I transferred to a different middle school.

This middle school had a very unorthodox reward system in place for students. Our mascot was a wildcat (insert High School Musical jokes here), and the reward was simply called “Paws”.

These Paws were a little three-inch square of paper with a lion pawprint on them and two lines: one for the student’s name, and one for the name of the teacher who issued it. Students earned them through various means–helping teachers, behaving in class, getting perfect scores on difficult assignments, and things like that– and would collect them. One thing to note was that teachers often didn’t give Paws out to a student two days in a row, so as not to seem like they were showing favoritism.

What was the point of collecting them, you may ask? Well, these Paws were a currency!

On Fridays during the lunch period, there was a small school store that would open, and we could buy things with the Paws we’d earned. Candy and snacks, books, crayons and colored pencils, small toys, things like that. The reason for having our names on the Paws was to ensure we weren’t using another student’s Paws for a purchase.

When I first enrolled, I didn’t know what Paws were for, and was a little confused when, on my second day, one of my teachers came over to my desk and slipped a little piece of paper with a pawprint on it under my notebook–I don’t even remember how I earned it.

After class, I hung back for a moment to ask about it; she explained that the Paws were used to buy things at the school store at lunch on Friday. I was excited–my old school didn’t have anything like this!

I did my best to earn as many Paws as I could during the week. Being the new, awkward kid in class, I probably seemed like an overachiever, but I was too excited to care. By the end of the week, I had earned about ten Paws altogether.

Friday rolled around, and come lunchtime, the gates of the kingdom opened. Each table of five students was called one at a time to shop in the school store, and it was at this point that I learned that the ten Paws I had earned were…meager. One student had a manila folder packed to the brim with Paws he had accumulated over a few weeks, one student had an inch-thick stack bound with rubber bands…

When it was our class’s turn to go shopping, I brought my piddling ten Paws in…and I realized why the students had saved so many.

This store was PACKED full of cute stationery, snacks, and the like. Small items, like erasers or singular pencils, were one Paw apiece, but other items like stylized notebooks or honey buns were five. To get anything of note, you needed to save up. I guess it was to teach us the value of saving money or something, without actually using money?

One thing in particular caught my eye–a pack of twistable colored pencils. In the singular week I’d been there, it was no secret that I loved to draw, and loved to get my hands on new art supplies. The pack was eighteen colors–including shimmering metallic colors. It would have been amazing to work with.

It was also fifteen Paws, and there was only one left.

There wasn’t any guarantee that it would have still been there next week–there was another lunch period, after all, and we also weren’t the last table called in. Someone else might buy it before I could save enough to get it.

It was a bummer, but I accepted that I probably wouldn’t be able to get them. Instead, I used my Paws to buy myself two spiral-bound college-ruled notebooks and returned to my seat dejected but not empty-handed.

I ended up having to step away to use the restroom as lunch was working through me a bit too quickly for my liking, and tucked my notebooks into my binder for safekeeping as I had been the first one to come back to our table. I was gone all of five minutes, and when I came back…there was something in my seat.

The pack of twistable colored pencils.

One of the other kids at my table had a very tiny smile on her face while she watched me put two and two together.

Those colored pencils saw a LOT of use.

A tour group of prospective college students and their parents is being led around our newly built science building. The guide mentions that there are greenhouses, an observatory on the roof, and a planetarium on the lower level.

Parent: “How do you use the planetarium?”

Guide: “The Astronomy faculty has some of their classes in there, and there are programs open to the public some evenings. Some of the advanced students also learn how to run it themselves.”

Parent: “No, I mean, if it’s downstairs in this big building, how can anyone see the sky from there?”