CONTENT WARNING: Cancer

When my brother was eleven and I was ten, we became big siblings to our baby half-sister. Our dad and stepmom wanted us to bond with the baby, so they decided to give us money to babysit her when they went out for, like, thirty minutes at a time. My brother and I had been home alone plenty of times, and I think we were generally trusted to be fairly responsible kids.

The first time, my dad and stepmom went to the cafe around the corner to get a sandwich lunch. They weren’t gone for more than thirty minutes, and our sister had just started her nap.

A true comedy of errors ensued: my brother tried to fill up a glass of water in the sink but ended up spilling the glass on the kitchen floor. As he went to fill it up again, he ended up slipping in the water and falling down. As he fell down, he grabbed at me for support, but I’ve always been very small (I think I was like half his weight), so I fell down first, and the way we landed ended with me breaking the frame and one ear of my glasses, and my brother writhing around in pain.

My stepmom came in the door first to find me panicking, blind, unable to see, my brother with a twisted ankle (it took like two weeks to heal), and my baby sister crying.

The first time we babysat, she was five months old, I believe. The next time we babysat, she was nine months old, and I was hospitalized and later first diagnosed with cancer the next day, so…

I’ve been cancer-free for twelve years.

My sister is a teen now, and we still joke that she was bad luck as a baby.

I just took the bus home. It’s the middle of June, and Europe is experiencing a heatwave at the moment. When I stepped onto the bus, I was met by a wall of hot air. Clearly the AC wasn’t working, and several people were fanning themselves with whatever they had at hand.

Luckily, I only rode this bus for about five minutes to its end destination at the local train and bus central. But this line is regional, and the full route takes forty-five minutes. I felt so bad for the people who spent that entire time in that stifling heat.

Once we arrived at the end of the line, a young woman made her way to the bus driver and started talking to him. At first, I assumed she was asking about connecting buses or trains, but as I got closer, I realised that she was complaining about the heat.

She was calm but very insistent, explaining the heat issue to him in detail, as though he would somehow be unaware of the current temperature and air quality. The bus driver was looking at her, giving her the most perfectly neutral face I have ever seen. He was completely and entirely unmoved and said nothing. He knew there was no point in arguing.

I walked past her and got off the bus as she was still going, into the terminal where a large group of people was waiting to get on. I genuinely don’t think that woman realised that the bus driver may very well have spent hours in that heat already and likely had many more hours of his shift to go.

Be kind to bus drivers, people. They have to put up with so much and rarely get any gratitude.

This is back when I was a desktop support temp just trying to learn the ropes. Some users had desktops and others had laptops with docking stations depending on their role, but we support both.

This user had been having trouble for about a week (as far as we know) where their keyboard would mysteriously type random letters and numbers for no reason. She would be typing, and random letters and numbers would show up too. The only way for her to fix it was for her to restart her computer, and it would come back soon after.

With this information from the user, we started troubleshooting. There isn’t much you can do but reinstall the drivers or replace the keyboard. So that’s what we did; the drivers were replaced, and it kept happening. That’s when I was sent with a few others to investigate this super weird issue on site.

This user had a standard setup with a laptop and docking station where a normal user would close the laptop and work off of the separate monitor and keyboard. She decided she liked the laptop keyboard better and the ability to use it as a second screen.

When we approached, it was difficult to keep from laughing since it was apparent what the problem was. The user had just bought a half yoga ball mat to rest her legs on. She had also decided, since she didn’t like the separate keyboard, that she would put it on the ground WHILE KEEPING IT PLUGGED IN. Which is how the yoga ball mat ended up on top of the keyboard.

She would work and want to rest her legs, so she would put them on the yoga ball mat, which would press the keys when she moved it. Then she would get frustrated, take her legs off the yoga ball mat to restart the laptop, fixing the problem. And then restart the process.

I work from home. While this usually allows me a certain level of freedom to take a walk during the day, grab lunch, etc., at some times of the year my workload is so high that I’m working from sunrise to sunset. At these times, I use online food delivery.

Over a period of about six weeks, I’d ordered toasties, cakes and coffee from a chain coffee shop for lunch delivery most days. Honestly, the caffeine, sugar and cheese were all that kept me going.

One afternoon, when I’d been working non-stop from about 6 AM and would be at it until at least 9 PM, I opened the bag containing my lunch to find two fully completed loyalty stamp cards stapled to my sandwich wrapper, each good for a free coffee and sandwich, and a note that said, ‘You deserve this. I hope you are having a great day.’

There’s no way the worker who added those to my order could have known this, but that day was my birthday. Thank you, coffee shop person.

Between eight and ten years ago, I received an email welcoming me to Netflix. That was a bit concerning since I hadn’t signed up, so I contacted the company. They told me someone must have accidentally used my email when they created an account. Our last names were the same, and our first initial. I said “oh no problem, you must have additional contact information for them besides my email, could you please remove my email from the account and let them know so they can fix?”

Well, immediately that was a big problem for Netflix, and well, no, they couldn’t remove the email because it was the only one they had for the account, and how did they even know that it was mine? I said Give me your email address and start talking, I will email you the words as they come out of your mouth. That wasn’t good enough for proof somehow. More likely, I was in the other person’s Gmail account asking not to have Netflix?

What they finally ended up doing was changing the account password so that when the customer went to log back in, they wouldn’t be able to and would need to do a password reset by calling Netflix, and then they would confirm the email address.

I kept getting Netflix emails, so that didn’t work.

I called again; same again, didn’t work.

I changed the password several times myself because I could use the forgot password function and get an email to reset it; that didn’t work. I don’t know how they kept getting the new password without updating an email address, and I didn’t really care at this point.

For the last eight to ten years, I have had Netflix on everything I own. I have signed in on hotel televisions, used it on my phone, my Xboxes; My kid uses it. I only ever signed in under “Family” and told him to do the same. The entire history in “Family” is ours. The other logins, “Fred”, “Softee”, and “Lylla,” accumulated history. I would occasionally look because, curious. Never did a single new show appear in the “Family” watch history that wasn’t because of me.

Well, I woke up this morning to an email from Netflix telling me that this email address was no longer associated with that account and that if I had any questions, etc.

Thank you, “Softee”! It has been an amazing run, and I am not sure why you gave me free Netflix for the last decade, but I think you are amazing!