I will do everything in my power to never have roommates again. I tried three times and all of them ended horribly.

My favorite was the one who kicked me out because I wouldn’t leave my senior, longhaired, deaf dog with a heart condition outside in the middle of summer in a yard he could easily escape.

I left the dog in my room, and my roommate kicked me out the same day.

Being the parents of two boys two and under, my husband and I don’t often go out to eat, both because of finances and because, well, they’re pretty young, and expecting them to sit through a whole meal can sometimes be asking a lot. However, my husband and I were given a gift card. We tried numerous times to arrange babysitters, but it just didn’t work out.

So, finally, after almost a year, we went. I met my husband there, we went around 4:30 (before our boys were hungry for dinner), and I brought snacks just in case. I beat my husband there, so I took the boys in and got seated.

Of course, my two-year-old started crying. He was hungry, but the snacks weren’t his thing today. I was trying everything I could think of to help him calm when our server appeared. He smiled patiently as I finished buckling our dramatic two-year-old in place and then set down an appetizer “on the house.”

He quickly asked what he could get them (and me) to drink and hurried back. My two-year-old immediately quieted; his needs were met. The restaurant ended up getting packed by the time we got our food, but our server still checked on us frequently.

It ended up being a great family dinner. When I asked if I could speak to the manager to brag about him, he humbly said that it wasn’t needed. We tipped well, but I hope that server knows that what he did was more appreciated than I could express.

About twenty-one years ago, I was making my bi-monthly drive from Duluth back to the Twin Cities. The drive up and down I-35 is boring. At the time, the speed limit was sixty-five miles per hour, and it was a solid three-hour drive from Duluth to the Twin Cities driving at this speed. My car at the time was a 1989 Ford Tempo and the color was called “almond,” but it was really an off-white/tan looking color. The car wasn’t fast, but it was awesome with getting high miles per gallon, and it got me from A to B without issues. The speedometer only went to eighty-five, but on a few occasions I buried the needle and I’m sure I was flirting with 100, but I didn’t make a habit of it.

It was Sunday, early morning, and I was about halfway home from Duluth. The speed limit was sixty-five miles per hour, but I was cruising at eighty-five. As I came around a bend in the highway, about a good mile down the road on the straightaway I saw the glimmering of a car sitting in the median.

I thought to myself, “Crap, a state trooper is sitting there.”

I killed the cruise control and let my car slow down closer to the speed limit, and I continued on. As I passed the trooper, he was not moving, and I impatiently watched in the rearview mirror to see if he’d come out. I got maybe half a mile past him and started to feel relieved that he didn’t follow me, but that feeling of relief soon vanished as I watched him pulling out of the median.

I thought to myself, “Son of a b****. I’m screwed.”

I rounded a bend in the highway, and the trooper was far enough behind that he was no longer in direct line of sight in the rearview mirror. I was in the right lane, and I was coming up on an exit off the highway. I passed it, and a car was coming up the onramp. I got in the left lane to allow this car to merge onto the highway.

The car merging onto the highway was the exact same make, model, and color as my car, had Minnesota license plates on it, and had a single male driving the car — just like mine.

I’d been checking the rearview mirror this whole time and the trooper hadn’t come into view yet, so the trooper never saw this other car merge onto the highway.

About ten seconds later, the trooper came into view, and he had picked up speed to catch up to me. About thirty seconds later, he was right on the tail of the guy driving my cloned car in the right lane, and I was driving along next to him in the left lane. The trooper hung back behind both of us for a couple of minutes, and then he dropped back and went into a cross point in the median on the highway.

My best guess is that the trooper didn’t know which of us had been speeding, and after pulling up our license plates in his system, nothing came back to give him a reason to pull either of us over.

The rest of my drive home was much closer to the speed limit.

Roughly two years before the health crisis, I worked for a company with a fairly lenient alcohol policy; in fact, at some company events, even on company property, they served alcohol. It was not uncommon for executives and managers to have a drink at lunch on a Friday and finish out the day.

One day, one of my employees went to lunch on his twenty-first birthday and had a couple of beers, and I drove him back to work to finish out his shift. He does basic computer input, and he has no contact with customers or operating machinery or anything dangerous.

I got a note from Human Resources saying that I needed to give the employee a formal warning for what he did when they heard about it. I pointed out that there wasn’t a policy to enforce, and they decided to create a zero-tolerance alcohol policy based on this event. What they didn’t understand was that they had two other policies in effect that we exploited.

In order to make sure that people didn’t infect the workforce, there was an “infection reduction policy” that allowed for people who called in sick after working part of the day to go home and get paid for the whole day. We could use this once per paycheck, every two weeks. There was another Work From Home policy that allowed for employees to work from home for half a day without needing a reason. We could also use this once per paycheck, every two weeks.

After hearing about this zero-tolerance alcohol policy, I instructed all of my employees that if they were going to have a drink at lunch that they should either call in sick for the rest of the day or work from home for the rest of the day. Eventually, it got to the point where we would have a drink at lunch every Friday and alternate working from home or calling in sick. Drunkenness, after all, counted as a sickness to the letter of the policy.

We called it “F*** It Friday.”

My brother used to have a full-sized teepee he lived in on my parents’ large corner block. He rang a pizza place to get some food delivered, but he had to explain to them not to deliver it to the house but to drive around the corner and deliver it to the teepee.

They weren’t so sure about this. However, forty-five minutes later, the driver arrived. We asked him to come in, but he was petrified that we were a cult or something and wouldn’t set foot inside.

He took the money and a tip and virtually ran in the pitch black back to his car without tripping over anything.