The wholesale club I belong to regularly sends out mailers with the latest deals. I get my mailer and it has a number of items on sale that I really need, so I make my shopping list and off I go to the store.

I find everything I want, but there are no sale signs on anything. I seriously figure it is “a super-secret sale for people who read the mailer” and fill my cart with my treasures.

Upon doing self-checkout, I can’t figure out why nothing is marked down. I get home and pull out the mailer… and the sale starts the next day.

It turns out that it really was a not at all secret sale for people who read the mailer. I am dumb.

Working for a criminal defense attorney, I meet all kinds of people and hear all kinds of stories. Most of our clients are very nice people, in spite of the trouble they’re in. One, however, really stands out.

She was on at least her second or third DUI and just couldn’t understand why the police and the courts made such a big deal out of it. She insisted that “everyone” drinks and drives and she was sure I could not name a single person who had not done so.

But the clincher was when she told me that drinking and driving couldn’t possibly be illegal because, after all, bars have parking lots! I thought that was the punch line to a joke, but she was dead serious.

You know how some people say that they’re related to pretty much everyone in some way? My mother is one of them, and she’s actually not exaggerating when she says that. Nearly everyone in her hometown is her cousin or extended family. According to her, and corroborated by her siblings, it’s easier to count the number of people she isn’t related to than the ones she is.

Back during World War I, all the men in town were called on to serve the nation and defend France against the Germans. They all fought, and died, in the trenches. I’m not sure the exact number, but of the thirty or forty men that left, less than half a dozen came home in something other than a coffin.

Including my great-grandfather.

With the death of nearly 80% of the young men in town, there was a whole motherlode of widows and young women facing spinsterhood, and many families without heirs, so the surviving men got busy rectifying that.

My great-grandfather, in particular, was the most virile of the lot. He was married to at least four women at the same time. Seven wives is the most commonly accepted number, with nine as the highest. More, if the one-night stands and mistresses are counted.

He then proceeded to have nearly fifty children with them, which made up basically half of their hometown’s next generation. And when those kids grew up, they married the other half of their generation. That meant that, by the time my mother was born, nearly every other kid in town was her cousin.

She half-seriously told me that when we were at her hometown, she could point at a random person on the street, and chances were he or she would be a blood relative. In fact, she actually did that, after a night of drinking, and indeed, that person was her half-cousin once removed — her mother’s half-sister’s grandson.

All in all, I’m told that my mother has nearly two hundred aunts, uncles, and cousins. And if that isn’t enough to be related to virtually everyone in a town, then I don’t know what is.

Many years ago, my oldest child was in junior high. He took a computer class his first year in junior high. His teacher was interesting. On Parent-Teacher Night, she announced to all the students and parents that if a child in her class could hack the school’s Internet filters, they would get an automatic A for the entire year in the class. She even had this printed up on handouts she gave us parents.

My oldest child can be a challenge. I never wanted to be one of his schoolteachers. He just thinks of the most random things to do and then does them without thinking of consequences. (Thankfully, he has mostly grown out of this!) I could tell that my son was going to take her up on this “offer”/challenge. He was good enough with computers that I was pretty sure he could do it.

I warned the teacher that the school district did NOT want students hacking the Internet filters, especially not my son. Who knows what he would find that I didn’t want to know about?

Less than two weeks later, I was called up to the school on very little notice. My son was going to be expelled. That was all the info I had before I got to the school. I had a feeling it was about the computer class, so I brought in the handout the teacher gave out on Parent-Teacher Night.

I was right. He had hacked the Internet filters successfully, and because of this, the school was going to expel him. Permanently.

I had quite the chat with the principal. He was completely shocked that the teacher had challenged the students this way but claimed it didn’t matter because the school had rules that my son should have known. He was flabbergasted when I called the Superintendent of Schools for our city. He was more shocked when I chatted with him on a first-name basis. It might have been an entitled thing to do but messing with my kids brings out my inner Mama Bear.

My son did not get expelled; he didn’t get punished in any way, mostly because the teacher was an absolute idiot. I later learned that this was not the first time she had issued this challenge, nor the first time a student was able to do it. She had been warned not to do it again, ever, and she had ignored that.

They had a new teacher in under a week, because you are just not smart enough to teach school if you openly challenge kids to hack the school’s filters.

Earlier this summer, I temporarily took a job as a roofing salesperson for a construction company. The job description said I was managing a book of insurance agents and realtors, working referrals. In the interview, the boss was adamant that there was no door-knocking —just working relationships and referrals. I took the job and came to learn about week into my hire that they expected five or more hours a day of door-knocking. I could’ve quit right away but I figured I’d give it a go for a bit and just see how things went.

The job was full commission with a small weekly vehicle allowance, and I wasn’t responsible for working a regular schedule. But eventually, my boss started expecting everyone to work a regular schedule and report “at least forty hours” on our timecard app.

I fought with him about it because, as a non-hourly or non-salary employee, there was nothing to report. I got paid only for the work I brought in. Whether I worked eighty or five hours, the pay was the same and there was no contractual obligation to my time.

He got upset that I didn’t just give in and he told me that, because I hadn’t filled out a timecard, they wouldn’t give me my weekly vehicle allowance. It wasn’t a huge amount of money, but it was a matter of principle; I don’t get paid for time worked, so why do they need to know my hours?

My best friend is a labor attorney, and I asked him what I could do. He said I should just threaten to call the department of labor for withholding wages. So, I told my boss I’d call the department of labor. At this point, I was already in the process of getting hired for a job I really wanted, so I was planning on quitting soon anyway; I figured the company had it coming for all their lies and deceitful nature.

They agreed to give me the allowance. But then, later that day, Human Resources rolled out a policy that said that they would now be paying out the allowance based on hours logged on our timecard app. It was the expectation that we’d log forty hours, and if you didn’t meet forty hours, they would deduct a prorated amount from the vehicle allowance. The policy also said it was retroactive for the previous week. Therefore, I didn’t get my allowance for that week’s pay, as I continued to not log everything. I was a little pissed off about it.

That week, our boss made us work a great many more hours than usual, commuting several hours a day, each way, to a town he wanted us to get some work in. I went into our timecard app and logged my hours for the week — *a lot* more than forty. When the pay came that week, I only got the regular allowance — for “forty” hours. I asked my boss where the rest was, and he said it was a flat rate. I cited the new policy and said he owed me based on the “hours worked” and that I’d be calling the department of labor if I didn’t get it.

They ended up giving me the allowance based on my full logged hours. Later that week, Human Resources emailed the department saying that full commission people were exempt from logging hours and would be receiving the flat pay.

I won. I ended up quitting a short time later, followed by pretty much the whole sales staff.