A few years ago, in my early twenties, I had to come out to my parents as transmale. I’m also homoromantic and only date men, but I hadn’t thought that would come up during the conversation.

I’d only had one long-term relationship at that point, with a man, but for some reason, my mother had always made it known that she thought I was a lesbian. I hadn’t realised how convinced both my parents were that I liked girls until this happened.

Since I wasn’t living at home, I called ahead to let them know I was coming over for a chat. The conversation happened with few blips. But they were both encouraging and supportive, talking over each other like Irish families do. While my dad was pointing out that he was cool with everything and would be supportive of my future relationships and any girls I brought home, my mam was pointing out that she’d figured it out, and they’d just been wondering if I was coming out as trans or gay.

It took me a second to process both statements at once before I could respond, “Apparently, both!”

This happened during my uniform group camp when I was in my early teens. The uniform groups of about five schools were camping together in a school for four days and three days.

At the end of the first day, my groupmate’s shower cubicle couldn’t open, leaving him trapped inside. His response was to start pounding on the cubicle door and hollering, “I’m trapped in the toilet! I’m trapped in the toilet!” The boys all found the whole thing beyond hilarious and didn’t help the trapped boy, though he eventually got the lock open and escaped.

He was the butt of all the jokes that night. Thank goodness everyone was too busy laughing at him; I had accidentally packed my mother’s pyjamas and would not have lived it down if anyone noticed.

We expected the mockery to end by the next day, but there was this one schoolmate of mine that just insisted on rubbing it into my groupmate’s face. Every joke about being trapped in a toilet, he cracked, and he laughed non-stop. He was always a jerk, but this was on a whole new level.

And then, on the second night, guess who got trapped in that defective cubicle? My schoolmate, that same boy who kept mocking my groupmate, was now hopping behind the cubicle door, flapping his hands like a chicken and screaming, “Get me out of here! Get me out of here!”

I really couldn’t help myself. I burst out laughing until I started to cry before I ran off to get the teachers. I found them having a coffee break in the canteen, right as one of them said, “Ah, peace and quiet at last.”

I gleefully ruined their peace and quiet by telling them how [Schoolmate] got himself trapped in the toilet. The look on their faces was priceless. One of them actually said, “You just had to jinx us!” to Mr. Peace And Quiet.

The four of them followed me into the washroom, where all the boys were now out of their cubicles in varying states of nudity, laughing at [Schoolmate]’s chicken flapping and jumping. Seeing that nobody was showering, I snuck into one of the opened cubicles and began showering right as the teachers made themselves known.

There was a shriek of “Why are there girls here?” — one of the teachers was female — and then sudden pounding on the shower door as the guy I stole the place from tried to get in and get clothes on.

I ignored him, and he started angrily shouting that he’d kill me. It was about this point that the teachers realised that they couldn’t open the cubicle door no matter how they tried, so one of the teachers returned with an actual crowbar, which the four of them used to force [Schoolmate]’s cubicle open. While everyone was distracted by the crowbar, I snuck out before the guy I stole the shower from could notice.

The very first thing I proceeded to do was to find [Groupmate]. When [Schoolmate] finally stumbled out of the showers, the two of us stood there and threw every single toilet joke he made back in his face. [Schoolmate] then snarled at me, “I mocked [Groupmate] and then I was trapped. Tomorrow will be your turn.”

On day three, I didn’t get trapped. I wasn’t an idiot, and the teachers had declared that one cubicle off-limits anyway.

And to add insult to injury, someone made a play about the whole situation and had it performed in front of the entire uniform group the next year, forever preventing [Schoolmate] from living it down.

Moral of the story: karma is one h*** of a b****.

I consider myself a bit of a medical disaster; if something goes wrong, it does so in the most spectacular or strange manner. 

This story begins the day before I head to the ER. My indoor cat makes a mad dash for the front door while I am taking rubbish out and disappears for a few minutes. As he is a black cat, and it is 1:00 am, he’s practically invisible.

His presence is made known when he starts getting his a** handed to him by a cat half his size across the road. I sigh, knowing that separating them will get me scratched up, but as a lifelong cat owner, I decide it’s worth it just to get him safely indoors.

What I am not expecting is my cat latching onto my hand, violently. He bites my hand and digs his claws up my arm! I get him back home and begin to clean the wound. It’s deep, but not bad enough for me to realise it needs medical attention. It’s late at night but I wake my parents to let them know what’s happened because I know how dangerous cat bites can be. With copious amounts of disinfectant, and closing up the most suspect scratches, I head to bed. 

During my shift at work the next day, it becomes apparent it needs further attention. I get out of my shift at 9:00 pm, call a nurse hotline, and am told that I really need to be at the hospital within twenty-four hours of the initial bite. Off to the ER I go, much at the dismay of my parents. They’re convinced I’ll be given a prescription of antibiotics and sent home.

Funnily enough, the reception nurse is a lady I assisted at work during the day, and we have a chat while waiting for the doctor. She asks me to take the bandage off my hand, and her face falls. I haven’t really looked at it for a few hours, but it has clearly swollen to almost twice the size of my other hand.

I get taken out back, but there are no beds available. I apologise for taking up valuable time and resources, but they say that they trust my judgment and that it was the right call to come in. The doctor finally makes it in and starts preparing me for an IV. I’m kind of shocked because at this stage I was still just expecting them to clean it and send me home with a prescription. I call my dad, who has been sitting in the car waiting for this “inevitable” outcome, but when he sees the situation, he is shocked, too.

I have terrible veins, which is great fun for all the blood tests I’ve needed in my time. They try to get one into my left arm, the one without injury, and fail. I’m informed it’s really against all best interests to have the injured arm stuck, but they have to go for it anyway. I receive the first round of antibiotics, and some painkillers, too. I’m asked when my last tetanus shot was. I think for a second, and then laugh.

My last tetanus shot was in 2012 when I was hospitalised… for a cat bite that pierced a hole through my skull! (Different cat!)

I’m admitted overnight and placed in the children’s ward, despite being an adult, as they really need to monitor my situation. I also need my arm suspended above my head, which is very uncomfortable with the attached drip. A sleepless night ensues.

The next day, as I’m about to be discharged, four rounds of antibiotics later, I hear the doctor speaking to the patient in the bed beside me. He mentions an animal bite, and I think that he may have the wrong patient.

Nope! The lady beside me, who was admitted mere minutes before me, is there for a snake bite! We end up laughing over it and realise that my situation is actually worse; I am genuinely at risk of losing my hand, but Snake Bite Lady is comparatively fine!

Although I now have a few scars up my hand and arm, it was almost worth the pain when the hilarity of the situation hit realising that my house cat bite was worse than a venomous snake bite!

I live in an area which rarely sees decent concerts coming to town, so when my favorite band suddenly comes out of hiatus and releases a tour date in a city about an hour away from me, I jump at the chance to go. A friend and I plan to splurge on floor tickets as neither of us have ever seen this band, and I’ve never been that close to the stage for any concert.

On the day the tickets go on sale, I wake up with severe food poisoning and have to call out sick from work. Small blessings: this leaves me more freedom to buy the tickets. I am sitting by my computer with my debit card ready for an hour before they go on sale.

The moment it happens, I enter the queue. Nine hundred people are in front of me and I’m getting closer to the front every moment. My friend calls me as she is also in the queue, though considerably farther back than I am. The plan is for her to buy the tickets just in case something goes wrong on my end.

I reach the front of the queue and immediately select floor seats. I hit the button, the website loads for a few seconds… and then I receive an error message telling me that the purchase cannot be completed, and to use another device or make sure I’m logged into my account if this is a shared device.

I’m already logged into my account; I made sure to do so before joining the queue precisely so this wouldn’t happen. I’m afraid to refresh the page because I don’t want to lose my spot, but seats are quickly being snatched up. My friend is still in the queue so there’s not much she can do. I frantically search for the website’s help section and it says they have a live chat option, but I cannot access it because I haven’t made a purchase yet. There is no phone number to be found, just an email which I quickly send a message to.

Meanwhile, the seats are quickly selling out. My friend finally manages to get in and, after some technical troubles of her own, secures two seats in the loge. It’s not ideal, but I tell her to get them just so we at least have something to show for all this. I keep trying to purchase tickets on my end as the floor seats keep opening and then closing again, but I keep getting the same error. I try logging in on my phone, instead, and the price of tickets has skyrocketed from $200 to $700. I’m getting increasingly frantic and upset that I am unable to purchase tickets when I was so diligent about getting in on time. 

Finally, I receive an automated email from the website letting me know they will respond in twelve to twenty-four hours. They also provide a phone number if I need immediate assistance, so I call that number. I wrestle my way through the automated menu and am on hold for a good thirty minutes, long past the time when all the tickets have completely sold out except for the $600+ platinum tickets.

The representative I speak to is super friendly and I do my best to be polite even though I am on the verge of tears. I explain the situation and she says that all I need to do is clear my cache and refresh the page, which shouldn’t affect my place in line. I tell her that the website didn’t say anything about that, and she says that she doesn’t know why they don’t inform customers of the fix. I do as instructed and see there are a handful of nosebleed seats left, so I attempt to purchase them. Now, I get an error code which the representative explains is an issue with my purchasing history, which makes no sense because, so far, I have never purchased anything from them.

I’m so disappointed about the situation and miserable from being sick that I just start sobbing. I do my best to hide it from the representative, thank her for her time, and then call my friend back to give her an update. She says that the only floor upgrades available would cost over $200 each, which we both agree is not worth it even if this is our favorite band. 

I’m most disappointed that there was a solution to my error which would have allowed me to make the purchase on time and at a reasonable price, but nothing on the website indicated that solution, and getting in touch with another human about it was like pulling teeth. Like I said, it is rare for bands I like to come to my area, so I only splurge on opportunities like this once every few years. This is an especially difficult situation for me because the band had been broken up for so long that I’d never imagined I’d ever get to see them live. 

In the end, though, I still got tickets with a semi-decent view of the stage, and I will be going with a good friend who I don’t get to see very often. I am focusing on being grateful that I have tickets at all, and as naive as it sounds, I hope the feedback I provided in my email will encourage the website to improve this experience for future users.

CONTENT WARNING: ABUSE

I own a dry-cleaning business and work there. When the national lockdown happened, my business was considered among the “essential” ones, so I was allowed to stay open but doing fewer hours.

During this, I had a particularly nasty client visiting me on the regular — almost every week, in fact. He’d always bring in absolutely filthy bedsheets and pillow covers, never had the correct amount of money, and only used hand sanitizer when he gave me his rags.

By chatting against my will with him and by what info my wife told me, I found out that he actually lived in the apartment above mine, meaning that he not only he was a pigsty of a person, he also was the same man that heavily swore in the wee hours of the morning and stomped up and down his place, waking my son up and scaring him, and had done so for months.

Due to this client’s boorish behaviour, I had nicknamed him “Shrek,” and I told my son that “Shrek” had left Fiona, took a potion turning him human, and then went to live upstairs from us, which was good enough to get him to stop being scared at his heavy steps and his Tuscan blasphemies against God at strange hours.

A few days ago, restrictions relaxed, and I was allowed to finally take my son out to play in the park. As we were getting ready to leave, I saw “Shrek” come down the stairs with some luggage on hand.

My son looked at him with curiosity and intensity, and then he asked, very loudly, “Hey, Mister Shrek, where are you going? Were you really an ogre?”

The client stopped midway through the steps to look at my son. As embarrassed as I could be, I rushed my son back inside, scolded him, and gave him a couple of slaps on the butt to teach him.

I just hope the guy never figures out why my son said that.