I used to live in a three-story house with two other families. The woman who lived on the first floor acted as a sort of concierge and interfering busybody for the landlords. She was always on my case about things that did not exist or noise at times I was not home. God protect me if I was typing or walking across the kitchen floor after midnight.

She absolutely refused to ever lock up at night, leaving all the connecting doors unlocked and wide open. Then, she would complain if someone came in and took things off her porch. The other family and I kept asking her to lock up at night, but she said we were ridiculous and didn’t trust people. (We didn’t; our city is notorious.)

Still, we were all pretty friendly and we all hung out once or twice a week.

Her cousin moved in with her and her kids and, starting in the winter, she and the cousin would wake me up in the morning because their car batteries were dead; since I had the only functioning car, I would throw on boots and a jacket and run downstairs in my pajamas to give them a boost.

After I had done this several times over the course of the month, I asked why on earth their batteries were always dead.  

“Oh, someone keeps coming in here at night,” they explained, “and they open all our car doors, turn all the lights on, and leave them to sit all night long.”

“That’s awful!” I said. “Shouldn’t you tell the police?”

“Nah, it’s just some kid feeling his oats.”

She watched me unlock my car, get in, and start it up so I could give her the boost.

She nudged her cousin and said, “Do you believe her? She locks her car at night!” The cousin expressed similar disbelief and disdain. They actually called me distrustful and mean for locking the car.

I looked at them both for a few minutes while the car recharged and finally, I said, “Well, I may be mean and distrustful, but which one of us has a car that is able to boost everyone else’s?”

They just looked at me as if I was positively evil and repeated again that I must be small-minded and racist for locking my car at night.

“Okay,” I said. “From now on, you’d better find someone else to boost your cars, because we are going to pretend that mine is also possessed of a dead battery.”

I was so glad when I was able to find a nicer, bigger rent in a way nicer part of town.

When I was a toddler, my family and I were on a camping trip. We decided to take our large, black dog, Camela, on a walk through the facility.

I had the leash because she was very gentle despite her size, and we passed another family on the road: a father and mother and their son. The mother led her family off the road and told my mother, “I can’t believe you let that thing near your son,” gesturing to Camela.

My dad looked her husband in the eye and said, “I can’t believe you let that thing near your son.”

The woman was outraged as her husband shamefully led his family down the road without a word.

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My husband and I enjoy baking as a hobby and decide it’s time we learned to make sourdough bread. Over the winter holidays, we’re gifted some starter — basically a mixture of fermented flour and water — from my father-in-law that he has been maintaining for at least two decades, despite not actually baking bread that often.

We dive right into bread-making, and while our first attempts turn out far from perfect, we have fun experimenting with different recipes and showing off the results to my in-laws.

Every time we talk about it, my father-in-law laments that he’s never been able to get the hang of sourdough and that his bread never turns out right. We tell him what we’ve been learning, and we give a few website and recipe recommendations, but on he goes with his “It never works for me” attitude.

Fast forward a few months, and he asks us for our favorite recipe so he can make some bread for Easter, on the day before Easter. If you’re unfamiliar with sourdough, it takes much longer than bread risen with commercial yeast, and you often start it at least a day ahead of time, depending on how “active” your starter is.

Again, the man has had a sourdough starter for literal decades but seems to have very little idea of how the timing works. We manage to find a recipe that can be done in one day and send it along.

Due to the health crisis, we don’t gather in person for Easter, but we text and video call and ask how the bread is going. The picture sent is… interesting. The dough doesn’t look like it’s risen, and it’s cracked on top and looks dry like it wasn’t covered. We ask what recipe he used.

My father-in-law explains, “Oh, I didn’t have time, so I just winged it. Didn’t really use any measurements or directions.”

And he wonders why his bread never turns out?

This prank on a coworker required a degree of sophistication, preparation, and a little engineering but it came off great. [Target] is in charge of shipping and receiving and works in the warehouse area of our office. [Target] is, I guess you would say, easily spooked, which makes him the perfect candidate.

I rigged up a zip line in the back warehouse, constructed a shape of something resembling a ghost with a wig head and sheet, attached it to the zip line so that it would zoom across the warehouse where it would be captured by our security cameras. I had to put up the zip line for testing and take it down so it wouldn’t be detected during the day.

I finally got it to where Tristan — the name we gave our ghost — would sail across the warehouse at the right speed. The trick was how to get Tristan to release in the middle of the night where he would be captured with a time stamp on our cameras that had night vision. I tied a restraining cord to Tristan and put the other end of the cord in a frozen bottle of water. This way, as the ice turned into water, the string would release and Tristan would complete his journey.

It worked perfectly. So now, we had this video of some unidentified form drifting across the warehouse in the middle of the night on our camera systems.

The next day at work my coworkers [Accomplice #1], [Accomplice #2], and [Target] were in the office chatting. [Accomplice #1] casually mentioned how tired she was because she received a call from our security monitoring company around 4:00 am saying that motion had been detected in our back warehouse.

While they were chatting, [Accomplice #1] began reviewing video footage from the warehouse from the night before. The cameras only record if there is an event, so it wasn’t hard to find the right spot on the footage. Sure enough, at 4:08 am, there was Tristan soaring across the warehouse. The first time they saw it, it was a WTF moment. They ran the footage back.

When [Target] saw it again, there was a momentary pause, then bye! [Target] proceeded to walk back to his area, grab his things, and walk out.

“You tell [Boss] she’s gonna have to get somebody else,” he said, and he proceeded to get in his car and leave. He was gone before anyone had a chance to explain. Finally, after we reached [Target]’s cell phone and explained, he did agree to come back. He was a good sport about it but has sworn revenge on me.

After college, I moved in with a friend from high school, renting a room in her house. The house’s washer had been malfunctioning — and by that, I mean shooting water back out the pipes — and I offered to meet with a plumber after work so we could get it fixed.  

The plumbers were two super nice gentlemen who figured out there were roots growing all throughout the plumbing and would need to be removed. One temporary option was $500; the more permanent option was $1,000.

My friend had left me a blank check for this but I wanted to check in with her first. Upon calling and telling her the situation, she immediately started freaking out over the cost but said to go ahead with the $1,000 option. 

Ten minutes after the process had started, she called back telling me to stop them from doing anything because these men were con artists and lying to us. I insisted that I had seen the roots myself on their camera and that the men had already started. 

These two men could hear her screaming and crying in my ear about how these men were lying and I was too stupid to know that. She wanted me to make them pull a piece of root out from the pipes to prove they weren’t lying. The process these men were using was to shoot a high-pressure hose down the pipes to break them up, meaning no “proof” for her.

She eventually just left work and came home and “thanked” them in a sarcastically cheerful manner and, thankfully, paid up. I informed her that, in the future, if she wanted something fixed in the house, she’d better be there herself.