My grandparents have owned a shop in a small tourist town on the Texas coast for 28 years, two years longer than I’ve been alive.

While the shop has a gift shop portion, our main attraction is our homemade fudge, brittle, divinity, pralines, canned goods, and other sweets. We also offer cakes, pies, and breads by special order. My grandma makes all the candies, while my grandpa bakes all the cakes and things. 

As you can imagine, we’re slammed the week leading up to Thanksgiving. My grandparents spend days baking and making candy while my mom and I work at the shop to give them the time they need to make the special orders. 

Thanksgiving rolls around, and everyone shows up for Thanksgiving at my grandparents’ house. This year, it’s my grandparents, me, my daughter, my dad and stepmom, my mom, and one of my uncles. Everything is going great, and the food is as amazing as ever. But then we get to dessert… 

My grandparents were so busy baking and making candy for everyone else, they both thought the other had made pies. They had even asked each other what they had made, and both answered orders for someone else, not paying attention to what the other was saying.

At least the rest of dinner was amazing!

I’ve started taking krav maga to get in shape, and before my fourth or fifth lesson, I go in an hour early for open mat time to practice. During this time, one of the instructors and I talk about our personal lives. It’s a Friday and his day job is as a substitute teacher, so he jokes about how he’s happy not to have to deal with any more kids for the weekend.

Almost immediately after he says this, a boy between the ages of 13 and 14 walks in, no parents in sight. I already know this isn’t going to end well, as the gym has special youth classes that he should be enrolled in instead of attending an adult class, but I try to cut him some slack since the time and class he’s in are likely his parents’ choice, not his.

At the start of class, everyone is curious as to whether or not we’ll practice disarming people with the “weapons” — weighted replicas — due to a prominent shooting the day before, and our instructor tells us we won’t. Despite this, the kid continuously asks the instructor questions about the weapons and if we’ll be using them throughout the class, and of course, the instructor tells him no each time.

In addition, he doesn’t pay attention to the instructor in favor of hitting the punching bags with random punches and kicks that don’t match anything we’ve learned. At one point, he starts complaining of his wrist hurting, which is a surprise to exactly no one. The instructor has to spend most of his time keeping an eye on this kid and his partner to make sure he doesn’t kill himself or anyone else instead of correcting form on anyone else, even when people ask him for help or what they’re doing wrong.

Eventually, I’m the unlucky one partnered with him for a type of kick I’m just learning for the first time that day, and I make sure to go slow to ensure I’m following the proper form, as our instructor told us to do. Despite this, my kicks easily make this kid, who’s holding a pad, stumble back each time. Then, the kid starts trying to give me (primarily incorrect) instructions, which is honestly testing my patience.

I don’t want to lose it and start yelling at the kid, so I focus on my breathing and stance and pretty much tune him out. However, at one point, he bends over while I’m mid-kick, resulting in me jamming my toe. Thankfully, as stated, I was going relatively slowly and without much power behind it, so it’s not too bad, but I’m officially miffed. When he tries to tell me for the millionth time to put my full power behind the kick — note that I’ve told him repeatedly that I want to focus on my form, not on power — I finally give in and do so.

The kid falls onto his back, air knocked out of him, and I hear the other students trying not to laugh. I help the kid up and we get back to practicing, but he finally stops talking and lets me work on my form without interruption.

I don’t get to visit my favorite hometown coffee shop much anymore, so it’s always kind of an event when I have a chance. It’s an extremely hot day and I’ve been on the road for almost an hour; I also had to take a detour around some road construction to even get to the coffee place.

I park next to a car with two teenagers chattering away inside. I notice because I don’t want to accidentally slam doors with one, but they are in no apparent hurry to exit, so I get out and head for the building. The shop has one barista on the register and a second one to make orders; I’ve actually finished paying for my order at the register when the two teens from the parking lot come in and the second barista greets them with Valley Girl-esque enthusiasm. The three of them start chatting and I move down to the end of the counter to wait for my drink.

I notice a frozen mocha sitting next to the sink, and I wonder if it’s mine, since I ordered a frozen mocha. But the barista at the register has disappeared and the second barista is talking nonstop with the two teens while she throws together two iced coffees for them. Being really non-confrontational, I don’t want to say anything, in case that wasn’t my drink at all. Still, I’m a little miffed she’s making their drinks before mine. But maybe there was something wrong with the machine and my drink couldn’t be completed. Anyway, I tell myself, it can’t be my drink, because I asked for no whipped cream. I tell myself all kinds of things to keep myself from speaking up.

The barista finishes, hands the two their iced coffees, finishes her little visit with them, and then finally goes over to the sink to retrieve the rapidly-melting frozen mocha that was mine all along and hands it to me.

I’m completely infuriated that my order was evidently finished before those two jabber jaws even paid for theirs, and for some reason, the barista just couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to pass it to me at any point while making two more drinks. But I was too afraid to speak up before confirming it was my drink, and too shy to complain about it once I realized what had happened, so… here I am complaining into the void! Hello, void. Thanks for listening.

My family frequently goes skiing in the winter. We typically end up staying at a nearby hotel for one night per trip.

One weekend, I have to share a fold-out bed with one of my younger brothers, who is taller than me and quite lanky. I’m awake long after everyone else is asleep, being an insomniac. My brother sprawls out and I don’t want to touch him, so I’m basically clutching the side of the bed for dear life to keep from falling off.

Eventually, I get fed up with the awkward position and move to the floor, which at least has more room. Once I attempt to lay down, I realize that there is a freezing draft down there and remember seeing an extra blanket in the closet on the other side of the hotel room.

I wrap myself up in the white hotel blanket and slowly shuffle across the room, not wanting to trip or fall because I’m tired and walking in the dark without my glasses. While I’m making my slow trek across the room, my mother wakes up.

She told me the next morning that when she saw a shuffling figure all dressed in white and thought that she’d seen a ghost! I told her that no, it was me trying to get another blanket because my brother was being a bed hog. We had a good laugh about it.

This happened in the 1970s at a well-known hotel chain in Oklahoma. My (now-ex) wife and I stayed there one night because she was having an outpatient procedure at a hospital in the area early the next morning. 

It was a disaster from the beginning. The room was dirty, to the point where I got stabbed in the foot by a straight pin that was in the carpeting. There were cracker crumbs ground into the carpeting. Very little about the room was right.

As there was no alarm clock in the room, I requested a wake-up call for 6:00 am.

We woke up at about 8:00. No call.

I called the desk and angrily asked what had happened to our wake-up call. “I don’t know. I just came on shift.” No apology; no acknowledgement of the problem that they had caused.

I called the hospital, who said they could still get us in as long as we got there as quickly as we could.

We ran down to the desk, rushed through checkout without looking at the bill, made it to the hospital, got the surgery done, and got home safely.

Then, I got the credit card statement. They had charged us for a meal in the restaurant; we had never been in the restaurant at all!

So, I wrote a strongly-worded letter to the hotel manager, with a CC to the chain’s headquarters. The original, sent to the hotel itself, clearly had “CC: [corporate headquarters]” on it.

A short time later, we received a money order from the hotel for the amount we’d been overcharged, along with a handwritten note apologizing. The note was poorly written, with misspellings and other mistakes. It was obvious that someone in the hotel had intercepted the letter and replied in the hope that management would never know.

Okay. We got our money back.

A week or so later, we got a check from corporate for the full amount we’d paid, along with a very nice, typed letter promising that they would investigate the incident.

We ended up with more than we had paid, which I figured came close to compensating us for all the crap we had had to put up with.