My nine-year-old niece is an amputee. About four years ago, she was involved in a car accident which caused her right arm to be amputated below the elbow and her right leg to be amputated above the knee. My sister is a single mom and works a very demanding job, so [Niece] often stays with us, whether it’s for a few hours or a night or weeks at a time. She gets along very well with my kids, boy-girl twins just a year older than her. 

Last year, [Sister] had to travel around Thanksgiving for work. [Niece] is here often enough that my in-laws consider her their “honorary granddaughter”, so it was only natural that they invited her to Thanksgiving at their house. Thanksgiving consisted of my family, [Niece], my in-laws, my husband’s sister, her kids, my husband’s brother, and my husband’s two aunts — his father’s younger sisters.

My husband’s sister and parents had met [Niece] before; his brother and aunts hadn’t. His aunts can be a bit nosy, and they comment about everything, getting into everyone’s business. I’d never been a fan, but my husband’s family mostly tolerated it. I could easily imagine them making weird statements about [Niece] about how she eats a lot of food, how skinny she is (moving a prosthetic leg with a knee joint is a lot of work, and she needs a lot of energy to keep it up), or the different ways she’s adapted to eat with one arm.

I’ve already yelled at them about saying stuff about my kids — that they’re too pale and should go outside more, or that they’re too young to have glasses and should go outside more. (Both are statements that also apply to [Niece].) [Niece] is pretty shy and sensitive, and understandably, she dislikes when other people stare at her or make rude remarks.

My husband and I decided to head off his aunts by letting them know first that [Niece] was an amputee and to refrain from their usual comments. I think we could have been gentler with our warning. Both aunts got very offended.

One of them refused to attend Thanksgiving. The other one showed up. She was there when we arrived, and from that moment, she started making a big deal about how offended she was that we would even suggest that she’d make rude comments — all while making exactly the sort of comments we were afraid she’d make. She wouldn’t stop complaining. She insulted my husband and me to our faces for offending her.

While my mother-in-law was in the kitchen by herself, my husband’s fifteen-year-old niece took the other kids outside, and my father-in-law laid down the law. He told [Aunt] she had one chance to prove she could handle Thanksgiving. The next words out of her mouth were an “apology” where she referred to my niece as “the cripple”. (Luckily, the kids were well outside at this point.) My father-in-law kicked her out before any food had even been served.

[Niece] felt super bad that she had “ruined” everyone’s Thanksgiving. Literally no one felt that way, and others kept trying to convince her that she was actually completely in the right, but [Niece] wouldn’t listen and spent about ten minutes gently crying in my son’s chest. It seemed to be very overwhelming for her, so after a quick and quiet meal, we left early.

A few days later, when [Sister] came back, [Niece] still blamed herself, despite my and [Sister]’s best efforts.

Only two weeks after Thanksgiving, my father-in-law sent [Niece] an invitation for Thanksgiving the next year, promising that “Ol’ Grand-Auntie Meanieface” wouldn’t be in attendance. After that, she felt much better.

We just had Thanksgiving yesterday, with [Sister] and [Niece] both invited, and [Niece] had a lovely time. My father-in-law revealed that he finally stopped talking to [Aunt] and barely talks to the aunt who didn’t attend, saying what had happened with [Niece] was the final straw.

I heard a story from a friend, similar enough to this one. Ice cream theft kept happening at their work.

Then, a Polaroid picture was found showing a penis stuck in the bowl that someone kept eating the ice cream from.

Scandal happened, and a public display of penises was demanded to find the perpetrator.

It did not happen. But the ice cream theft stopped after that.

Related:
Revenge Is A Dish Best Served WAYYYYY Cold

Full disclosure #1: I honestly wouldn’t know where to put this story: “Right”, “Working”, or maybe even “Romantic”. And that’s because of full disclosure #2: I made it up. Well, sort of — I did it subconsciously. It’s about a weird dream (like an actual dream, in my sleep, not a metaphorical one) that I had about an odd customer request at the grocery store where I worked at the time.

It also involves my girlfriend at the time, who was of Korean descent. The grocery store where I worked was pretty big and prided itself in having a vast product range, including quite a lot of Asian food products. All of this fed into the dream’s storyline.

In my dream, a coworker comes up to me to ask for my help with an Asian food product that a customer is looking for. She says she’s pretty sure we don’t have it, but maybe I can help anyway because I’m a bit more familiar with that stuff since I have a Korean girlfriend. (This has happened before in real life; having a Korean girlfriend made me the closest thing they had to an actual Asian or Asian-descended employee!) So, I go up to the customer and ask him what he’s looking for, and he goes, “Kimchi Schnapps.”

Now, if you’re Korean, or at least familiar with Asian cuisine, you’ll know, A, what kimchi is and that it’s THE national dish of Korea, as well as, B, that Kimchi Schnapps doesn’t exist. So, you’ll know how absurd this request would be in real life. (If you don’t, imagine being asked for coleslaw liquor.) That’s why it stuns me so much that I just repeat it questioningly.

Here’s the thing, though. I’m a sleeptalker, much to the annoyance of [Girlfriend], who’s a relatively light sleeper. So, while I had slept silently next to [Girlfriend] up until that point, I not only said, “Kimchi Schnapps?!” in my dream, I said it out loud. In my sleep. In the middle of the night.

[Girlfriend] and I woke up and, after taking a moment to process this, we broke out in fits of laughter, through which I tried to explain this dream to her — a scene that repeated twice the next day when we told her mum and sister about it. Plus, it led to the phrase, “How about you drink a Kimchi Schnapps first to calm down?” becoming an inside joke for us.

The relationship ended badly several years later, but I’ll always remember this as one of the funniest moments we shared.

So, you tell me, who was at fault here: the (admittedly not even real) customer for having an impossible request, my store for not carrying that product, or me for waking [Girlfriend] up by sleeptalking?

I am an assistant manager at a BBQ restaurant. One day, a man and his son came in and spent a very long time looking through the menu. Eventually, the father came up and started asking me about ingredients because his son was allergic.

At some point, the boy, who was probably about six or seven, handed me a laminated card that listed all his allergies. It was a lot. I don’t remember exactly, but I know eggs, gluten, and pork were on there, as well as a couple of seasoning things, like onions.

There was no way I was remembering this, and I didn’t know what the seasoning blends were off the top of my head, so I asked to borrow the card so I could go check. He agreed, and off I went.

It turned out that a lot of our seasonings and sauces used at least one thing the boy was allergic to, and the allergy to pork took over half our menu options away on its own. I spent roughly ten minutes checking basically everything to see what we could serve him safely.

I occasionally went up to update the family on what I was doing. The father seemed mildly surprised that I was going out of my way to figure this out.

Eventually, I did figure out what I could serve the boy. Because one of his allergies was meat, I switched out every piece of my cutting board, wiping the table for good measure as pork grease gets everywhere.

The father thanked me profusely for being so accommodating. He had apparently had trouble finding a restaurant that served something his son could eat that wasn’t just essentially under-seasoned or extremely boring.

They quickly ended up becoming regulars, and I would see them at least once a week. Since the boy already knew what he wanted (and what was safe), it was much faster. I still cleaned the heck out of the cutting station and made sure anyone else I saw serving them did the same, but that usually took less than a minute.

The boy kept telling us this was his favorite place to eat, and the father added that it was extremely reassuring to him, watching me automatically start to change everything out when I saw them come in; sometimes he worried the extra precautions were too annoying to deal with, and I was always very cheerful about it.

Eventually, they stopped coming in. I think they moved, but I’m not certain. I missed that family.

My son is autistic. When he was ten years old, before the Internet, he became fascinated with everything related to pharmacology. I bought him a white jacket and a clip-on tie so he could be a pharmacist for Halloween. He carried around an out-of-date copy of The Physician’s Desk Reference, which listed everything about every medication.

That was all well and good… until…

My landlady came over looking for advice. She had visited a tropical country the previous year and had to obtain certain immunizations. She was returning to that same country and wanted to know if she could get away with not repeating the same immunizations.

My son didn’t know and couldn’t find it in his book.  

But my goodness, who takes medical advice from a ten-year-old?