As someone who’s outdoors in all kinds of weather, I opt to invest in a decent pair of hiking boots from a major outdoors and sporting goods store, with a repair service. When my old pair wears out (and is no longer waterproof) after six years, I go back to the same store to buy the exact same model again in August.

In November, a bare three months after buying them, I am cycling to my weekly D&D game when I am caught in a deluge. My raincoat and trousers keep me (mostly) dry, but I arrive at my destination with my feet drenched. This is not a little spatter; it’s clear that both boots have sprung a leak somewhere. My socks take hours to dry on the heater, and when I am ready to go back home, I have to put my now-dry feet back into wet and cold shoes.

Since it’s Friday night, and Saturday just happens to be a holiday, I am at the store bright and early with my boots. I explain my situation to the gentleman at the repair center. I am have some difficulty getting him to take me seriously. According to him, my boots cannot possibly be leaking after three months. What was I doing? Cycling? Am I sure it’s not just perspiration? These are heavy boots, after all! (I had to wring my socks out before putting them on the heater. No, it was not perspiration.)

Reluctantly, he takes the boots to send them to their repair center. If they find anything wrong with the boots, they’ll either repair them if possible or issue me a store credit. In order to send the boots in, I have to take out the laces and insoles. The insole of the left boot still has water droplets clinging to the underside, but he dismisses this, too, as an overreaction on my part. Still, he takes them, and I get an email confirmation that they’re being sent in.

On Wednesday morning at 9:05, I get confirmation that the boots have arrived at their repair center, and the process can take four to six weeks, depending. I resign myself to using my old pair for the time being, and I pray for no more deluges.

At 10:55, I get an email issuing me a store credit for the full amount. I guess they found the leaks.

Unfortunately, things can often get screwy with small rural churches. The thing is, everything is basically being worked on by volunteers, and those volunteers are not necessarily professionals. There can also be very little oversight or built-in accountability and generally iffy organization. So, you get the occasional person who in other locations might be the petty HOA board tyrant and tries to throw their (nonexistent) weight around, people who feel proprietary because they’ve been with the church so long, etc. And because it’s a social community instead of a business, people get leery of calling people out because it’ll cause drama (or at least pop the top on all the preexisting simmering drama).

I went to a tiny private high school that was affiliated with a nearby church. Some guy died, and in his will, he left some money in the trust of the church to be used for the school.

A decent amount of the congregation decided that the money should go to the church instead, and apparently, the church meetings got spicy.

I didn’t go to the church, but I got to school and even my unperceptive self could recognize the palpable aura of people being pissed off. (School staff had been at this meeting, and a decent amount of other students did attend this church. I mostly got details from a friend and my dad since he was part of the school board.)

Then, to make it worse, the church treasurer’s mother for some reason had access to the church safe. She took out the inherited money, which was for some reason physically in said safe, and had herself a shopping spree.

That didn’t de-escalate things, but it did get a lot of the details hidden from us students since there was now a question of pressing charges, so I’m actually not sure how it ended.

In 2006, I started working for a large nationwide mortgage company. When I went to the interview, they gave the impression that it was an easygoing, fun place to work. That day happened to be “nerd” day. Many of the employees were dressed like stereotypical nerds. I had just come from a company with a similar atmosphere, so I thought this was the place for me.

We had eight weeks of training. My job was to help people who already had loans with the company by answering questions or sometimes taking loan payments over the phone. What I didn’t know was that we were also expected to get them to agree to a transfer to a sales agent so they could talk them into refinancing, getting a home equity loan, or even better, getting a whole new loan. We got a bonus if the person we transferred agreed to one of these.

After a few months, I realized that, despite their claims of high ethical standards, there was something sleazy going on. I was making more money than I ever had before, we had a party and/or theme day at least once a month, and we had every holiday off with pay. But still, something wasn’t right.

After nine months, I found another job at less pay but closer to home, and it had no sleazy feeling, so I quit. Within a few months, the mortgage company was in big trouble for their loan practices, the CEO went to prison, and the company was dissolved.

I was never happier that I had left a job with great pay. If you are wondering, the company was Countrywide Home Loans, a primary contributor to the housing price collapse in 2007.

I work as a housekeeper for a senior assisted living facility. Every month, we run a fire drill for both the main building and the memory care building. The procedure is to go to the nurses’ station because there’s a panel that tells us where the fire alarm is being set off. Then, we move the residents from the affected area to the other side of the two sets of fire doors, and we evacuate the entire building if need be.

Residents are not encouraged to try to find their own exits because we need to know where they are and who is accounted for.

Every so often, fire system maintenance comes out to test and maintain the fire system, including testing the fire alarms. One day in the main building, the alarms were going off and the fire doors were automatically closing in response to the alarms for about six hours. The staff and the residents who were aware of it were getting annoyed.

Finally, sometime in the afternoon, the company finished up and left, giving us some peace. It was short-lived, though; about half an hour or so afterward, the alarm went off for a split second and the lights started to flash.

Rolling my eyes, I headed down to the nurses’ station just to make sure it wasn’t the company doing one last test. No one else showed up. The nurses were looking at the fire alarm panel in confusion as it was showing them that a “Resting Room, West” had the triggered alarm, but we had no such room.

Admin came down from their office to see what was going on. As my boss, the head of the maintenance department, and the head of nursing tried to figure it out, I waited. As they ran back and forth between the panel and the various alarms in the different rooms, no one else showed up. It was just me and the nurses who were already at the station.

When they pinned down the alarm, it turned out that it was a real trigger; the baker had left something in the broiler for a bit too long and it got smoky.

Admin was furious and called everyone down to the nurses’ station to give them the butt-whooping they deserved. One of the dining people was brand new and started to cry because she was getting yelled at for something she hadn’t been taught yet — apparently, someone had told her to tell residents to go out the closest exit rather than the fire evacuation routes — and she had to be consoled by the head of dining away from the meeting.

The head of maintenance decided to run a fire drill again that day to drill into peoples’ heads what they were supposed to do. That was the fastest drill I have ever seen take place since I’ve been there.

About ten years ago, I worked for a small family firm in website design. One thing I could tell you about this family firm is that it did extremely well. The family was very well off, drove flashy cars, had big houses, etc. — you know the type of people. However, another thing I could tell you about them is that they were the most generous, kind, and downright loveliest people you would ever meet. They treated their employees extremely well. I’m talking quarterly bonuses, Christmas bonuses, gifts for promoting and successfully bringing in customers to the business, regular wage rises, etc.

In one particular instance: I had been working there for about four years, when out of the blue and without word of warning, my partner cleared out our joint account and savings account and left me. I was absolutely devastated. I had nothing and ended up having to take mental health leave due to extreme stress and depression.

When my bosses found out about this, they not only gave me a hefty wage rise, but they also paid me all my bonuses back plus more, which meant I had enough to pay for a house of my own. They also gave me a promotion. They were the kindest people I’ve ever met and worked for. And I will never forget what they did for me.

I no longer work there anymore, but there is a happier ending to the story: I am now married to one of those family members. And I couldn’t be happier.