I work for a hotel in Las Vegas. While working security one night, I am sent up to a guest’s room who is having an allergic reaction. I arrive and the man is in a pretty bad way. He has his shirt off, his chest is covered with hives, and his throat is closing so fast he can’t speak and soon may not even be able to breathe.

I call for the paramedics and they arrive fairly quickly. They give the man a shot, and his allergy symptoms quickly begin to get better. When he can finally speak, one paramedic asks if the man is allergic to any kind of food. The man admits he’s severely allergic to shellfish. The paramedic then asks if the man has eaten any shellfish lately. The man then says, “I just came back from a seafood buffet and ate a lot of it because it doesn’t count when you’re in Vegas.”

So many people see the city slogan, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” and think Las Vegas is some kind of negative zone where anything you do doesn’t affect real life.

My supervisor appears at my desk one evening an hour before home time and announces he needs me to print, hole-punch, and sort into files three copies of an instruction manual by lunchtime on Friday — the next day — because he has an urgent request to get it to the dispatch team by then. Each manual has roughly a thousand pages, double-sided, throughout eight chapters, and he wants this done without me hogging the one printer in the office so that nobody else’s work is slowed down. Also the hole-punch is faulty, so I have to be careful with that.

So, I get to work. I spend the last hour of the day printing as much as I can in bursts and apologising frantically to anyone waiting at the printer. The next day, I come in early and crack straight on. One section of the manual is a 175-page document, so I have to do it in bits and end up almost upsetting several people queuing for their own printing. My supervisor has so far dropped in twice to remind me that he really needs this doing by lunchtime and it’s urgent. A friend in another department offers to print me one chapter on his printer to help me out, and I take him up on that with only three hours to go. Eventually, I have six ring binders full of printing, with all three copies complete, with only twenty minutes to spare. I haul them over to my supervisor’s desk and he looks at me in surprise.

“Oh! Well, just leave ’em on your desk; we’ll deal with it on Monday.”

It’s my first few months working at a smaller chain pet store in my city. In spite of having worked there a bit, corporate wants me to finish up training on the products the company sells directly.

On its own, this is just boring, but my manager warns me in advance that in the section on discussing health and how our dog food and health treats can help breeding and mother dogs, they use the B-word to describe them, purely clinically like how dog breeders insist on doing, but he warns me I should probably pause the video when there are customers in the store.

Fast-forward to me standing at the register letting the video run; it’s the video I was told uses said word to describe the dogs, though it seems pretty sparing of it. I’m doing some other things I needed to finish up when I hear the bells on the door ring, right as the video says the B-word no less than four times. I stumble to pause the video and look up to see this older lady who has be no younger than 60 with a granddaughter who is no more than six. She looks at me, mortified, for a handful of seconds before staring intensely at me like I am the devil incarnate, and turns on her heel and leaves.

My manager has been hanging in the back but I tell him what happened when he comes back up. He laughs and says something similar happened to him, and that I wouldn’t be in trouble because if she called and complained to corporate he’d have my back, since it’s corporate’s fault for having training videos that include that word in the first place.

I was a foster child before I was adopted, and before I was given up, I’d had little or ineffective discipline. As a foster child, my parents were not legally allowed to physically discipline me in any way, so they had to get creative.

The first thing my foster mom did when I was newly in the home — like within the first week or so — was sit me in the corner. The general rule is that you’re supposed to put a kid in time out for one minute per year of age. I was four, so I had to sit for four minutes. My mom made that clear. What she also made clear was that she wouldn’t start the timer until I was quiet. And boy, could I yell. I yelled and screamed and beat the tile floor and escaped and was put back and got quite colorful with my language, apparently. She sat at a table and tried — pretended — to read.

I was there for over three hours the first time.

The second time, less than three. The time after, just over an hour. I slowly started to get it. This (saint of a) woman was not going to put up with my nonsense.

I was adopted by them within the next two years.

Though my kindergarten was part of an entire elementary school, the kindergarten was held in a separate building across the street from the main school with its own parking lot. This was originally done to ensure the children could see and point out whoever was picking them up without the clutter of other grades — also why the first graders had their own hall with its own exit in the main building. It also forced the school to teach us road safety at a young age since we’d have to go to the main school building to have library, PE, music, art, computers, and lunch. However, it wound up proving to have one more bonus after this incident.

Our last activity before recess was acting out Three Billy Goats Gruff, complete with masks for all four characters. After I, the third goat for this group, rammed the final troll, someone noticed my goat mask didn’t look the same and asked the teacher about it. She started by examining the mask, and then the kid playing the troll and me. Our troll was wearing makeup. Everywhere. While asking him why, the teacher started rubbing it away before stepping back, horrified.

The troll had chickenpox.

While I don’t remember this for sure, I believe that at the time vaccination was only required for entry into middle school, so not only was it quite likely that none of the students in the kindergarten were vaccinated against chickenpox, but it was just as likely many of the students in the main school weren’t, either. And this child’s mother decided it would be better to send him to school. How do I know it was his mother? Well…

The very first thing my teacher did was get the neighboring teacher to watch us, and then drag our troll right out of the classroom. When I took a restroom break later, I passed by the kindergarten’s office and heard a woman yelling about how this was no big deal, that she shouldn’t have had to come down for this, and more. The troll student didn’t come back that day, or any other day.

Once she got back, we were locked in the building the rest of the day. The teachers had to go get our lunches, and we lost our main building class for the day. Throughout the day, others were getting picked up unexpectedly. Evidently, the school called all of our parents to let them know a mother sent her child in with chickenpox, and many decided to get their kids out immediately.

The school was closed for the next two weeks, which means we lost two weeks of our summer vacation and our parents had to find sitters. Once the incubation period ended and symptoms would be appearing in anyone infected, the school reopened, but attendance was incredibly low; on the very first day back, I was the only one who came to class. Part of it was that some parents didn’t feel safe leaving their kids with the school any longer and transferred them out, but most of it was because the school had an outbreak which left most of the children sick, and the parents of the remaining healthy children were concerned another parent would do the same thing. After some assurances, the healthy students finally came back. I had bragging rights, however.

Since I was the only one who came in on the first day, the teachers called my parents again. With their permission, my teacher took me bowling for the day — out of her own pocket if my mother is to be believed — and even drove me home while everyone else stayed to close the kindergarten early. It was my first and only improvised field trip, and I absolutely loved it.

In the course of my education, I encountered almost my entire kindergarten class again. While a couple of them have scars, everyone I’ve found was just fine. The only mystery left in this case is the student who caused it. I’ve yet to encounter him again.

To the troll’s mother, while I hate that you delayed my summer vacation and cost me time with my friends, thank you for enabling a wonderful day of bowling with my teacher. I hope your stupidity hasn’t killed your son or anyone else.