CONTENT WARNING: This story contains content of a medical nature. It is not intended as medical advice.

I am seven months pregnant, and my friend picks me up for a girl’s night. We watch movies, eat junk food, etc., until she falls asleep about one am. At two, I’m still up, unable to get comfortable. I’ve been having Braxton Hicks contractions for the last couple of days, but tonight they’re just relentless.

I consider waking my friend up to take me home; however, she has epilepsy, often triggered by exhaustion and lack of sleep. She’s a bit of a worry-wort, and I don’t want to have her be tired, panic, and end up having a seizure, especially while we’re on the road.

About six am, I get a hold of my mother, and she agrees to come get me. By this point, the contractions hurt, and I can’t really sit or stand. But I don’t want to make a mountain out of a molehill, so I just grit my teeth and breathe until they’re over. Once there, my mom tells me that she doesn’t really know how to help me, but that she’s going to take me to the hospital, just in case there’s a problem.

When we get to the hospital, I have to stop every couple of steps to breathe and crouch over. My mother comments, “You don’t have a very high pain tolerance, do you? You’ve never really been able to handle pain.”

I ignore her comment because she’s been saying this since I was a kid. Once we finally make it to labor and delivery, the nurse — who has a really cool tattoo sleeve — tests for leaking amniotic fluid, and checks my cervix. She makes a less than promising face, then tells me that she’s going to grab another nurse for another opinion.

She comes back with an older lady that doesn’t even look at me. They go to the counter and I hear the nurse with the sleeve showing her the amniotic test. “It’s faint, but I definitely see a line.” The older nurse glances at it and quickly dismisses her, “No, no. It’s definitely negative.” The sleeved nurse says, “No, I think it’s positive for fluid. Can you at least check her cervix? I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I think it’s close.” The older nurse rolls her eyes, “It isn’t close to her due date, but fine.”

The older nurse then turns to me and goes to check my cervix. Her eyes widen, and she turns back to the nurse with the sleeve. Unfortunately, I have another contraction and only manage to catch a couple key words of their conversation. Then, the older nurse leaves. The sleeved nurse gently talks me through the contraction, and then tells me what’s going on:

At 29 weeks, I am in labor, already eight centimeters dilated, though my water hasn’t broken. The baby could come at any time now, but they are going to try to give me some medications to slow it down. She says that she is going to call the doctor to get approval on some pain medication for me.

Six hours later, I give birth to a healthy baby girl, who is rushed off to the NICU. I silently labored for almost 12 hours, and almost had my baby at my friend’s house. After everything calms down, I am bewildered at my mother’s “low pain tolerance” comment, and I wonder what would’ve happened if I had only seen the older nurse and not had the sleeved nurse to stand up for me. The sleeved nurse was the most amazing healthcare professional I’d ever had, because for the first time, she took what I said seriously. My daughter is doing well, and will hopefully be able to come home soon. My mother still believes that I’m over-dramatic and wimpy when it comes to pain, but at least I can say I went through most of my labor without medication or complaint.

I’m working retail in a department store in high school. While putting clothes away I notice a woman lurking in a seldom-frequented corner of the store. The company has a strict policy on apprehending shoplifters and prohibits clerks from approaching or even remarking on it to anyone suspected of it. Because of this, I follow her from a bit of a distance, keeping an eye on her in case I need to alert loss prevention.

She darts into some high-hanging racks used to hang long bathrobes and dresses. Glancing around, she doesn’t notice me and proceeds to grab a handful of bathrobe and whip it behind herself. She stuffs the wad of cloth deep into the back of her jeans and begins—to my horror— scratching and rubbing vigorously, using the cloth as what can only be described as toilet paper. She ends this session with one long, satisfying swipe, shakes the cloth free, and wanders off. Disgusted, I hunt down my manager and alert her. She moseys over, glances at it, and, seeing no “stains”… also wanders off.

I now launder all new clothes before wearing them.

I work in video game publishing as a producer. I’ve actually been in the industry for nearly a decade, but with this company for only a few years. My previous job was terrible. I worked for a guy who was awful to his employees and his customers — which meant they, in turn, were awful to us. I was working insane hours for no appreciation or recognition. He would regularly cut our pay because he “couldn’t afford us,” but then would take regular vacations to his luxury cabin in the mountains.

I stuck with it both out of a misguided sense of loyalty, and because at the end of the day I still loved the industry and wanted to be part of it, which is exactly the sort of cycle that enables awful working conditions like what I went through and worse. It didn’t help that so many people just tell you how lucky you are and how grateful you should be no matter what because they would kill to have your job, so you feel even worse about… feeling the way you do. I didn’t even notice how miserable and depressed I had been for years until I finally left and realized what an awful spiral I had been in. It was like I had existed for years in a sort of fog, and on the rare occasion I wasn’t working because I had time off, I was still unhappy because it was just looming over my whole life.

It was bad enough that I was actually scared to get back into the industry when my current company reached out about hiring me a few months later. I didn’t talk about my previous experiences. The first few months I felt like I was walking on eggshells. Whenever something went wrong, even something I wasn’t involved in, I would panic and become terrified, even though the owner was an amazingly chill, gracious, generous guy. My coworkers, who rapidly became actual friends, wondered why I was always so nervous or self-deprecating. One very bluntly asked me why I seemed to have no confidence, while praising my work. It was like being on another planet. Working with people who were themselves hard workers and good people, who valued my work and me, was literally a transformative but alien experience.

All of this came to a head when we attended a major industry conference and got invited to be guests of honor at an awards show. We weren’t up for any awards ourselves, but sitting there, surrounded by happy, excited people, listening to everyone talk about how much they loved their work just sort of overwhelmed me. I started to cry a bit because I finally realized after over a year that this was how it was supposed to be and that I was among friends.

I played off my tears as just being moved by the acceptance speech onstage at the time, but I do want everyone to know that you deserve to feel this way, too. You deserve to have work that is rewarding and that you enjoy, with people you like being around and who value you in turn.

I know I’m fortunate to do the work I do, and that a lot of people who will read this are working the jobs they have to in order to get by, and can’t do anything else right now for whatever reason. I guess I’m just sharing this to say that I hope one day you get to feel this way about your work, because you deserve to, no matter what that work may be. In the meantime, know that I’m sending good vibes to you no matter who or where you are, because I’ve been there, too.

The delivery area for a [National Pizza Chain] store I worked at was rather diverse, with two overlapping gang territories closest to the store, a business district at the northern boundary, middle-class housing to the south, and high-end housing to the west.

One night, I had a delivery to an upper-middle-class development, a house I’d delivered to in the past. But when I got there, all the lights were off inside. I went ahead and got out and knocked anyway, given the location, and the door was opened a few inches by a shabbily-dressed teenager. It was a rather snobbish family that I knew to live there and I doubted this person would be associated with them. A car drove past before he said anything and he ducked behind the door frame as it went by before opening the door far enough to pay and take the pizza. When he did I could hear more hushed voices coming from another dark room.

Once I was back in my car and was driving away, I called the police to report a potential burglary in progress. And it turns out it was. It boggled my mind that someone would order pizza while committing a crime. But, people hide nothing from the delivery driver, so I brushed it off and went on with life expecting that would be the end of it.

However, two weeks later I delivered to the same development, but a different house… and the same teenager in a house I knew wasn’t his. I called the cops again, and again it was indeed a burglary in progress.

While not my favorite delivery story from the three years I spent doing so, it remains one that never fails to leave me shaking my head at the stupidity of some criminals.

I’m a guy, and a female friend of mine has invited me to join her and a few of her friends to go to a bar they like. They are all rather attractive women, but as I’m already in a relationship, the idea of being romantically interested in any of them doesn’t even cross my mind.

At one point in the evening we are outside on the bar’s patio area, save for one friend who is still inside. I am in need of a new drink and ask if I can get anyone else one, since I’m heading to the bar, anyway. After getting people’s orders, I head inside and see the other friend standing by a table talking to a guy that I assume she knows. She’s on my way to the bar, so I stop and ask her if I can get her a drink, since I am in the mindset of buying the next round. She politely declines, but then the guy she was talking to says something to me. The music is very loud and I can’t make out what he said. I ask him to repeat himself, but I still can’t make it out. However, from the cadence it sounds like he is making a joke, so I smile at him and chuckle and continue on to the bar to get drinks before I forget what people have asked me to get.

Later, after our group leaves the bar, the friend who was talking to the guy says she is astounded by what I did. I don’t know what she means and ask her to explain. The guy she was talking to was just a random guy who was trying to hit on her. When I came up and asked if I could get her a drink, he thought I was trying to hit on her, too, so he was threatening to fight me for having gotten in his way.

So, from his perspective, he threatened to beat me up, and I looked at him, smiled, laughed, and walked away. He was so intimidated by that that he ended up leaving her alone for the rest of the evening.

I am in no way a “tough guy” and, in fact, tend to avoid conflict to a fault. But this particular time, I managed to accidentally “out-tough” a random guy at the bar.