About ten years ago, I worked for a nationwide company. We would take photos of families for their church directories. They got one photo for free, but the others were extra. One day, I caught one family taking a photo of my computer screen.

Me: “Hey, I’m sorry, but you can’t do that.”

Customer: “Why not?”

Me: “Because you didn’t pay for it.”

Customer: “Well, I have it now. What are you going to do about it?”

Me: “I guess nothing. I’ll just make a note here next to your name that you didn’t pay for your photos, so when the church and all of the members ask why they haven’t received their photos, we can let them know who to talk to.”

Customer: “…”

I typed for a moment in silence.

Customer: “So, how much do I owe you?”

After she left, the other photographer walked over.

Photographer: “That was great! I wouldn’t have known what to do if something like that happened to me!”

Me: “To be honest, I just made all that up. They probably could have gotten away with it, until she pissed me off.”

The day I moved out of my mom and stepdad’s house, they came along to help me move. Normally, that would be great, but my mother has serious anger issues, and she was clearly looking for a fight all day. There were several small incidents before it finally boiled over that night.

Eventually, she started stomping around like a toddler and screaming that I was “f****** useless” over a minor problem with her suitcase, which I hadn’t packed and had never used. I told her, as calmly as I could, that we were in my house now, and if she kept screaming at me, I would ask her to leave.

Mom had a complete meltdown, spent the night melodramatically sobbing in my guest room, and left early the next morning.

After a few months of us not speaking, I had this conversation with my stepfather.

Stepfather: “You know, you should call your mom and apologize.”

Me: “I’ve been down that road. If you apologize to her, she takes it as an admission that you were wrong and she was right. I’m not going to tell her that it was okay to scream at me and call me names like that, especially over something that wasn’t my fault.”

Stepfather: “Well, you went too far. You shouldn’t have asked her to leave.”

Me: “If I call her and apologize, she’ll assume that means nothing has changed between us. She’ll believe she was 100% right to treat me the way she did and that I’ll just keep letting her do it the way I did as a kid. And that means that sooner or later — probably sooner — this s*** will happen again. So, let me ask you: what should I do?”

Stepfather: “What?”

Me: “When Mom’s throwing a tantrum, you can’t get her to stop. Believe me; I tried for years! I tried apologizing and telling her she was right, I tried reasoning with her, I tried standing absolutely still and not responding, and I tried standing my ground and fighting back. Nothing worked. She just keeps yelling until she runs out of steam or one of us leaves. Well, I refuse to stand there and be treated like s*** for no reason in my own house, and I refuse to leave my own house to get away from her. And apparently, I’m not allowed to politely ask her to leave, either. So, next time she’s here and she starts screaming at me over something that isn’t even my fault, what do you think I should do?”

He paused for a moment.

Stepfather: “I’ll think about it.”

That was well over a year ago. I did eventually partly reconcile with my mother, only because I hosted my brother’s wedding and I wanted us to be civil while she was at my house for that. I was right: as soon as I said I was sorry, she started telling me exactly how out of line I was to ever ask her to leave under any circumstances. The closest she came to taking any responsibility for the fight was a half-hearted “I’m sorry you felt like you needed to do something like that” non-apology, and she never so much as mentioned the screaming tantrum she’d thrown.

Mom hasn’t been back to my house since I moved in, except to attend the wedding, and she told my brother that she would never come back for any other reason. She told me to my face that she’ll “never trust me again”. And my stepfather never did come up with a suggestion for what to do instead, nor did he ever admit that there WAS no good alternative. 

Oh, well. I guess I was wrong about one thing. If Mom never sets foot in my house again, she can’t scream at me here again after all, so it doesn’t really matter that my stepdad never gave me an answer.

I have just finished a long, sleepless trip from the UK to the USA to see my boyfriend. His car is in for repair work, so his mum kindly drives him to pick me up and drive us back. It is half a day round trip as I couldn’t land at their local airport, so I had to go to one in another state.

On the way there, they have a warning light go on, so [Mum] decides to stop by a garage to make sure it’s all okay. At this point, I have been awake for close to forty-eight hours and I am very tired. I am standing outside the garage window where there’s some restaurant, with a large sign on it saying, “Checks Accepted”.

I am confused, and I say, mostly to myself:

Me: “They accept pattern fabric?”

Boyfriend: “What?”

I point to the sign.

Boyfriend: “Oh, no. Like… Do you not have them in England? It’s paper… money… Er…”

Mum: “Oh, honey. They have them; they just spell it different.” *To me* “Cheques, honey — c-h-e-q-u-e-s.”

Me: “Ooh. Right. Yeah. We do… French things.”

Boyfriend: “What?”

Mum: “Lots of letters, pronounce only some of them.”

Me: “Your mum gets me.”

I work as a meat cutter for a certain large chain organic grocery store and have myriad interesting customers. Most of them are very nice, but occasionally, we have some characters that pop up.

I am in the middle of serving a customer when a woman barges up to the counter and starts barking orders at me. I am alone, so I have to deal with the situation. Thankfully, the first customer is understanding and lets me deal with this lady first. She seems a little agitated as it is.

While we do not like to encourage customers like this, our leadership will come down hard if we don’t cater to the customer, so any complaint about any little minute thing inevitably comes back to us.

Customer: “Lemme get eight pounds of ground beef. The 90/10. And pack them separately.”

I start scooping some ground beef into a bag.

Customer: *Shakes her head vehemently* “No, honey, I’m gonna need more than that.”

I keep scooping, aiming for eight pounds.

Customer: “No, more! Lemme get six pounds all in one bag, and three pounds of stew meat in another.”

She constantly interrupts my scooping to tell me more and more… but we still end up with less than eight like she’d originally wanted? I finally finish with the ground beef around six pounds, wrap it up, and start in on the stew beef.

Customer: *Interrupting again* “Okay, gimme four pounds of stew meat.”

I put some in a bag and she cuts in again.

Customer: *Barking* “How much is that?”

I put the bag up on the scale and it’s right around 3.25 pounds.

Customer: “Take some out!”

All right. I get it to three pounds.

Me: “Is that sufficient?”

She asked for more to be taken out. We ended up at 2.75 pounds by the time she was satisfied.

Honestly, it was not the worst request I’ve gotten. We really do get people asking for five to ten packs of one or two pounds of meat each wrapped separately, which takes so much time when I’m the only one on the counter. Thankfully, most of my customers are pretty understanding and patient!

My boss never seems to have enough time; her meetings constantly run over. I think conversations like this may be part of the reason why. Her dialogue is significantly shortened because I don’t remember everything she said; it was even more rambling and repetitive than what’s shown here.

We are on a call.

Boss: “For the monthly report, you need to replace the computer-generated column headings with ones humans can read.”

This is already enough information; I know what report she means, I know which of the column headings are computer-generated, and I know what would be good names to replace them with. The only reason I haven’t already done this is that the same users who are now saying they can’t understand previously told me not to change anything.

Me: “Okay, I’ll change those today.”

Boss: “Let me show you what I mean.” *Brings up the report on her screen* “This column is called [computer-generated name]. The users cannot understand that.”

Me: “Got it.”

Boss: “You must change it to [descriptive name]. Otherwise, the user will have to look up what it means every time.”

Me: “Right, I understand.”

Boss: “It is very important that you change these names so that the users will understand them.”

I respond with my microphone muted, thanking God that we don’t use cameras.

Me: *Muted* “I’ve already agreed with you; you can stop persuading me!”

Boss: “The users cannot understand these column names.”

Literally pulling my own hair in frustration, I unmute myself.

Me: *Unmuted* “Right, so I’ll change them.”

Boss: “So you have to change the names.”

I mute myself again because I don’t trust myself to raise this point politely.

Me: *Muted* “You’ve spent five minutes telling me this. You have seven other talking points on your agenda, and this was supposed to be a half-hour meeting!” 

Me: *Unmuted* “Yes, I will.”

Boss: “Yes, because the users…”

I send a text to my brother while [Boss] goes on.

Me: “How do you get someone who’s supposedly in a hurry to stop explaining why you should do something you already agreed to do?”

Brother: “If I knew that, my meetings would be a lot shorter.”

[Boss] eventually wound down and moved on to her next point without ever bringing up any new information about this one beyond “the users don’t understand the current column names”. The meeting ended up taking about fifty minutes, and I don’t think I got any information from it that wasn’t contained in the list of bullet points she was working from. I don’t think I needed any more information, either; I had no trouble making the changes she asked for.