I’m working in a hotel around 1:30 am. A guest comes in to check in, so I get his name, check his ID, and verify his reservation.

Me: “All right, will you be parking with us?”

Guest: “Yes.”

Me: “Okay. Parking is $39 a night, plus tax. Let me get you a parking pass.”

Guest: *With a blank smile* “Is that how much it is?”

Me: “It is.”

Guest: “Oh, I don’t want to pay that.”

Me: “Yeah, I know it’s expensive.”

Guest: “You will take the charges off and let me park for free.”

Me: “I’m sorry?”

Guest: “I don’t want to pay that. You will let me park for free.”

Me: *Pauses* “Sir, I can’t just let you park for free.”

Guest: “Yes, you can. I don’t want to pay that.”

Me: “Sir, you’re not a loyalty member, and your reservation is just regular with no parking included. Has something gone wrong that you want this as compensation? What’s your reason behind why you want it for free?”

Guest: “I don’t want to pay that.”

Me: “Sir, not wanting to pay for it isn’t a valid enough reason to get it for free. Nobody here would pay if it was.”

Guest: “But I want it free.”

Me: “Sir, so does everyone who parks here.”

Guest: “You cannot give it to me for free?”

Me: “No, sir, I’m afraid not.”

Guest: “Perhaps your manager will give it to me. May I speak to him?”

Me: “Our general manager isn’t here on account of it being 1:30 am, but you’re welcome to talk to him in the morning. I promise he’s going to say the same thing I did, though.”

Guest: “Perhaps.”

Me: *Pauses again* “Until then, shall I set you up with a parking pass?”

Guest: “Yes.”

My manager was unsympathetic in the morning, and the guy did pay.

Parking is outrageously high everywhere in this city, not just at this location. It’s also an internal, gated garage, though there’s an open city lot nearby that costs about the same.

Sadly, I was, in fact, not the droid he was looking for.

I recently bought a house and have been having some work done before I move in. It was empty on the market for about six to eight months before I bought it.

One morning, I got a call from my contractor, asking me about moving the cars in the driveway. Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about. I hadn’t moved in yet.

I left my job site and drove nearly a half-hour to get there. When I arrived, the people who lived on the east side of the house were walking toward the cars.

Me: “Are those your cars?”

Neighbor: “Yes. We’ve been parking here for a few months with permission from the owners.”

Me: “I’m the new owner. You can’t park there anymore.”

We went back and forth, and with the intention of being a good neighbor and trying to show some goodwill, I agreed to allow them to park there for a few more weeks until I moved in — with the agreement that they would move them by 6:00 am every morning.

The rest of the week went by without incident. The contractor called me about scheduling a walk-through on Saturday, and we set a time for early afternoon.

When I arrived, there were four cars in the driveway, and there was nowhere to park. (The only on-street parking is two blocks away.) I called the neighbors and asked them to move their vehicles, reminding them of our agreement. After twenty minutes, they finally came out and moved them.

I spoke with them, and they claimed to have misunderstood and thought our agreement only referred to weekdays and not weekends. I corrected them and moved on.

On Sunday morning, I grabbed a trailer and loaded some furniture to take over and store in the garage. Once again, there were cars in the driveway. I called the neighbors and got their voicemail. I texted them and said they had until a tow truck could arrive to get them moved. No answer. I called a tow company.

Forty-five minutes later, two tow trucks showed up, backed in, and hooked up to the cars. All of a sudden, the neighbors were home. They ran out to stop their cars from being towed, and it ended up costing them a little over $300 to get them unhooked.

I called my contractor and asked if he knew someone who could put in a driveway gate, and he did. I let the neighbors know that they could no longer use my driveway at all.

On Wednesday, I got a call from the gate installer telling me that there were cars in the driveway. I called the neighbors and said tow trucks were on the way. They moved the cars.

The gate was installed and I went by to pick up the opener that evening. The neighbor husband came out to confront me, and I opted to just call the police department and deal with it legally.

That Saturday, I went by to accept an outdoor furniture delivery and check on things. I noticed a towel beside the pool and a small kids’ flotation device. My initial thought was that I just hadn’t noticed them before, so I wrote it off and threw them both in the trash.

Later that day, the movers arrived with everything and we began moving things in.

About 7:00 pm, my daughter and I left to go grab some dinner, arriving back at the house around 9:30 pm.

The neighbors were in my pool. They were hanging out and using my furniture. When I opened the door and began raising h***, they told the kids to go to their house, and the children ran to a corner of our fence and just walked through.

They had cut out the privacy fence so it could be removed and had been using the pool at their leisure for who knows how long.

Again, I called the police and filed a complaint. The dad was arrested for trespassing and an outstanding warrant, and the oldest boy (age twenty) was arrested for an outstanding warrant, too.

I replaced the fence with a new one because they had destroyed the posts, runners, and pickets by removing and reinstalling the panel. Small claims court awarded me the total cost of eighty-three feet of eight-foot privacy fence, which came out to $3,800.

The following Monday morning around 5:00 am, the neighbors’ cars were parked in the street, where there was no street parking, so I made a phone call. They were gone when I left at 7:00 am.

I haven’t been paid yet, but I did notice a “For Rent” sign in their yard this morning, so that’s just as good. I met the owner of their house, and he told me the house would likely be empty within a week as the family had been evicted for non-payment of rent.

Good riddance.

I installed a security system the next week, along with six cameras around the house, a camera doorbell, and a fence around the pool itself to keep the dogs and my grandson out of it. I’ll be closing and covering the pool in the next few weeks.

We have a regular customer who is the manager of a hotel. She is a chronic problem when it comes to credit card data security. The problem is that her hotel uses a credit card machine that isn’t interfaced with our software because that would cost too much, or some excuse like that. We host their software, and because of that, we’re very diligent in making sure credit card data can’t be stored in our software. This customer is also very creative and keeps trying various fields and ways of typing the information to try to defeat our security measures.

We recently rolled out an update with significant improvements to the detection of credit card data in various forms. Basically, the code searches for fifteen or sixteen digits within a certain range of characters, and if it passes a Luhn check [an algorithm for checking whether certain numbers are accurate], we then check if it matches any known issuers. If it does, then ZAP! We remove the numbers and replace them with a notice that explains that they were removed and why entering credit card data like this is bad.

We got another call from this angry customer.

Customer: “Why does your software keep making my credit card numbers vanish?! This is a bug, and you need to fix it! I figured out that if I typed the credit card numbers on four different lines with an asterisk between each line, the numbers wouldn’t get deleted, but then you changed something, and even that won’t work anymore!”

She was entering this into the guest notes section, which has a warning against this in large red letters. I wrote her a response:

Me: “While there isn’t a bug, we did improve the security of the software, and you are seeing the results of that. This change is for your safety as well as ours since we both share liability if the data is compromised.”

Customer: “It isn’t a big deal! If your servers are secure, then there’s nothing to worry about. It’s just a small hotel, after all.”

I can’t wait to see what new method she figures out to store credit card numbers in plain sight.

About four years ago, I used to live in a nice HOA (Homeowners Association) in a small town in Texas, and I enjoyed having only one neighbor over my backyard fence. The plot was about two acres, and the other side of the backyard butted up to a hay field. The stars were beautiful at night because of virtually no light pollution…

Until the neighbor decided to install an incredibly bright security light over their back porch aimed right at my back patio and bedroom windows. I tried to ignore it at first and put shades in the bedroom, but out on the patio, it was like having a bright LED headlight in your face all night.

I consulted the HOA about adding a privacy addition to my fence to increase its height, and they said no because it was already at the eight-foot maximum allowed height. They said there was nothing in the bylaws or whatever about bright lights, so there was nothing they could do.

I hated for this to be the thing where the neighbors and I finally had a formal greeting after three years of back porch waves, but I walked over and rang the doorbell with $20. I politely explained that the light was causing the aforementioned nuisance and asked if there was any way I could convince him to point the light down or in a different direction. I even offered to buy him a case of beer (with the $20) out of goodwill and even a new motion-sensing light. The neighbor seemed nice and agreed to point it down.

But after waiting a month, nothing changed. I went back to have another polite conversation, and he said he had changed his mind and was going to leave it on every night and leave it pointed as-is.

Needless to say, I was a bit upset that diplomacy had failed, and I started figuring out how to win. If the military taught me anything, it’s that there are always ways to adapt and overcome. So, I started researching fast-growing plants to create big privacy walls and reading through the HOA bylaws and city and state ordinances about what I could or couldn’t plant and whether there were any repercussions for encroachment across the property line.

I quickly discovered that running bamboo, despite being very invasive, would grow super fast to make the neighbor’s house and light disappear from view, and there was nothing on the HOA, state, or city books to prevent me from planting it or cause legal recourse if it spread and grew on his side on the fence. The only thing he could do was cut anything that grew on his side of the line.

So, I pulled the trigger and planted a bunch of Golden Bamboo which grows and spreads crazy fast in Texas and grows up to twenty feet tall. I didn’t care if it took over the fence line because his house was fifteen feet from the fence while mine was fifty yards away, so I planted a bunch right against the fence and only put a root barrier on my side to prevent it from spreading into my yard.

Within six months, my neighbor’s house and light were gone from view, replaced by a pretty bamboo jungle row at the edge of my yard. Within a year, he complained that it was growing into his yard via mailed letters. They went right into the trash with no response. He rang my doorbell once, and I looked at him through the window but just didn’t answer the door.

I unexpectedly sold the house and moved two years after planting for a career opportunity. It’s been two years since I sold, and I just checked the property on Google Earth. The neighbor’s entire backyard is bamboo.

I worked as a cake decorator during my undergrad. I worked in a grocery store chain, so we were all about efficiency and speed; I had like seven minutes per cake to fully assemble and decorate standard case cakes. (That didn’t happen, but I tried!) We could have fifteen minutes for custom orders. The hours we were allotted for cake decorators for one week depended on how productive we’d been in previous weeks; the system counted automatically every time we printed a label for a cake.

Once, a young guy came in and placed a custom order. I was twenty-two, so he was probably around twenty-five. My brain is telling me he looked slightly like a “chill” type; maybe he had a beard and a beanie.

Customer: “I want a sheet cake for my friend’s birthday. On it, I’d like an artistic interpretation of what each of my friends would look like as a cat based on their physical appearances and personality traits. I want each cat to have an item that reflects a hobby — like, one friend who likes to write would have a notebook… but still as a cat. Oh, and I also need you to write each cat’s name so they’ll know who is who.”

He tried to describe each one of his friends to me in terms of appearance, notable characteristics, and hobbies. He had like eight friends.

I wish I remembered how I got out of the conversation and subsequently got out of that order! I usually worked with my manager or my bakery lead, and I feel like the lead took over. We were allowed to reject orders if they were better suited to a specialty bakery. (Many were; I don’t know why people thought we could do tiered cakes or use fondant.) We could turn down orders like this that were straight-up ridiculous.

It was really funny to me, though. I remember the guy being super earnest about the cat cake.