I work in the office of a company that staffs home health aides (HHAs assist with non-medical care, assist with daily living tasks, etc.). I get a call from one of our clients.

Client: “I am furious! No! Worse! I am livid!”

I gloss over the immediate need to create a list of synonyms for anger based on intensity (ADHD brain!) and ask the client:

Me: “Can you please let me know the issue that’s causing you distress, ma’am?”

Client: “That new woman you sent over! She’s a busybody! She’s getting too much into my business!”

Me: “The home health aide, [Name], who was assigned last week?”

Client: “Yes! Her! She got into my fridge and threw away all my jams!”

Me: “Did she say why?”

Client: “Yeah, but it was only a little bit of mold! I usually just scrape around those bits, and it still tastes fine on toast!”

Me: “Ma’am, it sounds like she was doing her job and assisting you in removing potentially hazardous food from your home.”

Client: “But I didn’t ask her to!”

Me: “Actually, you did, when you signed the contract to allow our HHAs into your home to assist your day-to-day living. The contract also involved monitoring your health, including any potential impediments to your health.”

Client: “Well… she had better replace all my jams! I had them organized just how I liked them!” *Click.*

When I mentioned the call to the HHA in the office, she just rolled her eyes.

HHA: “Yeah, technically she had them organized… from least to most moldy!”

CONTENT WARNING: Vomit

I currently manage a wine-focused, just-under-fine-dining restaurant. It’s a busy-a** night, our town is doing an annual ‘Restaurant Week’. I’m running the door. There’s a table of four middle-aged women celebrating a birthday, and I assume we were not their first stop on the night. They all get the three-course ‘Restaurant Week’ option and share some wine bottles.

Somewhere between the second and third course/bottle, one of the women is overcome with nausea and proceeds to dip her head below the table and unload. Her server, a woman of similar age, brings her a champagne bucket and many napkins, trying to keep the situation as discreet as possible. The server quickly gets all the desserts boxed up, the checks dropped, and all seems well, as can be assumed.

The ladies stay at the table. Laughing, reminiscing, and enjoying their night for thirty more minutes! As though there are not two trash bags of vomitous rags surrounding them, and a pint of baby-bird food on the ground, under them.

I finally had to go and ask them to leave. The scent was in the air, and their table was en route to the bathroom.

As these debutantes made their way out the door, they found the need to complain to my seventeen-year-old hostess that “We’ve never been treated this poorly at a restaurant.” Which begs the question, where do you go on a normal Friday?

I work in a BBQ restaurant as the pitmaster, so I run the smokers and handle all raw meat preparation. I have to get there by 5 or 6 AM, depending on the day, in order to have food ready to open the restaurant at 11 AM.

The General Manager decided she was spending too much on labor and needed to cut my hours. As such, she told me at around 2 PM on a Thursday the following:

General Manager: “I need you to clock out by 1 PM every day, no matter what.”

I asked for it in writing and got it.

So, the next day, I went to the Head Chef when I got there and said that the General Manager said I had to be out by 1 PM no matter what, and showed him the signed note.

I set an alarm on my phone and got to work.

I got through all the prep for the next day and was starting on the cleaning when my alarm went off. Now the pit area looked awful. The walls had some smoke stains that come off pretty easily with degreaser, but build up over time, the cooler floor had some blood on it that needed to be cleaned up before it spoiled and started smelling bad, my table had some seasoning left on it from where I seasoned the pork for the overnight load, the walls still had bits of skin, gristle, etc stuck to them, the trash can was full.

I told the head chef:

Me: “Well, it’s 1 PM, and I have to go.”

He looked in the pit and said:

Head Chef: “Yep… This is what I expected…”

But he let me clock out and go.

This goes on for about a week, with the pit looking worse and worse each day. Then the District Manager comes in on my day off… The Head Chef told me that the District Manager immediately started on the General Manager for the pit, looking awful, and how the pitmaster needed to stay until the pit was clean no matter what.

So I got it in writing and am now currently working until about 2:30 PM every day, doing the full cleaning I was doing before again…

This will be the final entry of the saga of the crazy grandmother from the Stab Caesar series. This is because my parents finally got her on Medicaid, and she is now in a home full-time. But it was not without drama.

In October, her doctors approved her for a pacemaker set to be put in at the end of December. However, in early November, she came downstairs one Thursday, claiming she didn’t have a pulse. My dad barely managed to find it, and the decision was made to take her to the ER. The doctors at our local hospital determined her pacemaker surgery had to be moved up. This meant they needed to transfer her to a different (and much better) hospital in the next county.

Now, non-emergency transport is, in a word, slow. They took so long to get to her that my dad ended up leaving before the ambulance arrived. The slow service was completely unacceptable to her, and no one could give her an exact time of when her transport would arrive. It was nine or ten o’clock at night when it finally arrived, based on when she stopped calling the house to complain about the wait, the nurses, and whatever else she fancied.

Friday, the next day, she had the surgery. My dad, uncle, and cousin went to visit her around lunchtime. She was not happy. “The doctors are horrible! The nurses are horrible! I’ve never been treated so horribly in my life!” This is arguably the best hospital in the entire state, and you don’t hear many stories about patient neglect here, so my uncle did some digging.

The problem: the doctors and nurses insisted on doing their jobs, which involved seeing their other patients. My grandmother seriously expected them to wait around on her hand and foot like they were servants. My uncle went to the nurses’ station to warn them that she was in a mood, but she had already been labeled as “difficult” in their system. She had been in this hospital for a little over twelve hours at this point.

The next day, my dad went to get her, since we had been told since October that the pacemaker surgery was supposed to be an outpatient procedure. But two different doctors agreed that since she is ninety-five, she needed to go straight to a rehab place for a few days so she can be under observation and someone can answer any questions she has about the pacemaker. She was pissed when she found out she wasn’t going home, but the staff eventually convinced her that this was for the best.

The staff at the hospital told my dad they would arrange the transportation, but since it was a weekend, she may not get transferred that day. Dad stayed with her most of the day, but he did eventually have to leave since Mom didn’t want him driving an hour and a half in the dark. (He had a mini-stroke last summer, and he’s mostly fine, but every once in a while, he does something weird, like taking three lefts to turn right.) Crazy called the house several times to complain about the lack of transportation. My dad tried to reason with her. “It’s Saturday night, they’re probably busy and have minimal staff.” This wasn’t good enough.

Sometime on Sunday, she was transferred to the rehab/nursing home. My dad visited her on Monday. She was not happy. After a few days, some of the staff talked to my parents about getting her homed there permanently. Now, my parents had tried to get her on Medicaid a few times before, but she was always denied since she made too much money from Social Security. She drew off my grandfather’s Social Security, even though 1) they divorced when Dad was in high school, 2) he’s been dead for almost twenty-six years now, and 3) she’s been married and divorced a couple of times since she divorced my grandfather.

We can’t figure out how she was allowed to do this.) The staff at the rehab were great and helped walk my parents through the process in a way that would significantly raise her chances of getting accepted, and in the meantime, Medicare would pay for, I think, a hundred days of care for her.

Grandma went back and forth on her view of the place during this hundred-day trial period. She liked the social aspect of it and often played bingo with the other residents. (We had tried to sign her up for elderly social things before and rejected it.) But, she wasn’t allowed to have any outside medicine, and the staff still weren’t treating her like the queen she thinks she is.

We did try to clean her room while she was gone since it was a complete disaster area. The amount of medicine we found in her room was astonishing. Twenty bottles of unopened OmegaXL. Twelve unopened bottles and three opened bottles of Balance of Nature vitamins. Two opened things of Colace. One unopened bottle of calcium chews. Four bottles of Shaklee vitamins. And a whole medium-sized box full of various prescription medications. Some of the medicines and supplements my parents bought for her with her money, but the rest she conned my cousin into getting for her.

Then there was the food.

There was a peanut butter jar that wasn’t closed, three big cans of coffee, too many protein shakes to count, a moldy orange juice bottle, a large jug of powdered Balance of Nature, three boxes of her special tea bags (she refused to drink tea that wasn’t a certain brand), and two cans of long-expired chicken were in her closet. There were also countless pills scattered on her floor, and we are lucky the cats never tried to eat them. The power strip had stains from where she spilled coffee, juice, and who knows what else on it over the years. We’re lucky she didn’t burn our house down. And the smell of urine, baby powder, and Chanel No. 5 was baked into that room. Leaving the window open for a full day did nothing to get rid of that smell. Our best guess is that she lost her sense of smell long before she moved in with us.

We greatly enjoyed our holidays without her. The stress levels in the house plummeted. My parents started to fantasize about going away for long weekends without having to arrange care for her. Finally, at the end of January, we got the acceptance letter in the mail! She is approved and will now stay in the home!

Related:
We Should Totally Just Stab Caesar! (Salad), Part 2
We Should Totally Just Stab Caesar! (Salad)

I took a geology/environmental sciences class for a required part of my degree, and one of our first tests was identifying specific rocks by structure, color, and how it reacts to a drop of acid we were provided. One of the rocks is Halite – aka rock salt (this one I identified because it did have a distinctive salty smell).

The next time we meet, our professor looks at us and announces:

Professor: “I am very disappointed none of you tried to identify the rocks by licking, as one would have been immediately identifiable that way.”

We all stared dumbfounded as the college had only started letting us have in-building classes a few months ago (it was 2021).

Classmate #1: “Uh. Professor… you’re asking us to lick rocks.”

Professor: “Yes, it’s a tried-and-true method in geology.

Me: “I think most of us know that, but you remember last year, right?”

Classmate #2: “Yeah! I don’t think it’d keep any germs on for long, but excuse us for not wanting to lick anything after everything.”

Professor: “Oh… uh.”

Classmate #3: “I only thought about it after using acid on every sample, and I’m not licking acid.”

Classmate #4: “EEEW! You mean I touched stuff other people licked?!”

Professor: “Okay… I guess that’s understandable, but really, this is the one science where licking the subject is acceptable; you should take advantage of it.”