The military is very good at drilling behaviors into you to the point that you do ’em without conscious thought.

The first time my brother came home on leave from the Army, he did a lot of sleeping. He loved to sleep past noon. One day, he had plans to do stuff with Dad, but he didn’t wake up on time.

Dad verbally tried to wake him and then physically poked him with a stick. Nothing. So, Dad resorted to dirty tactics.

Dad grabbed one of his CDs, cranked the volume all the way up on the stereo, and hit “play.”

My brother shot up out of bed and rushed into the living room, nearly standing at Attention.

Once he woke up enough to realize what’d happened, he half-jokingly yelled at Dad for blasting “Mess Call” to wake him up. (Where my brother was stationed at the time, they still played bugle calls. “Mess Call” was my food-loving brother’s favorite.)

My family is on vacation in Florida from Pennsylvania. We are eating breakfast one morning at a nationwide diner chain.

Waitress: “How do you want your eggs?”

Sister: “Dippy.”

Waitress: “I’m sorry what?”

Sister: “Dippy.”

Waitress: “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what that is. Can you explain?”

Me: “Sorry, she wants them over-easy.”

The waitress leaves and my sister turns to me.

Sister: “How did she not know what I meant? I order them all the time at home, and they always know what I mean.”

Me: “That’s just a Pittsburgh term. Like how only Pittsburgh uses the word ‘jaggerbush’.”

Sister: “‘Jaggerbush’ isn’t used all over the US? I’m learning so many things about our accent today.”

Back in high school, over the summer, I’d spend a lot of time at my friend’s house. He had a little sister who was about three or four at the time. One day, whilst we were watching something on the computer, she came into the room, and [Friend] noticed a rather serious scratch on her arm.

Friend: “Whoa, hey, [Sister], how did you get that boo-boo?”

[Sister] replied in a sweet but serious voice.

Sister: “Satan scratched me!”

Friend & Me: “WHAT?!”

Sister: “Satan scratched me! See?!”

She repeated herself firmly, showing us her arm with the scratch.

Sister: “I don’t think he likes me…”

Me: “Uh, yeah…”

I looked at [Friend]. [Sister] was very young, and though his family was religious, they hadn’t introduced such concepts as Satan or the devil to her, so you can imagine how troubling her statements were.

We both started quickly firing off questions, testing her to see if it was a misunderstanding, but her answers either did little to calm us or, more concerningly, made things that much more sinister and worrying.

Me: “Did he say anything to you?”

Sister: “No, he doesn’t talk.”

Brother: “What does he look like?”

Sister: “He’s black, and, uh, small and he has yellow eyes… and nails! That’s what he scratched me with!”

After a few more questions, [Friend] asked:

Friend: “Have you seen him before?”

Sister: “Yes, but sometimes he’s there and sometimes he’s not. Sometimes he follows me around, but most of the time he just watches me.”

Yeah, that one actually genuinely shocked us both. Neither of us said anything for about ten seconds after that.

I mean, seriously, we were being told that a small, black, yellow-eyed “entity” that didn’t like [Sister] would come and go, sometimes following her around but mostly just watching her. And now, no longer content to just watch her, he had actively attacked her. And despite being unable to talk, he had somehow communicated to a three- or four-year-old little girl, that his name, of all possible names, was Satan. That gave the both of us pause. 

Concerned, suspicious, and slightly dumbfounded, [Friend] eventually got a bright idea.

Friend: “Can you show us where this happened?”

Without saying anything, [Sister] confidently led us through the house and into the garden and pointed at the fence. 

That’s when [Friend] figured it out.

The next-door neighbor’s new cat named “Satin”, after the fabric, had been the one to scratch her, and she just hadn’t learned the cat’s name properly.

We both collapsed into hysterical, deeply relieved laughter once we figured it out, and we went on to excitedly tell the rest of his family. Still, for a few moments there, it was quite sincerely like being in “The Exorcist”.

During the global health crisis, my boyfriend’s job goes fully remote (as many jobs did). One day, he’s presenting in a meeting when he sees that his grandma is calling him. He ignores it since he’s not just IN the meeting but leading it. His dad calls, and he ignores it. Then, his sister calls. She is a serial texter, and he doesn’t know the last time she called him.

Boyfriend: “I’m sorry. Can you excuse me for a minute? My phone has been blowing up and now my sister is calling me; I think there may be a family emergency going on.”

He quickly mutes his meeting and answers the phone.

Sister: “Where are you?”

Boyfriend: “Uh, at home? Working? Actually, in the middle of leading an important meeting?”

Sister: “So, just to confirm, you were not just in a car accident because you were driving drunk?”

Boyfriend: “What?!”

It turned out that his grandparents got a quintessential scam call: a “lawyer” was calling because [Boyfriend] “had been arrested and needed bail before they’d let him go to the hospital”. They had someone crying in the background pretending to be him; it was apparently pretty scary.

Luckily, his grandma was already skeptical because the person pretending to be [Boyfriend] said something about, “Dad is in a meeting so he can’t help me,” and [Boyfriend]’s dad had just been furloughed. As soon as his grandma said one of her sons was a lawyer, they hung up right away. They all were 99% sure it was a scam, but they couldn’t relax until they heard from [Boyfriend].

When I got home, my brother was outside on the phone with his girlfriend. About an hour later, when he came in…

Brother: “Well, that was an uncomfortable conversation.”

Me: *Hesitantly* “What happened?”

Brother: “My earbuds died, so I had to hold my phone up to my ear like a caveman!”