I am nineteen and have moved out of my parent’s house.

Me: “It was super late and we wanted to go home anyway.”

Dad: “Super late, huh?”

Me: “It was almost 2:00 am.”

Dad: *Suddenly irate* “WHAT?! You have no business being out that late! What were you even doing?”

Me: “We went to see the midnight release of a movie after work—”

Dad: *To Mom* “What are we going to do about this?”

Me: “Wait, what?”

Mom: “Well, obviously you broke curfew, so—”

Me: “Wait, hold up. Aren’t you two forgetting something? I don’t live here anymore.”

Dad: “You’re our daughter! You have no business being out and about at 2:00 am!”

Me: “I’m an adult that doesn’t live here or even rely on you financially. I have a job, I have a place on my own, and I pay my own bills. What I do with my time is literally none of your business.”

Mom: “You’re just a teenager! You need to listen to us!”

Dad: “As long as you live under our roof—”

Me: “I don’t, though. I have my own roof where I make my own rules. So you’re going to… do what, exactly?”

Dad: “Give me your keys.”

Me: “My car keys? The keys to the car I bought myself, that’s in my name? I don’t think so.”

Mom: “You broke the rules!”

Me: “Those rules stopped applying to me the minute I moved out. I’m leaving now.”

Dad: “You disrespectful little— Don’t you walk away from me!”

They still insisted I “broke curfew” as an adult and tried to demand that I either hand over my car keys or accept the grounding. I went home, instead. Somehow, they were shocked when I moved hundreds of miles away six months later.

This story is part of our Best Of October 2021 roundup!

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My mother suffered a terrible crash in the early 1990s that should have killed her but, for whatever reason, didn’t. It was off a low-water bridge and as a result, she went through a phase for over a decade of being terrified of driving over bridges. It lessened with time, but the one bridge that still terrifies her to this day is the bridge over the Mississippi River from Arkansas to Tennessee, which is unfortunate because she would have to drive over it to take me to visit my father as a child.

As I grew up, she refused to let me drive the trip because it was best for her to remain in control of the car while going over the bridge. But when my father died, we had to bring home several antiques in a moving van, which one of us had to drive, so she agreed to let me drive the trip for the first and only time.

On the way to the funeral, about a half-hour from the bridge, Mom is on her phone, reading an article about the history of the area, and she starts reading it aloud to me. I figure she’s doing this to distract and calm herself, so I tune her out and focus on driving. I get over the bridge and get to the eastern outskirts of Memphis when she finally looks up again.

Mom: “Uh… where are we?!”

Me: “We are [miles] from Nashville.”

Mom: “Did you cross the bridge?”

Me: “Kinda had to, yes. You were reading to distract yourself; I didn’t want to bother you.”

Mom: “I was just enjoying the article; I had no idea we even crossed the bridge!”

And then, on the way back, we’re trying to make the trip in one go because I have to be at work the next afternoon. Mom is driving the moving van, and we’re coordinating through our phones. About two hours east of Memphis, she calls me and asks me to pull over at the next gas station.

Mom: “You’ll have to call in to work; we need to stop for the night.”

Me: “Why?”

Mom: “The bridge is coming up and I just need a night’s rest. It’s dark and I’d rather it be daylight when we try.”

Me: “No, we’re going on, and we’re crossing tonight.”

Mom: “What?!”

Me: “It’s two in the morning. It’ll be four when we get there. There’s going to be no one driving. The bridge is lit up. We can get on the inside lane and go as slow as you need, because there will be no traffic to slow down. If you can’t see the water, you can tell yourself you’re driving on solid land. It’s going to actually be easier. If we stop, we stop in Arkansas.”

Mom: “I don’t know…”

Me: “Look, you can get a motel room for the night. I’ll see you at home.”

We cross the river, on the phone with each other the entire way, and we finally pull over at a large truck stop in West Memphis.

Mom: “I can’t believe I never thought of that before! That’s the easiest I have ever made that trip!”

Me: “Yeah, I have a lot of anxieties and phobias, and that’s how I always force myself past them.”

I work in a hardware store that has a large paint department — three aisles of paint, twenty to thirty shades of every color, and six different grades of paint. I watch a customer come up to the paint desk and say:

Customer: “I need a gallon of something.”

He didn’t specify anything about what he wanted, just “a gallon of something.”

We have a table of men’s shirts in different colors at the front of the store. There are about forty or fifty different versions and colors on the table. I’m helping a man who loves the shirts and wants a few black ones.

Me: “These are the options we have for black.”

Customer: “That one’s not black.”

Me: *Looking at the shirt* “Yes, sir, it’s black.”

Customer: “No, it’s not black enough.”

Me: *Pulling out the tag* “Sir, this is the color code this store uses for black items. This is as black as it’s going to get.”

He puts his shirt up next to the one on the table.

Customer: “See? It’s not really black.”

Me: “Fabric dye saturates different fabrics at different levels. Just because they look slightly different it doesn’t mean they’re not both black.”

Customer: “Well, it’s just not black enough for me.“

My husband and I are volunteer firefighters and EMTs in a rural area of Tennessee. We respond to a 911 call from a VERY scared teenage girl who has run her car into a ditch on a one-lane rural road during a period of very bad thunderstorms.

When we arrive on the call, the young lady’s father is already there, screaming his lungs out at his daughter for putting the car in the ditch. The poor girl is in hysterics, pleading with her father to stop yelling at her. I did the same thing in my husband’s brand-new Lexus SUV at that exact same spot on that road about eight hours ago, so we both have a lot of sympathy for her.

My husband and I confront the father after we make sure that the girl is okay physically. My husband speaks to the father in his VERY loud retired Marine Corps drill sergeant voice.

Husband: “Excuse me, sir! Why are you yelling at your poor daughter over an accident that she probably couldn’t control?! We have been getting calls all day for accidents on this road due to the weather!”

Father: “She should have known better than to travel that fast during this weather! She may have damaged the car that she just bought! Kids shouldn’t make mistakes like that!”

We notice that the car is a roughly twenty-year-old Buick sedan.

Husband: “Yeah, so? My wife did the same thing at this exact spot this morning in my brand-new Lexus, and she had to call a tow truck to get it out. The running board was damaged, but it isn’t a big deal.”

Father: “Your wife must be very stupid to make a mistake like that!”

My husband is getting VERY angry.

Husband: “My wife is forty and she has driven tour busses accident-free since she was twenty-five! Everyone makes mistakes! There was oil on this part of the road when my wife went off the road and that, combined with the wet road and the huge bump in the road, would cause anyone to lose control of their vehicle! Your daughter is just a kid; go easy on her! I am a retired Marine Corps drill sergeant, and I would never be that hard on someone over an honest mistake!”

A sheriff’s deputy arrives and he immediately confronts the father.

Deputy: *To the father* “Calm down! She just needs a tow truck to get her out. I have already called one. It doesn’t appear that she hit the ditch very fast. The worst-case scenario is that the undercarriage is scratched and there are some scratches and minor dents to the body, which I wouldn’t be worried about on a vehicle this old. This could literally happen to anyone!”

The father starts sputtering and the tow truck arrives. The tow truck driver is a high school friend of my husband, and the driver is also an ASE-certified mechanic. The tow truck driver gets the car out of the ditch and looks for obvious mechanical issues on the car. He finds a bunch of minor scratches to the side of the car that hit the ditch and a few scratches underneath, but the car is still drivable.

Tow Truck Driver: *To the father* “The car is perfectly fine to drive! She made a mistake. So what? It’s just a dang car! Get over it! In fact, I am not going to even charge her for the tow because of the way that you are acting! The poor girl doesn’t need any more grief! The car going off the road is probably enough to make her be more attentive when she is on this road!”

The father angrily gets in his own car and starts to drive away extremely fast. The next thing we know, HE ends up losing control when HIS car hits a puddle of water, putting his car in that same ditch about 300 feet down the road. We all go down to check on him and the sheriff’s deputy starts talking to him.

Deputy: *To the father* “You were just yelling at your daughter for the same thing? Based on what you said to your daughter, you must be a first-rate moron! We all told you that it could happen to anyone!”

My husband’s friend pulled the father’s car out of the ditch, and the father had actually hit the ditch so fast that he tore out his brake lines, ripped off part of his front bumper, broke the side view mirror, AND caused numerous dents and scratches to the right side of his car. The father was completely fine physically but looked EXTREMELY embarrassed. My husband’s friend said that the damage would easily cost at least $6,000 to fix and the car could possibly be totaled due to the age of the car. We all hope that he learned his lesson for yelling at his daughter over a minor mistake.