I am visiting my parents while I’m waiting for my company to send me to the site of my next assignment. My sister, her husband, and their two sons are living there while their house gets completely remodeled, so it’s pretty crowded.

My younger nephew is five years old and he’s quite destructive. His parents, grandparents, and I have tried to teach him to take better care of his toys, but he still keeps throwing them around, slamming them into each other, stepping on them, and smashing them on the floor. Then, he gets upset when they break and we tell him they can’t be fixed and need to be thrown in the garbage. He even managed to destroy a punching bag by holding it by the base and whacking it on the floor.

I am in the basement working out, and my younger nephew has brought a box of his cars to play with in my presence. He digs out a couple of old beat-up Hotwheels cars and puts them in my hand.

Nephew: “Mommy says these used to be yours.”

Me: “Hey, wow! These were mine!”

I look them over. The plastic windscreens are cracked and pushed into the cars, the paint is half gone, and they are rusted and chipped.

Me: “That’s a shame. I had quite a collection. I sold most of them when I was thirteen. I had no idea that these things would become valuable collectibles. I wish I had known; I would have kept them all together protected in a case or something. It would have been really great to have them alongside my other collections.”

I look them over sadly for another moment and conclude that they are well beyond saving, so I wistfully give them back to my nephew.

He immediately chucks the cars against the basement wall.

Me: “Wow, thanks for rubbing salt into the wound.”

I am pretty tall and thin. I also have a large afro that I like to fluff up when I am going out. Because of this, a bouncer at a club I go to has taken to calling me “Lowercase”. In his words, “With those skin-tight outfits and big hair, you look just like a lowercase I!”

We are on friendly terms and talk a lot when I’m there. I call him “Shag” because of his mop of unkempt silver hair.

On this particular night, Shag was with a new bouncer I hadn’t seen before. I waved hi to him, as well. 

Shag: “Hey, Lowercase! Hey, Newbie, this is Lowercase. She comes here a lot. If you’re nice, she’ll bake you something.”

Newbie: “Why do you call her ‘Lowercase’?”

Shag: “Oh, it’s because I think she looks kind of like a lowercase I with that big hair.”

Me: *Laughing* “It’s been a joke between us for a while. I don’t mind.” 

Newbie: “Oh, well, it’s nice that you’re willing to joke about that. Most girls get pissy when you point out they don’t have t*ts.”

I got super uncomfortable at that point. Shag has never made any comments about my body, and it was always clear that our nicknames were in good fun. Shag immediately looked livid.

Shag: “Boy, what the h*** is wrong with you?”

Newbie: “I thought that’s why she had the nickname, right? No curves, all hair?”

Shag gave me a smile and ushered me inside. I caught the beginnings of him chewing the absolute f*** out of the new guy.

Later on in the night, Shag came in, bought me a drink, and apologized. He insisted that I’m gorgeous, but I’m the same age as his daughters, so his only intention is to make sure I’m safe and happy when I’m at that club. 

I still go there a lot, and I bake a lot more things for him when I can. Love you, Shag!

This is my first year of retail after four years of fast food work. As a result, this is my first holiday season in retail specifically, but I am already used to people’s nasty attitudes during the holidays. My store is closing at four on Christmas Eve and has made it abundantly clear. My general manager even specified to shut the door in people’s faces if need be.

At 3:55, the closing manager for the evening stations me at the door to inform people coming in about when we close and to wish people a lovely evening as they leave, but mostly, I am to man the door after we close and inform folks that they can’t come in. As a stocky young lady with a voice good at projecting, I am the most intimidating choice. All is well until four hits and I power off the door so that I can manually let people out.

A lady tries to come in as I let a couple take their shopping out.

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we are closed.”

Customer: “When did you close? I just need to grab a cheesecake really quickly!”

Me: “I apologize, ma’am, but we closed at four. I can’t let you inside now.”

Customer: “But all of those people are checking out! My son is coming all the way from Virginia, and he loves your cheesecakes!”

Me: “They came in before four o’clock, ma’am, and they are finishing up now. Unfortunately, we sold out of our cheesecakes yesterday so we don’t even have one.”

Customer: “Oh, yes, you do. I just know you’re lying to me, young lady, and I don’t appreciate your tone! I might have to talk to your manager.”

Me: “I apologize, ma’am, but as we’ve already closed, I’ll have to shut the door. If you’d like to speak with the store manager, she’ll be back on Monday morning from open until five-thirty. She’ll be simply delighted to discuss your concerns then, once we’re all back.”

And then I shut and locked the door as everyone else had filtered out during our conversation. She stood there shocked as I walked away to help my coworkers finish up closing, but she did eventually leave. Sorry, lady, but you had all week to get your dessert!

My parents’ Wi-Fi fails suddenly while I am visiting. I work in IT, so it naturally falls on my shoulders to fix it. I try resetting and reconfiguring their wireless access point without any improvement, so I decide to call technical support. My cellular service provider has zero service in my parents’ neighborhood, so without Wi-Fi, I have to borrow my dad’s phone to call. My dad’s hearing is poor, so he wears hearing aids and has used their Bluetooth capabilities to connect them to his iPhone. I switch the phone back to the internal speaker to use it.

However, we discovered today that if my dad’s hearing aids happen to fall back in range of the phone’s Bluetooth receiver, the phone automatically switches back to them as the audio output.

My dad is in the kitchen walking around talking to my mom while I’m in his office working with the WAP and router.

Suddenly, the helpdesk employee’s voice cuts out.

Me: “Uh, hello? Hello, are you still there? Ma’am, I can’t hear you anymore.”

Dad: *To my mom* “D*** it, hang on.” *Yelling out to me* “[My Name]! There’s a woman in my head trying to talk to you!”

I’m the author of this story, about working for my uncle for a ridiculously low “salary”. One day while I was working for him, I and several coworkers at his nonprofit were called into a meeting with a “consultant” that my uncle had hired. She spent half an hour or so giving advice that seemed pretty meaningless and generic to me — lots of buzzwords and platitudes — but no worse than any other consultant.

Then, at the end of the meeting, this happened.

Consultant: “You need to focus on consolidating for a while and not start any new projects because Mercury is in retrograde.”

Me: “I’m sorry, what?”

Consultant: “Well, it just makes sense, right? That’s why [Coworker] got overwhelmed and had to go home early.”

Me: “She has the flu!”

Consultant: “No, the energy just isn’t right for new things because of Mercury.”

I’m making $100 a week, but it’s nice to know that at least the company can afford vital resources like an ASTROLOGER!

And to top it off, my uncle gave me a lecture that afternoon about how I needed to be more open-minded. I’m so glad to be out of there now.

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There’s No Room For Error When Working With Family