In Singapore, every male has to serve 2 years in the army as part of mandatory conscription. Some of us (like my brother and half my cousins) absolutely dread and loathe it. Others (like me and the other half of my cousins) look forward to it. I was elated to do my duty to the country and serve as a soldier.

So imagine my horror when I get told that due to my (minor) peanut allergy, I got downgraded into mostly non combat vocations. Worse, it’s right after quarantine, so a lot of the fun stuff, like grenades, gets cancelled.

And I got assigned a bunk made up of childish and loud recruits, and the sergeant just seems to like bullying me and another recruit as we’re Bi. Then my bunk got assigned to suicide watch duty as the other Bi guy snapped under the bullying and tried to commit suicide twice.

Then after boot camp, I was shipped off to a new unit, and of all the choices available, I got saddled with the absolutely worse one. It was a desk job where you are actually expected to work hard. It’s not like I don’t mind working hard, but working hard at a desk job wasn’t my thing.

It is at this point I realised that my luck was beyond horrible and I could bank on it to consistently draw the shortest straw possible in every occasion. Ironic, considering that my childhood nickname was “Lucky”, as I used to consistently have good luck.

Sure enough, when bunks were assigned, I got the dirtiest one on the highest floor. Our assigned toilet broke within the week and was never completely repaired. The bunk right opposite us held many female soldiers so modesty was a big thing and strictly enforced, which meant no more walking to and back from the showers in nothing but a towel. And our new superiors seemed to have something to prove as they thoroughly upped discipline standards and punishments.

Tired of being stuck in that horrible desk job, I tried to arrange to leave for a combat vocation, but the medical officer told me that I needed a doctor to certify that my peanut allergy wasn’t severe enough to warrant an epipen. It didn’t, I knew that, but they needed confirmation. But the doctor claimed that based on the preliminary tests, I had only a 5% chance of passing the requisite allergy test. And unless I completely passed, she couldn’t certify that I was combat fit.

Regardless, out of stubbornness, I decided to go for it anyway. I passed with flying colours, to everyone’s bafflement. For a period of time, I felt like my bad luck had finally broken. I was free of that horrible desk job!

Then my A level results came back (I studied overseas, which is why they only came back after I enlisted for some time) and I had screwed up badly. I needed to retake my A levels and would not have the time to study if I left my desk job and went to a way more time consuming and exhausting boot camp and combat vocation.

In short, my bad luck literally made me pass a 95% chance of failure test just to screw me over with it. The combat vocation I wanted was right in my grasp and I couldn’t take it.

Honestly, I am impressed in the worst possible way at my bad luck. Even my childhood good luck was never so potent.

It happened in the middle of 2007, I was at dvd vendor looking for latest anime dvd. There are several customers there minding their own business. The employee is watching nearby. Then a mother and her son (4 or 5 years old) comes to the employee, she looks little distracted and in hurry.

Mother: *showing a dvd case* do you have this that had been dubbed in bahasa Indonesia?

The employee guy and I look at what she shows us. It is a famous kids’ stop-motion animated show with sheep as main character. We look at each other.

Employee: *scratches head* uh… You don’t need them in bahasa Indonesia…

Mother: but I don’t understand English! So is my son! We didn’t speak English!

Employee: ma’am? They don’t speak any words…

(The shows’ characters speak a gibberish-like sounds and animal sounds)

The mother, clearly embarrassed, purchased it and left in flash. Everyone in the vicinity are laughing at that. Maybe you should pay attention to what your kid is watching?

I have mentionned in the comments of some stories that I got married and left Canada to move to France whitout telling my family about it almost 10 years ago. It was not an easy thing to do but I had to, for my own mental health and also for my son. It was one of the best decisions of my life. I could write a whole book of all the crap I went through because of my family before I completely cut ties with all of them but I will share with you this one that happen 20 years ago, involving my son who was barely 2 years old at the time.

My mother and sister, who lived about 150 km away, came to visit me for the day, along with my niece who was 3 years old. My mother had brought bratwurst sausages and potatoes to cook for lunch and also some salad she had made that morning. She started to cook the sausages and potatoes and asked me to set the table since I knew where to find things and she asked my sister to watch the kids while she would take care of the food. After setting the table, I had to go to the bathroom and told them I needed to and that I would be back shortly. I was not gone more than 5 minutes and came out of the bathroom and back to the kitchen to see my niece entering the kitchen alone, my mother and sister nowhere in sight and I could see the whole living room from the bathroom doorway. I then saw my son next to the stove, putting his hand on the handle of the skillet with the sausages still cooking in it, tilting dangeroulsy the skillet as he was pulling on the handle. I think my heart skipped a beat right there. I knew that if he pulled just a tiny bit more, the hot sausages would fall and the oil would burn his face and neck. I was on the other side of the kitchen and had no time to get to him and I screamed “NO!” whitout thinking about it. He instantly let go of the handle and the skillet returned in it’s position on the burner. My mother and sister who were in my bedroom came back into the kitchen screaming at me because my niece was now crying. My son was also crying but my niece was clearly more important to them. I explained that my son almost burned himself with the sausges and oil if he would have tilted the skillet just a bit more. According to my mother and sister, I should not have screamed like that because I traumatized my niece. They also said that if I would have been watching my son, none of this would have happened. My sister was supposed to watch the kids and my mother left the stove with the sausages cooking whitout putting the skillet handle out of reach but it was still all my fault according to them. When I pointed out that they had gone to my bedroom while they knew I was in the bathroom, they replied only that they were there for just a few minutes. None of my arguments were good enough for them and they both spent years reminding me and blaming me about making my niece cry for nothing and traumatizing her and my son almost getting burned because I had not been watching him. They even said that I was a bad aunt and a bad mother and that I should feel lucky that they would not report me to child protective services. When I told my side of the story to my sister in law( my brother’s girlfriend) who is a nurse, she agreed with me that he could have been badly burned if I would not have screamed and made him let go of the skillet handle. She said that she knew what kind of damage hot oil can do on skin and that my niece could have been traumatized for real seeing my son badly burned or disfigured because of the burning hot oil, the way she was traumatized seeing her brother disfigured after he was bitten on his face by a dog when she was a child. She also said that when you cook and have kids around, you should never leave the stove unattended and always keep the handles out of reach. Unfortunately for me, my sister in law would never say to my mother and sister what she said to me. She told me to let it go because it was not important. What I got from this is that my son and I were not important. Just like his girlfriend, my brother agreed with me on most things but would never admit it to my mother and sister either. They did not want to be treated like crap the way I was so they never took my side and even told me that I was just trying to make my mother feel guilty for leaving the sausages cooking on the stove unattended. That I did not care about her and only wanted to be right. All of them spent years bringing back the subject, hoping to make me believe it was all my fault and kept saying that I was the one who always wanted to be right!

This is just a tiny drop in the ocean of things they made me go through. With everyone against me, I even began to doubt myself at times and not just about this incidents. I have gone through so many depressions because of all their crap that I don’t even have enough fingers to count them. It took a long time but after I managed somehow to pull myself back together and started to trust myself again, I realized that things were never going to get better and my son was going to be the next black sheep of the family and I did not want that for him.

If you have a good relationship with your family, learn to appreciate it and make sure it stays that way but if things are not good and you are treated like crap no matter what and you think about cutting ties with them because your mental health suffers from it, do it!! The only regret I have is not doing it sooner!

This story happened before COVID-19 hit everywhere hard. I’m a true nocturnal person, to the point where I did all my grocery shopping at 3 AM at the local Walmart.

I was on my way back inside from taking my purchases out to my car – I had to take care of some business while I was there. As I was walking in, a couple of young men were walking out, past the employee monitoring the door and the Self-Checkouts. She said something to these boys and they bolted out of the store.

Trying to be heroic, I went after them and watched them peel out of the lot while someone was on the phone with Sarpy County Communications. As they left the lot at high speeds, a cop was right behind them already. Turns out, speeding out of a parking lot in front of a cop is a crime.

A while back, I worked the front end of a medical office. Before that, I coached at small school that required coaches to have a Commercial Driver’s License, to drive teams to and from competitions. One of the front end duties was calling–this is before texting was widespread–patients two business days before their appointments to remind them to come in. Of course, some people still didn’t remember and no-showed their appointments. We’re discussing this in an office meeting, when one of the nurses speaks up, blaming the front office staff.

Nurse: Are you calling patients to remind them of their appointments?

Front office staff: Yes.

Nurse: And do you tell them what time they should be here, you know, 10-15 minutes early?

Front office staff: Yes… (in our heads: Tell patients what time to arrive? What a novel idea!)

Nurse: Then why are they still late?

Office manager: Most of the patients are adults. They make the appointments, we tell them when to come, but they still have to get here. Sometimes people are going to forget.

Nurse (annoyed): There must be something else you can do.

Office manager: We’re already doing calls, and when patients make appointments in person we give them a written record of when to be here. We mail new patient paperwork to first-time patients, along with reminders. At some point, the patients have to take responsibility. There’s nothing more we can do.

Nurse (more annoyed): I don’t like my the front office can do.

Me: I have a CDL. If we get a bus I can drive around to patient’s houses and pick them up. They’ll still need to be ready to go when I get there though, and I bet some won’t be.

The nurse stopped protesting and said she’d take care of calling all her doctor’s patients for appointment reminders. Some still failed to arrive on time or at all.