I am sixteen years old and have just gotten my driver’s license. My parents have me run to the store to pick up some groceries. I stop by my friend’s house on the way back home for maybe five minutes to show him that I got my license and am out driving alone. It is a really fun moment in the life of a sixteen-year-old.

My stepmom freaks out.

Stepmom: “We did not give you permission to drive to [Friend #1]’s house! We told you to go to the store and that is all!”

Me: *To her and my dad* “You let me drive to [Friend #2]’s house yesterday, so I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

Stepmom: “You are not allowed to drive anywhere we do not give explicit permission for you to drive to. Period, end of sentence. Just because you were allowed to do it previously, it does not ever give you permission another time. Ever.”

Fast forward three days. My thirteen-year-old stepsister has been a jerk to me all day, and I’m sick of her BS. She goes quiet for about thirty minutes and then comes out all sticky-sweet.

Stepsister: “Hey, [My Name], it’s time to take me to ballet.”

I have taken her to ballet three days a week since I got my license. It’s basically one of my chores. But I see my opportunity to say, “Screw you!” to all three of them at once.

Me: “Sorry, [Stepsister]. I’m not allowed to take you to ballet. The parents didn’t tell me to take you, and I don’t want to get in trouble!”

She screams, she cries, she begs, and she threatens. She calls her mom and leaves a message. She calls my dad and leaves a message. Just like Steve Miller says, “Time keeps on slippin’, into the future.” I’m not sure I’m brave enough to hang on to the bitter end and actually go through with it. I’m shaking, but I know I’ve got them dead to rights. There’s no call back from the parents, and the clock goes on past the start of [Stepsister]’s class.

[Stepmom] comes home, and [Stepsister] runs to meet her.

Stepmom: “[Stepsister], what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be at ballet!”

I hear [Stepsister] tell her rendition of the story, leaving out how miserable she has been all day, and they go back and forth. [Stepmom] comes pounding down the hall and yells (as God is my witness):

Stepmom: “You just wait ’til your father gets home!”

I have to stifle a laugh because I never really believed people actually said that.

An hour later, Dad comes home, and BOTH [Stepmom] and [Stepsister] go running out to meet him and tell him how horrible I was. I wait in my room for the hammer to fall.

About ten minutes later, my dad calls down the hall:

Dad: “[My Name], would you please come here and talk to us?”

I walk out of my room.

Dad: “Well, [My Name], you did it.”

Me: “What do you mean, Dad?”

Dad: “You got us all, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. Okay, let’s make this reasonable for everyone.”

And they did. They agreed that they were over the top. They recognized that [Stepsister] wasn’t always very nice to me, and they spoke to her about that. I was allowed to have reasonable freedom if I was driving somewhere since I had good grades and had never been in trouble.

I walked down the hall back to my room, my back to my parents, with the world’s biggest grin on my face.

In Germany, we have mandatory ESL (English as a second language) classes in school, starting from elementary school. All English classes in German schools are catered toward people who only learn English as a second language and don’t speak it regularly outside of school. Even most English teachers only ever learned it as their second language.

As such, my high school was wholly unprepared for me; having spent almost all of my childhood up to that point abroad and naturally growing up German/English bilingual, I am fluent in both languages.

Sadly, my teacher in my final year of high school was not. In fact, she had only recently started teaching, had very little authority, knowledge, or any idea of what she was doing, and made up for it by being as obnoxiously high and mighty as they come. English was the first language you ever spoke and you were, thus, fluent? Nope, that was a lie, and you could not possibly be more fluent than her. After all, she was the teacher.

She hated the fact that I would just read (English) novels in class but would still always be able to answer her questions and fill out our worksheets flawlessly. After just the first week of classes, she had it out for me. When she handed us back our first graded tests later, it really showed: I — a straight-A student — had gotten a D.

But it wasn’t just me; the entire class got an average of two to three grades below their usual results. And that’s when I noticed something on my test: she had marked countless words and phrases on my test as “wrong” or “misspelled” or “made up” — when they were all perfectly correct — and deducted a full point for every single one. I whipped out a dictionary and Post-its and went to work, proving every single mark-up the teacher had given me wrong. I pointed this out to my friends in class, too, and told them to check their own results, and soon I ended up with the entire class’ stack of graded tests to re-correct them.

It turned out that our teacher had, apparently, never gotten past the cover page of a dictionary, and her “corrections” were all blatantly wrong. The class and I went up to her and tried to point out her wrongful “corrections” to her with the help of a dictionary, the Internet, and common sense, but she was having none of it.

We eventually escalated the matter to the head of the language department at our school who then re-graded all of our tests. The average score went from a D- to a B, and my own grade went back up to an A.

And our class teacher was livid when she was no longer allowed to grade tests. She tried her hardest to make my life in her class miserable for the rest of the year, and she never missed a chance to tell me how full of myself I was and how she’d make me come to my senses once she’d get to fail me in my finals. (Never mind that she wasn’t allowed to grade us anymore, especially not on our finals).

I got through the year with her out of spite alone, but I have to say, when I got to rub my fifteen points (full score, A+, for everyone unfamiliar with the German grading system) in her face during our award ceremony at the end of the year — the only one in the entire school who got full score in the English final exams — and watch her stalk off while barely keeping it together in front of all the other teachers, that was a beautifully cathartic moment!

I just started driving for a rideshare/food delivery company to make some extra cash. I live in a small town. It’s not so small that everyone knows each other, but it’s small enough that there isn’t much crime to speak of. But as a smaller female, I was still nervous about giving rides to people at night, because people in my town are heavy and frequent drinkers. I considered getting a dash cam as a safety precaution, but I didn’t have the money to invest in a good one just yet, and I felt like I probably wouldn’t need one, anyway.

Once I started getting the hang of rideshare driving, I felt more comfortable driving into the night a little bit, because I found that most people were just trying to get from Point A to Point B without incident, and I had some very fun conversations and interactions with most passengers.

However… there’s always one bad apple in the barrel, right?

I arrived at the pick-up destination for a rider one night, which was (I assume) his home, way on the outskirts of town, in the middle of nowhere, where it’s very dark. I didn’t pull fully into the driveway because I didn’t trust myself to back up all the way back onto the road in the dark (and snow), with sharp ditches on either side of the rural driveway, but I was completely off the road just fine.

My rider stumbled out of his house (uh-oh), and on his way to my car (staggering the whole way), he made dramatic sarcastic gestures to showcase how much of the driveway was there that I could have pulled into. Great.

He got in the car and immediately got on my case for not pulling as far into his driveway as he felt like I should have. I stated my reason for not doing so and began the navigation to his destination, which was to a bar back in town, about fifteen minutes away.

He looked at my navigation screen from the back seat.

Rider: “Oh… Are we going to [Bar]?!”

Me: “Yep, it looks like it.”

He clapped his hands like a child and squealed:

Rider: “Yay!”

Yeah, this guy was already fall-down drunk. He was slurring his words and acting drunkenly obnoxious and loud. I was annoyed but didn’t feel unsafe.

As I started driving, he called his friend to let him know he was on the way to the bar.

Rider: *On the phone* “Yeah, I’m on my way. Have you gotten kicked out yet?” *Pauses* “Well, don’t get kicked out. Get me a [Beer #1]. Oh! And get one for the [Rideshare] driver, too.”

Me: “I’m on the clock, sir. I can’t have a beer with you.”

He ignored me.

Rider: “Yeah, she wants a [Beer #2]. Yeah, that’s what she wants.” *Pauses* “You get a [Beer #1] for me and a [Beer #2] for the driver. Yep.”

I rolled my eyes but just stayed quiet. I’ve learned from experience that you can’t win an argument with someone that drunk. But then, he said this…

Rider: “Yeah, we’re gonna make babies! Haha! Yep! Me and the [Rideshare] driver are gonna make babies!” *Laughs obnoxiously*

Oh, God.

Once he got off the phone, my hope was that he was so drunk that he’d already forgotten he’d said that, or maybe he was just making a crass “guy joke” to seem cool to his friend.

Nope.

Rider: *To me* “So… we’re gonna do that, right?”

Me: *Playing dumb* “Do what, sir?”

Rider: “Make babies! You’ll make babies with me, right? I wanna make babies with you!”

Yes, I know I was within my rights to stop the car and kick him out right then and there. However, it was the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, and very cold outside. My conscience wouldn’t allow me to abandon a person this drunk in such circumstances. I was very annoyed and uncomfortable, but I didn’t feel like I was in danger, so I just figured I’d get him to the bar and that would be that.

Me: “No, sir, I’m afraid I’m spoken for.”

Rider: “Awww… d*** it. What’s his name?”

Me: “[Boyfriend].”

Rider: “Oh… Yeah, I can’t compete with [Boyfriend].”

Me: “No, you can’t.”

Rider: “He must have a huge d**k!” *Laughs obnoxiously*

Me: “He is a big dude — as in he benches 300 pounds, has muscles as big as my head, and could knock someone out with a single punch.”

This was actually true. My boyfriend has been on the bodybuilder path for a couple of years, and he is remarkably muscular and strong. And he used to do martial arts and never lost a match. He absolutely could have stomped this guy just by looking at him. Unfortunately, he’s a trucker and was at work at the time, about 200 miles away. I had activated the “share my ride” feature in the app the second I’d seen my rider stumbling to the car, so my boyfriend was aware of my location. I had told him that I would activate that if I ever felt nervous on a ride, so in some way, he was “there” with me.

Rider: “Oh. Well, if you ever get tired of him, you call me! Then we can make babies!”

Me: “Uh-huh.”

Rider: “So, your boyfriend has a huge d**k. I have a small d**k, but I can still make you laugh!”

Me: “Uh-huh.”

Rider: “We can have a good time together, even though I have a small d**k. I can make you laugh, and we can have a good time.”

I tried to change the subject.

Me: “I hope your friend didn’t get kicked out of the bar.”

Rider: “If he did, you’ll just drive us to another bar, right? And come and drink with us, and then drive us to the next bar!” *Obnoxious laugh*

Me: “No, sir, I won’t do that.”

Rider: “Awww, come on! We’ll have fun together. Hey! You’ll call me when you break up with your boyfriend, right?”

Cripes…

I finally got to the bar and parked on the street to let him out. He took an annoyingly long time to exit my car.

Me: “Okay, sir, here we are. You have a good night, okay?”

Rider: *Not leaving the car* “Hey… hey… If you and your boyfriend don’t work out, you’ll call me, right? We’ll have a good time.”

I just wanted him out of my car.

Me: “Sure. Have a good night, sir.”

Rider: “Hey! Will you be my driver when I leave?”

Me: “If you call for a [Rideshare] and I’m still on duty, maybe.”

Not a chance, my dude.

Rider: “Oh, I hope so. Hey, you call me, okay?”

He finally opened the car door to leave.

Me: “Have a good night.”

I watched him cross the street to the bar and immediately rated him one star in the app, citing “Disrespectful, Conversation, and Other” as the reasons for my rating. I clocked out of the app and went home. That had done me in for the night.

Once I got home, I called my boyfriend and told him what happened. Though my boyfriend is an excellent fighter and enormous (muscle-wise), he’s a gentle giant and not violent in any way, nor does he have a temper, so I knew telling him about this guy wasn’t going to send him on an “I’m gonna find him and kick his a**!” rampage. He simply sighed heavily listening to my ordeal and agreed that this guy was totally out of line, and he said he thought I handled it well.

Then, I went back into the [Rideshare] app and officially reported the rider for sexual harassment. The help team responded a little while later saying that he had absolutely violated the Community Guidelines, and they temporarily suspended his account.

I was fairly certain that was an isolated event… but I did buy a dash cam the next day.

I worked as a parking lot attendant and cashier when I was sixteen. I pushed plastic carts all day, or I rang up people’s groceries.

I was halfway through my shift out in the sun getting carts when I decided to take a small break under the shade near the bench beside the front entrance of the store. I didn’t pay much attention to the few people in the area, but this very nice older Chinese lady struck up a conversation with me.

I was a bit stunned because it came out of nowhere. She started talking to me in a thick Chinese accent about my job and saying stuff like:

Customer: “You have a good job, and you earn good money.”

This weirded me out at first, but she kept the conversation going and talked about how in China, people would work out in the soybean fields and rice paddies only to get very little money at the end of the day.

I was taken on one amazing trip in this chat with this lady, and I still don’t understand why. To end this conversation, she said:

Customer: “You do a good job. Thank you.”

And with that, she kinda just walked away. I never saw her again, but I wish I had. Those words and that lady have stuck with me ever since. I’m sure I did a better job after that because it was very motivating to hear some positive feedback from customers for once!

It is Cinco De Mayo, and as we’re a well-known Tex-Mex place, we’ve had a busy day. (I know, I know, CDM is more an American thing than a Mexican thing. I just serve people tacos…)

Customer: “I’ll get the taco combo, but… uh…”

He leans in closer and whispers.

Customer: “Can I get that white people spicy?”

I try not to laugh, and I assure him that we will make it mild. We bring the meal out to him, and I note that he is struggling after the first bite, drinking cold water as he goes.

Customer: “I thought you said this was mild!”

Me: “It is, sir. The salsa is extra mild — and also on the side, sitting there untouched by you. You’ve just eaten a bite of corn taco and unseasoned ground beef.”

The customer noticed that I was right and immediately calmed down. The placebo effect is a crazy thing…