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…

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 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.

An angry older woman skips the line to storm up to me at the customer service desk and demands the store manager. I call him over while I serve the customers actually patient enough to wait their turn. The manager arrives and introduces himself.

Customer: “I should call the police on you! I caught my son with cigarettes, and he said he got them here! You should all be ashamed!”

Manager: “I’m very sorry, madam. We always ID for tobacco purchases, so I can’t explain why that happened. Maybe he was carrying a fake ID?” 

Customer: “And now you’re accusing him of having counterfeit documents?! I am reporting you to the Better Business Bureau and complaining on your Facebook page!”

Manager: “Do you know when he made the purchase? We can check the camera footage and see if we can figure out what happened.” 

She gives us a short window when her son was here this morning, and from the terminal at the customer service desk, [Manager] is able to isolate the purchase.

Customer: “That’s him! See?! You just sold him the cigarettes without any issue!” 

Manager: “Ma’am… first of all, we can all see that he clearly presented ID, but second of all, if that is your son, then he’s an adult.”

Customer: “He is an adult when I say he is!”

Manager: “How old is he?”

Customer: “That’s not the point! The point is that you sold them to him, and you didn’t even get my permission! I do not allow him to smoke!”

Manager: “Ma’am, if he’s over twenty-one, which he clearly looks to be based on the video, then he doesn’t need your permission to buy cigarettes — or anything for that matter. He’s an adult, and we have done nothing that the Better Business Bureau can do anything about.”

Customer: “Then I am still going to blast you for this all over your Facebook page! I’m going to complain on every post! You need to do something to make sure this doesn’t happen again!” 

Manager: “[My Name], can you go get some popcorn from the snack aisle, please?”

Customer: “What?! Why? I’m not asking for popcorn!”

Manager: “Oh, no, it’s not for you; it’s for us. If you’re going to go on to [Store]’s Facebook page to complain that we should have called you for permission to sell cigarettes to your twenty-one-or-over-year-old son, then those comments are going to be very entertaining.” *To me* “[My Name], get the family size. I have a feeling I’m going to be reading them for a while…”

I did a zombie event like this one in Glasgow, and other than an awkward moment with some confused junkies in a car park the event was a lot of fun.

I did nearly flatten a zombie at one point, though. The actor stepped in front of me when I was sprinting at my top speed, and I couldn’t stop or sidestep.

Apparently, body-slamming zombies is a viable survival strategy. Who knew?!

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