A few years back, I had my first birthday party in around fifteen years. I don't generally celebrate my birthday, but this year I did, and we had a small party - mom, my partner at the time, my brother and SIL, my niece, my nephew, and my nephew’s ex girlfriend Olivia. And Olivia, who's as handy with baking and crafts as she is sweet, made me a plate of twelve beautifully decorated birthday cupcakes for a present. You know the kind, swirly icing and sugar roses, the kind you buy in posh bakeries for like five bucks apiece. She must have spent hours on them, and I was so touched. Nobody had ever made me cupcakes before.
So I rushed around for the whole party, cooking and making sure everyone was well-looked-after, and I didn't get a chance to eat any of my cupcakes, so I put them in the kitchen to store later. I fell into bed, exhausted, and when I woke up in the morning I immediately thought of cake.
I went downstairs. No cupcakes.
“Mom, where are the cupcakes Olivia gave me as a present?”
She wouldn't even look at me. She won't, when she's feeling guilty about something. Eventually she admitted that she sent six home with my brother and ate the other six in the night. She didn't even leave one. I didn't get one cupcake. And Olivia had been very clear that they were a present, not her contribution to party food. She put them in a pretty box with a ribbon and everything.
I totally lost my temper. I rarely get angry, but when I do I go nuclear. I yelled, I threw fruit at the wall, I threatened to leave home. After that, I refused to talk to her for most of the day. And in the evening, I made a pan of brownies - the cake she loves above all others - and sat next to her in the living room while she watched TV. And I ate the whole pan.
I had a stomachache that night, and had to swim an extra mile every day for a fortnight to make up for the calories. Totally worth it.
Edit: Just a friendly reminder that Quora has a BNBR (Be Nice, Be Respectful) policy. While I acknowledge that some of you now consider me the equivalent of Nero orNorman Bates, I wouldn't want you to get kicked off Quora because you couldn't resist the temptation to tell me how ashamed I should be of myself. Hate me politely, please. :)
No1
We were dining with friends. The hosts were celebrating her getting pregnant again. Everyone else at the table had had kids. We hadn’t. At this point, we found ourselves being questioned, quiet intensively I felt, about when we would be having kids, why we hadn’t done so and so on.
Just as I was getting ready to snap, my implacable and genius husband responded quietly by saying very pointedly: “Well when we have decided to stop using contraceptives, we will write you a letter and let you know.”
You could have heard a pin drop and we were never questioned again.
No2This happened to a friend. She was a buxom lady and a very motherly type. She worked in an office with three other ladies, who had become close friends as they had been on the same team for years. They were used to supporting each other through thick and thin.
As it happened, one particular Executive from the Accounting Dept came to see her once a week to get some figures (no email on those days). Unfortunately, as he leaned forward to pick up the document from her table, he grabbed her right breast and pinched the side of it quite hard, cracking a joke, as if this was funny. Apart from the fact that this was excruciatingly painful - there are more nerves around the side of the breast than there are in the centre - she was mortified and outraged. So were her colleagues.
The next time he came around, she tried to stand up to avoid this, but he did the same. That evening her husband said he would come in and punch the man’s lights out, but she said no, she would deal with it once and for all. He asked her what she was going to do. She said she would think of something.
When she came into work the following morning, she told her colleagues she was going to do something drastic, but had no idea what, and asked them if they would support her, just in case he complained to HR. They all said ‘totally - go for it.’
Sure as eggs are eggs, he comes in, and makes a move to pinch her breast again, but this time she was prepared. She grabbed both his hands in hers, put them on both of her breasts and said in a very loud voice ‘There. Are you happy now?”
He went red in the face and more or less ran out of the office. He sent someone else to pick up the figures from then on.
No3I was standing on a crowded tube one day. You literally could not move. Everyone was holding the ceiling straps and swaying around as it jolted. There were so many of us, that we all moved like we were one physical mass.
All of a sudden, a male hand was held aloft by a female hand and a very loud female voice bellowed into the silence ‘And whose grubby little hand is THIS?’
He tried to snatch it away as everyone stared at him, and at the next station left the tube in a hurry.
No4This is my favourite. It was in a newspaper. A man wrote in to say he was responding to a previous letter-writer who had experienced the distressing event of being flashed at on the underground train one evening when she was going home late after work. She had clearly been very upset by it and wanted the underground to provide a more vigilant TV monitoring service.
He wrote that he was pleased to have been able to do his bit for women’s lib in just such an incident and that he hoped she might derive some comfort from this. He confessed he was a transvestite and wrote ‘Though I say so myself, I make a very passable woman’ .
He described how he had been seated on the train on his way into town, when he had been approached by a big burly man, who had taken out his penis, saying ‘how about a bit of this?’
‘Whereupon’, the man wrote, ‘I whipped out my own and said ‘AND HOW ABOUT A BIT OF THIS THEN?!’
The flasher fled in terror.
Edit: Thanks to everyone who has viewed and upvoted this. I loathe the fact that we have the pc-police lurking in every area of our lives, and I love the fact that these people threw all that to the winds - and that you agree. lol.
I live in an area of Scotland where the roads are single track. That means only one lane shared by traffic going in both directions with passing places every thirty to forty yards.
Now usual practise is to pull in to a passing place or stop opposite one to let other traffic pass. It’s debatable about who should pull in for who, but whichever driver is nearest to one going forward is expected to pull in so as not to force another driver to have to reverse. If you are on a hil, then you are expected to give way to traffic who are driving uphill (so as not to force them into doing a hill start).
Now that’s pretty easy to judge when visibility is good and you can see oncoming traffic - but what if you come around a corner and there’s a car coming towards you? Well in that case, the person with the shortest distance to reverse must reverse.
So with all that in mind, I was driving uphill along a very steep and twisty single track road, like the one in the picture. I had passed a passing place and knew that there wasn’t another one for around 80m - the road was so steep there wasn’t room for one for this distance. I also knew that just around the corner ahead was the next passing place so If I met anyone they’d have an easy time backing up.
Well as I came to the corner I met another car coming towards me and politely came to a stop so that he had time to slow down and prepare to reverse, he had passed the passing place literally 10 feet behind him.
It was a red Jaguar saloon and driving it was a rather overweight and florid faced gentleman of around seventy accompanied by his similarly aged wife/companion in twinset and pearls.
I fully expected him to reverse the ten feet into the passing place to allow me to pass, (remember the last passing place behind me was around 80 metres away) but instead he drove forwards to be nose to nose with me. He started shouting and gesticulating that I should reverse and started getting redder and redder in the face.
There was no way I was going to reverse that distance (80m ) when he had a passing place just behind him, so I put on the handbrake and waited. Please note - I’m not generally rude, if he had politely asked me to reverse because he couldn’t, then I would have. But I don’t react well to being shouted and gesticulated at. Especially when I’m in the right.
Oh yes I was driving something like this.
Only a little rustier and beaten up than this one.
Anyway Mr. florid faced Jaguar monkey was getting more and more angry and jumped out of his car and came over to mine. I locked the doors, wound down the window and said “good afternoon”. I was met with a tirade of swearwords, “fucking fucketty fuck fuck you reverse,fuck fuck fuckety right of way, fuck fuckety ignorant scotch bastard” Now I didn’t really mind being sworn at but I really didn’t like being called an “ignorant scotch bastard” It’s Scottish or Scots, not Scotch.
So I wound up the window, took my keys out of the ignition and waved them at him, took out a newspaper that was on the passenger seat and ignored him.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see him continue to splutter and swear getting almost purple by now. So I looked at him, put my finger up to my lips and said “Shhhh”, then reached over to the radio and turned it up.
I heard his car door slam and the engine start up and then with much over revving and squealing of tires he started to reverse.
Well I had kind of guessed right. He didn’t know how to reverse properly, probably just bullied other people out of the way so he never had to, he reversed straight through the passing place and into a ditch on the other side.
I started the car, put it into gear and drove up to where he was.
I wound down the window and politely asked him if he wanted towed out.
From his reaction I fully expected this to happen.
Shame really that there was no mobile phone signal for a few miles there and the nearest recovery garage was about an hour away. I could have had him out of that ditch and on his way in around five minutes!
It doesn’t pay to be rude.
