Usually once you've worked in the service industry, you learn how to be a good customer. Oftentimes, you'll learn how to respect your server, clean up after yourself, and generally be a half-decent human being while you're enjoying food at a restaurant. You'd think that it would be a natural reflex to be polite to the person handling your food supply, but for the disrespectful types, tormenting your server is a prize-winning sport.

Rallying family members for group gatherings can take more mental energy than taxes, apartment hunting, and scheduling your next doctor appointment combined. Everyone has that one family member who makes planning these kinds of social occasions way more difficult than it needs to be. It's like rallying a whole troop of soldiers, except really you're just rallying one infuriating human who has no regard for other people's time and schedules. I'm all for moving at your own pace, but not at the ex…

For childfree couples, the holiday season is usually the time of year you get chased around by all of your aunties and older cousins, pestering you about your life choices, your aging physique, and your inability to (so far) provide your bloodline with an heir. What is it, the 1700's? Is that all we're good for?

There is nothing like a technical problem at work that allows you to have the whole day to yourself until it's resolved. Whenever a situation like this arises, it's important to luxuriate in the moment. This means you can finally get your act together. You can vacuum the apartment, do laundry, and cook yourself a nice meal. Or you can lie down on the couch for hours on end and finally binge the new episodes of The Crown . Who cares? The world is your oyster, and it's not like you're shirking an…

We all spent the past week giving thanks and expressing our gratitude for life's many joys. Unfortunately for us and for the rest of the world, life still comes with Karens. So now that we are done saying what we're thankful for this week, let's take a look at some of the people who we aren't thankful for but we have to deal with every so often. This week's roundup of Karen stories includes an Internet rant, a parking debacle, a customer service experience gone wrong, a workplace sabotage saga,…

As a service industry employee, there's nothing as sweet as the I-told-you-so moment at the front desk. Hospitality employees learn to put up with a lot of hooplah from their customers, so that moment when they get to flex their ounce of power is really important.

Imagine the kind of level of desperation one would have to exhibit to draft a Santa Wish List letter as a 12-year-old child in order to get expensive Christmas gifts. These are the kinds of letters to nonprofit organizations where billionaires purchase Holiday gifts for underprivileged kids. These are the kinds of organizations that are meant for children in need, not fully grown choosing beggars with a whole lot of audacity.

Raising a well-rounded child is always a conundrum. I can't speak from experience, but I imagine it would be particularly difficult to keep your teenager grounded if your family is affluent. Teenagers are inherently entitled, but imagine throwing a couple million dollars in their bank account along with the latest iPhone.

One thing no one is thankful for is their nightmare roommate who has made the year exponentially more difficult than it needed to be. Thankfully, my year of having a nightmare roommate is long over, but I remember it like it was yesterday. I'm sure I am not the only person who will tell you that these experiences stick with you. Sure, you might go through a process of convincing yourself that it was an important chapter of your life and one that helped you grow into the person you are today, bl…

We often talk about work-life balance these days, with many folks managing to keep their professional and personal lives completely separate, meaning no work at home (rip remote workers). However, what happens when a personal issue becomes a work issue, too? That's the situation the OP found herself in. OP has been working at her company for a while now, and there's this colleague who seems to harbor some envy. We will call her Karen.

Pranks can easily go too far when you're young and dumb. Spurred by the jests and jeers of their fellow kin, kids don't have the restraint to resist being little dirt bags. But how can we, as civilized citizens of the world, help teens and kids learn when they've gone too far with a prank? Scare them straight, of course.

There is no such thing as Thanksgiving without a little family drama. It's part of what makes this Holiday so memorable. I'll always remember the year a family member wasn't allowed to leave the hotel room because they were under the weather. Then, there's that time someone spilled a side dish all over my hair. And who could forget the time no one wanted to ask the old lady in the room if she had changed out of her onesie at all the whole weekend? This kind of family tension is perhaps the most…

Do you know a nepo-baby? The term was coined very recently, but “nepotism” has been around since the dawn of material riches. If you didn't know, it's when someone already in power favors someone they know, say a family member, friend, or whatever, and provides them with things like a job. Basically, it means you need money to make money. And I mean a lot of it… To add insult to injury, most nepo-babies will deny being one. They will claim they just worked harder than anyone else and made their…

There are definitely unwritten rules about using the communal microwave in an office. If you're heating up your lunch during an in-demand time and it's a frozen meal that takes more than five minutes to cook, you might want to step back and let other people use it first. Furthermore, if you're eating something particularly aromatic, consider eating in the break room and not right at your desk. This also applies when you're eating a messy meal. I cannot tell you the number of times I have seen c…

One of the first things you learn in driving school is how to merge. Shortly after you learn which pedals make the car go and which pedals make the car stop, you learn the tried-and-true method of merging, fondly called “The Zipper”. However, once we're released onto the roads of the real world, oftentimes, people forget the you-go-I-go flow of traffic, forgetting entirely how to merge like a civilized driver.

There is a reason why they say to make sure to get everything down in writing. This employee had the unfortunate experience of learning that life lesson the hard way after the HR representatives of the mental health facility in which he works kept shadily making adjustments to his contract. As someone who has worked freelance, part-time, full-time, and just about all the variations in between, I can confirm wholeheartedly that companies and bosses are going to make grand promises they cannot ke…