Website / Not Always Related

Not Always Related is a sister site to Not Always Right, added to the network in 2011 alongside Not Always Romantic. As the name suggests, these stories detail moments, misadventures, and/or mayhem among families, both good, bad, ugly, or sometimes just downright strange. (As usual, it's best to take these stories with a grain of salt.)

Not Always Related contains examples of:

A-K

• Abuse Mistake: In this story, a Drama Queen notices that her brother's girlfriend has a broken wrist and bruises (which are actually from a ladder fall), and attempts to lead her into admitting he's been beating her. The girlfriend says that yes, he beats her all the time — at chess, Go, Rocket League, Overwatch, Mario Kart... Though in this case it's not so much a mistake as wanting it to be true so she could be the hero riding to the rescue.
• Abusive Parents: Occasionally.
  • This mother is going to be the reason her daughter makes some therapist very wealthy someday.
  • This father destroyed the OP's room upon receiving a vague letter from the teacher, thinking it was something bad. Turned out the OP had received a scholarship to a University and the teacher wanted to surprise the parents. Not surprisingly, the OP and the father no longer speak.
  • This stepdad covers for the money he fritters away on gambling by selling his stepchild's (the submitter's) belongings, including a set of rare Pokémon cards they and their (considerably nicer) mother went through a lot of effort to procure, and mocks and threatens the submitter when they confront him over it. Needless to say, this leads to a serious Calling the Old Man Out moment, and the only time the submitter has made contact with the stepfather since leaving was through their mother to request that he get them the same set of cards for their birthday (and given that 15 years have passed since the initial incident, the card set is going to be far more expensive than they were in the late 90s).
  • These parents actively discourage the submitter from pursuing her dream of becoming a musician (music being one of the few things that makes the submitter happy), because, in their eyes, music is "just a hobby and you’ll never be able to feed yourself or have children properly". It soon goes well beyond just trying to discourage the submitter from pursuing her passion, and eventually the parents are outright sabotaging the submitter's chances at becoming a musician. They start by pulling her out of her music classes behind her back, and when that doesn't work, they begin enforcing ridiculous curfews so the submitter will be unable to attend music concerts, trick her friends' parents into making her come home before she can go to them, and stop driving her places. The last straw comes after the submitter gets accepted to the college of her dreams; on graduation day when the submitter, her best friend, and her brother come home to discover all of her many music instruments are gone. They confront the submitter's father, who reveals that the mother has gone to sell off all the music instruments so the submitter can go to the college they want her to go to, all the while continuing to denounce careers in music and the submitter's aspirations. What happens next is that the submitter's friend calls the police since the parents technically stole the instruments (including some that were rented), and, while we aren't shown what happens next, we do learn that the parents disowned the submitter over the incident, and the submitter is all the happier for it and is now leading what sounds to be a perfectly happy life and music career without them.
  • This stepfather changed the Hulu password and, when questioned about it, calmly admitted that he wanted to kick the submitter out of the house and this was part of the effort. This came as a shock to the submitter, who had no idea there was anything amiss in their relationship with their stepfather. The submitter's mother, who was the one actually paying for the Hulu subscription, rightfully reamed him out and, at the end of the story, is noted to be divorcing him due to this and "several other recent incidents".
  • The boyfriend's parents in this story are implied to be a horror story. The OP runs for the hills when the mother refuses to allow her — a guest in the home and quite possibly a minor at the time — to use the bathroom with the door closed.
  • The mom and stepdad in this story attempt to force the then seven- or eight-year-old OP to drink wine (yes, they wanted a small child to consume alcohol), getting mad at them for "wasting" it (when the kid never asked for it in the first place — they made an innocent request for a soda) and driving them to tears. This ended up getting the story tagged with Child Abuse.
  • This mother told her then 5-year-old daughter she was being naughty for not wanting to leave the playground. The mother took away the daughter's glasses and hearing aids (she has visual and hearing impairments), leaving her virtually blind and deaf, and left her to sit alone on a park bench in order to buy a burrito.
  • This dad looks through his kids' groceries without explanation, finds tampons in the submitter's bag, assumes she's had sex, and immediately kicks her out of the house without letting the poor girl defend herself. His wife has to explain that tampons are not evidence of lost virginity and ends up divorcing him partly because of this incident.
  • The parents from these two stories are controlling miser nightmare parents who think that looking like they're rich is more important than spending on necessities, feeding the submitter expired food, preferring to treat her ADHD with quack remedies, and ignoring an illness that winds up paralyzing her for three days. The father "carried a number of bad lessons" from his time in the army, telling the submitter she's too big to cry after she's just walked through nettles, and responding to his then-three-year-old daughter's fear of monsters hiding in the dark by telling her to go to sleep quickly or the monsters will get her. The latter spurs the submitter to sneak kitchen knives into bed well into her teens and gives her nightmares for even longer. The submitter's controlling, bigoted mother is no better, trying to break up the submitter's relationships. She even goes so far as to try and get her sister – a special needs teacher – to surreptitiously diagnose the submitter's boyfriend with autism (the sister refused and told her niece about the plot). Thankfully, the submitter eventually got away from them.
• Accidental Truth:
  • The trans man from this story was born in his grandparents' house. At the time, his older brother got his sex wrong and hence woke up his grandparents announcing he had a brother, which was quickly corrected to "sister" by their father. Years later, that little boy's "sister" turned out to be a brother after all.
  • This contributor describes "tricking" their sister into thinking that Calling Shotgun is because the person who isn't driving holds the shotgun. As the title says, though, "But That IS What it Means".
• Actor Allusion: invoked If they say fire at Will, but he's not there, who do they shoot? Legolas.
• Actually Pretty Funny: A near-miss in a parking lot causes the submitter to cuss out the other driver, leading him to be lectured by his friend's 3-year-old daughter, which he ends up finding hilarious.
• A-Cup Angst: "I'm always feeding my boobs. I need them to get big and strong."
• Afraid of Needles: This cat is smart enough that she steals the needles and hides them.
• Almighty Mom: As this gentleman puts it, "You don't ignore the 'Mom Voice'!"
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: And siblings, and grandparents, and cousins, and...
• Animation Age Ghetto: invokedThis OP's brother seems to be a firm believer in it, ridiculing the submitter's girlfriend for liking Frozen (2013) and buying an Elsa doll and outright saying that "cartoons are for kids" and "grownups don't care about it". He ends up being disproven by his daughter, who points out the various cartoon and/or comic book characters their various family members like.
• Artistic License – Biology: As a girl growing up in the 1940s, this "aunt" was taught by her mother that highly processed foods are better than fresh foods, to the point where she tries to throw out the homemade bread the submitter's family baked and tries to substitute it with Wonder Bread that's way past its expiration date. Though to her credit, when the ten-year-old submitter uses their textbook to prove that fresh foods are healthier, the aunt backs down (remarking that they didn't teach that in the 1940s), and actually seems to like fresh bread when she tries it out.
• Artistic License – History: The submitter's father is convinced the first European colonists in America taught the Native Americans how to grow corn and not the other way around.
• Ass Shove: Hell hath no fury like a geek burned.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: "Which is shorter, Shrimpy’s life span or my brother’s attention span?"
• Audience Participation: A couple of stories make use of the comments feature by asking commenters to title the story. Whether or not this will start being done on the other Not Always sites remains to be seen.
• Auto-Incorrect:
  • A mom is informed that a visit to the submitter's grandparents has to be rescheduled because the grandfather is sick, but that he will get better soon. The mom replies: "No problem, I hope he does."...which her phone auto-corrects to "No problem, I hope he dies." Luckily for her, everyone just found the goof hilarious and it subsequently becomes a running family in-joke.
  • This phone somehow turns "chicken" into "chelicerae", much to the utter bewilderment of the submitter and their sister (especially as neither one knows what the word even is at first).
    "Yes, [phone], let’s just check the temperature of our SPIDER JAWS."
• Awkward Poetry Reading: In Poetry Getting a Frosty Reception, the OP briefly reads a line from "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost. Their grandmother is confused because she's never heard of this guy, and she says she can't keep up with modern celebrities (not knowing that he's been dead for over fifty years).
• Backseat Driver: Multiple:
  • One poster noticed that his father was unusually eager to help him get his first car. Then he drove his mother on an errand, and found out why.
  • This poster's father had a full meltdown over how his kid was going to smash into another car in the parking lot... which would have been quite the accomplishment since they hadn't started the engine yet.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: A textbook example of this trope is this brother-in-law, who punches a puppy in the face when the puppy – not knowing any better – jumped up at him. He claims this is how you're supposed to get animals under control, and it's soon shown this is how he tries to get people under control too, as the submitter points out (to the brother-in-law's fiancée's chagrin) that he has a history of domestic abuse. Hopefully the guy's engagement didn't last, as the submitter implied that if he had kids, he would have beaten them too!
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • This story sounds like one kid is "gatekeeping" his cousin regarding being a "real" Star Wars fan, quizzing her on what she's seen and various pieces of lore until a question about The Mandalorian stumps her because she doesn't have Disney+ to watch it. Instead of belittling her over that, however, he excitedly grabs his Xbox and they proceed to spend the night binge-watching The Mandalorian on his own Disney+ account. Turns out he was fishing for something he could introduce her to regarding a common interest.
  • In this story, an old man, his adult daughter and her daughter enter a fast food restaurant, and the old man starts yelling at the employee about his order not being made right for the third time that week. The daughter also looks angry and it seems like she's going to start berating the employee as well... but she yells at her father for being rude to the employee and reminds him that she used to work in fast food (and her brother still does), and she would come home crying many times because of customers being awful to her, and he would try to cheer her up by making fun of them, and that those employees are going to do exactly that when they get home. She tells him to wait in the car and proceeds to politely ask the employee to fix the order, which they do. Apparently he takes the lesson to heart, because every time he comes in after that, he's polite and well mannered.
• Belief Makes You Stupid:
  • A particularly sad example here. The OP's father-in-law becomes a born-again Christian, and his personality changes over time from being easygoing and laid-back to a fanatical Christian. He briefly threatened not to go to his daughter's wedding because they weren't getting married in a church, before his wife persuaded him to attend. Six months later, the OP and his wife go to visit him, and after dinner, he attempts to make the OP and the OP's wife sleep in different rooms, as he considers their marriage invalid on the basis that they didn't get married in a church. His wife angrily reminds him that they weren't married in a church either, and he storms out. Sadly, this was merely one of a series of escalating incidents, resulting in his mother-in-law divorcing her husband after the latter attacked an openly gay cousin, most of his family cutting ties with him after the attack, and the OP's wife no longer talking to her dad.
  • This grandmother insults her grandson with homophobic slurs for being not Christian due to the latter being gay, only to be called out by both her grandson and his mother that she isn't a saint since the grandmother has bragged about having many affairs in the past.
  • “Just go read your bible. That’s all you need to know, not outer space facts.”
  • This ablist grandmother, among other nastiness (as related under Gruesome Grandparent), claims her great-grandchild being born with hearing loss is divine punishment for the submitter and her husband having the baby out of wedlock and not marrying in a church.
    (Apparently, Jesus didn’t die for everyone, just the select people Grandmother says he died for.)
• Big Friendly Dog: Meet Bailey, a shy but sweet husky who seldom strays too far from the submitter and goes on to become very protective of the submitter and her husbands' two human babies. Her sibling is a more traditional example of the trope.
• Bilingual Backfire:
  • Here. May overlap with Little Miss Badass.
  • "Listen, you inbred sons of syphilitic whores."
• Black Comedy: This poster and their family are greatly amused when the poster's great-grandmother is late for her own funeral, just as she predicted.
• *Bleep*-dammit!: This one-sentence story includes the word "bitch" twice. It is censored one time, but not the other.
• Blind Without 'Em: The submitter of this story has such a high prescription (+10 in one eye, +13 in the other) that everything is simply too blurry for her to even function if she isn't wearing her glasses. This becomes a massive problem when her paternal grandparents look after her and her older brother while their parents are on vacation, as they refuse to comprehend the idea of any six-year-old needing glasses. After an evening of trying to force her to go without glasses for a week to no avail, they hide her glasses from her while she sleeps, forcing her brother to call their parents to get them to intervene.
• Born Lucky: The luck of this sister absolutely baffles her entire family. The story opens with her needing a GPU for her new gaming PC, but there is a shortage on GPUs and she can't afford to get one. A few months later, the 2022 Crypto Crash happens and crypto miners begin selling their GPUs left and right, and the sister not only scores one but is able to get two more for the submitter and a friend as well. Then a few weeks later, she wins big money while on vacation in Las Vegas.
• Brand Name Takeover: Here is an example of somebody who fails to understand the concept.
• Brain Bleach: "... I’m really wishing I could forget it again."
• Bratty Half-Pint: This little brother, who is heavily implied to have severe anger issues.
• Brick Joke: three... two...
• Bridezilla
  • This sister turns into a very passive-aggressive one while her family is doing all they can to help prepare for the wedding, with the submitter overhearing her complaining to a friend at her bridal shower about how nothing is being done right and that the friend should 'just hire a professional' to take care of things. The submitter is annoyed, as the sister never even says what is wrong, but only complains, and proceeds to continue work on the dress 'made with rage and frustration'.
  • These two stories involve a bridesmaidzilla. The submitter's sister-in-law insisting that her daughter be part of the wedding party, when this was never part of the plan, and even buying a bridesmaid dress that goes against every rule the submitter had listed for what the bridesmaids could wear to the wedding.
  • This bridezilla insisted that a disabled friend be one of her bridesmaids ... but also insisted that the friend walk in the procession without her cane because it didn't fit the "aesthetics", and that simply wasn't physically possible. When the friend insisted she would need the cane, 'zilla stole it while the bridesmaids were getting ready at the church. Luckily for the poster, she'd had some warning and taken precautions — she went down the aisle in the wedding procession without her cane, but riding an extra-gaudy mobility scooter.
• Broken Ace: The brother in this story was an ace in high school, being one of the smartest kids in his class and scoring high on all his placement exams. Come university, he slips further and further, to the point that he stops attending class altogether.
• Buffy Speak: "The black thing!" The submitter needs a tool from their father but doesn't know what it's called, because the only thing they ever heard their father call it was 'the black thing'. It turns out that it's a very limited run custom tool that has no official name.
• Cassandra Truth: The submitter in this story says she doesn't want to pee in the outhouse because there are monsters in it. Her mother comes with her to prove there are no monsters, only to find a pair of timber rattlesnakes on the outhouse floor.
• Christianity is Catholic: Said by this submitter's sister, who didn't realize Protestants like her are also Christians.
• Clashing Cousins: A very one-sided version here, where the submitter is relaxed about her upcoming wedding, while her cousin desperately tries to one-up her by getting married at the same time, and later having kids first. (Joke's on her; the submitter doesn't want children.)
• Coattail-Riding Relative: The submitter's in-laws in these two stories seem to think they're special and will become famous since the father-in-law is a cousin of a B-list Hollywood actor despite the fact he hasn't seen his cousin since the 1960s. Despite her best attempts to dissuade them, her in-laws (and, to a lesser extent, her husband) are convinced they can get the Hollywood cousin to come and perform a USO show for the submitter and her husband when they're living in South Korea in the first story and in the second story, have the cousin promote the mother-in-law's awful music and get her on Oprah.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • This girl is chastised by her mother for saying "Missy has a shitty diaper!", and her mother suggests using the word "messy" instead. The girl corrects herself, saying "Messy has a shitty diaper!" instead.
  • This aunt visits her doctor and is told that, due to her smoking habits, she's developing emphysema and will be "lugging around an oxygen tank within two years". Her reaction is that she needs a new doctor.
  • This guy texts his daughter to rescue him from a boring conversation by saying she needs help to get something from the car. She misses the "needs help" bit, and just takes his car keys. Even better, she then texts back in confusion, because she can see that this hasn't helped his situation, but still isn't sure what she was meant to say.
  • This grandmother with dementia has a habit of throwing things at people as they enter the room. Her teenage granddaughter tells her that someone might get hurt, so from that point on, the grandmother decides to warn people first, then throw something.
  • A double example in this story. First, the submitter catches their young cousin drawing giant circles on the walls and tells them not to "draw such big circles on the walls." They then catch the cousin drawing circles on the walls again, only this time, they're much smaller circles. They tell the cousin to quit it and that "Your dad will be mad!” Later on, they find he's drawn on the wall again, this time a message saying “Don’t be mad, Daddy.”
• Computer Equals Monitor: This person has trouble explaining to his younger cousin why this isn't always the case, since said cousin has almost exclusively owned or used computers that were all-in-one.
• Conspiracy Theorist: This crazy aunt believes that the Church deals "lemon drugs" at bake sales to make money, among other, even crazier things.
• Cool Old Guy/Cool Old Lady: Some of the grandparents.
• Crashing Dreams: In this story, the submitter's mischievous younger sister begins playing random videos on YouTube while the submitter sleeps instead of their white noise meant to help them sleep because of their tinnitus, causing the submitter to dream, in order, that they are in the middle of an intense police shootout, in an anime, and then jamming out to their favorite song before they wake up and see what their sister is up to (waking up just short of ending up in the climax of Rocky IV). In the end, the incident ends up giving the submitter the idea of creating a playlist including guided meditations that ultimately helps them sleep a lot better, so they have to give their younger sister credit for that.
• Crazy Cat Lady: The mother-in-law in this story has had cats her whole life but refuses to take them to the vet for anything. By the end of the story, her cats have been removed from her care and Child & Youth Services is investigating her family for neglect given the state of her home.
• Crazy-Prepared: The mom in this story has apparently made a plan for everything. Even before she knew her child was a boy, she had plans for both the "gets girlfriend pregnant" and "gets pregnant" scenarios, just in case, and has made plans for the event of his sudden death before she was even married. She planned what to do if her own parents die when she was sixteen. As a result, people frequently come to her for advice, because whatever scenario has befallen them, she has already planned what to do if it happens to her.
• Creepy Child: This kid does a decent impression of one.
• Crying Wolf: In this story, the submitter is told that the family's first Dog Got Sent to a Farm, but later they learn the truth. Later on, the submitter is told that the family's second dog is being sent to a farm, causing them to panic until they receive photographic proof that the dog really did get sent to a farm.
• Cute Mute: Well, not permanently mute, but extremely cute.
• Daddy DNA Test: This poster's brother had always accepted the little girl a former fling said was his as his daughter (to the point of accepting full custody), and while those around him were pretty sure the mother was conning him, the brother loved her as his own and refused to hear otherwise, and most of the family had eventually accepted the girl as part of the family on the basis that, regardless of biology, she was the brother's child in every way that mattered… except for the poster's father, who was totally hung up on the biological aspect and refused to back down. When the girl was 6, he agreed to babysit her as an excuse to get her to a DNA testing clinic to "prove" she wasn't his grandchild. First off, the mild-manned brother beats up his dad in the process of explaining that he didn't care about DNA, the girl was his and that was that. Then the family is gathered for another relative's birthday and the idiot pulls out a cake inscribed with "I fucking told you so" and an envelope from the testing clinic. He announces that he finally has proof the little girl isn't a relative, dramatically opens the envelope, and collapses in shock as he reads that the girl is his son's biological child.
• Dead Pet Sketch: This grandmother, while taking care of the submitter's fish, wound up accidentally killing their neon tetras, so she froze them, took them to a pet store, and bought identical replacement fish – all without the submitter finding out until years later.
• Didn't Think This Through: A pregnant woman's husband demonstrates what she needs to do with her prescribed medication by popping one of the pills into his mouth and downing some water, remembering too late that the pills were sleeping pills meant to help his wife get to sleep. Making matters worse is the fact that the man, a pastor at a church at the time, had a church meeting to attend and spent the entire meeting trying to force himself to stay awake. Whoops.
• Did You Die?: "Did your dad die when he was four?"
• Dinosaurs Are Dragons: The grandmother in this story thinks so.
• Dissimile:
  • "A priest, a rabbi and a minister walk into a bar. Only there’s no rabbi and no priest, and it’s not a bar, it’s a KFC. And the minister is me and I’m not a minister."
  • “It’s a lot like ranch dressing, only without the ranch flavor, and with blue cheese instead.”
• Discreet Dining Disposal: At this family wake (with the deceased in an open casket per local tradition), the newly-widowed hostess botched her preparation of dessert, leaving it inedible. The poster and two of their cousins, while trying to find a way to ditch their cake without being caught, discover that the great-grandkids already found a "safe" place — inside the coffin.
• Discriminate and Switch: A surprisingly large amount of parents react to their kids coming out of the closet by sighing in relief that they weren't something else (some of them nowhere near as dramatic as coming out usually is).
• Does Not Like Spam: The poster of this story has one foodstuff which they absolutely cannot stand. Despite knowing this perfectly well, the poster's brother adds some to a stew they were making for a family dinner (the ingredients for which they had paid for with their own money), and refuses to acknowledge that he is in the wrong, insisting that he made it taste better and has nothing to apologize for.^note  The poster never actually specifies what the food is that they hate so much, possibly suspecting that the comments section would be full of well-meaning "Have you tried..."-type advice. However, given the hints in the story — it has a strong taste and smell and a distinctive texture, and the brother apparently thought he could hide it by chopping it up finely — it's probably either onions or garlic.
• Doesn't Know Their Own Child: This divorced, deadbeat mom is so uninvolved in her daughter's life that she doesn't know the girl loves reptiles and insists that a crocodile-themed cake isn't "fitting" for her birthday party. When the dad tells her she would know if she bothered to act like a mother, the woman can only answer with, "How dare you? I gave birth to that girl!" According to the submitter, when the daughter grew older, she realized her mother wasn't worth it.
• A Dog Ate My Homework: Apparently, it does happen.
• Dog Got Sent to a Farm: The perils of this trope are laid bare in this story, when the submitter's dog dies and the kids told that they were sent to a farm. Later, they learn the truth that he'd had to be put down because he was uncontrollable. Later, when the family gets another dog who proves to be a handful, and the parents tell the submitter that they're sending the dog to a work friend with a big farm. The submitter panics, fearing this trope being used again. But no, the dog really is being rehomed at a farm, and the submitter is sent photos to prove it.
• Doom It Yourself: The insane, probably narcissistic dad in this story duct tapes a leaky spigot when a new faucet is available to him because of his delusionally strict standards for what counts as broken, and also covers up leaks by duct taping trash bags over them. Taking this to hopefully unique extremes, he also replaces perfectly fine, brand-new items with the broken ones they replaced - those items being a toilet fill valve with a failed gasket and the toilet itself when it's cracked. The result is water damage so extreme it ends up causing his house to be condemned, but thankfully long after his wife has divorced him and taken their child with her.
• Eats Babies: When a pregnant mother tells her son she has a baby in her tummy here, the son thinks that she ate one.
• Empathy Doll Shot: This writer predicted one.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Determined to prove his son's one-night stand had saddled him with someone else's child despite being long since accepted by the rest of their family and the son in question openly not caring if his daughter is biologically his, this man takes his six-year-old "granddaughter" to get DNA tested behind his son's back, starting a fight that drives them apart for months, then interrupts his own wife's birthday party with an "I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO" cake and the unopened test results... which are positive for a match. The submitter describes him dying a little inside upon reading it as he realizes he permanently and pointlessly alienated his son and granddaughter.

  My brother said nothing but turned the cake around so that the message on the frosting faced our father, instead.

• Entertainment Above Their Age: In All Little Girls Dream Of Their Red Wedding, a young girl pretends to stab her mother (the submitter) with a plastic knife, saying that "the Lannisters send their regards". The submitter asks her if her father let her watch Game of Thrones, and she nods.
• Entitled Bastard: This grandmother and cakemaker ignored everything that the submitter wanted on her cake, including not letting her get a cat on it because the grandmother doesn't like them. Yet when the submitter gives a forced thank-you (which she only did to be polite), both get mad her for not being grateful for "her" cake because they spent a lot of time and money on it.
• Epic Fail: An attempt to make simple hard-boiled eggs has explosive results for the submitter and their dad.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: This entitled Bridezilla is left confused when her mother refuses to keep paying for her wedding after her only reaction to her sister having a miscarriage (after she had been trying for three years for a baby) is to cheerfully declare she can be part of the wedding again, as said bridezilla had previously kicked her out for getting pregnant. The fact that the mother would be horrified by her complete and utter Lack of Empathy towards her sister goes completely over her head.
• Evil Laugh: These two girls.
• Exact Words:
  • When you ask a family member to hang up the holiday decorations, you should specify which holiday.
  • "Stop not touching me!"
  • This submitter's grandfather kept insisting that he would quit smoking on Monday, only to assert each week that it wasn't going to be that Monday. The right Monday finally came... just not the way they expected.
  • When this submitter's grandmother, who was in her 60s, was asked her age, she'd tell them she'd just celebrated her sixteenth birthday. This was actually true...because she was born on February 29, so her true birthday only came around every four years.
  • This cat is smart enough to realize that while he's not allowed to touch food on people's plates, it's fair game if it's on the floor, so he starts knocking food off the plates and onto the floor.
    Dad: “Not his fault if you didn’t make rules about batting plates. He’s following the rules exactly as you taught them. [Cat] should have been a lawyer.”
• Eye Scream: You know those mothers who won't let their kids have an air rifle claiming the kid will shoot their eye out? Well, this story makes that claim well-founded.
• Facepalm: One of those kinds of conversations.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • In her excitement, this mom, elated to be visiting her kid (the submitter) where they live now, fails to notice that at some point while she was raving about the things she and the submitter will be doing during said visit, she picked up a TV remote instead of her phone after setting it down for a moment and spoke into it for eight minutes straight.
  • This poster mistook a drainage ditch for the will-be basement of a new church wing, when they both happened to be built at the same time. Consequently, he missed the entire church being built for several months because he was focused on the drainage ditch. Even seeing them put grass in the ditch didn't deter him; he just wondered "Why do they want grass in the basement?" ^note If this sounds familiar to long-time tropers, you're right: One commenter recalled seeing the story before on This Very Wiki back in the days of Troper Tales, to which the OP replied that he was indeed the same person who posted it way back then.
• Feeling Oppressed by Their Existence: This submitter's brother is described as an 'almost aggressive carnivore', and appears to resent the fact that vegetarians exist. He ends up boycotting his favorite fast food place because he accidentally orders, eats, and enjoys a vegan burger, all while bragging that he'd be able to tell the difference between 'real' and 'fake' meat.
• Fridge Horror: invoked Defied here; after the submitter's aunt, who thought her pregnancy symptoms were constipation, does several things to relieve it that could harm the fetus, the submitter makes sure to note at the end that the baby was born perfectly healthy.
• From Bad to Worse: Marital issues for this family rapidly deteriorate after the teenage submitter being busted for sneaking out to party in the middle of the night becomes the Spanner in the Works revealing their father's infidelity.
• From the Mouths of Babes:
  • Remind me to teach you the importance of prepositions when you get back.
  • "...my dad calls me shit-head!"
  • "Mama, the Lannisters send their regards... Now you die! Die! Die!"
  • "I DIDN'T PLAY WITH THE SCISSORS. MY MOMMY DID IT, NOT ME! GO FUSS AT HER!"
  • “Look, uncle! That man and woman, they're mating!”
  • If you bury them deep enough, you can't hear them scream.
  • "I have known for years that the Naughty-Man is really just Father and Uncle playing 'Hide The Pickle'!"
  • "MOM! MOM! THE PLANE IS HERE! AND BOY IS IT A BIG MOTHERF***!!"
  • "And when will you be five?" "On my birthday."
  • This four-year-old comments on their parents' roommates having lots of books to read, too many actually: "“Well, if you don’t finish them all, I can read them after you’re dead!”
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • "Tap And Regulated Directional Inclined Spray!"
  • Squeal Tires On Pavement (or "Stop Teasing Old People").
• Gasshole: To be fair, the poster noted being backed up.
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: "Are you two gonna do lesbo stuff?"
• Global Ignorance: This woman who claims to not eat Asian food, but then claims to love General Tso’s chicken, not realizing China is part of Asia.
• Good Stepmother:
  • Gender-inverted. The submitter of this story picked up a lot of feminine habits due to being raised solely by women in his family (such as wearing towels wrapped under his arms instead of around his waist, and using towel turbans despite not having long hair). When his mother's new boyfriend moves in, he mentors the kid on how men normally take care of themselves, while assuring the submitter that he'd support him unconditionally if he wanted to keep doing any of it; he was just making sure that the submitter had the full picture and didn't keep doing things blindly without understanding them (like wearing mascara because he didn't realize it was makeup).
  • Another gender-inversion here; after the OP's Step-Aunt (Stepfather's sister) reneges on the plan to take OP to ride the Tower of Terror (the only thing asked of her the entire trip) in favor of dragging her around Epcot while getting drunk (and not letting her get any food or water of her own because she didn't want to deal with taking her to the bathroom), the Stepfather chews her out when she gets back to the hotel. When Step-Aunt crosses a line by claiming that OP isn't the Stepfather's real child so why does OP's happiness matter more than her own, Stepfather promptly cancels her flight home and tells her she can either pay for her own flight or he'd give her money for a bus. According to the OP's parting comments, he didn't talk to her again for two years.
  • This story's title says it all, really: "There’s Nothing Like A Mum — But A Great Stepmum Is Pretty Close". In a nutshell, the OP's biological mother died when she was five, and her father, after grieving for several years, went on to remarry an amazing woman who loved the OP like her own child while also being incredibly understanding of the fact that OP's deceased mother still held a place in her life and always would. When OP's father became ill and there was concern over what would happen if the worst came to pass (thankfully, it didn't, as the OP later reveals that her father survived, though he did lose a leg to the illness), the stepmother made it clear she was willing to adopt OP if she wanted, but was also ready with an alternative option — a legal guardianship, which would allow her to have parental rights over OP without having to do a full adoption — and wasn't bothered in the slightest that OP chose the latter due to feeling like an adoption would amount to "replacing" her mother. Years later, Stepmum is now an awesome grandmother to OP's own children. The last line sums it up pretty well:
    "[Stepmum] is absolutely my mum in every sense of the word except on paper — and she never pushed for the paper, either."
• Gosh Darn It to Heck!: “Oh fiddle farther!”
• Gruesome Grandparent:
  • This father is incapable of being quiet, insists that his granddaughter gets brought over for visits and is still as loud as ever, despite said granddaughter needing special care due to epilepsy. He doesn't care that his being loud is causing her unnecessary seizures, citing that he needs to 'assert himself' and that it's his house.
  • This submitter's mother in law convinces the OP (a new mother with postpartum depression) to let her watch her three month old granddaughter so she and her husband can have a date night. Seems fine… except when the parents come to pick up the baby, they find her hyperventilating and miserable. They learn that the mother-in-law disregarded their requests to not let her “cry it out” and refused to comfort her when she got fussy. She also coldly says that she’ll do "whatever she wants" whenever she watches her, and that "she’d just shut the door with the vacuum on". The parents respond by refusing to leave the baby alone with her. To make matters worse, the daughter now panics every time she sees her grandmother, leading commenters to believe that the mother-in-law did worse than that. This story wound up being tagged with a child abuse warning.
  • These grandparents force the submitter and her older brother to overeat because they're "too skinny"; belittle the submitter's interests behind her back because they can't comprehend the idea of a Girly Girl with a Tomboy Streak; try to convince a girl who is incapable of functioning without glasses to go without them for a few days because of their "kids can't need glasses" mindset; then, when that fails, hide her glasses while she's asleep. The submitter's brother has to call their parents to intervene, at which point their maternal grandparents have to pick them up to avoid their parents having to cut their tenth wedding anniversary vacation short.
  • This grandmother is a Female Misogynist who comes from a culture where men "buy" daughters to marry, and since this doesn't work in the US, she unfairly singles out the submitter for being the only girl among her grandkids and thus unable to carry on the family name. (not like her, of course! Her husband paid six cows for her!) She makes her disapproval known by gifting the submitter actual garbage, then when people object, says she should be grateful she got anything at all. Even the submitter's parents can't bring themselves to disagree when the submitter calls her grandmother a bitch to her face.
    
    Later, the grandmother becomes a Gruesome Great-Grandparent, as when the submitter has her first child, not only is it also a girl, but it's out of wedlock, and the submitter doesn't marry in a church. Naturally the grandmother doesn't approve, ranting that her new great-granddaughter will be go to Hell for their sins. Then when the submitter's daughter is diagnosed with hearing loss, the grandmother claims that this proves her point and that this is "God's punishment," feeling that the disabled are nothing but a drain on their families and the government. This proves to be the last straw for the submitter's father, who disowns his mother on the spot. And even then, the grandmother harasses the submitter and her husband until they get the police involved (and even then, she tries to bribe the cops).
• HA HA HA—No: This story's submitter's response to being invited to a beach wedding in Jersey Shore with a near-identical prelude to a traumatic vacation that happened 20 years prior^note (way too many people crammed into a four-bedroom, two-bathroom beach house, including a cranky grandmother who misjudged how many people could fit into the beach house she was renting, a pregnant woman who will frequently need the bathroom, and a couple having marital problems that will only be exacerbated by the stress of being in an overcrowded beach house; the only thing missing is the surprise factor, and all the absence of that did was allow the submitter and their brother to nope out of there).
• Happy Ending Override: This story seemingly ends on a positive note, with the OP's future mother-in-law helping her and her husband (MIL's son) communicate better and thereby saving their relationship. Unfortunately, OP revealed in the comments that this argument — and specifically her husband's I-can't-be-wrong attitude that was a major factor in said argument — proved to be a sign of more serious issues that ultimately ended the marriage, and that consequently, at the time of the story's publication, they were in the process of getting a divorce.
  • To a lesser extent, this story of rehabilitating an abused rabbit, as the submitter revealed in the comments that the story was a few years old and that the subject of the story had since passed away. However, it's only downgraded to a Bittersweet Ending, as the story of the rabbit overcoming her past and going on to live a happy life remains a heartwarming one even after said rabbit's death, something the submitter acknowledged in the same comment.
    Submitter: This story made me cry good tears and brought a smile to my face, to remember her and how she became such a sweet, happy girl.
• Heteronormative Crusader:
  • The mother who was willing to disown her own daughter just for dating a woman.
  • This grandmother likewise argues that married gay women won't be able to raise children properly without a man around (despite having raised a son by herself) and when the submitter reveals she's gay, the grandmother tries to use the fact that she's "too old to change" to try and get the submitter to change her mind, and then, two months after the submitter marries a woman, asks if she's getting a divorce.
• Hiccup Hijinks: This family seems to have found a cure that works for them.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Jealous of the benefits his twin sister is getting through her private school (while he is going to a public school that he realized too late had no such benefits due to neglecting to research it before applying), this brother tries to get her in trouble during the school year by tattling on her at every turn as payback. His attempts at getting her in trouble backfire every time, be it through getting scolded afterward for the tattling or getting himself grounded by swearing in frustration after his plans backfire.
• Horrible Camping Trip:
  • A family vacation to Jersey Shore goes awry when the then eight-year-old submitter's aunt and uncle ask to come along (their marriage is on the rocks and they think a vacation will help calm everything down) and bring along their three kids (who all bring one friend each) and cram themselves along with everyone there already into the four bedroom beach house, causing the house to be very crowded and causing stress for everyone involved (including a pregnant aunt who can never use the toilet as it's almost always occupied). Then not only do the aunt and uncle begin constantly having fights, but their kids all end up having falling-outs with their respective friends that they brought and begin constantly fighting as well (which ends up injuring the submitter when one of the cousins attempts to burn her former friend's hands on something only for the submitter to do so instead) and the submitter's drama-loving grandmother enables the fighting parties' behavior and picks fights with everyone as well. To make matters worse, it rains for the entire duration of the vacation, so the fighting parties are stuck with each other and can't leave to cool down and those who aren't fighting and just want to have a relaxing vacation can't get away from them. The end result is that it decimates what's left of the fighting aunt and uncle's marriage, creates a number of family feuds (some of which are still on-going), and when the submitter gets invited on another vacation 20 years later that has an eerily similar setup to the one that started the mess back then (complete with a pregnant relative and a couple having marriage troubles), they and their brother head for the hills.
  • A couple with no knowledge of camping decide to take their seven children on a camping holiday. They have to borrow a tent, which is too small, they take far too much stuff for their horse to carry, and with the knowledge that there are bears in the area, the father takes along his brother's rifle which he's never fired in his life with the assumption that the horse will warn them if there's anything coming. After an awful night jammed into the tent, during which the father got no sleep because he kept jerking awake with the rifle in his hands at every bump in the night (the invoked Fridge Horror of the nervous, inexperienced man with a gun in a tent full of kids not sinking in until years later), and with breakfast going just as badly, they decide to pack up, go to an amusement park, and never go camping again.
• Horrible Judge of Character: This possibly senile grandmother-in-law is paranoid about her family stealing from her, but is gullible enough to take anyone else who asks for information from her at their word, so due to a combination of identity theft and scams, she fritters away all $250,000 of her inheritance from her late husband (which would've gone to her children on her death) in less than two years.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • "You've got to be careful of what you eat, you don't want to become unhealthy. Do you want me to get Twinkies when I'm at the store?"
  • "You can't force people to do something they don't want to do! Now you have to rewrite this story in a way you do not want it written! Several times!"
  • "Why do we even call [deer meat] venison, though? We don't invent special words for other animals, like beef." "Gee, that beef sure is having fun, frolicking in the field."
  • From a mother who asked her college-age daughter to bring some laundry home for her to wash — "...and you know college students: here she comes, SWANNING in with a bag full of laundry!"
  • "She’s not showing good manners!" Said through a mouthful of chips.
  • "I do wish the Muslims would realise we westerners are not all the same."
  • Turn your reasonably quiet metal music off! But don't tell me to turn my loud classical music down while you're trying to sleep.
  • This uncle lambastes his sister for being asleep when their mother couldn't get an answer from her at 3 AM. When asked why he waited for five hours before doing anything about this, he gives the excuse that he was asleep.
  • This aunt goes on a spiel about how the submitter's dad is "raising a murderer" because the submitter just got a rifle as a Christmas present, despite said submitter being a legal adult, having taken multiple gun safety courses, and having been a competitive shooter for years. This all in response to the submitter's dad pointing out that said aunt is letting her ten-year-old son drink an alcoholic beverage. And then she gives her car keys to said intoxicated ten-year-old so they can get ready to leave, while claiming the submitter's family are the dangerous ones.
  • This father yells at a grandmother for feeding his one-year-old son a sugar cookie ("That stuff is poison!")... then turns and gives the baby Jack Daniels. Everyone gapes in disbelief, the poor toddler is disgusted, and the man's wife immediately drags him out of the room to read him the riot act afterward.
  • Adjusting the AC controls with one hand while driving? You could cause an accident! Why are you arguing about me unfolding and poring over the map while I'm driving?
  • This mother threatens to sue if her child slips on a wet floor, but can't be bothered to properly buckle her poor child into her car.
• I Always Wanted to Say That: Literally.
• I Call Him "Mister Happy": This argument.
• I Got a Rock: This poor kid.
• I Have No Daughter!: This mother kicks her bisexual daughter and her girlfriend out the minute she realizes that they're dating, yelling "Good riddance!" when the daughter decides to move in with the girlfriend instead to rub salt in the wound.
• I Have This Friend: This story claims the subject of the story is "my 17-year-old cousin", but at the end the narration switches to first-person after that person is embarrassed for saying too much.
• I Reject Your Reality:
  • This dad has such ludicrously strict standards for what counts as "broken" that he refuses to replace things that any sane person would consider broken. To point out how ludicrous his standards for what counts as broken are: he sees a leaky faucet, a fill valve with a faulty gasket, and a cracked toilet as totally fine and not broken at all, to the point where he is willing to replace brand new items with the unfit-for-use items they replaced. His wife ends up divorcing him, taking the submitter with her, after he smashes a $3600 toilet to reinstall the cracked toilet it replaced. Even after his house ends up condemned because the totally-not-broken faucet and toilet end up causing severe water damage and black mold is found behind the shower, he's still convinced there was nothing wrong with the house.
  • This neighbor refuses to believe that her sons have been breaking the submitter's things while going to his backyard to use his basketball hoop in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, namely that she is the only one in the neighborhood with sons the boys' age and another neighbor has captured photographic evidence that it was indeed them. (Though to the boys' credit, they apologized and paid for the things they broke and were allowed back in to use the net with the submitter's permission.)
• I Want Grandkids:
  • One mother with a gay kid seems to be willing to accept a puppy as a reasonable substitute.
  • This dad really wants some from the submitter, constantly ignoring the fact that the submitter doesn't want any because the aforementioned dad has too many and the oversized family put the submitter off early.
  • This poster's grandmother's goal in life is to be a great-grandmother. The poster is the oldest granddaughter, so is the "lucky" recipient of regular demands that she find a guy, get pregnant, and pop out that great-grandchild pronto. (The end of the story implies that the poster has gone low-contact with Grandma in response.)
• Ignore the Fanservice: This teenage boy is more enthralled by a tool belt than he is by the scantily-clad woman wearing it.
• Inherently Funny Words: "Eggplant" was this for this kid.
• Innocent Innuendo:
  • Horny! Horny!
  • I finally got into my boyfriend's pants!
• Insane Troll Logic:
  • Why you never see cats near ice cream shops.
  • This stepmother simultaneously tells her son he doesn't have to listen to what his stepsister tells him, and punishes that stepsister when he doesn't listen to her and promptly injures himself.
  • This woman can't understand why her daughter crashed the motorbike she was riding and broke her arm. After all, she's twelve and the friends who owned it are ten, so she should be better than them, right? Never mind the fact that they have been riding since they were four and she's never been on one before.
  • This mom seems to be employing this by asking one kid to help her shop for gifts for the other kid, then dismissing every suggestion the submitter makes and buying the gift recipient a sweater in the wrong size.
  • This dad kicks his daughter out of the house for being a "slut"... because she bought tampons. His justification? "YOU CAN'T HAVE TAMPONS IF YOU'RE A VIRGIN!"
  • A rare (mostly) harmless version here, in which a father responds to his son's innocent question about why trains go clickety-clack.
    Dad: “Well, what is a train? The locomotive and the cars. But the cars are only riding along, so only the locomotive is important. And what is the locomotive? Electric engines and wheels. But the engines are rotary, so these do not click. That leaves the wheels, and what is a wheel? A disc. A disc is pi times radius times radius. But pi is a constant; you do not need it. And what is radius times radius? Radius squared. And corners of that square are what clicks.”
  • This paranoid alcoholic mother is a repeat offender, jumping to very strange conclusions about the people around her. She thinks her husband raped a woman because he came home with his face scratched up (it was from an angry customer), and accuses the submitter's nine-year-old sister of perpetrating a recent bank robbery because the actual perpetrator was a petite teenage girl. The story itself centres around the mother thinking the submitter – her son – stole her purse, even going so far as to get him called to the office at school over the matter. Not only did she just leave the purse in a friend's van, but the reason she thought the submitter had stolen it was because he'd talked about moving to California, so she assumed he'd stolen her purse, not for the money, but so he could use her I.D. to impersonate her and buy a plane ticket. The submitter's father would wait until both his children were of age before divorcing her, and it's implied that the submitter doesn't talk to her anymore.
    Submitter: “You thought I was going to dress in drag… and try to buy a plane ticket as a seventeen-year-old who is a six-foot-two, 180-pound male using the license of someone that says the bearer should be a thirty-nine-year-old woman standing at five-foot-three and weighing 130 pounds?”
    Mother: “Well… I’m just glad to know you wouldn’t do something like that. It says a lot about you.”
    Submitter: “JESUS CHRIST, MOM!”
  • This aunt (loudly) blames her misfortunes in life on the fact that she was the only one of five children who wasn't breastfed. Eventually, her mother – the submitter's grandmother – gets fed up with this, rips her shirt open, and asks the aunt if she wants to start now. The aunt never complains about it again.
• Insult Backfire: In this story, a daughter says that a classmate said she looked like a wild swine. Her grandfather agrees, because a wild swine is a strong, courageous, and intelligent animal, who routinely stands up to hungry wolf packs, and who, when she grows up, becomes the most caring mom in the whole forest.
• Is It Something You Eat?: "Lizard?! I thought [an iguana] was a fruit!"
• It's All About Me: Now has its own page.
• Jerkass: Now has its own page.
• Jerkass Realization: This poster's mother complains about the poster's son not answering the phone or door when the mother came over to leave a message, ignoring the fact that her grandson works night shift and she came by during the day (when he was asleep). The poster finally gets the message across by reminding their mother about that time the mother had to work a night shift and her mother demanded she get up after only three hours of sleep.
• Kids Prefer Boxes: This story features someone Genre Savvy enough to give the cat the box itself.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: This story centers around a nephew's self-centered, girlfriend named Cleo who likes to hop on to whatever trend she thinks is fancy, be it depression, women's rights, pescatarianism, or veganism. Only trouble is, she doesn't seem to have done much in the way of research on those trends. For example, she thinks pescaterianism is eating only chicken.

L-Z

• Lame Rhyme Dodge: R we sure it's rated PG? Yes we are!
• Laser-Guided Karma: Now has its own page.
• Last-Minute Baby Naming: Combined with Line-of-Sight Name in this case, where the parents chose a name ahead of time, but forgot to allow for the effects of painkillers on Mom. Fortunately, the nurses kept the birth certificate away from her long enough that the poster was not named Window.
• Lethal Chef: Borderline in this story, where the submitter's parents-in-law see absolutely nothing wrong with cooking with ingredients that are several months past their best-before date and in some cases are very obviously mouldy. It crosses over into Way Past the Expiration Date for the oil in the frying pan, which the submitter hasn't seen cleaned out in over 15 years.
• Lethally Stupid:
  • This grandfather can't seem to figure out why his daughter-in-law won't let him and his wife watch their granddaughter for a few days.
  • This story opens with the submitter describing her mother-in-law as "the kind of person who would cause the apocalypse with a rubber duckie and blame the whole world for overreacting to the duckie just happening to sit on the big red button." The mother-in-law demonstrates this by trying to surprise her son and daughter-in-law with a new dog, Apollo, meant to be a companion for her future grandchild. Apollo turns out to be a poorly bred, very bad-tempered, and – due to the mother-in-law's laziness and stupidity – non-neutered and un-trained creature who actually tore a raccoon apart and is incapable of so much as playing without causing bodily harm to others, including the very pregnant submitter. By the end of the story, both the submitter and her husband have cut off all contact with the mother-in-law because they don't trust her around their daughter, and she still doesn't see why they reported Apollo for "just playing" with them.
  • This anti-vaxxer mother-in-law thinks that the COVID-19 Pandemic is a scam and when the submitter and their husband catch COVID over the holidays, she sees nothing wrong with bringing her entire family (including her grandkids) to their house. The submitter and their husband have to tell them to Get Out!. Not surprisingly, she and some of the family subsequently come down with "bad colds."
• Literal-Minded:
  • "Give Nana a big smack on the lips!"
  • A common metaphor from The American Civil War was "seeing the elephant" to mean one's first experience of combat, and a film about the soldiers used that phrase as its title. This poster's kid was disappointed that there were no elephants in the film.
• Logic Bomb: This person attempts this with their brother.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • This kid offers his brother $20 to break three eggs over his head... unfortunately for the brother, the submitter never said anything about having to break the eggs.
  • These brothers' wives said that they couldn't buy themselves game systems for Christmas. They said nothing about buying one for the other brother, though. The men's mother suggested the wives buy each other expensive jewelry next year.
• Love-Obstructing Parents:
  • The mother in this story, as these bigoted parents are controlling misers who disapprove of the company their daughter keeps (objecting to one friend for being Polish). With her boyfriend the mother objects in particular to his parents being in the public sector, or to him being too poor, or to him hanging around with the wrong crowd (when they haven't even seen his crowd). It comes to a head when the mother invites the submitter's boyfriend on a holiday, but also invites the submitter's maternal aunt – a special needs teacher – to surreptitiously screen the boyfriend to see if he has autism. When she finds out, the aunt refuses to go along with it and tells the submitter and her boyfriend. The submitter would later move into an apartment with her boyfriend and hasn't looked back.
  • Similarly, this controlling mother disapproves of the submitter – her son's girlfriend – for things like offering to help babysit or cook (claiming it undermined her parenting), having the audacity to disagree with her in front of her children, and treating her son to miso soup (“Miso soup has soy! Soy makes boys gay!” – even though the mother regularly has soy sauce). She only gets worse until the submitter breaks up with the boyfriend over his mother's tirades and personal attacks.
• Malaproper:
  • This girl, for instance.
  • "Oregon milk."^note Meant to be organic milk
• Mama Bear: "Well, that proves it. If you anger a mother, you must have a death wish..."
• Massive Numbered Siblings:
  • This submitter's great-grandparent might be the reigning champ on the site. After the vast majority of a town's male population was wiped out during World War I, the submitter's great-grandfather came home and proceeded to marry between four and seven women (no one is quite sure) as well as having numerous mistresses and one-night stands. He effectively repopulated the town by himself, siring upwards of fifty children, one being the submitter's maternal grandparent. The end result is that the submitter's mother is literally a blood relative of nearly every person in her hometown.
  • Though it's nowhere near as many as the previous example, the father in this story, by the time the submitter is in their thirties, is up to five marriages and twelve children (three adopted). Despite living in a house too small for the number of people, constantly complaining about the noise his children make and having to work three jobs, the father would still rather have another kid than use any kind of contraceptive. And he refuses to accept that the submitter (who by the end of the story is a happily married lesbian post-hysterectomy) won't give him any grandchildren.
• The Matchmaker: This grandfather is determined to marry off his granddaughters.
• Meaningful Name: Two dog adopters are surprised when a puppy in no way resembling a wolf is called "Wolfie" by the breeder's children. They find out why later that night when the puppy starts howling at the moon.
• Mistaken for Gay:
  • This poster's boyfriend, by his (well-meaning) parents. They even arranged a little surprise party to congratulate him on coming out of the closet... only to discover that the partner he'd brought home to meet them was, in her own words, "a skirt-wearing, female-born girl" who just happened to have a Gender-Blender Name. They broke up six months later, and it's implied that the awkwardness with his parents was at least part of the reason for it.
  • This school assumes that the (male) submitter showing up to a high school prom in a dress is his way of coming out. In reality, he just refuses to wear tuxedos (he and his Japanese wife wear kimonos for their wedding).
• Mondegreen Gag:
  • "Life's a butter dream."
  • The horse on 7th Avenue.
• My Beloved Smother:
  • And why she didn't go to the wedding.
  • Another mother wasn't happy about her kid choosing a college three hours away from home, so she slashed his tires to keep him from moving out.
  • Exaggerated in this story, where the submitter's then-boyfriend grew up in a household where privacy 'is for sinners', and neither he nor his seven siblings are allowed to do anything without their mother knowing what they're doing. Lock a phone? It gets taken away. Lock a door? That gets taken away. Want to go out? Provide an exact itinerary or you're not going. This means that nobody, not even a guest - the submitter - is allowed to use the bathroom with the door closed, a fact which drives her to dump her boyfriend that night when he says she should get used to it.
  • This mom learns that her college-age daughter has signed up to do relief work after Hurricane Katrina. She proceeds to drive all the way from Ohio to see what conditions the volunteers are staying in, and immediately takes her daughter back home when they don't meet her standards.
  • A case where the dad is just as overbearing as the mom is. The submitter's parents find out that she went to see a midnight movie premiere with her friends and throw an absolute fit that she broke curfew, demanding that she turn in her car keys or get grounded...never mind that the submitter is an adult who has a steady job, her own house, and can now make her own curfew. Her parents refuse to let it go and months later are completely baffled as to why the submitter decided to move very far away from them.
  • This mom enforces her house rules so hard that she kicks her son's girlfriend out of the house while she is visiting because the mom found out the girlfriend had a beer with her meal at a restaurant the night before (which the mom only knew about because she snooped around in the girlfriend's car and found the receipt). When her son rightfully calls her out for not respecting his girlfriend's boundaries, she refuses to budge, so he leaves the house. The couple later marries and it's heavily implied that they haven't spoken to the mom ever since.
  • This mother, who lead a very rough-and-tumble youth and is paranoid about her own children doing the same, expects her daughter – the submitter – to bring her along on her honeymoon (citing the example of a friend of hers who did the same with her son and daughter-in-law). By the end of the story, the submitter lives six time zones away from her mother.
• Never My Fault:
  • A textbook example in this story courtesy of the submitter's ex-sister-in-law blaming everyone but herself when a trip goes wrong despite her ignoring every single piece of advice given to her.
  • In this story (Warning: animal injury), the submitter's father repeatedly lets the submitter's greyhound out of the house despite being told to never let her out of the fenced-in back yard, as the greyhound is one of several greyhounds rescued from a greyhound racing circuit after being rejected for not being fast enough to race and must be kept contained in an enclosed space and be muzzled for the safety of both herself and other people and animals. Unfortunately, the submitter's father completely disregards these warnings and continuously and deliberately lets the dog out again despite the submitter berating him over it every time. Then when the dog chases and attacks the neighbor's cat as a result of him letting the dog out AGAIN (fortunately, the cat escapes any serious physical injury, but the poor thing never goes out in front of the house again), he has the nerve to play the "why didn't you stop me from letting her out again" card and acts like the whole incident was the submitter's fault (but he never lets the dog out again anyway).
• Nonchalant Dodge: Two brothers have become so accustomed to their younger brother's frequent temper tantrums that they dodge and/or block every single thrown projectile that comes toward them or the submitter without breaking their conversation(s).
• Noodle Incident
  • There's probably a very juicy story behind this comment...
  • This submitter mentions that their flight was cancelled due to bad weather, and they were then treated like a criminal by airport security for hours, but the story focuses on their dispute with their siblings. Most comments want to know the story behind the airport security behavior.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: In this story, the submitter loses a trilogy of books their father convinced them to borrow within their messy house, and their father is irate because he intended to let his brother borrow the books later. After failing to find the books, the submitter gives up and replaces the books out of their own pocket... at which point their dad forgets about the books and his brother and instead begins railing on the submitter for being careless with their money.^*In the end, it turned out the dad had the books the whole time and they had ended up under his and his wife's bed; he simply refuses to mention the incident again afterward.
• No Indoor Voice: This father shouts to get the submitter's brother's attention, not seeming to notice that he's distracting the submitter from their studying.
• No True Scotsman: This Singaporean grandmother has an outdated view on what she consider a real, proper marriage, so much so that she refuses to give her family engagement ring to any of her children who don't fit that view which includes having an older wife, being an architect, or a lesbian marriage. Ironically, the daughter to whom she did give her engagement ring (since she was the only one she viewed as having a "proper" marriage) ends up giving the ring to her daughter, who's actually a lesbian and plans to use that ring to propose to her girlfriend!
• Nonconformist Dyed Hair: In this story, the submitter's hair is blue and pink before her wedding and her soon-to-be mother-in-law suggests that she dye it a more normal color before the wedding. Not only does the submitter get married with her hair still blue and pink, but her new husband and stepchildren also dye their hair different colors for the wedding.
• Not Blood, Not Family: The submitter's brother in this story takes in the daughter of an old flame of his who claims the child is his. His father however, doesn't see the point, insisting the child isn't his, so he shouldn't bother. The submitter's brother, however, defies this trope, saying that he sees her as his daughter, regardless of if he's the real father. Of course, this also counts as a Subversion, as when the submitter's father surreptitiously gets a Daddy DNA Test to try and prove the child isn't his, he winds up making a total ass of himself when the test reveals that the girl is in fact the brother's.
• Not a Morning Person: Maybe, but he's good at getting rid of spam phone calls.
• Obnoxious In-Laws:
  • This woman repeatedly shows up very late for events involving her son and his wife, which the submitter believes to be a power-play of hers to gain attention. When their wedding rolls around, they tell the mother-in-law an earlier time than it actually takes place. Not only does she arrive 'late' (five minutes before the event starts), but also wears white to the wedding, which is considered a no-go. Realizing that she's not late, she storms out, and spends the reception (to which she is, of course, late) pouting in the corner.
  • This submitter's sister-in-law is a prude who believes married couples only have sex to get pregnant, which she weirdly calls "delicate condition", and when she spots the submitter buying a large box of condoms at a convenience store, she accuses her of having an affair since "married couples don't use condoms". When the submitter explains she bought the box of condoms since she and her husband enjoys sex and are just being safe, the sister-in-law tries to shame her, claiming her mother would be embarrassed by what she's doing - only for the submitter's mother herself suddenly appearing with another box of condoms for her, causing the now embarrassed sister-in-law to storm out while sputtering about how "shameful" they are.
    • Likewise, when this sister-in-law drops in for a surprise visit with her husband, she catches the submitter breastfeeding her baby in her own house, prompting her to cover her husband's eyes, drape a shawl over the submitter, and accuse her of "molesting" her children and "exposing my husband to nudity."
  • In this story, the submitter and their spouse names their daughter "Macy." Two years later, the submitter's cousin-in-law had named their daughter "Maizie" (short for "Maiizelen") Macy's first memories wind up being of the submitter's in-laws stating that their Maizie was the better one. The cousins even pregame on Christmas with mugs that say "#RealMaizie[last name]." Not surprisingly, Maizie is not invited to Macy's wedding.
  • One particularly overbearing mother-in-law has the (dis)honour of being the subject of seven different stories (one of which is on Not Always Right), usually for "volunteering" the submitter for things without consulting her. The stories themselves centre on her…
    • Falsely telling a work friend that the submitter would make a wedding cake for $50 when the cake they wanted would cost hundreds of dollars.
    • Falsely telling a relative the submitter had never met that their family could stay at the submitter's house.
    • Falsely telling another co-worker that they could have the submitter's preemie clothes.
    • Coercing the submitter's husband into letting her bring a neighbour she wanted to court over for dinner and then (loudly) calling the submitter "a horrible mother" and accusing them of raising a spoiled brat. (Said child was a toddler and a slightly picky eater) Thankfully, the submitter nonchalantly put the mother-in-law in her place, and the neighbour had the mother-in-law's measure and said they'd make sure everyone knew how the submitter had embarrassed her.
    • Reorganizing the submitter's kitchen without her consent. (the submitter would later return the favour)
    • Falsely telling her co-workers that the submitter was starting a daycare and that they could drop off their kids with her.
    • Leaving one of the submitter's kids in a shopping cart for some time while she shops several aisles away, then when the submitter won't let her take care of her kids again, harassing other relatives to try and get them to talk her out of it.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • This teen here.
  • This dad.
• Older Than They Look: "Wait... you're her daughter? Just show me your ID then; if you're old enough to drink then she sure as hell is!"
• Outrun the Fireball: This family outruns a massive blizzard on a Wyoming interstate while on a road trip, remaining only what is implied to be only a mile or two ahead of it and describing the view behind their car as "just this wall of gray chasing us".
• Parental Favoritism:
  • Unfortunately, there's an example of this, too. Fortunately, it's limited to the father - who, of course, calls the submitter an "awful selfish daughter" for not wishing him a happy birthday as payback for this incident.
  • The parents in this story very clearly favor their son over their daughter. Even after he gave up on doing college classes, they do everything they can to cover for him, including trying to emotionally blackmail their daughter into helping them do his online courses, her academic standing be damned.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: This submitter does a Headbutt of Love to their infant niece. During another visit quite some time later, the niece ends up performing a pretty hefty headbutt against the submitter's face, leading to them yelling "Fucking shit!".
• Poor Communication Kills: A terminal lack of communication on the parts of the submitter's parents and aunt and uncle (along with existing tension in the family) ends with said aunt and uncle arrested and the submitter's mother shouting the submitter's ear off in this story.
• Promotion to Parent: The submitter in this story is the older brother to a set of twins and is forced to babysit for them every time his parents want to go out, which is often and scheduled at the last moment, making it hard for him to make plans. It comes to a head when he moves from Canada to Japan to be with his fiancée, and his parents once again call him to see if he can babysit his siblings that night. The submitter immediately berates his parents for assuming that he can simply go from Japan to Canada to cater to their last minute plans (and that he had told them for a month that he was moving to Japan) and refuses. His parents don't take it well and send him several texts treating his move like mere tourism, and OP doesn't invite them to the wedding.^note  Several comments note that had the parents been invited, they would have likely tried to make OP babysit during his own wedding.
• Pun: Prostatitis? Does that come from a prostitute?
• Punny Name: A. Wan Kenobi.
• Pyromaniac: This eight-year-old girl carries matches everywhere she goes.
• Racist Grandma: The submitter's Irish aunt's racist beliefs have made it difficult for her liberal-minded relatives to get along with her. She insists the Irish have it worse than Blacks when they came to America, and even says that it was the black people's fault they were made into slaves due to their "backward culture," despite her relatives pointing out that blacks were forcefully brought to America against their will and were treated way worse than the Irish.
• Raised by Dudes: Gender-inverted in this story, where the submitter was raised by girls, and unwittingly picks up femme behaviors like shaving his legs. He later gets a cool stepfather who offers to teach him the ways of masculinity.
• Red Scare: Extends to the animal kingdom, apparently.
• Relative Error:
  • This story is more like the trope turned inside out.
  • "Thank you, but even if I swung that way, she is my sister."
  • And many more.
  • And this one, made even more surprising seeing that it was another relative who made this assumption.
• Rhetorical Question Blunder:
  • When this poster came out as asexual, their mother asked how they knew they didn't like sex if they hadn't tried it. The poster asked how their mother knew she didn't like sex with girls if she hadn't tried it. The mother's reaction implies that she did, disgusting the poster with the thought.
  • This mother:
    Submitter: “You have subscriptions to [Service 1] and [Service #2]! Do you call every day to see if you’ve been robbed?!”
    Mother: “YES! AND YOU NEED TO!”
• Rouge Angles of Satin:
  • Chicken Thai.
  • A more literal example than most that leads to the submitter and their friend briefly thinking the Prince of Darkness scratched the friend's three-or-four year-old sister (it was actually a cat named "Satin").
• Rule of Three: A trilogy of stories revolving around the submitter's aunt and the senior centre she attends. First with her obsessive attitude about how every senior should belong to one, the second (which is a Not Always Working story) revolving around the senior centre director's attempt to pass a state law to force seniors to attend senior centres because she believes they cannot take care of themselves (and their senior centre is running out of money), and the third in which it emerges that – thanks to the pastor who preaches there – the aunt has become a holocaust denier. Thanks to the submitter's reports, both the second and third stories result in the director and the pastor's firing and banning respectively, and ultimately (as a result of the third one) the aunt no longer speaks to the submitter.
• Running into the Window: This cat is used to a window in the house being open so she can jump up there and watch things happen outside. One day, the cat's owner shuts the window because it's starting to rain. The cat comes back from eating and tries to leap up onto the windowsill like she always does. BONK! After this, the cat always stretches out her paw to make sure the window is open before jumping up.
• Scotireland: This mom can't seem to keep the two straight.
• The Scream: Brings the stepfather running when "I went to open the basement door and Donald Trump scared me."
• Screamer Prank: This mother falls victim to a malware-induced one involving a photoshopped picture of Barack Obama. She responds by setting the entire computer on fire.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After this insane man smashes a toilet intended to replace one that was developing a crack because he doesn't consider clearly damaged objects "broken" until they're genuinely unusable—never mind that plumbing is still usable long after any sane person would consider it "broken"—his wife has enough of him forcing them to live in a house that makes a colander look watertight and bails with their kid, the submitter, in tow.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: This motorcyclist forgets enough things to come back into the house three times before departing. Only forty-five minutes and a trip to his place of work later does he remember that he doesn't work on Sundays.
• Shaped Like Itself:
  • "I was the same height as me when I was 16!"
  • "Dad, what's chicken made out of?" The response? "Chicken."
• Shark Fin of Doom: Encountered in this story.
• Shoddy Knockoff Product: "Dunicell" batteries.
• Side Bet: Betting on loved ones' sexual orientations is apparently very common:
  • "Coming Out Can Be A Gamble"
  • "No Disorientation on the Orientation"
  • "Straight-Betting"
  • "What Can You Bi for Five Bucks"
  • "How did everyone take it?" "Nana paid Granddad £50."
• Silent Snarker: “I can actually hear you rolling your eyes over the phone right now.”
• Skewed Priorities: This guy's car engine suddenly bursts into flames when he starts it up to leave his six-year-old daughter's school, and his first instinct is to try to put it out and leave said daughter, still inside the increasingly smoky vehicle and struggling to open her car door, to fend for herself. He doesn't even realize that the submitter has rescued his daughter until after the fire has been put out. The man's blasé response to this leaves the submitter furious:
  "Oh, I forgot she was in there. I was worried that I'd have to rebuild the car if I didn’t get the fire put out."
• Snake Oil Salesman: This cousin peddles all kinds of quack remedies and during the COVID-19 Pandemic, managed to trick another cousin into taking sheep excrement.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: This woman's fiancée, apparently.
• Spoiled Brat: This story features a Terrible Trio whose response to the gifts that the submitter and their brother got for them with their hard-earned cash is to vocally disclaim their dislike for the "cheap" gifts and throw them away right in front of the submitter and their brother. To make matters worse, their parents and grandmother are encouraging this behavior and tell the submitter and their brother that they ruined Christmas by getting their perfect little angels inferior gifts. It comes as little surprise that the submitter and their brother have had little contact with the Jerkass family since.
• Squee: This Underworld fangirl.
• Stay in the Kitchen
  • This grandmother balks at her granddaughter dressing as Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, saying that girls should only dress as girls. Luckily, it only takes a removal of the gloves to fool the grandmother into thinking as much.
  • This guy's father seems to have this stance, as he's unhappy that his son went to culinary school and sounds astonished when his son's girlfriend patches a hole in a wall perfectly, something his son can't do. The girlfriend quickly puts the father in his place... much to the mother's satisfaction.
    Father: So basically, your dad raised a boy with girl parts.
    Girlfriend: According to your redneck idiot logic, you raised a girl with boy parts. But no, I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as being raised knowing how to handle myself.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: This guy. They call him Ninja Brother.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: Even when only one of them's asleep.
• Straw Vegetarian: Inverted with this brother, who's described as an "almost aggressive carnivore" who seems to take issue with vegetarians so much as existing. It gets to the point that when he eats a vegan burger without realizing it (while bragging that he could tell the difference between real meat and fake, no less), he never sets foot in his favourite restaurant chain again.
• Take a Third Option: What this father wants to do.
• Talking in Your Sleep: This mother is fast asleep when the submitter tries to wake them up to tell her they're going to bed. It takes multiple tries, during which their mother drowsily tells the submitter to prepare to go do school (it's not a school night), get ready for soccer (they don't play soccer), and to wake up their sister (they don't even have a sister!).
• Talking with Signs: This little girl, who had a sore throat. Mixed in with a case of The Notecards Knew You Would Say That, as she had four cards prepared for the conversation.
• Tantrum Throwing: This ten-year-old little brother with anger issues does this so often that his older brothers have become masters of the Nonchalant Dodge.
• Technologically Blind Elders: This father does not adapt well to doing things online during the COVID lockdowns in Italy. His child – the submitter – tries to set him up with an account on a grocery store website so he can order things online. After "a long slog" setting him up, the father calls them back, revealing that after being unable to find castellane from the store, he's trying to order from an another company… from Indonesia. And then the submitter finds that their father hasn't even made an account on the Indonesian company's website, and when they try and explain this, the father gives their child a cuss-laden rant about "your incomprehensible online things."
  (Sometimes I wish I could tie him to a chair and make him learn basic informatics.)
• Tempting Fate: This aunt-to-be chidingly asks her sister, pregnant with her first child and due soon, not to have her baby on a specific weekend as the aunt will be away at a wedding during said weekend. Guess which weekend the baby ends up being born? The aunt is very upset that she missed out on her new relative's birth, but she is unable to bring herself to stay mad her sister or her baby for very long.
• That Came Out Wrong:
  • "We should do crack more."
  • "Hey, feel my butt. It feels weird."
• There's No Kill like Overkill:
  • This mother's suggestion for killing a roach — drop a big wad of wet paper towels over it, stomp on the paper towels, scoop it all up into a plastic bag, seal the plastic bag, put it in the trash, seal up the trash bag, take the trash bag out into the yard, douse it with gasoline, and set it on fire.
  • Similarly, this grandfather:
    Submitter: “Grandpa, why did you shoot the wall in my bedroom?”
    Grandpa: “There was a spider.”
  • This mother's reaction to a scary picture of Barack Obama popping up on her computer with a message that he's spying on her is to take the entire computer, cables and all, outside and set it all on fire.
• They Just Dont Get It: Now has its own page.
• Tomato Surprise: Too short to really surprise anyone, but this story opens with the submitter describing the wedding he's going to with his family, and ends with the reveal that he was the groom.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • The mom in this story knows that the house heater has been acting up, so she decides that it's a good idea to heat the house overnight by leaving the gas stove burning. It goes out in the middle of the night, and it's only one open and one broken window that prevent the submitter and the mother respectively, as well as the pets with them, from being gassed to death.
  • This father, who decided that soaking his driveway in kerosene and lighting it on fire would be a good way to kill weeds growing in it.
  • This story includes two examples of people who smoked while on oxygen, one of whom actually did die when her house went up in flames.
• Took a Level in Kindness: This mother is known for being a hateful religious zealot. Then, she gets mugged (as in, a shelf full of mugs falls on her head), and she claims she had a vision of Jesus telling her to be kinder or she'd go to Hell, and overnight she becomes much kinder and more generous.
• Transparent Closet: The brother in one story drunkenly comes out on his 18th birthday, only to find out the next day that his family knew already. In fact, the only one who seems surprised and upset is the homophobic aunt.
• Twin Switch: Discussed by some twins here, after having just moved.
• Unusual Euphemism: This family uses "dead" as a substitution for sleep. It leads to an Open Mouth, Insert Foot moment for the submitter, as their mother wanted a day asleep, and Tuesday doesn't work, because she's attending a seminar at a funeral home.
• Up, Up and Away!: What this father thinks his baby should be able to do.
• Uranus Is Showing:
  • “I didn’t think there was anything bigger than Uranus.”
  • The submitter and their mother in this story find some planet themed bath bombs. The submitter expresses dread about what Uranus's scent is.
• Waxing Lyrical: "You're insecure... I don't know what for."
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: This dad's standards set for their kid (the submitter) at school are so impossible for them to achieve that a 105% test score does not impress him and leaves him asking the submitter that there was surely something they could have done better. This sadly leads to the submitter giving up on doing well in school entirely, no longer finding it worth the effort if not even that is good enough for their dad.
• What Are Records?: This 21-year-old son tries to explain a Raspberry Pi computer to his eight-year-old cousin, and finds the cousin is used to all-in-one machines and thus doesn't know about computer towers. The son realizes he's running headlong into this trope.
  Son: “Oh, God… I’m trying to explain defunct technology to a younger generation. I feel so old. Now I know how dad felt trying to explain what a telegram was…”
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Invoked. This daughter is a little young to be watching Game of Thrones, and her daddy has some explaining to do for showing it to her.
• Who's on First?:
  • "Where's Heaven?"
  • Guess.
  • "No! I! Won!"
  • "I, [Groom]…"
• Womanchild: this cousin throws a temper tantrum like a two-year-old – complete with throwing herself on the floor – at 14 when her mother won't get her the jeans she wants right that second, and again at age 34 when the submitter is proposed to before she is.
• Worst Wedding Ever:
  • This Las Vegas wedding turns into a total fracas. The night before the wedding, the groom and his family get themselves drunk as skunks and got into a fight, resulting in the best man spending the weekend in jail and the groom's family being all hung over in the wedding. The ceremony takes place in an outdoor venue with no shade in 108-110° F (42-43° C) heat, and has twenty guests packed into a venue built for no more than twelve, so some people have to excuse themselves while the rest swelter in the heat. The reception takes place at a bar where, once again, there isn't enough seats for everyone, and the caterers and cake are no-shows. But the reception does have plenty of drinks, so once again, the guests get drunk and disorderly, necessitating police intervention, so the groom spends his wedding night in jail. Oh, and the marriage? Doesn't even last a year.
  • Narrowly Averted in this story. First the bride decides to go out for the night one last time the night before her wedding, despite her controlling and mentally abusive mother threatening to disown her if she goes through with it and tells the submitter – the bride's cousin – to let her know if the bride goes out. Then a family friend's son of dubious character (he's thirty but brought his teenage girlfriend) tells the submitter that he got the bride's mother's permission to let the bride go out for the night with a few family members. Then after encountering the groom and groomsmen and getting drunk, the son started having "PTSD flashbacks of the war" (the submitter would later learn that the son had never even been in the military) and gotten violent, eventually pulling out a knife. On hearing about this from the bride, the submitter alerts their parents, who rush to find the son and the rest of the party, telling the bride and the submitter to lock their door. Soon after that, when the bride's mother wakes up and finds out what's happened, she throws an absolute fit, banging on the door of the bride and the submitter. Thankfully, the submitter's brother managed to talk down and disarm the son. Surprisingly enough, despite all this chaos, the wedding goes off without a hitch (the son opted not to attend), but the submitter hopes they never have to attend one again.
• You Know What You Did: This dad finds tampons in his daughter's grocery bag and immediately assumes she's had sex, resulting in him kicking the poor girl out of the house with no explanation other than calling her a slut.
• You No Take Candle: "You can't math!" "Yeah? Well you can't ENGLISH!"
• Your Brain Won't Be Much of a Meal: Implied here. A mother reassures her son that, even though she is turning into a zombie, he won't be in any danger from her because, well...
• Your Television Hates You: A home assistant variant here: During a very hectic school morning and a very bad Australian brushfire season, the submitter's home assistant turns on and offers to play relaxing sounds. The exasperated submitter says yes, and the assistant starts playing...fireplace noises.

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