KAREN DEMANDS A MAN CARRY A MONITOR TO HER CAR, THEN CHOKES HIM IN-STORE WHEN HE REFUSES!

I’m 20 years old and I’ve lived in Germany my whole life. My family moved to a bigger city when I was 16 for my dad’s work and I’ve been studying computer science at university for the past 2 years.

I picked up gaming when I was younger as a way to deal with anxiety, and it’s been my main hobby ever since. People always told me I was too sensitive growing up, but honestly, I just feel things pretty strongly, and I cry easily when I’m stressed. I’m a pretty big guy, though, 1 m 9 and about 110 kilos, most of it muscle, from going to the gym with my roommate.

I mentioned this because what happened next made me feel like my size didn’t matter at all. I went to this well-known electronic store in the city center because I just gotten paid from my part-time job and wanted to treat myself to some accessories for my Switch. I was wearing a red t-shirt with Japanese characters on it and some tight black pants.

Nothing about my outfit screamed employee, but you’ll see why that didn’t matter to one particular person. I was walking through the gaming section when this older woman, maybe in her 70s, approached me looking confused. She asked me if I knew where she could find Steam cards. I told her they were upfront by the registers.

She thanked me and apologized for bothering me, explaining that she’d asked because I looked young enough to know these things and there weren’t any employees around. I said that it was no problem at all and that I was glad to help. She was really sweet and reminded me of my grandmother, so I felt good about helping her out.

I went back to browsing and eventually found this really nice case for my Switch that had extra storage for game cartridges. I was examining it when I heard someone clear their throat behind me. I looked up and there she was, mid50s, short red hair styled in that specific way, secretary glasses and this expression on her face that just screamed soccer mom energy.

She asked me where she could find something, then pulled out a piece of paper and read off the name of a gaming monitor, the BenQ Zoe RL2755. I told her I actually knew exactly where that was because I just bought one for myself about 3 hours ago. I explained that they weren’t in the regular monitor section, though.

They had them on discount in a different spot. She said she knew that and that was why she was here. I told her to follow me and walked her over to the right aisle, then pointed at the monitors. She looked at them and then told me she had back problems and would need me to carry one to the checkout and her car. No, please. No, thank you. Just a demand.

I said I could help her out when I was done with my shopping, but suggested she should probably ask an employee to do that since they’d be better equipped to help. She made this weird sound and asked if I was sure I wasn’t just being lazy. I asked her what she meant. She said that if it wasn’t my department, she’d understand, but acting like I didn’t work there was disgusting and lazy.

I told her again that I really didn’t work there and that I just helped her because she asked and I happened to know where the monitor was. She said she’d seen me help that lady before and that she knew I worked here. Then she demanded to speak to my manager right now. She went from fake smiling to screaming in literally one second and I just froze.

I told her once more that I didn’t work there and asked her to look at my shirt, questioning whether she really thought it said the store name in Japanese and how she could even come to that conclusion. She yelled that I wasn’t getting out of this and then started screaming for help. She screamed for help like I was attacking her or something.

I called her insane and started walking away because honestly, I was terrified of this woman. She had this wild look in her eyes that genuinely scared me and I just didn’t know how to handle it. But she wasn’t going to let me leave. She came up behind me and grabbed me, wrapping one arm around my neck and her other hand went straight to my throat.

That’s when I smelled the alcohol on her breath. Procco I think. I panicked completely and fought to get free. And in the process, my elbow hit her face. She screamed like I’d murdered her. I’m a really sensitive person and the whole situation was too much. So, I just started crying. I couldn’t stop myself. It was like my body didn’t know how else to react.

She was bleeding from her nose and screaming. I was crying. And by now, employees and other customers had gathered around. She yelled that my colleague had just punched her nose in. I told everyone through my tears that I didn’t work there and that she just grabbed me and I’d panicked. I kept saying I was so sorry and I felt horrible even though she attacked me first.

I’m a big guy and I guess I felt like I should have handled it better, like I used too much force or something. I tried to help her up and apologize, still crying. When I reached toward her, she scratched my face and got my lip which immediately started bleeding everywhere. So now we were both bleeding. I still couldn’t stop crying and employees were trying to figure out what happened.

They separated us into different rooms to wait for the police. When the police arrived, they took my story, but I could tell they didn’t believe me. They gave me these dirty looks and made comments under their breath that made me feel like I was the criminal here. I felt like everything was falling apart, and I still couldn’t stop crying or get my lip to stop bleeding.

After about 45 minutes of sitting there scared out of my mind, the police came back in. Behind them was the woman now in handcuffs. The officer told me they’d reviewed the security footage and that my story checked out 100%. He said they were taking her in anyway because she’d thrown her phone at one of the store employees while she was waiting.

Then he asked if I wanted to press charges. I said yes. They told me she’d spend the night in custody and that I’d hear about a court date. That was a few weeks ago, right after Smash Bros. came out for the Switch. The hearing is coming up soon and the case is still ongoing. But German courts move slowly, so who knows when it’ll actually be resolved.

Knowing she spent a whole night in jail makes me feel a bit better about the whole thing, though. I grew up in a family of loudmouths. We’re the type who don’t back down from anything, who’ll argue about the price of milk at the corner shop just because we can. But my cousin was different. She was the quiet one, the sensitive one who’d rather read a book than start a row at Sunday dinner.

She was 19 when she got her first proper job at a massive warehouse on the industrial estate. The kind of place with endless rows of shelves and forklifts zooming past every 5 minutes. She was buzzing about it, finally earning her own money. Finally feeling like an adult. My aunt was proud too, even if she worried about her being out in the real world.

For the first two weeks, everything was brilliant. My cousin would come home and tell us about the other workers, about how she was getting faster at picking orders, about the free coffee in the breakroom. Then something changed. There was this woman at the warehouse. had to be in her late 30s, maybe early 40s. From what I heard later, she’d been there for years and thought that meant she ran the place.

She started on my cousin almost immediately after those first two weeks. It began small. The woman would finish her own tasks and then dump half her remaining work on my cousin’s station. She’d tell my cousin that the managers had specifically said she needed to handle it. My cousin, being quiet and not wanting to cause trouble, just got on with it.

She’d stay late, skip her breaks, anything to get through the mountain of work. Then the woman started with the comments. She’d tell my cousin she was slow, that she was doing everything wrong, that maybe she wasn’t cut out for warehouse work. She’d say it loud enough for others to hear, laughing like it was all a joke, but it wasn’t a joke.

My cousin would come home every evening with red eyes, trying to hide that she’d been crying in the toilets during her lunch break. My aunt noticed right away. You can’t hide anything from that woman. She’s got eyes like a hawk and a temper like a firecracker when someone messes with her kids. She kept asking my cousin to report it to speak to the managers, but my cousin refused.

She said she could handle it, that she didn’t want to be seen as weak or a troublemaker. But we’re fighters in this family. My cousin might be quiet, but she wasn’t about to quit. She’d come home exhausted and miserable, then wake up the next morning and go back in. My aunt was furious watching her daughter go through this, but she’s clever.

She doesn’t just lose her temper, she plans. The next Monday, my aunt announced she gotten a job at the same warehouse doing the same work. We all thought she’d lost her mind. She had a decent job already, and she was going to throw it away to work in a warehouse. But then she explained she was going to look after my cousin until that horrible woman either left or learned her lesson.

My cousin had no idea until the orientation day. She walked into the room expecting to meet the new starters. And there was my aunt right at the front, grinning and waving like she was at the school assembly. My cousin told me later she nearly died of embarrassment, but also felt this huge wave of relief.

My aunt had worked in warehouses before years ago. She knew the systems, knew the pace, knew how everything operated. Within a few days, she was one of the fastest workers on the floor. She blast through her own assignments and then go looking for more. And she made sure to take on work from the woman who’ been tormenting my cousin.

The woman would try to dump tasks on my cousin, but my aunt would swoop in and take them instead. She’d finished them in half the time and make it look easy. After a week of this, my aunt started chatting with the managers during smoke breaks. Just casual conversation at first, but then she’d mention how certain people seemed to have a lot of free time.

She’d point out how some workers were standing around while others were drowning in orders. She never named the woman directly, just planted the seeds. The managers must have started watching because a few days later, the woman got pulled into a meeting. She came out fuming. She was ranting to anyone who would listen about unfair treatment, about being singled out, about how the managers had a doubt for her. My aunt saw her chance.

She went right to one of the managers and told them the woman had been threatening and abusive toward her after the warning. She said she felt unsafe working near someone so hostile. That was it. Another meeting got called. A week later, the woman was told to collect her things. She got fired exactly 7 days before she was supposed to leave for a month-long cruise she’d been bragging about for weeks.

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. One of the managers my aunt had befriended during all this became a proper mate. She has been coming to family gatherings ever since. We call her Aunt Debbie now, even though there’s no blood relation. She’s told us stories about the woman over the years. Apparently, she’d had multiple warnings before for creating hostile situations at work.

Nobody was surprised she got the boot. Last I heard, the woman got divorced a while back. And Debbie still sees her around sometimes. She’s always asking Aunt Debbie to make birthday cakes for her family members. She offers her £5 for a custom cake that would cost 50 anywhere else. Aunt Debbie just laughs and tells her she’s booked up for the next 6 months.

My cousin still works at that warehouse. She’s a supervisor now. Been there for 15 years. My mom raised me mostly at my grandparents’ place during the week since she worked long hours, but I’d visit her and my stepdad on weekends. Their house was nice enough. Nothing fancy, just a regular home with a small yard and a hot tub out back that we’d sometimes use in the summer.

The trouble started in July of 2002 when I was 16. Our neighbor Karen lived in this house that had been built way too close to the property line, though we didn’t realize just how close until later. That summer, Karen decided she absolutely had to have satellite television. The problem was her yard was tiny, especially in the back, and the only place to put the satellite dish was on the rear of her house.

The installation trucks couldn’t get back there through her own property. So Karen came up with what she thought was a brilliant solution. She was just going to have the workers tear down our fence and drive their vehicles across our land to reach her backyard. My mom found out about this plan and lost it. She walked over there and they got into this massive argument right in the driveway.

Karen started yelling that the fence was too close to her house anyway and that my mom had built it on her property. Mom fired back that the fence was exactly where it was supposed to be according to the land description and offered to show her the paperwork. Mom brought out all the documents showing the property line.

Turns out they were both sort of wrong. We knew Karen’s house was close to the line, but it was even closer than anyone thought. She was only feet from it. That fence should have been practically touching the side of her house instead of being 5 yards away. Karen got furious when she realized she couldn’t win this argument. So, she called her uncle.

He was the deputy mayor of our town, which only had about 2,000 people in it. She thought having him on her side would solve everything. He looked into it, but nothing came of it. We figured that was the end of the whole mess. We were wrong. Late September, maybe early October that same year, I was at school when everything went sideways.

Mom was taking a shower when our two dogs started going crazy barking at the front door. She threw on a bathrobe and went to see what was happening. She opened the door to find the police chief and about a dozen officers standing on our lawn. The chief told her they’d received a tip about a meth lab on the property and demanded to search the premises immediately.

Mom asked if they had a warrant. The chief said they didn’t need one if she cooperated. Mom told him she wasn’t letting them search without one. This kicked off several hours of them refusing to leave our property. They just stood there insisting they needed to search. This all started around 9 or 10 in the morning.

By the time 3:00 in the afternoon rolled around, mom was getting worried about me. She told them she needed to go pick up her daughter from school and take me to my grandmother’s house since I couldn’t drive yet. The chief refused to let her leave. He said they’d send a squad car to pick me up from school instead. Mom knew that would humiliate me completely.

Everyone would see me getting picked up by the police and rumors would spread like wildfire. She called her lawyer who told her that without a warrant, she could tell them to leave. The chief’s response was chilling. He said that if he had to go get a warrant, he’d tell the judge he could smell meth on the property.

He’d get authorization to search for anything and everything. Then he’d come back, kick the door off its hinges, and if the dogs even looked at him wrong, he’d shoot both of them in the head, and kill them right in front of her. My mom went pale. She called my grandma to pick me up from school and then let the police search the house.

They found my mom’s gun safe first. It was one of those heavy steel safes with a circular lock, kind of like what you’d see on a soda machine. The key was sitting right on top of it. Before anyone thinks that was unsafe, my mom kept her bedroom door locked with a key. I didn’t live there full time, and there were no other kids in the house.

Nobody under 18 was getting near those guns. The cops took a crowbar and pried the safe open. They completely ignored the keys sitting right there in plain sight. Then they took all the guns outside and started dividing them up among themselves. They even took my mom’s handgun, which she had a concealed carry permit for. This went on for hours.

Eventually, mom gave in and opened my stepdad’s shop building. He was using it to restore a motorcycle he’d wrecked about 15 years earlier. The cops barely got through the door before they started shouting that they’d found a meth lab. They pointed at some cleaning agents and bottles sitting together. That was it.

Just some cleaning supplies and empty mason jars near each other. No other signs of anything illegal. They brought in heavy spotlights and called for more officers. By 1:00 in the morning, my mother had been sitting outside is in nothing but a bathrobe in the cool, full air this entire time. Finally, they claimed they’d found an MJ plant behind our 6-ft tall privacy fence that blocked the view of our hot tub.

I found out about all this later, and I was devastated. I was 16 years old in a tiny town. Everyone would know about it by Monday. The next day, Saturday, I was on the internet when a friend messaged me asking what had happened and why my mother was in jail. I told her my mom wasn’t in jail and asked what she was talking about.

My friend said her mom had just seen it on the news. According to the report, my mom and stepdad were sitting in jail that weekend without bond for running the largest drug den in the town’s history. I felt sick. Mom called the news station to ask why they’d run that story without checking the facts. They apologized and said the town police had contacted them and told them to run it.

The next night, they issued a public apology. I refused to go to school on Monday. It’s important to remember that I hadn’t been at school since Friday. On Tuesday, when my grandpa dropped me off, there was a drug sniffing dog at the school. It was close to drug-free week, so I didn’t think much of it at first.

My business teacher pulled me aside and told me she’d seen the article in the paper, but it looked staged to her. She said if I caught any trouble for this, I should let her know. I went to my locker and noticed one standing completely open down the hall. The officer was just walking away from that hallway, but since the principal’s office was down there, I didn’t think anything of it.

When I got closer, I realized it was my locker standing wide open. I went straight to the principal’s office and demanded to know why my locker was searched. The principal claimed I hadn’t been searched. He said I must have left my locker open the night before. I told him that was impossible. I had two friends with lockers next to mine and they had basketball practice until 4 every day.

They always shut my locker if I left it open. Plus, I hadn’t been at school since Friday. I asked if he was seriously telling me that everyone in the entire school had left a locker standing wide open for all of Monday. I called my mom and she pulled me out for Tuesday as well. The court case fell apart because of that MJ plant.

The chief of police put in his official report that it had been 8 ft tall. When the judge questioned him about it during the hearing, he stuck to his story and confirmed it was 8 ft tall. The judge asked when he’d found this plant. The chief said it was about 1 in the morning. The judge pointed out that if there really was an MJ plant 8 ft tall behind a 6-foot fence, the chief wouldn’t have needed permission to search the property.

He could have seen it from outside. The judge dismissed all charges right there. That’s where things stood for 10 years. My mom played the long game. She waited for the statute of limitations to run out because she didn’t want to give the chief any legal reason to retaliate. She bited her time until finally at the first town council meeting after the deadline passed.

She reached out to the head of the council. His grandson was my coworker at the time, so he knew me and liked me well enough. She told him everything. He listened carefully and then said he’d heard there was nothing in the evidence locker at the station at the moment. None of the guns they’d confiscated had been properly entered.

When she explained that most of them were family heirlooms that belonged to me, he nodded and asked if she could prove they were hers if he managed to produce them. Mom said she had a notebook with descriptions, serial numbers, and two of them had distinguishing marks hidden from sight that she could point out. He told her she’d get them back Monday.

He went to the station and told the police chief that since they’d never successfully charged us with any crime and the statute of limitations had run out, all confiscated property had to be returned. He also mentioned there was a rumor the guns weren’t in evidence and he’d be checking on Monday. The chief went pale.

On Monday, all the guns were suddenly in the evidence locker. One was missing a scope, though. It came out that the chief had never intended to enter them into evidence. He’d sold them to his friends, thinking he’d gotten away with it for a decade. When mom showed up with proof they belonged to her, he had no choice but to return them.

He had to track down every single gun and buy them back, sometimes paying more than twice what he’d originally been paid. Some of his so-called friends weren’t even speaking to him anymore, and one had removed the scope a while back. He was fired and arrested immediately. We got our guns back. every single one. And now we have reached the end of today’s stories.