Your Wildest School Detention Story

Hear that bell? School’s in session… in the the living room. With remote learning an everyday reality now, I imagine there are fewer opportunities for kids to act a fool and get detention. And what an experience they’re missing out on! For this week’s pissing contest, I want to hear about the time you got detention—if it was only once or twice, if you were a well-behaved kid, or simply one that rarely got caught—or your most memorable. What did you do that was punishable? How was your time spent with all the other delinquents? Let’s remember our bad boy roots together.

But before we get to all that, let’s take a look at last week’s winners: these are your Thanksgiving disaster stories.

Super Nintendo Chalmers, this is a real comedy of errors:

One year when I was a teenager, my family decided to try and deep fry a turkey. They let the enormous vat of oil heat up on our porch for HOURS, convinced that it wasn’t hot enough because it wasn’t boiling. (You have to put something in hot oil to see the bubbles!) Finally they fried the thing, it was delicious, but then when it was time to clean up, the drunken lot of uncles who tried to lift and drain it misjudged and they spilled the whoooooole thing all over the porch. Dirty turkey oil everywhere. It was impossible to fully clean up and the porch was a slippery mess for what seemed like months. Later that winter I slipped and cracked my tailbone on the porch steps. I blame the turkey oil.

tonight, living in a fantasy, your mom is brazen:

I just remembered the one Thanksgiving when my mom returned the cooked turkey to the store. She was pissed off that it turned out really dry. She hauled the whole 20lb roasted turkey in the roasting pan back to the grocery store, puts it on the customer service counter, and says she wants to return the bird because it’s too dry.

The poor young woman behind the desk, not knowing that submitting to my mother’s request was required to live, countered my mom with a dull, “well maybe you just didn’t cook it right.” My mother stood as tall as her 5’4″ body would allow, looked down her nose at this simple thing, and haughtily snapped, “Honey, I’ve been cooking turkeys for longer than you’ve been alive! This bird has been frozen and thawed repeatedly or something to that effect! Either give me a refund or let me speak to your manager!” I suppose now you could say she went full Karen, but at the time I felt like my low-income mother was channeling Alexis Carrington or British royalty. She even had some weird sort of accent. The poor thing retreated to the back of the store and returned with her manager. My mom got her money back and turned to leave. The young woman said, “hey! You forgot your turkey!” My mother snapped, “I don’t want it! You deal with it,” and storms out.

I had been standing about 10 or 15 feet behind her, having an out of body experience.

In my mom’s defense, she was right about the turkey. It was terrible, like eating wood pulp. Flavorless and dry, and had definitely been frozen and thawed too many times. My mom is Polish and can cook the shit out of anything; it wasn’t her mistake. Also she made minimum wage, and as a single mother, preparing a Thanksgiving feast for her 3 kids and her 2 brothers was a huge, huge deal for her. Not just the effort, but her way to shine and show love. Also now, I realize she was going through menopause and was not having that shit.

anneelliott1993, I’m so sorry, please stay safe!:

Might be this Thanksgiving. My kid is distance learning but needed some extra support, so we hired a tutor. Monday, tutor comes. Both parties, as always, wear masks, for the 40 mins he’s here. Today tutor texts and says he took a Covid test Tuesday and got the results today – positive. FUCK.

I’ll update at the next pissing contest.

ItsSmallerOnTheOutside, this is nice, actually:

So it was just us 3 this year and somehow we managed to screw up dinner so bad that we ate spaghetti & meatballs for instead. At least the tiny human was happy. Oddly we are normally very capable cooks but you know 2020.

BookOBaldylocks, I feel you:

Last year’s Thanksgiving was a failure on so many levels.

For back story, my folks are divorced but try to be friendly or whatever (which comes and goes in waves) and my mom usually hosts Thanksgiving at her place. She always tells everyone that dinner is at 4-4:30, and people who have the side dishes generally arrive in that window so we can eat.

Well, not my dad. He always insists on doing the turkey for some reason (I think it’s related to his control issues and my mom relents) but he’s ALWAYS late. Not by an hour, it’s usually at least 3-4 hours. We go through the same shit every year too: 4:30 comes, he’s not there so we call. He says he’s finishing up soon and leaving shortly (which is a 10-12 minute drive for him). People start arriving and we put food in warmers and get the table ready. 5:30 comes and he’s still not there. Grumbling from family members leads my mom to call my dad again. Still hasn’t left. Another hour goes by and we call again, this time he says he got caught by the freight train on his way (which was a lie). He shows up, acts like nothing happened, and then insists on blessing the table.

All of that happened like clockwork last year and when he got to the building, I went to help bring food up. I brought the turkey up and went back down to help with the rest of the stuff. In the time it took for me to go back downstairs and come up again (5 mins or less), the rest of the family had already blessed the table and started eating. This did not sit well with my dad, who literally parked his ass on my mom’s bed for 3 hours and pouted. Both my mom and I had to field questions of “where’s your dad”, which I just had to play dumb about. To say I was pissed and embarrassed about all of that is an understatement.

And to make things worse, my wife and I both had some terrible gastrointestinal distress later that night. She made the 6 hour drive to her hometown by herself while I was laid up on the bed for a day and a half.

Get nostalgic in the comments below.