All the stories presented below are not the figment of the author’s sick imagination and are not anecdotes. Absolutely nothing has been invented. From the word "absolutely". All this is reality. Absolutely real stories from real lives of real people, collected by me over a little over ten years. The heroes themselves told me something, something from my personal practice. In fact, I just gave them a more literary form. Of course, as they say: first and last names have been changed so as not to affect the interests of real-life persons. In some places even the geographical names have been changed. Some stories are funny, some are scary. As my literature teacher said: “laughter until tears and laughter through tears.” They all have one thing in common - each story is very instructive. Separately, I would like to thank those people who helped me compile the collection, shared their life experiences, many without even suspecting that one day their stories would take this form.