If your teeth have not unionized, you can stop reading right now. This isn’t for you. Click off this article. Go back to your life of regular teeth, with regular grievances, that simply happen quietly inside your head where they belong.

For the rest of you, here are five things only you will understand.

1. The molars are running it. Wisdom teeth, having retired and moved south some years ago, are not involved. The incisors are rank-and-file. The premolars wanted the job and didn’t get it, and you can feel them sulking when you bite into anything firm. It’s the molars, and the molars have demands.

2. The demands are not reasonable. They include, but are not limited to: no apples after seven, written advance notice for any cold beverage, a 3% raise (of what, they will not say), and the immediate retirement of one specific lower-left canine for reasons the bargaining unit will not put in print.

“I’m not supposed to read this part out loud. I’m reading it. Please spit.” — A dental hygienist, on the bargaining unit’s published demands

3. There is a strike. When the strike happens — and it happens — your teeth simply will not chew. You attempt to chew. Your teeth refuse. You stand alone at the kitchen counter, holding a sandwich. The sandwich watches you. You watch the sandwich. Federal labor law, specifically the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, appears to neither anticipate nor forbid this.

4. Scabs. Other teeth, brought in from somewhere, refuse to identify their origin. The color is wrong. The bite is suddenly off. Your dentist is uncomfortable but is being paid quarterly by an entity that has asked her not to inquire further. She has stopped making eye contact during cleanings. She has, on at least one occasion, hummed.

5. The picket line. At some point, on a Tuesday — always a Tuesday, because of an obscure clause inserted during the third round of mediation — your teeth will leave your mouth briefly, in the night, and form a picket line outside your face. You will wake to find small printed notices pinned to your pillow. The notices use legal language. One of them is signed.

If you found yourself nodding along — carefully, because nodding is now in the contract — please reach out to the Garbage Opinion newsroom. We are organizing a non-binding mediation. The teeth have agreed to attend if there is yogurt. The yogurt cannot be from a brand they have previously boycotted. The intern is updating the list.