i had to watch this like 5 times because of no captions but lmao if someone makes a transcript for this it would be bomb
transcript: “So we have these Santas at work, right, okay? We have black and we have white Santas. And they’re like creepy, five-foot tall, lifelike animatronic… like, Santas that hold plates of cookies and milk, and they kinda look like they could wake up and come to life and murder you in your sleep– and they don’t include batteries, but we have these Santas. Like nothing screams ‘festive holiday cheer’ like a big, hulking Santa. Um. Nothin’ will jingle your jangles more. So, um, this woman comes in and she’s like, “Do you have these?” and I’m like, “Oh my god, yeah!” So a couple weeks ago we sold out of our white Santas, and we are down to like, three black Santas. And so, I take her to the aisle, I show her the Santas, and the first thing out of her mouth is, “I’m not racist, but…” and I’m like, well, I can’t– I’m not in the position to decide if you are or not, but if like– if I could use context clues and infer, uh, I would say maybe that you might be. And three, we’re talking about Santa. Like– (stuttering) did we switch subjects? And so, um, I’m in like, I– the next thing that pops out of her mouth is like, “This is not right.” and I’m like, okay, I’m sorry, but this is what the picture was. And she’s like, “No. Santa is white.” And I’m like, oh no, okay. Okay. So I’m in– I’m about to tell her, I’m like, mid-sentence, like, “I’m sorry, do you want me to go call another store, do you need me to, like, write you a raincheck just in case we we get any more.” And she’s like, “This is wrong, I want them taken down.” She interrupts me, says that, and I’m like, (pause). I like, look around, and I’m like, is she talking to me? Is this, like, my own, like, personal hell? But like, of course it is. So, um, I’m like, “I can’t take these Santas down.” And she’s like, “Why not?!” And I’m like, “You either have to buy them, or take them down yourself.” And that was like, the stupidest thing I could have ever said, because– (sighs) she takes this bag, with like, Jesus’s face, like, slammed right in the middle as a design– it’s big– she takes it off her shoulder, and starts beating these black Santas! She starts beating these Santas down, they were like, falling down… and I’m like, oh my god! What– what is happening? So like, I step in the middle of her and these Santas and I’m like, “Ma’am, ma’am, you need to leave, you need to stop, or I’m going to have to call someone.” So she like, stops, and she’s like, beet red, and like, huffin’ and puffin’, and she like, looks at me and I can tell she’s just trying to get like, a one-liner in, and she’s like, “The Santa I know is white.” And then she walks away. And I’m like, well– I’m processing what’s happening, while also thinking, like, the Santa you know? Santa’s not real. So unless you’re using an ouija board to contact good old Kris Kringle, um, from like, B.C. or whenever, I’m like, that’s pretty impressive, but how ya doin’ that. And, um, I– the last thought that ran through my mind is that, I’m like, I would hate to be in the room with her when she finds out that Jesus is not white.”
You teach them responsibility by entrusting them with these devices.
You teach them teamwork by taking them away at night and storing them in your room.
My dad kept the computer locked and monitored (and only used when under direct supervision), an intolerable situation to which my little brother and I reacted with gusto. We set up a camera to get the password, coded password guessers, bootcamped a Mac to allow us to use an entirely different system, and figured out various ways to avoid logging internet activity, logins, and even the hidden camera my dad set up. He would discover our new hack and put even more restrictions (he is very computer literate), and we would crack it again. We learned computer security just because my dad didn’t want us to.
I breezed through AP comp sci into a tech field. Ironically, I was introduced to porn because I was looking for another bypass and stumbled into a BDSM site so I can also blame my dad for me being a freaky ho.
Out of all the responses to this post. Yours was my favourite. I cried laughing when I saw the last paragraph
-A woman came in with a skirt made of neckties. Just. Neckties, all strung together to make a skirt. She had leggings on underneath, thank god.
-Been asked for the Mona Lisa
-Been asked for the Sistine Chapel
-Been asked where the dinosaurs are
-Been asked where the animals are
-Been asked for “The Bitch With The Pitcher” (Vermeer’s “Woman with a Water Pitcher,” by the way)
-Been asked for “The Girl With The Pearl Earring”
-Been asked for the Mona Lisa
-Got bored and learned the name of every single one of the Buddhas
-Got bored and learned the name of five Chinese dynasties (long day in Asian Art)
-Chilled in the Buddha room
-Watched someone escorted out for trying to take a nude photo in the Arms and Armor section
-Been asked for the Michelangelo’s, then the Raphael’s, then the Leonardo’s, then the Donatello’s (they were naming ninja turtles)
-Heard curator in Musical Instrument section play Night On Bald Mountain on giant historical pipe organ while laughing maniacally.
-Fielded a day when a filthy counterfit version of the museum program was disseminated among visitors, guiding them to the filthiest art in the museum – such as the painting of Cupid peeing on Venus
-guarded Cupid peeing on Venus
-Been asked for the Mona Lisa
-Been asked if I had seen the First Lady of Mexico (she had gone missing)
-Been asked for that one sculpture of Kronos that is featured in Percy Jackson WHICH DOESN’T EXIST GUYS (directed children to sculptures of Poseidon with trident instead, children were very happy)
-Witnessed two Secret Service Agents get into a swordfight with pieces of packing material.
-been asked by a very polite Fransiscan monk in full brown robes if he had found ‘One of us. He has gone missing.”
-Found missing monk and returned him to the herd
-Coworker was asked for the Ark of the Convenant
-Same coworker was asked for the Baseball Hall of Fame
-stopped about 15,000 people from poking that one lion statue in the nuts
-saw a woman in a banana suit with banana shoes take a picture in front of an Egyptian temple
-Been asked for the Mona Lisas (plural)
I’ve got more but this is what I remember for now.
I would have paid money to witness the Night on Bald Mountain incident.
I used to work at McDonalds (I know). Opening usually involved me at the front counter with a headset on so I could do drive-through orders and handle making coffee / putting orders together / taking money at the front from the little old people that came in at the crack of dawn every morning. We would also have a manager who was there to be important and one person in the kitchen. We’re a small rural town so usually this is fine but we were on kind of a major highway so sometimes it would get busy out of nowhere.
Depending on the manager the amount of help we had would vary wildly. One morning we got super busy and I started cracking under the pressure. I’m a fantastic multi-tasker but my drive-through line was backing up since I was trying to juggle them and all the walk-in folks from my front registers and when it gets packed…well, it’s fun. I glance around trying to find my manager for help. I see him on one of our cameras – he’s outside smoking a cigarette around the side of the building. Mind you, this is like his third trip out to smoke this morning. I’m absolutely dying trying to get caught up. Customers are being passive aggressive saying they will come behind the counter and get their own coffee and stuff. I have people yelling at me in my headset from the drive through. I end up having to remove the headset just to try to get the frontline sorted. I start making progress with the front but I basically had to sacrifice the drive-through customers for two minutes.
Apparently the cars outside start yelling at my manager and interrupt his smoke break so he comes in, sees me with my headset off and goes berserk. He’s like “WHOS TAKING THE DRIVE-THRU ORDERS?” I’m in the middle of trying to get a fresh pot of coffee going so I sort of auto-respond “No one. Hang on.” as I continue to dash around behind our counter to grab a fruit & yogurt parfait for an order. He basically gets in my way and starts giving me shit. Loudly, talking to me like I’m a dog. I point to the camera and yell, loudly enough to disrupt the entire inside of the restaurant. “I’m these two registers, first window, second window, and I’m bagging. I’m like FOUR PEOPLE and you’re out behind the building not doing SHIT!”
His eyes go wide. I can tell he knows I’m holding on by my last thread. He’s sighs. And he’s like “You’re in a ton of trouble but we can talk about this later.” No. Fuck him. I’m done. I’m all riled up from random customers yelling at me. I toss him the headset. “You want to give me shit for not being able to run like four stations with no support? Run five. I’ll watch.” I remove my name badge.
He went to say something to me. I turn away, facing the one girl working in the kitchen who is watching this all play out. I remember telling her “I’m so sorry.” and then I dropped my name badge, toss my hat on the counter, grab a water cup, put on (and zip) my jacket so my uniform is covered up. I go to the drink fountain, fill my water cup, and then I go sit on the far side of the seating area and watch him go down in flames. He ends up ALSO taking off the headset and picking up the phone so he can spam call the whole workforce one by one trying to call for help. It’s like 5AM so no one is going to accept a call from their work number. About ten minutes into his struggle he ends up very loudly pleading with me to come back from behind the counter. I can’t even see him on the other side of the sea of people swarming the counter at this point.
I call back “I need a smoke first!” and I go outside.
I’ve had snakes tossed at me twice myself. Once during an animal demonstration at the zoo when the keeper holding a corn snake had a sudden and very intense hiccup, and once on an extraordinaily ill-fated middle school backpacking trip when one of the other girls thought she was picking up a necklace in the bushes and instead picked up a garter snake and panicked.
I’ve also had spiders, birds, cats, lizards and on one particularly memorable occasion, a small shark lobbed at me on acident. It happens, and cake is an appropriate way to apologize.
A shark?!
So when I was a kid, my ADHD was… much more visible to others than it is now- lots of physical stimming, climbing on stuff, starting a sentence on one topic and ending on another while leaving out the middle, poor impulse control and emotions at roughly 5000%. I didn’t get into trouble per se- I did well in school and didn’t get into fights but I was an extremely ODD child and probably very difficult for the more neurotypical kids to get along with.
This wasn’t an excuse for Anna to constantly tease and bully me, calling me things like “Retard” and “Freak” and organizing my social ostricization, and it DEFINITELY wasn’t an excuse for her mom, leader of the local girl scout troop to tell my mother, in front of me, that “She needs to get that condition treated so I know she isn’t a danger to the other girls before we can let her join.”
So my mom did what any reasonably pissed off woman would do for her extremely odd child and enrolled me in every Science and Outdoor summer camp she could, which is how I got to go to Marine Science Camp, which is hands down the best fucking thing I ever went to.
It was run out of a university research outpost to fund and get free labor a bunch of marine research in the San Francisco Bay, which means instead of being in a disused daycare with a bunch of bored highschoolers, I was hanging out at a combination marine science museum and spceimen zoo with a bunch of hyperinvested grad students. There was a gray whale skeleton, an above ground pool full of leopard sharks, the fiberglass dummy from Free Willy that one of the professors had stolen off the studio lot, and a semi-functional robot submarine we could drive around the part of the bay the camp was on. There were animal dissections, mucking about in tidepools, and lessons on the higher ed aspacts of marine bio, whcih was fantastic for my hyperfixating ass and the other 20-odd kids, pretty much none of whom could reasonably be called “neurotypical”
The BEST part was every week we’d go out on the university research boat and do the grad student’s transects for them. (A transect, for those of you that aren’t huge nerds, is when you pick out a designated swath of enviornment, AND COUNT EVER SINGLE SPECIES IN IT. fun time!) I didnlt KNOW thats what we were doing until years later when we went to do transects for AP Bio, but when you’re eight and the camp grad students say “Wanna run a net through this section of bay then identify every single animal in this bucket?” which means you get to handle the fish and Do A Real Science, YEAH THAT SOUNDS FUN BRIAN. HIT ME WITH THAT DICHTOTOMUS GUIDE AND A BUCKET OF PERCH.
So we’re out on the boat, hauling in the net and it’s… unusually heavy. this usually means we picked up a bunch of seaweed but whatever. Grad student Brian is getting us all hype about the net becuase he and his slipped disc are real glad he’s got a dosen kids to pull this in. He grabs the bag at the end with all the fish and whatnot in it the dump it into the sorting tank before the job of identifying everything is farmed out to us, and the bag is THRASHING.
“Looks like we got a shark!” says Brian, wildly excited by this. You never grow out of your love of sharks. Sure enough when the bag was opened, out spilled a multitude of anchovies, perch, small midwater fish and a four-and-a-half-foot-long Sevengill Shark.
It looked pretty much like this one (image source)
“HOLY SHIT.” Said Brian, swearing in front of the children becuase during the 80′s the sevengill had nearly gone extinct in The Bay, and this was the mid-ninties, so seeing them again was very exciting. “WE GOTTA TAG THIS THING.” He said, grappling the shark as it tried to make the best of the situation and hork down as much perch as possible. He got ahold of it, and started to jog up the boat to get it to the Big Tank but since he was ingoring Boat safety by not holding onto the rail AND running, he slipped on the stairs, probably cracked his patella, and accidentally lobbed the shark into the air.
Sharks are, strictly speakling, hydrodynamic and not areodynamic, but thier sleek bodies and fine tooth-like scale also do an excellent job letting them sail through the air on the rare occasions they are accentally lobbed at crowds of children by overexcited grad students, and the sevengill arced gracefully though the air, tail flapping in a vain attempt to steer, and landed nose-first, directly into my right eye socket.
A Sevengill is not an insubstantial animal and I was a pathetic waif of a child so the impact knocked me clean off my feet, but I had exactly enough presence of mind to think that I didn’t want the poor shark hitting the rough deck surface or flopping overboard before we could tag it for Science, so I managed to wrap my little arms around the thing, cradling it against my chest as I slammed into the deck, the open mouth of the extremely confused fish cutting a very dramatic slice into my cheek.
The next few minutes were a blur of screaming children, screaming adults and flailing shark but it got into the big tank safely and I managed to convince the grad students it hadn’t bit me that badly as I stood there, blood gushing down my cheek and onto my shirt.
Eventually things calmed down and Brian hobbled over to me and, after apologizing roughly twenty times for throwing a shark at me, asked if I would like to help the adults tag it, since I’d been so Brave?
WOULD I?
It was to my immense glee that I’d be going right after Anna in out baby’s-first-powerpoint-presentations about What We Did That Summer, so once she finished boring everyone with her trip to see a cousin get married in tenesee or something, I got to go up and show everyone the picture of me, surrounded by half a dozen grad students, holding up a shark almost as big as me, with the radio tracker I’d personally gotten to secure to it’s extremely bewildered head, still bleeding, and tell everyone about CATCHING AND TAGGING SHARKS FOR SCIENCE, AND SOMETIMES GETTING BITTEN, A LITTLE.
I never did get an apolgy cake from Brian but that vengence was so much sweeter.
(If you like these stories and would like to supoort me and my caffiene habit, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi or PayPal. Thanks for reading!)
Every time my extended family gets together in upstate ny, we (the Adults) all get wasted & at least 1 giant Family Scandal comes out…..tonight is that night..
We’ve Got A Winner Folks, And It Involves Arson AND A Nun!
So apparently my aunt cecelia (not really my aunt, just the best friend of my dads cousin, whomst we also call aunt) once married a dude referred to only as Florida Asshole. He was named such because he apparently left my aunt cecelia while she was in the hospital, stole all of their stuff, and fucked off to florida. Aunt cecelia then hired a p.i. to find him, as u do, and went down to florida with my dads cousin (who was going to florida for a work trip, and had no idea Florida Asshole was there). Apparently the p.i. told aunt cecelia which city the guy was in, but hadnt found the exact address yet, so ofc aunt cecelia did what any other able bodied half insane scorned person might. She went to a costume shop, bought a full nun costume, and went door to door under the assumption that she was collecting charity. (She did, in fact, donate everything she collected. This was an important fact to her). At one of the houses, she looked in the window and noticed an awful lot of furniture that used to be hers. So she, obviously, went to a gas station and bought several cans of gasoline, threw a molotov cocktail through the front window, and began pouring gasoline over the rest of the house. At this point, Florida Asshole came outside, recognized his ex wife looking like a renegade nun sent to punish him for his sins, and began beating her. The neighbors, seeing the strange new man beating a nun in his front yard while his house was on fire, did the only sensible thing in this story and called the police. Who promptly arrested Florida Asshole for assaulting a nun. Aunt cecelia did not get arrested, came clean to her best friend, and was immediately sent back to new york with a ticket bought under my other aunt’s name. We don’t know if she still has an arrest warrant out for her in florida, and that’s tonight’s Family Scandal!
So a tiny story: on Black Friday a few weeks ago I went to Gamestop to buy my brother a game for Christmas, and I noticed this older man was watching me like a hawk. He was loitering around the front of the store without really buying anything, and every time I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye he was looking at me. I went to look at the PS4 games, and he was looking at something right behind me. I checked out the Nintendo games, and he was looking at them too. I was the only woman in the store, by the way.
By the time I got in line to pay he was loitering at the front of the store again, and I just had that feeling that he was going to try and take the game I just bought, or steal my purse, as soon as I left the store. OR, he was going to try and follow me home. And I know I don’t have to explain that terror to any woman reading this, but all I could think was that I’m in this Gamestop alone with at least twenty other men and something is about to happen. I’m beginning to freak out, to the point where I’ve just pulled my pepper spray out of my purse and into the pocket of my coat.
So there I am, next in line to pay, and there is this GIGANTIC dudebro right behind me, and I say gigantic as a 6 foot tall woman. He says, “Ma’am? Don’t be offended, but would it be alright if I walked you to your car?” and I was like “Are you serious?” and he was like “There are some weird guys in here right now. Have you noticed that guy watching you?” and then I showed the dudebro the pepper spray in my pocket and he was like “Right on. Would you still let me walk you to your car?” and I said yes.
So I paid, and waited while HE paid, and he walked me to my car. And just as I was getting in, the weird guy who’d been loitering came out of the store, saw me and my dudebro, and turned around and walked away in the opposite direction.
In short: men who recognize that women are unsafe in dark alleys, college campuses, grocery stores, gas stations and retail stores and do something about it are the kind of quality men that this world needs more of.
Please for the love of god yes.
The Warrior protects.
He does this through his Prowess, his Ability
to Protect.
His fight Ability, combined with his
Willingness to Protect, earns him Worth in the eyes of his fellow Men.
i saw this post earlier about therapists and it reminded me of my old therapist paul, who in my opinion is one of the greatest men alive and who did not put up with my bullshit for even one second
anyway i go in to see paul one week in the summer of 2016, and i’m doing my usual bullshit which consists of me talking shit about myself, and paul is staring at me, and then he cuts me off and says that he’s got a new tool for helping people recognize when they’re using negative language, and gets up and goes over to his desk
and i’m like alright hit me with that sweet sweet self-help article my man, because i’m a linguistic learner and whenever paul’s like here i have a tool for you to use it’s pretty much always an article or a book or something
paul opens a drawer, takes something out, and turns back around. i stare.
i say, paul.
is that a nerf gun.
yeah, says paul.
i say, are you gonna shoot me with a nerf gun in this professional setting.
he happily informs me that that’s really up to me, isn’t it. and sits back down. and gestures, like, go ahead, what were you saying?
and i squint suspiciously and start back up about how i’m having too much anxiety to leave the house to run errands, like it was a miracle to even get here, like i’ve forgone getting groceries for the past week and that’s so stupid, what a stupid issue, i’m an idiot, how could i–
a foam dart hits me in the leg.
i go, hey! because my therapist just shot me in the leg. paul blinks at me placidly and raises an eyebrow. i squint again.
i say, slowly, it’s– not a stupid issue, i’m not stupid, but it’s frustrating me and i don’t want it to be a problem i’m having.
no dart this time. okay. sweet.
so the rest of the hour passes with me intermittently getting nailed with tiny foam darts and then swearing and then fixing my language and, wouldn’t you know it, i start liking myself a little more by the end of the session, which is mildly infuriating because paul can tell and he’s very smug about it
anyway i leave his office and the lady having the next appointment walks in and i hear what’s all over the floor? and paul very seriously says cognitive behavioral therapy tools.
The “I won’t hesitate, bitch” vine but @ friends who don’t love themselves
CaptainBubblebath 