forget wanderlust, sonder, all those words for vague dreamy feelings… what I’m asking for is a concise word for the feeling you get when someone makes an assumption about you that’s 100% correct but you really don’t like that anyone was able to make that assumption. for now I’m calling it a fuckor
“he asked me ‘you main junkrat right’ and a wave of fuckor wracked my feeble body”
in my experience with the three (3) i went to in the surrounding area it was. uh. you know when you step into a place and there’s nothing immediately noticeably wrong but you can just Feel that this is a Bad Space? like the kind of space where if you catch a glimpse of your mother walking down an aisle and turning a corner you know it’s a demonic trick and if you follow her it’ll lead you down a path to a dark space you can’t return from?
or you go in with your friend who’s right next to you but you get a text from them saying “hey i’m in the shoe aisle, you should come here” and you know it’s a trap from the devil? like other things:
only half of the dim, washed out, often flickering fluorescent lights were lit at any given time, usually only every-other set, leaving these valleys of darkness that made entire aisles inaccessible for fear of shadow people latching on to your soul like a dark passenger.
entire sections were just Empty. empty shelves with no product, never any employees filling them up, no boxes waiting to be unpacked, no signs saying what should be there.
no employees at all actually? wandering around the store even though the parking lots were full and you walked in with a group of 20 or so felt so lonely. you could walk the whole place and it was dead silent and the only other “people” around always were several aisles away with their back turned, unmoving. there was always only one cashier and there was never anyone in her line.
there was never any music on or announcements played? another place that does this are all the dollar trees in my area and it gives me anxiety. i feel like i’m being hunted, like i have to hold my breath and listen for the footsteps of beasts in other aisles.
the fitting rooms had a strange, dark energy to them. it felt like if you ever used them, whatever universe you closed the door on would not be the same one you stepped out into when you were done. the washrooms also contained this same dark energy.
passing the employees-only doors felt like wandering too close to a bears den. the glass windows never showed anything going on back there, no racks of product, no employees milling around. it was just pitch black, complete darkness. a hungry void.
leaving a target was the same disorienting feeling as leaving a dark theatre and exiting into the light. sound and colour and feeling rush back in. you feel like you can breathe again. a weight is lifted from your shoulders. you can’t remember any of the time you spent inside the target.
it is my sincere belief that the targets in canada never existed. the storefronts were put up, yes, but the stores themselves were vast empty caverns filled with dark dreams and sinister interlopers. passing through the automatic doors was meant to teleport us to the nearest american location, but something went wrong and we entered an unnatural zone halfway between the upside down and whatever it was that happened in the langoliers.
i just realized ive never met a woman whos been named the exact same as their parent and i feel like that has to do with the fact that men are obsessed with themselves and their Lineage or whatever the fuck
today a dude slammed my finger on accident because he was closing a metal drawer i had my fingers in and i was on drive through and i literally screamed into the headset and the lady just kept ordering her drink as i was trying to hush down three different LOUD MEN SAYING “OH MY GOD WHAT DID HE DO TO YOUR HAND”
she just kept going
i screamed into a headset and she just kept going
working in customer service
One time I was either coming down with or getting over a bad sinus infection and suddenly had a coughing fit while helping a patron at the front desk.
And I mean, my face was red, I was practically choking trying to stop, doubled over, nearly on the floor, my coworker was asking if I was alright.
And the patron just kept talking like nothing was happening. Just kept describing their mundane problem/request while peering over the desk and down at me on the floor gagging.
One time while I was still working in a bakery, I was putting a loaf of a customer’s bread through the slicer. (Thankfully this was a fairly automatic process.) And I just up and passed out. Fell right over, blacked out for a second. I didn’t really know how I got on the floor. But the slicer was still going and no one has noticed. So I just finished the guy’s bread and gave it back to him. Then I calmly walked into the back of the bakery to tell my co-workers I passed out. They got me to go sit down, drink some orange juice and take a break. Then it was right back to work. So then I was taking this lady’s cake order and my one co-worker looks at me and asks if I’m okay. I can feel the faint coming on though so I look at the customer, say “Excuse me,” and collapse on the floor right next to the counter.
Seriously, read the notes on this post. Customer service is a special brand of hell.
We once had a patron drop down dead of a heart attack on the restaurant floor, and while my co-worker was trying to administer CPR, another patron tapped her on the shoulder to say she hadn’t gotten her cake yet. And then when she didn’t get it, complained. Like that is some evil villain bullshit right there, and that’s not even the worst of my stories from working in customer care.
Instead of the glass and steel skyscrapers of New York City, Park Avenue at Arches National Park in Utah leads you by natural towers of stone, glowing in the desert light. With great names like Courthouse Towers, Three Gossips, the Organ and the Tower of Babel, these dramatic rock formations line the 1-mile trail near the park’s entrance. Photo by Robert Caton (www.sharetheexperience.org).
I was at Adeevka where the Ukrainians are trying to take a strategically-located overpass from the Separs (I was there as a peaceful tourist who never even touched a firearm, of course) and the positions there are about 400 or so meters away from each other, so if you scream loud enough the fucks on the other side can actually hear you.
Up to this point, I’d observed a guy dropping his phone like it was going to bite him when I told him the Bruno Mars song he was playing was gay, and could reliably make people leave the room by asking them “would you rather sit on a chocolate cake and suck a dick, or eat a chocolate cake while getting fucked in the ass”, so it’s at this point in the trenches that a flash of inspiration hits me.
In my best Russian (which was utterly broken but “proper” Russian grammar is barbaric caveman-speak anyway) I scream out “next guy that shoots is gay”. And I swear to whatever god exists that two solid minutes of silence followed. It was some guns-fall-silent Christmas miracle shit
‘Okay, so, today at work I asked a question that made my boss recoil, but apparently, once asked, he has to tell me the full story or ‘bad things will happen’. Which, as it would, immediately piqued my interest.
I did the mash up last night, so I know that I left potatoes in the bin. I was last one out, and first one in this morning, and the potatoes are gone from that bin. Bit of a ‘huh?’ moment.
And my boss … he starts telling me about how they always used to put out roses outside the restaurant when they opened.
“What? Isn’t that expensive?”
“I mean, yeah, but it’s just what you do when you open a restaurant”
What the fuck kind of answer …?
Anyways, the roses always used to disappear, so they had to replace them everyday, (This skinflint spending that much cash?!). One outside the front door, in that little metal thing that I had forgotten exists. It’s above to the right of the front door, a small circle made by 8 vertical bands of metal, each in an ) shape. So, like, the cross-section is a )(. Apparently that’s a flower holder.
And then outside of the back door, apparently the old wooden post there never held up anything, it was just a post with a vase on it. That he drove into the asphalt there.
In the alleyway.
“What? Why would you do something so pointless?”
“Anyways,”, he brushed me off, “like I was saying, we used to put out the roses every night [[emphasis mine]] and they would always be gone by morning. City kids, right?”
“Why did you keep doing this?!”
“We had really good luck opening, I didn’t want to screw it up”
At this point I feel I should stress that my boss is a straight-laced no nonsense, no superstition, don’t-do-needless-things, pennypincher without an ounce of spirituality in him. But throughout all of this he’s defending putting out roses at nighttime, like it’s the most obvious thing n the world.
Just when I think he’s playing the longest, weirdest joke on me, he brings out the iPad, and he starts showing me security footage. It’s indistinct, it’s too dark, he’s trying to point out that the rose never changes from the beginning of the night to the end, but when it gets bright again, the flower is just gone, while the stem remains.
It’s about this point that I realize: This is a faerie sacrifice. This is how you sacrifice things to goblins and faeries.
These are rose faeries. Now you might not know, even if you live here, but Newfoundland has a tradition of rose faeries. We basically took all the stuff british colonists knew about faeries and said, ‘yeah, well, it’s all about wild roses now’. Hike up to Signal Hill from behind the geo centre and you’ll pass a faerie ring of rose bushes that someone planted because of that. (It’s not obvious at first). Later in Newfoundland history, we star replacing all of the rose faerie tales with tales about Mother Mary, (As in, Christianity), whose flower is the rose. Ask around the old folk, they’ll tell you tales about people getting sick or getting well really suddenly, followed by a strong smell of rose. About people working on church roofs, falling down into rose bushes, and not getting hurt. About statues of Mother Mary crying rose oil, indicating that an infant will be left in front of the statue soon. Those are all stories that are actually about rose faeries, but they changed the topic. I guess they still pay respect to them, they just think they’re paying respect to god with rose petals and rosehip tea.
“But what’s this got to do with potatoes?”
Well, he said, he kept this up for about 5 or 6 months, and then the winter started. And back then, the florists in town didn’t stock as much in green houses, there wasn’t enough call for it. So he wasn’t able to get roses.
The restaurant had really bad luck for a while, but then one day, all of the potatoes in the restaurant went missing. Of all the things, not the tenderloin steak, not the fresh salmon, not the halibut, not the cherries, not the fresh baked bread, the potatoes.
And the luck came back.
And he hasn’t questioned it since.
“So, about how many potatoes go missing every week?”
“About 25lbs in little bits”
We turned rose faeries into gluttonous potato faeries.
How does that even happen?!
Was a faerie just screaming “Where are the GODDAMN ROSES?!” while breaking into the restaurant?!
And what the hell happened when it found the potatoes?!
Like, *monocle pop*, “What the fucking WOT?!:, while holding up a potato and looking at it in reverence?
What do they even DO with potatoes?
I mean, the obvious guess is ‘eat them’, but like, did they eat roses?
Are there faeries somewhere swimming in potato water, blessing our restaurant for the earthy smells we have bestowed upon them?!
Just … potato faeries. We have fucking potato faeries in the restaurant where I work.
Potato.
Faeries.
(wondering idly how many people have tagged @seananmcguire on this one.)
the neat thing about potatoes is they’ll sprout green shoots just lying around on the counter. pretty sure if you were a fairy deprived of flowers due to winter, those pale, leggy potato sprouts would be fascinating.
I’m a broken record about this but I cannot stand pop radicalism
I mean, the sort of thing where say a post on tumblr gets like 50,000 notes despite assuming a political worldview that if actually adopted would require a wholesale rejection of existing society, probably a vast restructuring of one’s life, probably a vigorous involvement in direct action, and while there may be 50,000 people out there who are doing that, you just know that most of those notes were just from people looking at the post and thinking “huh, this sounds cool and right-on, I guess”
People seem to be leading these weird double lives, where they will just act like “normal people” and then occasionally mouth statements that sound like they come from radical pamphlets like yeah, of course, everyone thinks that, right? and then they just carry on like it means nothing
I respect people who believe this stuff and consistently talk about it like they mean it, but I’m really confused by the people who are in the middle like this
eh, it’s youth. extreme things are very exciting when you’re twenty. when you’re filled with desperate, helpless rage at genuine evil for the first time, not DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT RIGHT THE FUCK NOW seems like the dumbest, most cowardly, most terrible thing.
and then you get off tumblr and look at your life, and like… ok but where exactly do i throw the molatov cocktail? my boss’s office? what happens to my cat if i go to jail? and i have a date on friday and i haven’t seen wonder woman yet. maybe i will go to work like normal today. just for now. just for a while.
eventually you’re thirty or forty, you have a kid, you have a house maybe, some things you’ve worked and scraped to get and keep, and you realize that when you see a picture in the newspaper of some college boy in a mask throwing a flaming bottle, you don’t think “yeah! direct action!!” you think “FIRE IS NOT SAFE FOR CHILDREN STAY AWAY FROM US.” when someone talks about how property is theft, you think, “is that code for you’re going to steal my stuff for the greater good? where will we sleep? what will my children eat?”
when you’re twenty, you have little to lose and a lot of feelings. so you like and reblog and talk about ANGRY COOL ACTION POLITICS FOR HEROES. and probably that’s all you do, because you’re not actually suicidal and you do like living indoors. but the feelings are genuine. the anger is real. hell, the people the more excitable antifascists want to kill with baseball bats are mostly pretty horrible and i would definitely not want to be stuck in an elevator with them. so i wouldn’t say it’s fake or a pose.
i try not to rain on their parade too often. sometimes i just can’t help myself, though. i have the dad nature. every so often i have to be like THAT IS ENOUGH RUNNING WITH SCISSORS FOR ONE DAY PLEASE. sometimes people listen and sometimes they don’t.
We are smart enough to know hot things should be hot.
We are sorry if you don’t
fun story about the reason they do that (at least in America)
once this lady spilled her McDonald’s coffee on herself and ended up getting like 3rd degree burns and since there was no warning on the cup she was able to claim she didn’t know it would be hot (or at least that hot) and won a lawsuit against McDonald’s for $1 million
That’s what the media smear campaign against her would have you believe, anyway. The truth of the matter is that the McDonald’s in question had previously been cited – on at least two separate occasions – for keeping their coffee so hot that it violated local occupational health and safety regulations. The lady didn’t win her lawsuit because American courts are stupid; she won it because the McDonald’s she bought that coffee from was actively and knowingly breaking the law with respect to the temperature of its coffee at the time of the incident.
(I mean, do you have any idea what a third-degree burn actually is? Third-degree burns involve “full thickness” tissue damage; we’re talking bone-deep, with possible destruction of tissue. Can you even imagine how hot that cup of coffee would have to have been to inflict that kind of damage in the few seconds it was in contact with her skin?)
Yeah I’m tired of people joking about either the “stupid” woman who didn’t know coffee was hot or the “greedy” woman making up bullshit to get money.
She was hideously injured by hideous irresponsibility, it was an absolutely legitimate lawsuit and the warning on the cups basically allows McDonalds to claim no responsibility even if it happens again. Every other company followed suit to cover their asses.
So they can still legally serve you something that could sear off the end of your tongue or permanently demolish the front of your gums and just give you a big fat middle finger in court. “The label SAID it would be HOT, STUPID.”
obligatory reblog for the great debunking of the usual ignorance spouted about this case
obligatory mention that the media smear campaign to twist teh facts on this case and get public opinion against the victim was deliberate and fueled by the right wing tort reform movement
it was seized upon to limit the rights of consumers to hold giant corporations accountable for wrongdoing
watch the documentary Hot Coffee, it lays out all of the facts and examines the response to this case and explains why everything you think you know about this case is bullshit, and explains why tort reform is bullshit in an entertaining and informative manner
The woman injured in Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants was 79 years old at the time of her injuries, and suffered third-degree burns to the pelvic region (including her thighs, buttocks, and groin), which in combination with lesser burns in the surrounding regions caused damage to an area totaling a whopping 22% of her body’s surface. These injuries that required two years of intensive medical care, including multiple skin grafts; during her hospitalization, Stella Liebeck lost around 20% of her starting body weight.
She was uninsured and sued McDonald’s Restaurants for the cost of her past and projected future medical care, an estimated $20,000. The corporation offered a settlement of $800, a number so obviously ridiculous that I’m not even going to dignify it with any further explanation.
The settlement number most often quoted is not the amount that the corporation actually paid; the jury in the first trial suggested a payment equal to a day or two of coffee revenues for McDonald’s, which at the time totaled more than $1 million per diem. The judge reduced the required payout to around $640,000 in both compensatory and punitive damages, and the case was later settled out of court for less than $600,000.
Keep in mind that at the time, McDonald’s already had over 700 cases of complaints about coffee-related burns on file, but continued to sell coffee heated to nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit (around 90 degrees Celsius) as a means of boosting sales (their selling point was that one could buy the coffee, drive to a second location such as work or home, and still have a piping hot beverage). This in spite of the fact that most restaurants serve coffee between 140 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit (60 to 71 degrees Celsius), and many coffee experts agree that such high temperatures are desirable only during the brewing process itself.
The Liebeck case was absolutely not an example of litigation-happy Americans expecting corporations to cover their asses for their own stupidity, but we seem determined to remember it that way. It’s an issue of liability, and the allowable lengths of capitalism, and even of the way in which our society is incredibly dangerous for and punitive towards the uninsured, but it was not and is not a frivolous suit. Please check your assumptions and do your research before you turn a burn victim’s suffering into a throwaway punchline.
just moving along like everyone else 