Moving from lemmy.world.

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • TL;DR I worked for a department store as someone who fetched large/heavy objects for customers. Coworkers smoked together outside multiple times on shift. I did not smoke. I took “smoke breaks” in the back break room whenever this happened and a newer middle manager tried to make me work while they smoked. This same manager would later get flustered when I offered to buy an old unsellable item for 10 cents USD and he agreed. I was serious, he was not!


    In 2004, I worked for the moderately sized department store, K’s Merchandise, before they went under. A few months before I quit, we got a new mid-level manager. He was a young guy with clear aspirations to move higher in the near future.

    I worked as what they called a 600. I don’t remember why it was called that, but my job, along with a couple other 600s per shift, were to bring up large couches, non-assembled furniture, and anything that was too heavy or bulky to exist on the floor. These items were stored in the back warehouse. I got a lot of daily steps in with this job for all the walking we did. When a customer bought one of the large warehouse items, we would grab an appropriate cart and bring it to the front to load for the customer. We would carry walkie-talkies and floor salespeople would call for us to come get a ticket with the item(s) to be pulled.

    All of my coworkers at the time smoked and were permitted to take smoke breaks periodically. I didn’t smoke, so any time they took smoke breaks, and they’d do it as a group with some others in the store, I’d be the only 600 available.

    One day, my coworkers went to smoke with others, leaving me alone again. So, with my walkie still with me, I sat in the back and drank a small drink item from a vending machine in the staff break room. As I sat there drinking my…chocolate milk, I think, the newer middle management comes in from the back warehouse and asks me why I’m sitting down when I should be in the back sweeping the warehouse and other such stuff while business is slow.

    I told him I was on a smoke break while the others were also on a smoke break. When he brought up how I was not smoking and needed to get back to work, I refused on principal as I felt I was being punished for not smoking. He wasn’t pleased but just told me to keep the walkie close. I got to take little breaks like this whenever I was working with those other guys that smoked.

    This was also the same manager that casually complained about some large mirror, with corkboard, set in a wooden frame that wasn’t selling. I offered to buy it for $0.10. He laughed it off like I was joking and said sure. So I brought the item up front a little while later to ring it up. Told the cashier that the manager said I could get it for 10 cents. She congratulated me on my purchase.

    As I was coming back inside after loading it into my FORD AEROSTAR van, the manager asked me if I had really purchased that thing for 10 cents and when I confirmed he said he never said that I could. I corrected him and brought up how others were there when he said I could. He had no choice but to let me keep it.

    That mirror still has a place in my house, 20-years later!






  • I prefer LARPers with guns, myself. Coward is too good for these roleplayers who couldn’t be bothered to use their 6-weeks of training in how to beat black citizens and plant evidence, to take out an active shooter in an elementary school.

    We are a people with sociopaths in positions of power, with a license to kill, who feel no empathy toward others enough to ask why they weren’t acting to save these kids and teachers. Then to hear that parents were threatened with arrest (maybe actually arrested the mother who jumped a fence and managed to save her son when the cops would do nothing) if they tried to enter and do anything to help those inside.

    As a new parent to a kid that will be 5 this year, this shit is my nightmare. When the footage came out showing those scummy wannabes standing around hearing round after round of shots, knowing they were coming from classrooms of children and teachers, who likely were dying with every pop, made me so angry I was practically shaking and weeping. I’ve never felt that much utter contempt for police in my life. They’d have had to shoot me to keep me out of that school. I can’t imagine a more dystopian world than one where the parents were threatened while a gunman mowed down their children for over an hour.

    I’m so sorry for the families. They had to bury their children or loved one and live with the image of indifferent cops standing around in the school doing nothing. I would be left wondering which order my kid was shot and could they have been saved with the initial responding officers, or any other fucking one of the 300 and something on scene, doing their job, regardless of who the fuck was in charge. I guess at training these cops all skipped the class about active shooters are bad and can be legally shot.

    Not to pick any side in a world conflict, or make anything about this post anymore political, but this is why I have a hard time knowing about the civilian and children lost in Gaza. How the losses make up a disproportionally high number of women and children. I don’t give a flying fuck the color of a child’s skin or what religion their parents practice, THEY ARE FUCKING CHILDREN, FOR FUCKS SAKE!!

    (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻



  • When I was a Boy Scout, one summer at camp, a bad storm had rolled in around 7-8pm. We had just finished dinner and made it back to our campsites when the administration decided to issue the alarm urging scouts to return to the central lodge due to sever weather being reported.

    Us and another local scout unit were at a site situated at the top of a very large hill. Like, you’d get off a bike if you had to go up this thing. That kind of hill. As soon as the alarm sounded to get down to the central lodge, we booked it down the hill. As did the other scout unit from our area

    A little wet but otherwise fine, all the scouts and staff from the area entered the lodge and sat on the benches. From my perspective, I heard some gasps, a thud, and some screaming for help. I had no idea what was going on initially. Came to find out that the troop leader of the other local scouts had lurched over and fell on the ground, apparently suffering from a heart attack.

    All of us scouts, the leaders son included, had to sit there and watch a troop leader and father die before their eyes. It took the ambulance 30 minutes or so to get up to the campsite. The local scout administration performed CPR and did everything they could to keep him alive. He was probably dead soon after hitting the floor of the lodge.

    I have never forgotten this and is one of the primary reasons I try to take care of myself. Dude was a large guy but a great leader based on what I saw of him. I felt bad for his troop and his family. I hope that family and troop managed to get closure.

    I think the son was getting or had gotten that red arrow sash they give out for something scouts can do. Sorry, it’s been 20-years since I was in scouts.