Proposition: when one person has to cover a shift that is normally done by two people, they get paid double. This is both to compensate them for working twice as hard, and to remove any temptation for management to think “hey, actually that wasn’t so bad, maybe we should do this more often.”
YES
Make the pay **more** than double for that one employee so that it’s more costly than hiring 2 people like they’re supposed to do in the first place
She took up acting because the malnutrition she suffered under the nazis permanently damaged her health and prevented her from pursuing her dream to be a ballerina. During the war, she danced to raise money for the resistance - even though she was literally starving, she used what strength she had to make sure more nazis got shot.
She and her mom also denounced their royal heritage because of the Nazis in their family
Also Audrey was a humanitarian until her death, though ill with cancer, she continued her work for UNICEF, travelling to Somalia, Kenya, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, France and the United States.
These are things I literally never would have known about. I’m tired of women being painted as just being pretty.
I’M SO HAPPY TO SEE HER AT AN OLDER AGE I SWEAR!
Here’s another nice one.
For the longest time I assumed she had died really young because I never saw any pictures of her at an older age. She was an amazing woman.
Do this for any company that asks you to review their employees always.
You wouldn’t believe the number of times I swear I get 4/5 star ratings at my job just because the way people think is “well 5/5 means perfect and nobody’s perfect, 4/5 is good!” The company I work for doesn’t understand this common mentality at all, and will let people go over not having consistent enough 5/5 ratings. Obviously they don’t inform the customers of that.
When I was nine, possibly ten, an author came to our school to talk about writing. His name was Hugh Scott, and I doubt he’s known outside of Scotland. And even then I haven’t seen him on many shelves in recent years in Scotland either. But he wrote wonderfully creepy children’s stories, where the supernatural was scary, but it was the mundane that was truly terrifying. At least to little ten year old me. It was Scooby Doo meets Paranormal Activity with a bonny braw Scottish-ness to it that I’d never experienced before.
I remember him as a gangling man with a wiry beard that made him look older than he probably was, and he carried a leather bag filled with paper. He had a pen too that was shaped like a carrot, and he used it to scribble down notes between answering our (frankly disinterested) questions. We had no idea who he was you see, no one had made an effort to introduce us to his books. We were simply told one morning, ‘class 1b, there is an author here to talk to you about writing’, and this you see was our introduction to creative writing. We’d surpassed finger painting and macaroni collages. It was time to attempt Words That Were Untrue.
You could tell from the look on Mrs M’s face she thought it was a waste of time. I remember her sitting off to one side marking papers while this tall man sat down on our ridiculously short chairs, and tried to talk to us about what it meant to tell a story. She wasn’t big on telling stories, Mrs M. She was also one of the teachers who used to take my books away from me because they were “too complicated” for me, despite the fact that I was reading them with both interest and ease. When dad found out he hit the roof. It’s the one and only time he ever showed up to the school when it wasn’t parents night or the school play. After that she just left me alone, but she made it clear to my parents that she resented the fact that a ten year old used words like ‘ubiquitous’ in their essays. Presumably because she had to look it up.
Anyway, Mr Scott, was doing his best to talk to us while Mrs M made scoffing noises from her corner every so often, and you could just tell he was deflating faster than a bouncy castle at a knife sharpening party, so when he asked if any of us had any further questions and no one put their hand up I felt awful. I knew this was not only insulting but also humiliating, even if we were only little children. So I did the only thing I could think of, put my hand up and said “Why do you write?”
I’d always read about characters blinking owlishly, but I’d never actually seen it before. But that’s what he did, peering down at me from behind his wire rim spectacles and dragging tired fingers through his curly beard. I don’t think he expected anyone to ask why he wrote stories. What he wrote about, and where he got his ideas from maybe, and certainly why he wrote about ghosts and other creepy things, but probably not why do you write. And I think he thought perhaps he could have got away with “because it’s fun, and learning is fun, right kids?!”, but part of me will always remember the way the world shifted ever so slightly as it does when something important is about to happen, and this tall streak of a man looked down at me, narrowed his eyes in an assessing manner and said, “Because people told me not to, and words are important.”
I nodded, very seriously in the way children do, and knew this to be a truth. In my limited experience at that point, I knew certain people (with a sidelong glance to Mrs M who was in turn looking at me as though she’d just known it’d be me that type of question) didn’t like fiction. At least certain types of fiction. I knew for instance that Mrs M liked to read Pride and Prejudice on her lunch break but only because it was sensible fiction, about people that could conceivably be real. The idea that one could not relate to a character simply because they had pointy ears or a jet pack had never occurred to me, and the fact that it’s now twenty years later and people are still arguing about the validity of genre fiction is beyond me, but right there in that little moment, I knew something important had just transpired, with my teacher glaring at me, and this man who told stories to live beginning to smile. After that the audience turned into a two person conversation, with gradually more and more of my classmates joining in because suddenly it was fun. Mrs M was pissed and this bedraggled looking man who might have been Santa after some serious dieting, was starting to enjoy himself. As it turned out we had all of his books in our tiny corner library, and in the words of my friend Andrew “hey there’s a giant spider fighting a ghost on this cover! neat!” and the presentation devolved into chaos as we all began reading different books at once and asking questions about each one. “Does she live?”— “What about the talking trees” —“is the ghost evil?” —“can I go to the bathroom, Miss?” —“Wow neat, more spiders!”
After that we were supposed to sit down, quietly (glare glare) and write a short story to show what we had learned from listening to Mr Scott. I wont pretend I wrote anything remotely good, I was ten and all I could come up with was a story about a magic carrot that made you see words in the dark, but Mr Scott seemed to like it. In fact he seemed to like all of them, probably because they were done with such vibrant enthusiasm in defiance of the people who didn’t want us to.
The following year, when I’d moved into Mrs H’s class—the kind of woman that didn’t take away books from children who loved to read and let them write nonsense in the back of their journals provided they got all their work done—a letter arrived to the school, carefully wedged between several copies of a book which was unheard of at the time, by a new author known as J.K. Rowling. Mrs H remarked that it was strange that an author would send copies of books that weren’t even his to a school, but I knew why he’d done it. I knew before Mrs H even read the letter.
Because words are important. Words are magical. They’re powerful. And that power ought to be shared. There’s no petty rivalry between story tellers, although there’s plenty who try to insinuate it. There’s plenty who try to say some words are more valuable than others, that somehow their meaning is more important because of when it was written and by whom. Those are the same people who laud Shakespeare from the heavens but refuse to acknowledge that the quote “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them“ is a dick joke.
And although Mr Scott seems to have faded from public literary consumption, I still think about him. I think about his stories, I think about how he recommended another author and sent copies of her books because he knew our school was a puritan shithole that fought against the Wrong Type of Wordes and would never buy them into the library otherwise. But mostly I think about how he looked at a ten year old like an equal and told her words and important, and people will try to keep you from writing them—so write them anyway.
*sobs for like the umpteenth time this day and reblogs the fuck out of this*
this is it:
“Because people told me not to, and words are important.”
…yeah, my mother told me when I was 13 or 14 (right around the time I started writing both poetry and fanfiction) that I shouldn’t write so much. Why? Because she’d dug into the desk in my room, gone through my recent handwritten journals, and told me that what I was writing was too dark. Too emotional. It would make people wonder about me. Those were her exact words.
If someone tells you not to write? Write like your life depends on it.
The Phantom Menace is the best movie ever because the entire premise is essentially “Amazon has obtained its own private army and now two future samurai have to stop it from forcing Natalie Portman’s planet to use its services by cutting through Jeff Bezos’s army of robots and attempting to convince Congress to do something about it SPOILER WARNING Congress doesn’t do anything so Natalie Portman has to take matters into her own hands also the day is saved by a redneck kid the samurai picked up when the car broke down”.
The question is actually how the movie managed to suck despite that being the plot
The question is why you listened to people who told you it sucked instead of watching it and enjoying it like a normal person. There’s something new and fun happening in every scene. Secret meetings with shadowy figures, sneak attacks, fierce warriors, elegant queens, stampeding animals, mystical cities, monster attacks, harrowing escapes, whispered conversations, backroom deals, howling storms, thrilling races, ferocious fights, breathtaking skylines, political intrigue, worldbuilding, tests, infiltrations, sieges, rescues, spinning, explosions, all culminating in a fast-paced duel set to one of the most memorable cinematic scores of all time…then ending with a solemn funeral and a joyous parade.
It’s just as important to know how to enjoy a movie as it is to criticize it.
Counterpoint: Jar Jar Binks
You mean the founding father of motion-capture animation characters, the hapless castaway who was given a chance by war heroes because the Jedi value all life, the immature fool who matured upon the sun-scorched sands of a distant planet and the fire-blasted fields beside his home, the sole witness to the Battle of Naboo who survived to watch the Empire fall? That Jar Jar Binks? Frank Oz’s favorite character? Played so passionately by Ahmed Best, the man who nearly committed suicide because of the backlash and malice he suffered following the movie, but refused to do so and endures now to this day producing his own videos and delivering motivational speeches? Is this the Jar Jar Binks you speak of, or did you just jump on the first hate train that stopped by the station and say “well this seems like a fun ride”?
I rarely add onto posts, but if there’s an opportunity to further defend the prequel trilogy, I WILL DO THAT. If you were a kid who grew up with the prequels as your first intro to the star wars franchise, then you’ll also know that the only reason why they were hated SO MUCH was because Older Fans just… didn’t like it. They dictated all the criticisms and effectively made sure that they were the most hated films and that if anyone were to like them, well you just aren’t a good enough star wars fan.
No one’s denying Lucas’ clunky, and sometimes cringey dialogue writing. But I’m absolutely going to argue that TPT added more to the star wars universe than any of the other 6 films had. I’m talking the absolute grandeur of world building, costuming, score, an entirely new fighting style. The CGI is a product of it’s time, BUT we’re talking about a fully relevant narrative about how a democracy collapsed - which, I might add was completely enthralling, smart, and interesting.
All of the actors not only understood their characters, but their arcs, and essentially had an uphill battle of bringing back a 20 year franchise for a fresh audience - this meant pleasing the old fans as well as the new. And if we know anything about the star wars fandom, that was literally an impossible job. None of the star wars films are perfect - I’m definitely including the Original trilogy. But it’s absolutely unfair to treat them like trash when they were actually amazing. Literally just a bunch of neckbeards made you feel bad for having fun and you bought it.
(I’m going on a limb by saying Revenge of the Sith was probably better than any of them.)
Lucas created an incredible origin story for one of the most iconic villains ever. And whether people are willing to accept it or not, it was a goddamn good one. The fact of it is this - this fandom, particularly the old fans, are some of the most elitist and frankly TERRIBLE fans ever. It’s driven several actors to both career ruin, but mental breakdowns simply because they just didn’t like the performances. And the ripple effects have lasted so long because those incredibly loud voices have dictated the General Opinion. This is all despite what the Prequels have done for this franchise’s universe. I urge everyone to go back and try them again!
THIS.
Plus, straight up nothing was as awesome as the duel at Theed.
May spring semester bring you good grades, nice clothes and three new friends in the science department who will become your found family and with whom you will eventually start a rock and roll band the likes of which the world has never seen
Pretend, for a moment, that you’re an 18-year-old teenager from a family living below the poverty line.
One day, you make a silly mistake and get a ticket for it. Nothing major - maybe you rode the subway without a ticket or smoked too close to the entrance of a building. Maybe you were loitering. Either way, one thing is for sure: you definitely don’t have the money to pay the ticket.
So you don’t.
Eventually, you miss the deadline to pay your ticket, and you get a letter in the mail that says you have to go to court. But your life is chaotic, and a court date for a missed ticket is the least of your concerns. Your family moves constantly, which disrupts your life and puts you behind in school. You have one disabled parent and one parent who is always working, leaving you to raise your younger siblings by yourself. You have no means of transportation. There is rarely any food in the cupboards. The utilities are constantly getting shut off. The week that you were supposed to go to court, your family gets another eviction notice, your cousin ends up in the hospital, and your parent finds out that their disability payments are being reduced.
So you miss your court date.
Since you missed the court date, you automatically lose your case - now you have no hope of arguing your way out of the ticket, which you still can’t afford to pay. You can do community service hours instead of paying, but you don’t have time to do that, now that you have to work part-time and odd jobs on top of everything else to keep your parents off the streets and your siblings out of foster care. You know that you probably won’t finish high school on time, let alone fulfill your hours. You might be able to explain your circumstances to the judge, but you have no idea how to go about doing that now that you’ve missed your court date, your literacy skills are years behind thanks to your constant game of school roulette, and even though legal help is available to you, you don’t know how to access it or if you can afford to do so. But that’s still the least of your concerns - since you missed your court date, the judge has also charged you with failure to appear.
Which means you now have an active warrant out for your arrest.
And just like that, you’re now a part of the criminal justice system. A silly mistake that a middle-class teenager could have solved with Mommy and Daddy’s chequebook in a single afternoon has caused you weeks or months of stress and headaches over a process you don’t fully understand, and has ended in criminal charges. Instead of having a funny story to tell over dinner when you come home from college next Thanksgiving, you are now facing additional fines (that you still can’t pay), the possibility of a couple of nights in jail, the possible suspension of your driver’s license, and the possibility of being taken into custody any time you interact with the police. The next time your parent comes home drunk and violent, or someone breaks into the house, you think twice about calling the cops - you now have to decide if every emergency is “worth” the possibility of being hauled off to jail. And in the meantime, the circumstances that caused that first mistake haven’t gone away - you still don’t have the money to pay for the subway, you are still more likely to live in a house filled with smokers, you still can’t afford quit-smoking aids, you still live in a chaotic household that deeply affects your mental health, and you still don’t understand the legal system or who you’re supposed to talk to for information and resources.
So while those other teenagers get to go through life believing that they were “good kids who sometimes made silly mistakes”, you now get to go through life thinking of yourself as a criminal. And that might be the most damaging thing of all.
When I worked with homeless teenagers and young adults, I saw this process play out again and again and again and again. The kids often considered themselves “criminals” or “bad kids” because they had arrest warrants and criminal records, but few of them had ever actually committed a serious or violent crime - the vast majority were simply unlucky kids who did something stupid and didn’t have the skills or resources (or wealthy parents) required to get them off the hook. I had classmates in my upper-middle-class high school who did far worse things with far fewer consequences, because Mommy was a lawyer or Daddy was an RCMP officer, and some of those kids grew up to be lawyers or police officers themselves. The kids I worked with never got that opportunity. Second chances cost money, and the difference between a “crime” and a “mistake” has less to do with the offense, and more to do with the circumstances you were born into.
So when we’re talking about crime, punishment and who is “worthy” of being helped, maybe keep that in mind.
Jesus was fond of telling his followers not to worry about how they’d afford food tomorrow because God would provide. But Jesus told them this while handing out free bread and encouraging them to help people who were in need, making them the outlet through which God would provide for others
My mother was a waitress, we live in an area that has a lot of Christians and people would often stiff her on tips. Instead they’d leave a pamphlet with quotes from Jesus saying not to worry because God would provide
Jesus’ message was never that God would magically put food on people’s tables. God would provide opportunities to help each other, like the boat captains offering to help the dying man. That only works if people actually help each other
When I first heard this joke as a teenager I laughed at the guy who didn’t take the help that was offered to him. As an adult, I think of all the Christian politicians who vote against food stamps and I want to tell them “You were the boat captain but you steered away from the man in need instead of offering him help. Is that really what God wanted you to do?”
I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click
And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”
So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is
“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”
I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:
“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”
I accidentally called the director of the FBI.
My job got investigated because a computer randomly spit out a number to the Pentagon.
This is my new favourite story.
When I was in college I got a job working for a company that manages major air-travel data. It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.
There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server.
The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors.
During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”
So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound.
I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.
So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…
“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”
It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.
There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.
The red phone never rang again while I was there, so the people doing my training were only slightly wrong in their estimation of how often the doomsday phone would ring.
Every time I try to find this story, I end up having to search google with a variety of terms that I’m sure have gotten me flagged by some watchlist, so I’m reblogging it again where I swear I’ve reblogged it before.
But none of these stories even come close to the best one of them all; a wrong number is how the NORAD Santa Tracker got started.
Seriously, this is legit.
In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline. Here’s the ad they posted.
Only problem is, they misprinted the number. And the number they printed? It went straight through to fucking NORAD. This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay. NORAD was the front line.
And it wasn’t just any number at NORAD. Oh no no no.
Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red
one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the
number,” she says.
“This was the ‘50s, this was the Cold War,
and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on
the United States,” Rick says.
The red phone rang one day in
December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a
small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”
His
children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was
annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then,
Terri says, the little voice started crying.
“And Dad realized
that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him,
ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your
mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper
yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad
looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had
children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the
phones to act like Santa Claus.”
“It got to be a big joke at the command center. You
know, ‘The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering
Santa calls,’ ” Terri says.
And then, it got better.
“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and
Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam
says.
“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was
a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,”
Rick says.
“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re
sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’
Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called
the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat
Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks
like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour
and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.
For real.
“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people
saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor.
And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a
briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she
says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s
known for.”
“Yeah,” Rick [his son] says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”
So yeah. I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.
I was really depressed today and my gf convinced me to go take a bath and then a nap and when I came back out into the main area of our apartment she had cleaned, lit candles, and made me dinner I’m gonna fucking cry I love her so much
I really appreciate how she’s taught me to run through a checklist of what might be wrong when I’m down and I’ve learned to do the same with her. The questions are all super basic but help me a lot like:
- have you eaten recently?
- have you drank water?
- have you done something for your hygiene yet today?
- do you need to take a rest?
- is the space we’re in causing stress in some way? (too dirty, loud, bright, crowded, etc.)
- has something happened or is there a specific emotion you need to acknowledge right now?
- are you putting something off you need to do or a problem you need to solve and can I help you to accomplish/fix it?
Idk just having someone help me assess my feelings and give me space to open up has really made it so i shutdown due to depression/anxiety less and communicate more clearly. It’s really helped us not fight or get frustrated with each other.
