#(storytime)

[boyslit]

also a reminder that customer/patient confidentiality also applies to when you want to use their birthday for astrologizing, or even to wish them a happy birthday out of the blue. if they didn't tell it to you themselves, you don't know it.

Admitting my star sign was a mistake.

[sivavakkiyar]

John Cage, A Year From Monday

[silvermoon424]

It's so fucking funny how many people who owned Furbies as children ended up being traumatized by them in some way

[uwudonoodle]

Storytime: My brother Dave used to manage a Little Ceasars, and he hated it. So when my mom asked him what he wanted on his birthday cake, he jokingly said the Little Ceasars guy being stabbed with his own spear. My mom, who doesn't always get sarcasm, didn't even question it. She lovingly made him exactly what he asked for. It's my favorite cake ever.

Happy Ides of March to Ceasar getting stabbed!

[foldingfittedsheets]

Since everyone seems to love my sex shop stories, here’s another one.

Phone calls were literally a game for us. Not all phone calls, but there was a specific brand of call where guys would creep on us. 90% of the workforce at the sex shops was women. So we’d get dudes calling jacking off or trying to get their jollies from us.

The game: make them hang up. We could have hung up. On a few occasions I did, but for the most part we made a sport out of getting creeps to go flaccid. It really depended on a caller.

You couldn’t just go in for belittling them straight off- some guys wanted that. You had to tailor your strategy to the perv. Overall it was pretty fun and it turned an aspect of the job that could’ve become a major bummer into a fun sport. We’d get excited when the phones rang.

So one day the phone rings. I pick up and it was very clearly a young teen who was putting on a deep voice. I was utterly delighted, I’d never had a crank call before. He said, “I have a dildo emergency! Can you deliver 5 boxes of dildos to my home?!”

It took everything in me not to crack in that moment. It was so funny. It was like three kids had walked through the door in a trench coat and the phrase “dildo emergency” was one of the funniest things I’d ever heard.

But I kept it together. In smooth customer service tones I replied, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear you’re having an emergency, but due to the nature of our product we do require people to come pick it up themselves.”

The caller audibly deflated. Some of the deep voice he was putting on bled away when he said plaintively, “But it’s an emergency…”

“I’m sorry, sir, rules are rules.”

He hung up. I burst out laughing and told my coworker what had happened. She said, “I will buy you lunch if you call back and pretend you can deliver something.”

This sounded like an all around win for me, and the kid hadn’t used anything to block his number. So I called back.

“Hello!” This was before caller ID was common for home phones and so he picked up in his totally normal voice, several octaves higher than before.

“Hello, I’m calling regarding your dildo emergency?”

“Oh! Hem hem,” he coughed, getting his voice back into character for me. “Yes! The emergency!”

“Well I’ve spoken to my manager and it’s your lucky day. We’ll be able to make a delivery after all. Five boxes you said? We can swing it by later, we’ll just need your name, address, and credit card number.”

He was thrown by needing to provide info and was silent for a moment then said, “Well how much is it for five boxes?”

“About five hundred dollars, sir.”

He slipped out of his character voice to exclaim, “Five hundred dollars?! What kind of dildos are they?!”

“Just standard six inches with balls, sir.”

This was his breaking point. He started wheezing with laughter trying to repeat the phrase “six inches with balls” incoherently.

“So your address and card info?”

He hung up and I broke down laughing too. We both got a kick out of it, and I won the game twice in one day.

[batshit-auspol]

As a holdover from when churches used to run schools, many states in Australia legislate that the local church can come into schools to teach religion classes for an hour each week.

These 'scripture teacher' roles generally do not require any formal education training, and can be filled by just about any random off the street, which means that for one class a week Australian students are subjected to some of the most unhinged people on earth teaching them all kinds of made up stuff with zero supervision.

Aussies: This is a free thread to reply with the stories of the funniest things your scripture teachers said or did when you were a kid.

[corruptedremnant]

If they are food motivated, you can teach anything to any cat at any time.

As a note: you can teach basically any cat to come when called by just making your come here noise and bribing them when they come to investigate the sound. I use snapping my fingers (accidentally summoned Bigs into the thunderdome, who were then distressed to find I'd called them into such perilous conditions) and just...repeat until they're associating noise=treat, and then gradually reduce the quantity of treat and substitute with praise and other rewards. I started teaching the kittens at lunch today and they all get step one already.

[taffywabbit]

a bunch of my computer parts came with super bright gamer RGBs all over them (not by choice - the models with lights just happened to be better deals) and my case has a glass side panel, so when I first brought it home and set it up, I had to spend like 2 hours downloading and configuring several different programs to turn them all off (because no single app seemed to be able to control all the components at once).

in the end, the only light I left on was on the side of my GPU, and I set it to be a soft dark purple that would slide across the length of the GPU like a marquee every few seconds - nothing that'd disturb my sleep if my computer happened to wake itself up in a dark room, but enough to look cool and give me a visual indicator that the PC was turned on.

anyways sometimes I guess the driver that controls that specific component's RGBs just... crashes? for absolutely no reason? and the result is that it defaults to an intense, solid red that harshly illuminates my whole case and the area around it. every time this happens I cannot shake the immediate, instinctive fear that my computer has turned evil and is going to kill me. like oh god oh fuck it knows I ""fixed"" one of its CPU cooler fans by scotch-taping it in place so it would stop spinning unevenly and screeching at me, and now it's waiting for its chance to strike and claim ultimate revenge

[xiaq]

Charming interaction of the day:

There’s a construction zone around the corner that we pass regularly when walking to and from the house. There are several women on the crew, most of whom are virtually indistinguishable from the men folks from a distance. But there are a couple who really lean into feminine-coded floral shirts/pants/pink hardhats, etc.

As I walked past today, there was a woman who couldn’t have been over 25 who looked like contractor Barbie. Like picture a Latina Tinkerbell with a tool belt and purple work boots absolutely covered in sawdust, explaining something to a man who was likely twice her age and easily twice her size.

“Oh, no no no,” she said, as I walked by, gesturing to something on the tablet they were looking at, “don’t be silly! We’ll just [insert jargon I did not follow here]. It’ll be so much easier.”

After a moment’s consideration he said, gruff but earnest. “You’re right. That’s much less…silly.”

She gave him a little pat on the elbow, probably because that was the highest thing she could reach, and off they went.

Delightful.

[bluecatwriter]

I've been rereading some of my old travel diaries from my early 20's, and one of them seriously reads like a slow-burn fanfic. I was on tour with a small indie band and there was a cute guy my age traveling with the band. And we spent two weeks "accidentally" hanging out and sitting close to each other at the merch table in smoky bars and reading Tolkien poetry to each other and taking walks at the beach and sharing food and stargazing and sleeping next to each other on living room floors and giving each other back rubs and talking late into the night gazing into each other's eyes.

We never kissed. We never even held hands. I pretended to fall asleep on his shoulder once in the car, and one day I gave him a little kiss on the cheek. And that was it. We said goodbye two weeks later and we both thought it was forever and I pined so hard that I threw up.

A month later he sent me an apologetic letter saying that he was sorry for being so presumptuous when I clearly had no romantic interest in him, but that he had to be honest that he was in love with me. And I was like, "What?! He was in love with me this whole time???"

So yeah, we're married now (celebrated ten years last autumn) but if you're ever wondering if your slow-burn fic is too slow, or that your characters are too oblivious, just remember me and my now-spouse mutually pining over each other every single second of the day for two weeks without ever saying a word to each other about how we felt. I was reading my own diary yelling, "JUST KISS HIM ALREADY!"

[thatsthat24]

Narrating People’s Lives: The Saga Continues 🎃 (Felt like making a sequel to one of my favorites)

[beechfruit]

So in my class we name our glue sticks to stop the kids losing or mistreating them - they're much less likely to lose a glue lid if you're shouting "oh no, Alfred's been decapitated". It's fun.

Now, I'm a big batfam girlie ✨ so naturally I named all our glues after these characters. We have Richard and Bruce and Stephanie and Barbara etc. you see the point.

Recently, the first glue stick ran out. It had to go in the bin so unfortunately it "died", and you'll never guess which glue stick was the first to die...

It was Jason.

You could not conceive the sound I made as I had to throw Jason in the bin as all the children shouted things like "Jason's dead" and "noooo Jason!"

Worst things worse, I couldn't even explain how ironic that was that Jason, the second robin, was the first glue to go!

[sliceoflifebear]

Ok so I got this thing while getting discount candy and just look at it!!!

This looks stupid…so I bought it because IM A RESPONSIBLE CONSUMER!!! Let’s open it.

HOW TO EGG??!!

Ok so rock but also slime and also foam. I did not plan for this.

Slime and bones. Like I am back in the 90s

Fluffy foam and bones.

Time to crack open a hard one with the boys

Holy hell

I swear it’s not drugs

We can rebuild it, we have the technology

Meet my child Stevphen!

[thehmn]

I love people who never smile which make them seem kinda mean or disinterested in you but in reality they’re big softies.

I used to work as a cleaner at a paint shop. The boss was this middle aged man who never smiled and only ever talked to me when he wanted to correct me or show me a mistake I made. Not in a mean way and I much prefer people point out mistakes I’ve made to me instead of complaining to my boss later, but it did give me the impression he wasn’t fond of me.

Two years into the job they decided to merge with another paint shop and I assumed I had to look for other employment but it turned out the boss made sure everyone got to keep their jobs including me. “They can’t fire you” he told me “I extended the contract another year last week. You’re safe”

The only person who lost their job in the merge was him but he secured everyone else on his way out, even the cleaner who only showed up once a week.

[sivavakkiyar]

A young Buddha story I always liked (you might have heard it). When the Buddha was a young prince he was sitting in the garden one day when suddenly out of the sky a swan came crashing down, blood spurting everywhere, an arrow firmly lodged in it’s neck. It flailed on the ground piteously. The Buddha had not yet Awakened, so he ran over and panicked, started calling to his servants to come help him.

From around the corner comes his infamous cousin Devadatta with a big smile on his face. He says ‘don’t take it away! That’s the best shot I’ve made yet. That’s my spoils’. The Buddha is horrified, Devadatta is proud. ‘The bird needs help’, the young Buddha said. ‘The bird is my trophy,’ says Devadatta. The advisors aren’t really sure what to do, and the two boys can’t agree. So they go to the court room where the king and the ministers are gathered, and the court decides to hear the case between the two boys as a kind of break.

Devadatta makes his argument clear: ‘I shot the bird. By doing so, I claimed it. This is how everything works, every stone in this palace and each place of land one owns.’

The Buddha, young and bashful, says ‘Everyone agrees that things that hate each other belong apart, and that those who love each other belong together. Devadatta showed violence to the bird, who will not leave my lap, so you have to understand it as hate; I cared for the bird, who will not leave my lap, so it is clearly love. Hence the bird is under my care.’

The council weighs the arguments after the boys have spoken, admiring Devadatta’s maturity and a little embarassed by the Buddha’s emotional plea. Just as they’re about to make their judgement in favor of Devadatta, the king gives a small cough, and the courtiers remember themself: The Buddha is in the right, the bird belongs to him. Devadatta is outraged, screams injustice, storms out of the room.

Telling this story later in life, the Buddha says ‘Do you know? Devadatta had the better argument, of course. I only won because I was the king’s son—-pure privilege. In a sense, it wasn’t right. But I did care for that bird, and a week later it flew away squawking and happy.’

[dramaticqueerio]

When I was little, we got a huge custom library to hold all our books, and we had to measure the books for the right sizes to fit in the shelves.

Parents tried to stick to categories, like the Pratchett’s, Neil Gaiman’s, Political, Czech and Comics, but we also ended up with categories like small books and big books.

From that I learned multiple things.

The Neil Gaiman books were much more fun to sort through when I could see them all, and I started to read them with almost the same enthusiasm as the Discworld series

The Big Books were usually scary and boring, and hard to hide under the bedsheets when it was past my bedtime and parents came to check what the light peeking from under the door was.

The small books were fun. They were all old, and thin, and some even fit in the pocket of my shirt. I could never finish them, but I felt smart reading them, and people didn’t notice when I read them, so they couldn’t tell me that I was too small for them.

(my parents never did say that. My mum still remembered when she had to borrow books for her younger sister of seven years, because the librarian wouldn’t let her read them as she was “too little”)

The last thing I learned was that gravity still works even for little kids, and it hurts a lot when you fall from the chair you’re standing on with a stack of books on you.

The thing I’m learning now is that I’ll never read all the books we have, because there will always be more, and I’m mostly okay with that.