#i had to email systems to get them to reset it | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

daughterofcain-67 · 4 months ago

Text

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐖𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐩𝐭.2

CEO Jensen x Plus Size Female Reader

(masterlist)

𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: Monday has finally arrived and things are certainly smoother than expected. Jensen is certainly showing you a side you didn’t expect and it turns out that your roommate has a few surprises waiting for you.

𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬: nothing that I can think of?

The weekend had been filled with nothing but a Smallville marathon with your roommate. A part of you wondered if Rhema was more excited about your new employer than you were. Well actually, there wasn't a doubt in your mind about that. It was obvious when she nearly blew up your phone with different articles about Mr. Ackles buying the previous company just to expand his own casting company.

In a way, Friday had felt like a fever dream.

Still, you wondered why on Earth he left acting just to go into a business like this. Being a celebrity seemed like it would be such a better option. He wouldn't have to worry about any of the stresses of keeping a business alive, but here he was in the metal casting industry. It was definitely a 180 from acting.

Now that Monday had arrived though, you had to get back to reality. This Jensen guy was like the boss of everything, so if you could just stay off his grid and below the radar then maybe you'd survive the week while the company makes their adjustments to everything.

Once you made it to your cubicle you set your computer bag down on your desk and placed your coffee beside the monitor only to notice there was a little sticky note in front of your keyboard.

You took your seat in the little swivel chair and picked up the note to read what it said.

Apparently it was just a note from the IT guy giving you the new temporary passwords to your computer and other accounts for work since they had to reset a number of programs over the weekend as you'd predicted. You placed the sticky note elsewhere for the time being before you grabbed the supplies you needed to start the day.

After you pulled out your laptop and plugged it into the office system you logged into everything using the new password from the note and thus, your day began.

Your email had changed to your first initial and your last name @newedencasting.com, that would surely take some getting used to when you were handling phone calls. Although New Eden Metal Casting would just be an umbrella for the other casting departments that were under the previous owner - at least that was what you were assuming at this point in time until further notice.

In your email, there had some video tutorials sent to you for how to use the new programs the office was required to use now and once you watched them and started to get a hang of everything, you were finally able to start your work. Each new order, product question, or order status request was assigned as a case through this new program and you started getting to work, luckily your screen wasn't too bad for the time being.

While you were focused on work, your phone was sitting on the night stand and the screen started lighting up with message notifications from Rhema. You tapped on the screen to see some of the previews of the messages and you weren't really surprised at some of them.

RS: Is he there yet?

RS: What's he wearing?

RS: Send me a picture! I wanna see! I bet he's even more beautiful in person!

Then you noticed she sent a GIF with an animated character that had heart shapes for eyes, which caused you to chuckle, though you picked up the phone and started to message back.

YN: I can't just take a picture without his consent. That would be both rude and unprofessional. Plus I don't really want to interact with him and be tense at my own job.

Shortly after that there was another reply.

RS: Fineeeee, I guess I'll have to just take to Google or Pinterest.

You couldn't help but to roll your eyes a little before you placed your phone on the stand once more and resumed your work. Then you started hearing some footsteps. A couple of sets of them rather than one and you heard some voices.

"When was the last times those machines have been replaced? Some of them look old." You recognized Jensen's voice now that you've binged some of his previous work.

"They've been here for about as long as I've been here. So I'd say maybe fifteen years or so. We get them inspected every year to see of they have any faults and repair accordingly but I'm not sure we've ever had them replaced." You didn't recognize the other voice but you were positive it was one of the managers in the manufacturing and production department.

You supposed Jensen wasn't going to waste any time in making changes, but if it's been a long time since the machines have been replaced, maybe it was time to make some changes, not that you really paid much attention. Although, now that you've thought about it, Some of your emails last week did have to deal with some product returns because of manufacturing errors.

As you clicked on one of the cases and began to read the email you could still hear Jensen and the other individual discussing the machines before they stepped into the office right beside your cubicle and one of them shut the door. You had almost forgotten Jensen was practically right beside you for the next five days.

As you handled more emails and closed more cases whenever they showed up on the screen, you realized that there was an email that required you to actually go and talk to the engineering department. So, you printed off a sheet that was in the email and went to the printer that was conveniently by the engineer in your department.

Once you made it to his office, you knocked on the door before calling out: "Dylan?"

Once Dylan heard his name he turned around in his chair and looked over at you, "Whatcha got?"

You smiled a little. Dylan was probably one of the nicer guys there, despite his reputation for being a little rough around the edges. When you first started working he did intimidate you but once you started learning from him, you discovered he really wasn't that bad of a guy. He was one of those hard-to-read people that doesn't tolerate a whole bunch of nonsense, but Natalie said he liked you so that was enough for you to not feel s stressed anytime you needed to ask him a question.

"I've got this rep that has a customer in the paper industry wanting to order a few gears but they go beyond the biggest size we've got. Do you know if there's gonna be some new molds coming in with gears that have a bigger circumference than we've got now?" You asked and you handed him the paper that has the blueprints from that email.

Dylan took the pages from you and looked over the part they were needing before he went to the New Eden website, which you were stunned they changed it that quickly but it looked to have the other business branches still in tact including yours. You watched as Dylan typed the gear model into the search bar and started looking into alternative options.

"I haven't heard anything about getting new molds anytime soon so for now they're gonna need to contact one of the other departments that will have a gear in the size they need. Forward that email to me and I'll do some digging to get them to the right part they need." He answered as he handed the page back to you.

"Thanks!" You grinned and he nodded a little in his typical stoic way before he went back to checking his other emails, so you left his office.

As you started walking you couldn't help but hear some of the other Customer Service members talking.

"Did you see the way he was dressed? I didn't think he'd be that casual after his first impression on Friday." One of them said but you couldn't pinpoint who it was. But you knew they were talking about Jensen.

"He seems friendly though, still want to know why he's spending an entire week here. As a CEO you'd think he'd have other people come by and just observe the place and then email him about what they think of the place. Still makes it tense just the fact that he's here." Well, you supposed it was good to know you weren't the only one nervous about working with him here.

"Well at least it's only for a week and then everything can just go back to normal." A third person said and you shrugged a little to yourself before you started making your way back to your little cubicle.

That was when an office door opened and both Jensen and the man he was talking to earlier stepped out. You nearly froze in your tracks since you didn't want to bump into either of them and sure enough, you saw the more casual way Jensen was dressed with the black long sleeved shirt and a pair of jeans. Maybe he was going to make some frequent visits to the shop floor. You supposed you could understand not wanting to get nicer clothes dirty if he was spending his time in the manufacturing area.

When the other guy left, you had assumed Jensen would follow him out of the office area but instead he stayed but before returning to his office, he turned and he caught a glimpse of you. He gave a little grin and slight wave, which you returned with a little wave back before he went to his office and shut the door again. You assumed it was for some kind of virtual meeting.

"That was awkward..." You muttered under your breath before you walked to your desk so you could forward that email to Dylan.

Jensen had just finished his third meeting of the day and he knew the company would need to buy new machines so they wouldn't have faulty parts returned to them. As soon as he found out there had been more product returns last year bleeding into this year he knew he'd have to find a way to fix that as soon as possible, and when he walked onto the shop floor that morning he noticed there were more waste with the wax parts within the first part of the casting process and that had to've been part of the reason for delayed shipment. So one of the first machines Jensen wanted to get taken care of were the was presses.

By the time noon finally came around Jensen remembered he'd told Hyden to order lunch for everyone before they'd clock out for their breaks. So he walked out of his office and realized the workers had gotten their lunches from wherever Hayden ordered from and Jensen decided to walk around, stretch his legs after those meetings.

He didn't get very far though since he saw you at your cubicle. You seemed so zoned-in with your work. If a fire alarm were to go off he wondered if you'd even pay it any attention. Then when he thought about it, he didn't think he'd heard you really speak much that morning unless you were on the phone.

Jensen walked up to your cubicle and observed the way you were typing away like there wasn't any tomorrow. He raised a brow before he cleared his throat a little before speaking.

"Y/N, right?"

He could tell you were a little thrown off since your typing had faltered.

"Yes Sir." You'd answered and wrapped up the email and sent it off before you turned in your chair and looked up at him.

"Is there.. something I can help you with?" Jensen sensed the awkwardness in your tone and he chuckled a little.

"First off you can relax. And quit with the 'Sir' stuff. Making me feel like I'm in my eighties or something." Then he noticed you break your poker face and a smile tugged at your lips even if it was subtle.

"Just wanted to see if the new program was giving you guys any problems. I know a lot of changes were made over the weekend and wanted to know how the CSR department was adjusting."

You nodded a little as he spoke and you tucked a strand of loose hair behind your ear since it must've strayed from the bun you were wearing.

"So far it's not too much of an adjustment on my end. It's similar to the program we used before but the tutorial videos that were sent this morning did help a lot." You answered and Jensen nodded a little. That had to be the most he'd ever heard you speak before, then again he hadn't been there that long.

Jensen wasn't quite sure what to make of you. You seemed to have a lot of indifference and from the looks of it, you spoke only when you were spoken to.

He glanced around your cubicle and started to observe.

"How long have you been working here?" He asked curiously and you paused as if you were trying to think about it.

"December 2nd would make four years." You replied.

"So when do you plan on moving into this place?" He recalled how plain looking it was when he peeked in your space Friday.

This question seemed to catch you by surprise and Jensen saw you look around your little area then he noticed the way you rubbed the back of your neck.

"Not sure. I guess I haven't really thought about personalizing this place. I'm sort of plain in that sense I guess." Jensen managed to get a chuckle out of you while you responded and he smiled a little.

“Well… think about it a little more. A plant could brighten this place up a bit, plus it’s supposed to help produce oxygen and everything.” Jensen said and he heard you chuckle a little.

“I’ll give it some thought.”

“Good… I’ll let you get back to it. If you need anything… you know where I’ll be.” Jensen insisted, gesturing to his temporary office before walking away from your spot and onto his next destination.

Eventually he came across Natalie's office, recalling she was the CSR lead. He may have to pocket that information for later. Who knew when he'd her. After roaming around the office and conversing with some of the other office workers, Jensen found himself out on the shop floor where everything would be manufactured.

Jensen was lucky that he remembered his safety glasses were dangling from the collar of his shirt so he put them on as he continued to walk around. All around him, he heard machines grinding and almost groaning with each step of the process of work being done.

He watched as one of the workers walked from their wax press and went over to some large metal box. When the door opened, Jensen saw the man reaching into the box and he pulled our a large, cylindrical tube that seemed to be filled with already melted wax before walking over to an older looking press. It seemed so outdated and old, making the process so much slower but on the flipped side, it sort of made Jensen nostalgic because this was the exact kind of machine he used when he first started in the casting industry as part of the manufacturing team.

Jensen remembered having to reach into some large, rectangular heated box that had similar cylindrical tubes filled with already melted wax. Jensen also remembered how he burned his hands the first couple of times because he didn't know what he was doing during the training process. Obviously it got better with time and he found out ways to install the tube into the press without burning himself.

Jensen also remembered the countless hours he spent at the press making all sorts of parts and making sure the wax parts came out just right. There was no room for error unless he wanted the metal piece to turn out terrible looking at the end of the casting process. There were so many times he had to make sure the wax was cooled off just right to handle in order to clean off the edges, but not so cold that it would easily break in his hands. It was sort of tough to learn the right techniques at fist but Jensen was glad he got the experience.

But that was all back in 2007 or so, the mid 2000s after he stopped acting and right before he went to school for business. So yeah, that machine was definitely outdated and he noticed there were two others in the factory that needed to be changed out for newer machines. One of the meetings this morning pretty much made that official and now it's a matter of finding a good deal on a few of the machines and how fast they'd be able to get them here.

Eventually, Jensen made it to the quality department and saw the quality team inspecting some of the items before they'd go off to shipping.

"How's everything looking?" Jensen asked one of them and she looked up.

This girl had bright red hair and freckles across her face, bold green eyes behind the safety glasses. When Hayden was introducing Jensen to everyone on Friday, this girl had introduced herself as Amber.

"So far everything's looking good. Had a couple of returns but the items were able to go to stock and we can resell those items. But there were a couple of other orders that were supposed to be replacement orders and some of the parts were iffy at best." She explained with a shrug before going to one of the boxes she had inspected before pulling out one of the items.

"From the looks of it, the wax process was the problem and whoever approved the parts to go to through the rest of the casting process seriously slacked off. Whoever was at press three didn't wait long enough for the was to cool down so in these metal fittings there are a couple of dents and imperfections." She explained as she handed the part to Jensen to inspect for himself.

Jensen took the part and looked at the piece, noticing what went wrong. Inside the opening of the fitting he could see there were some problems and on the outside there were little dents that looked kind of like fingerprints from where someone was having trouble getting the fitting out of the mold during the wax process.

"We're looking into getting new machines soon so this doesn't happen. Looks like some of the machines can't cool the wax fast enough. Plus whoever was on the inspection side needs to be trained better and know it's things like this to watch out for so they could have the wax station redo those parts. You said press three?" Jensen question and he got a nod from Amber.

Jensen recalled walking by that machine and it was another old one they'd be replacing at some point, preferably sooner rather than later depending on how fast they'd be able to find the right that's close by.

Just before Jensen was about to say something to Amber, his phone started to ring. So he handed the fitting back over to Amber to put back in that returned order pile before answering and started walking back towards the main office area.

"Hello?"

"Mr. Ackles, we found a company that can make sure we can get at least one new press here in about three weeks. But the other two you want to replace would be about a month and a half away." Hayden said from the other line.

"What are they asking for those machines?" Jensen asked and when Hayden told them the price they were looking for, Jensen thought about it.

"Send the company's info to me via email but let's do a little mor price checking. It doesn't have to be a local company. It does sound like a good deal to keep in mind though." Jensen said before concluding the phone call and hung up the phone. Then a few minutes later his phone lit up again with an email with the company's information from Hayden.

"Definitely a start." Jensen muttered to himself as he used his badge and pressed it against the black scanner next to the corridor leading to the main office area before entering.

Another day was finally over, but you had to admit it was a much better start to the week than you were expecting. And it was a lot better then the previous week for sure despite having to learn new programs and make sure the reps were sending their orders to the correct emails.

As you were packing up your belongings you couldn't help but hear some of the other CSR ladies talking as they were packing their things and clocking out for the day.

"He's a lot more relaxed than I thought he would be. For sure means business with the changes in the factory floor though. Those new machines will help the department a lot." One of the ladies spoke.

"Still, don't you think he's too pretty of a guy to be in this kind of business? My sister did some looking on the internet and found out he was an actor in the 90s and early 2000s. He was dreamy for sure, he should've stuck with that!" Another lady said.

You were sure a certain roommate of yours would say the same thing.

As you were walking towards the door, the ladies whom those voices belonged to were behind you and before you knew it they addressed you as well.

"Y/N, what do you think of Mr. Ackles?"

All you could really do was shrug. Frankly what happened that afternoon around lunch was the most you got out of Jensen and you were shocked that he even came to talk to you after you aimed to stay under his radar. Then again you initially failed to account for the fact that his office was practically next to your own.

"Oh come on, you have to have some kind of opinion about him, more than just a shrug at least!"

You thought about it and pursed your lips while you opened the door and the three of you started walking outside to your cars.

"I don't know really. I mean he's trying to be approachable which I think is important. Better than flaunting your authority and intimidating people on purpose." You finally replied.

“That’s a suck up’s answer. What do you really think of him. Like if he wasn’t like everybody’s boss, what do you think?”

You tried to think, really think about it. Even you had to admit he was attractive when he was younger. Sure he was definitely something to look at even now you supposed. What else would they want you to say?

“He’s… cute I guess? I really don’t know what to tell you other than he’d be just another guy outside of work.” You said and the other girls just snickered at you.

“You wouldn’t try hitting on him or anything like that if he were just another guy and you both just happened to be at a bar?” One of them asked, causing you to get a little flustered.

“Probably not.” You chuckled nervously, putting your hands in the pockets of your cardigan. It was an honest answer though; you weren’t exactly the one that would make the first move in public. Or in any situation for that matter if you were completely honest with yourself.

“Anyways… I’d better go. See you both tomorrow.” You rushed to your car before they could ask you anymore questions about the CEO. You were just ready to go home and maybe make some tea.

Once you finally made it home, you took your shoes off and hung your keys on the little key rack that was beside the door.

“Finally! You made it back! I thought you’d never get here! I got you a little surprise.” Rhema exclaimed with so much excitement in her eyes, you had to admit the suddenness took you by surprise.

“Um… a surprise? Did I miss something?” You asked and she giggled at you.

The next thing you knew, Rhema was walking out of her bedroom with a box in her hand and there was a corner of a blanket draped on the outside of it.

“No. But I figured sometimes you may need a little company on weekends where you want to stay here and when I’m covering shifts at work.” Your roommate explained, causing you to grow a little skeptical as she walked over with the box.

“Well? Take a peek!” She giggled and that was when you heard a little noise, almost like a whine or a high pitched squeak. You couldn’t exactly pinpoint the description of the sound. But it certainly caught your interest and you slowly peered into the box.

When you looked inside you saw a small, short haired, blue eyed, calico kitten that couldn’t be bigger than your own hand. You could feel your heart soften at the sight of the little creature looking around the small surroundings of the box before it looked up at you. You couldn’t help but break out into a smile when it started to make that noise again before you reached into the box to pick up the kitten.

“Oh my gosh, Rhema!” You said, stunned that there was even a kitten in the house. You weren’t expecting to come home to something like this. The kitten continued to let out those little noises as you held it in your hands.

“You need to work on your little meow. Otherwise you’ll be stuck sounding like a squeaky toy.” You said and Rhema giggled.

“Do you like her?” Rhema inquired and you looked up at your friend who seemed so eager to keep her.

“I do. She’s precious. Thank you.” You smiled and she set the box down and you gave her a little side hug since your other hand was occupied with this kitten.

“Oh I hoped you would! The landlord is already okay with us having her, the pet fee has already been taken care of. All that you need to worry about now is giving her a name.” Rhema continued as she let go of the hug.

“Sounds like you had this all planned out, huh?” You chuckled and took a seat on the couch. When you did, the little kitten started climbing up one of the sleeves of your cardigan. You snickered a little before you pried the little creature from your sleeve and set it down in your lap.

“Well… I wanted to get her for you last week since it sounded awful but I couldn’t do that. But I was able to stop by the pet store again today and lucky for us she was still there so I picked her up and brought her here!” Rhema admitted and sat down next to you, then she reached over and used her first two fingers to rub the top of the kitten’s head.

“Now all that’s left to think about now is what you’ll name her.” Rhema spoke.

You looked down at the little creature in your lap that was circling around before laying down like a little cinnamon roll. Your head tilted a little to the side as you started to pet the little kitten, slightly surprised that it seemed to be getting used to you already. After all it wasn’t like you were some sort of Disney Princess or whatever that had animal powers.

“I may have to do some thinking about that.” You admitted and you could hear the kitten purring, causing you to grin to yourself.

“I gotcha. Maybe sleep on it tonight. But don’t take too long! We can’t call it cat forever.” Rhema snickered and you grinned, nodding in agreement as you continued to pet the new little addition to the apartment.

“So… how did things go today? Still rough from last week?” Your roommate asked, so you began to list off some of the things that happened that day.

You told her about how it was a little easier than last week, how some things needed a little adjustment with everything as far as the new systems, rumors of new machines, more rumors of new vendors to sell the product for the different brands under New Eden. Then you proceeded to tell her about how Jensen actually came and talked to you a bit and even suggested to decorate your cubicle area. You still weren’t sure if you would do that or not. Then you told her about the questions your coworkers were asking you and you finally went home.

“Wait, why wouldn’t you ask him out if you didn’t work together?” Rhema asked, although you doubted that was the only question on your mind.

“That’s what you got out of that? I’m just not that kind of person and you know that. Plus I wouldn’t have been in the bar in the first place so that scenario wouldn’t have even made sense for me.” You said and Rhema scoffed a little before she rolled her eyes.

“So, you gonna decorate after all and make it more your own? I’ve been suggesting you do that for years - ever since you first started pretty much.” Your roommate said and leaned back into the couch before she grabbed the remote and turned on the TV.

“I’m not sure… wouldn’t it seem unprofessional?” You asked while Rhema turned on Smallville, returning to your binge watching since you two didn’t complete the series over the weekend.

“You’re kidding, right? The CEO even said you needed to liven the place up. No, it’s not unprofessional. Tons of people do a little decorating in their desk area. This weekend we’ll go to the store and get you some plants or something. Maybe we’ll get you some little lights to hang around the border of your cubicle.”

Smallville’s theme started playing through the speakers and you had to admit you found some moments throughout the day where that would be in your head for a while before a phone call would interrupt your thoughts. You did start to like Jensen’s character though since you and Rhema just got to the first few episodes he was in.

“As long as you don’t send me to work with pictures of Jensen to hang on my walls from his acting days, I think we’ll be good.” You laughed and Rhema giggled too.

“No but you and your coworkers should take some of those pictures and print out tiny copies to hide throughout the office for him to find. He sounds light-hearted enough to get a kick out of a little prank like that.”

“I’m sure some of them may have thought about that already. It’s just a matter of if they can print out those pictures without getting caught. Unless they have their own personal printers at home and they can print them there.”

“I really hope they do! You should suggest it to them! Gives you some sort of thing to talk with them about too!” You smiled a little.

“Yeah I suppose.” You said, still a little unsure of whether or not that would happen, and you felt the little calico kitten squirming a little in your lap, causing you to look down at her.

“I really should come up with a name for you.” You admitted.

“By the way… How do you feel about blind dates?” Rhema asked sort of out of the blue, causing you to glance over at her.

“What are you talking about? You didn’t arrange anything did you?” You questioned.

“No no, I didn’t arrange anything yet. But…. I have this coworker that has a brother as well as a friend. They are both single and supposedly cute but I’ve never seen pictures of either of them. It’s just an idea my coworker had and I told her that I had a roommate that’s single too and maybe it could be some kind of double-blind date.” Rhema said and you lifted about brow.

“Uh, no. I bet this is the real reason why she brought you home, Little Critter.” You looked down at the kitten who let out a little squeaky sound in response.

“It’s not! Can you at least think about it? I mean if not I’ll still go on the blind date but I just thought this could be something we could do together.” Rhema spoke and you looked back at Rhema, then over to the television screen.

Several thoughts were going through your mind. A blind date? Really? What if something didn’t work out? What if something went wrong and you made a fool of yourself?

“Rhema… I really don’t know…”

Rhema pouted a little before she poked at your shoulder, “Hey… if a date seems a little intimidating for you… then we don’t have to call it that. Maybe consider it like you’re going as my moral support? A chaperone even? I mean… a blind date is a scary idea for me too. I’m used to at least knowing the guy before agreeing to go out with them. I wouldn’t know if this guys is some kind of creep and if he is, I don’t exactly wanna be by myself for that.”

“Well… when you put it that way…” You trailed off as you looked at the kitten again.

“It’s not like it’s supposed to happen tomorrow, right now it’s nothing but an idea.” She told you and you nodded a little. You could tell she was trying to put your mind at ease, which you were thankful for.

“I’ll think about it. After all, I can’t hand my roommate over to a couple of kidnappers, can I?” You joked and Rhema broke out into a smile before she wrapped her arms around your shoulders and hugged you.

“Great! Let me know what you think by Wednesday. Maybe we can go out Friday night if nothing else.” Rhema insisted and you smiled a little.

“Wednesday… got it.”

Tag List:

@deans-spinster-witch @roseblue373 @nancymcl @jackles010378 @hobby27 @chriszgirl92 @lyarr24 @wirdbeimaufhebengebunden @blackcherrywhiskey @prettyinplaid94 @suckitands33 @muhahaha303 @winchesterwild78 @ladysparkles78 @stoneyggirl2 @kr804573 @bobbdylan @n-o-p-e-never

#jensen ackles #supernatural #spnfandom #jensen ackles x you #jensen imagine #jensen ackles imagine #jensen x reader #jensen ackles x female!reader #jensen ackles x plus size reader #jensen ackles x y/n #jensen ackles x reader #jensen ackles fanfiction #spncast

43 notes · View notes

skullamity · 27 days ago

Text

Need to veeeent.

So we are almost a week without internet. We were with Rogers for TWENTY YEARS, and over those 20 years every interaction we had with Rogers was a huge fucking mess, stemming from the fact that, waaay back when we were in college, if you wanted their normal services AND their cell phone services, it was two separate accounts. Eventually they decided to merge those two accounts and informed us after the fact. Whatever they did to merge them? Completely locked us out of being able to view and pay bills online through Rogers' interface.

Over the years, we would call Rogers for one reason or another (just switching around and then eventually slowly cancelling all services with them except for internet) and every single time they'd be like "so we see you are still receiving paper bills. we are going paperless and phasing this out, so can we get you to pay through the online portal?" and every time we would have to explain that no, we needed paper bills because their broken ass system made even logging into the portal impossible.

Without fail, whatever intrepid techie would say, "don't worry, we will walk you through it, I'll get this fixed!" completely sure that they would be the one to hold our presumably tech illiterate hands though baby's first reset password sequence and then tell us to hit okay and watch the magic happen! Only for us to get the same error message that every other tech over the years got, have us read it out to them, have them be stumped, have them tell me that they have never encountered this before, that their supervisor is also stumped, and how about we just put a pin in that and see if there's a solution in the future! We will keep sending you paper bills for as long as we can (eventually they did stop and we had to have them email our bills to our personal emails directly as a work around solution).

We first encountered this issue when we were 19 years old and living with roomates. We have both recently turned FORTY.

Anyhow, flash to last week. The internet goes out after a day where we had freezing rain, no big deal, it happens. Oddly, I'm not seeing anyone complaining about internet outages in the local Facebook communities, which makes me think, 24 hours later when it still hasn't come on again, that it might just be us. We call Rogers and a nice lady on the phone tries to walk us through cycling the router (a thing we have done in the past 24 hours about 50 times and have been doing for years), and in the process of doing this, we discover that the issue is that our old ass Rogers router has kicked the bucket when she has us unplug it and plug it back in and it just...doesn't turn back on. We tell her the model, she says OH BOY THAT'S ANCIENT, LET ME SEND YOU A NEW ONE! Just let me confirm your address!

And here is where the problems start. You see, a decade ago when we bought this house after living in it and renting it from my inlaws, my inlaws split the property down the middle and sold the other half to someone else. Even though our house shows up on Google maps, even though uber eats and various other delivery services have no problem finding our very real house with our new, updated house number (went from something like 1234 Main St., Unit 2 to 1232 Main St., no unit), Rogers tries to update our address in the system and their system is like...that's not a real house or address. We assure them that it is, and has been, for like a fucking decade. They tell us that they can't send us a new router until they have someone physically come out to our house and confirm that it is 1) real and 2) in their service area.

I need to be so clear that our house is in the exact same place it has been for over a hundred years, and that up until the router broke while tech support was trying to get us to cycle it, we had a 20 year old Rogers account for which we were paying bills! We had internet last week! And they were sitting there telling us that before we can have internet again, they need to send someone physically to our house to be like that's a house all right.

So Shay was like...you know what? Fuck this, please close our account, we are looking into your competitors. The dude on the phone (to be clear was just doing his job, I get that) offered to cut our bill down from $126/month to $50/month if we would reconsider, which only made Shay more pissed, because like...way to tip your fucking hand? Thank you for admitting you overcharge us for a service that you could have offered us better rates on literally any other time over the past 20 years? Fuck you, we aren't doing business with Rogers anymore!

So we close our account and call a competitor who offers us a better plan for $40/month, says they will have a router to us to self set up by today and didn't make us wait on hold for 45 minutes to do any of that.

The router arrives this morning at 9:30am, we set it up, and....no internet. Tech support is like not sure what's happening? So we explain the lot severence again, and they're like...okay so we run off of Rogers system. So we have to call Rogers, and have them send someone out to your house to physically confirm it is a real house, and we have to wait on them to do this because otherwise our system will refuse to believe that your house exists. So now we are waiting on a Rogers tech to be like yeah that's a house!

I just want internet, man. I have work to do, Shay is still trying to apply for jobs. My phone data for the month is almost completely used up and it is only the 6th!

Love that we left this bastard ass company and are STILL haunted by the spectre of their incompetence!

#aaaargh fuck you Rogers

13 notes · View notes

rogueshadeaux · 1 year ago

Text

Chapter Twenty-Five — Fallout

It took me way too long to find my voice — I felt more disconnected from my body now than when I was freezing over. “When does it get easier?” I asked, voice croaky and barely there. “When do you stop feeling guilty over it?”

5,555 words [teehee] | 20 min read time | TRIGGER WARNINGS: violence, described spiraling, death, racism, illness

Brent pulled the sleeve of his sweater over the wrapping on his elbow as the phlebotomist, I’d discovered they’re called, filed away his blood samples in this tube holder, each one marked.

“Stress to them that I need the results as soon as they can get them,” Dr. Sims was talking off to the side with some technician. “The full report, in email.”

The tech muttered some agreement, clearly awestruck at who he was talking to, and was gone with the vials the moment they were handed off.

“So what’s a…microray?” Brent asked.

“Microarray,” Dr. Sims corrected. He was dressed differently today; business casual, collar of his dress shirt caught on the neckline of the wool sweater. “It’ll break down the sequencing of each individual chromosome and tell us if there’s any genetic malformations in your DNA,”

“And why would we need to know that?” Brent glanced over at Dad, who was sitting in the now-baren windowsill seats and looking out the window. Everything Dad and Brent had in this room was packed up, ready to go as soon as I got medicine from the in-hospital pharmacy.

Dad sighed hard, staring at the sky like it had all the answers for a moment longer before turning in place to face us. “There’s something I need to explain to you both,”

And then he began to tell us more about how Mom got sick.

She didn’t heal immediately after having us, but the doctors brushed it off; a Conduit has to be in decent shape to heal and she simply wasn’t. She lost a lot of blood in the abruption, and the blood transfusion had to be from someone without the Conduit gene as the enzymes are dangerous to normal people, so she may have been beyond drained out. That’s what they thought, at least. “They told us to give it a week,” Dad said, “That we’d probably see progress by then.”

They didn’t. Instead, Mom was discharged, and then back in the hospital nearly two days later for MRSA.

The Doctors contributed the infection to her weakened system, and brushed it off then as well. “When someone’s pregnant, their immune system is ass,” Dad tried to joke, with no real humor in his voice. “So they reset the healing clock on us. Told us to wait two weeks. Raising two newborns on my own when she was hospitalized was horrible, by the way,”

Two weeks came and went and her scar wasn’t gone. Her and Dad brought it up to her obstetrician, and they simply said to wait till her six week check-up. The amount of time it takes for someone normal to heal. “They did that again and again, a lot. Just told us to be patient and do it the human way,” Dad shook his head.

She began to bruise. She started getting bloody noses again. She had accidentally sliced a knuckle to the bone in a dishwashing accident and had to get stitches, which stuck around instead of dissolving almost immediately. “Healing was the first thing to disappear, and then her powers got weaker.”

Brent looked at me, fear in his eyes. “So does…does that mean Jean’s…”

“We aren’t sure yet.” Dr. Sims said. “That’s what the microarray is for. I was still in school when Fetch died — what was happening to her was what made me go in the first place. But that means we never found out what made her sick, and we’ve gotta rule out that it isn’t something genetic.”

“But didn’t you guys say it might be Augustine’s tar?” Brent asked.

“It might be,” Dad responded. “Which is where the second part of this conversation comes in.”

What the hell did that mean?

Dad took his jacket from his lap and chucked it on to the little backpack he had, hands going to his knees in its place. “Remember that holiday vacation I promised?”

What the hell did that mean? “Yeah?” I asked, glancing over at Brent with a cocked eyebrow. Was this like how people take out their dogs for the day before putting them down? Was I getting a ‘Best Day Ever’ before kicking the bucket? At least Brent seemed to be feeling the canine excitement; he was suddenly sitting perched at the end of my bed like he was waiting for Dad to ask him if he wanted to go for a walk.

Dad smiled slightly — though it looked more like a grimace. “Have either of you ever wanted to visit New Marais?”

Brent immediately cringed, and I couldn’t blame him. New Marais was…bad. Bad enough that Theresa’s mom basically fled from there after her dad was killed. I’m pretty sure it was the world capital for place most likely to get stabbed at. There were literal robbers poised at bridges, shooting the tires of cars on the highway to make them crash so they could pilfer everything from the vehicle. The only people that’d thrive in New Marais were criminals, extortionists, and other sorts of bloodsuckers. It wasn’t a pretty place, hadn’t been in literal decades; after the flood and the fascists, it had no allure. Unless you liked French colonial structures and being assaulted.

Even the architecture couldn’t convince Brent; he looked at me, and I knew we were thinking the same thing. “Why, uh…” I drew off. “Why New Marais?”

Dad wasn’t surprised at our apprehension — in fact, he seemed to agree with it. “There’s someone there that can help us out. Knows a bit about tar powers — but we have to be there to get answers. He’s outside of the city center, from what I understand, but it’s…”

“New Marais,” Brent said distastefully.

Dad nodded. “New Marais.”

“That’s still Louisiana,” I said, “That’s gotta be a couple hour flight, right?”

Dad grimaced. “Actually, it’ll be a…three day drive…”

“I’m not allowed to fly.” Dr. Sims said from his place, yet again, by the sink. “Not in planes, at least. I don’t plan on flying that far with my powers, either.”

“You’re coming with us?” Brent asked, an undertone of astonishment in his voice.

Dr. Sims nodded. “What’s happening to your sister is something I plan to see through. I didn’t get to…to help Fetch in time. I’m going to do it this time. It’s what she’d want.”

The way he talked, you’d think he and Mom were age-old friends. How well did they know each other?

The doctor came up with prescriptions, pain medicine and antibiotics and something else I couldn’t pronounce, giving directions I knew I’d forget the moment I left this room. Dad knew this too, saying, “I’ll put alarms on my phone — oh,” he reached down to the backpack, fiddling with the thing and pulling something out. “Put them on yours too.”

He tossed my phone towards my broken arm, forgetting I couldn’t exactly reach out and catch it with it held against my chest in the sling.

Dr. Sims slipped out at some point on promises that he’d be right back — and he was. Almost within three minutes. He was a bit winded, looking past Brent and I as he helped me figure out how to put on my jacket to look straight at Dad, saying, “We’ve got an issue,”

Dad’s face immediately got steely hard, and he stood, shoulders squared. “What’s up?”

“Not that kind of—” Dr. Sims cut off, “Well, it could be. Protest.”

Dad growled. “How the hell do they know we’re here?”

“Someone probably slipped something to the media,” Dr. Sims crossed the room in a second and was at the window, looking down at the parking lot a few floors below. “Might have seen you. Looks like they’re congesting the main entrance though, so we can probably slip out back. Problem is, none of us can get to the parking garage without them seeing,”

“It’s just a few protestors,” Brent shrugged. “We can get past them.”

“It’s…” Dr. Sims trailed off. “It’s more than a few.”

“One of us could go move the truck—” Dad started.

“They’ll just chase us down.”

“Is there a roof entrance?” Brent asked. “Maybe we can leave a different way, come back for the truck?”

Dad looked at him like he was an idiot. “I’m not letting your sister climb a hundred feet in the air when she can’t make the landing.”

I managed to balance the jacket on my shoulders, saying, “We should just go. Brent’s right, we’ve walked past them dozens of times before. There’s probably cops monitoring, we should be fine.”

Dad looked like he wanted to do anything, literally anything, except that. “If they get violent, Jean…” he warned.

Oh, God. Don’t tell me he’s turning into this sort of parent. “I can still defend myself, Dad.” I insisted. He wasn’t going to start keeping me in bubble wrap, right?

Dr. Sims actually came to my rescue. “We’ll all be there, she should be fine.”

“We can even escort her,” Brent added, amused. “Like some c-list celebrity.”

Dad bit at his cheek, unsure — but also entirely out of options. “Fine, okay,” He said. “We’ll move quick. Eugene, think you can guard Jean while she gets in the truck? I’ll cover Brent.”

Well, at least I wasn’t the only one he was being overprotective of. “Sure,” Dr. Sims said.

They found a formation when we stood in the elevators, just in case some people made it into the lobby of the hospital; Brent and Dr. Sims stood in front of me, flanking each side for space while Dad stayed behind me. A full cover of large, powerful bodyguards to make up for the fact that I was now weak. It felt so demeaning. I was some weak spot in the family now, a risk that they’d have to mind at all times.

As the elevator doors opened up into a hallway, I could hear them, a dozen voices, maybe even bordering on a hundred, all chanting angrily — although I couldn’t make out what. Brent cast an unsure look over his shoulder, asking, “Maybe we should stay a while?”

Dad’s face was steeled. “There’s no point.” he said plainly, a sudden shift from his hesitancy before. “The sooner we get out of here, the better.”

Still, as we passed an electronic map in the hall, Dad’s hand came out and drained it of all imagery, matching Dr. Sims in power.

The lobby was huge and fancy and white, with some big fountain fixture in the middle, its white noise barely doing anything to silence the voices. The windows, though, were big enough to show how many people there were. There were at least a hundred, all being forced to the sides by police so that the actual entrance to the hospital would be clear for patients and visitors, with three separate news vans recording the tension. “Fucking hell,” Dad muttered behind me.

“At least there’s cops?” I offered, not entirely sure that was a good thing. Rarely was.

“Stay looking forward, stay walking, don’t engage,” Dad listed off behind me. “You hear me, Brent? Don’t engage—”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard you,” Brent muttered, going a bit red.

The foyer of the hospital had a line of police whose eyes I avoided; just gotta stay in step and keep moving forward. Easy enough.

All of that assurance disappeared when we stepped outside to what was moments away from becoming an angry mob. But what I wasn’t prepared for was to be confronted with images of me; a grainy picture of me trying to get the huge concrete rock to not hit the helicopter, my Linus Pauling yearbook picture. The signs were all littered with words, accusations: Shot out of the sky on the ones with the footage, a sign with just the number 137 on it, the 7 written on a sticky note. An update on the death count.

Me. They were protesting me.

And as we stepped further into the light, the protestors zeroed in on me, and the general yelling became targeted insults that somehow melted into white noise and also stood out to me all at once. “Dirty Bio-terrorist!” one person yelled.

“There’s over fifteen thousand unemployed, I hope you’re happy!”

“You killed my brother!”

“We’re homeless now!”

“Someone oughta hold your head underwater!”

I didn’t realize I was frozen in place until Dad’s arm wrapped around me, and he began to roughly steer me through the slight divot in the crowd Dr. Sims and Brent’s bodies had made. “C’mon, Jean,” he muttered, voice as stiff as could be.

There was no getting through the crowd here; the flow of the protestors followed us like what I imagine wolves hunting elk did. But was it fair to paint them as the predators when they were the real victims here? If the Big Bad Wolf was on trial for the murder of those pigs, could you blame other swine for wanting to swallow him whole?

And that wasn’t an exaggeration; the crowd seemed to push closer in until they were claustrophobically close, until the heat of their insults warmed my skin. There was a shout, louder than the rest, and suddenly Brent was slamming himself into my side, arm steeled and shield up and I stumbled and yelled in pain. Something crashed against it with a musical ping, and a rather large decorative rock from the piles in the medians fell between his feet.

“The fuck, dude?” Brent shouted, swiping the rock up from his feet. He looked about ready to chuck it back, trying to get a good eye on whoever threw it.

“Things are getting out of hand,” Dr. Sims warned.

Dad tucked me closer into his side and walked faster, repeating under his breath again and again, “Stay looking forward, keep walking,” as if he was moments away from also going after people.

Brent stayed posted on my other side with his shield up all the way until we got to the entrance of the parking garage, people filtering around the entrance that was currently occupied by a few cars trying to either find parking or pay for it. Only protestors, though — all of those cops that had congregated the entrance? They were nowhere to be seen. The one running interference now was Dr. Sims, who stepped to the side, pushed us all into the stairwell, and then lifted his hands, blue light beginning to swirl around them.

“Eugene, what the hell are you doing?” Dad asked, pushing me up a step.

“Buying us some time. Go!” He demanded. “I’ll catch up.”

He waved those arms, and the air in front of him began to turn blue and solidify. Parts of it went silver like Brent, other parts stayed blue, and it began to take on a humanoid form when Dad pushed me again, forcing me up the stairwell.

Brent was in the lead, taking two at a time and looking back to watch me struggle to climb. God, the cut in my side was throbbing with each rough breath. Dad stayed behind me chanting encouraging reassurances, like “You’ve got this, Jeanie,” and “Last flight of stairs, c’mon.”

Thank god — I didn’t think I could go much farther.

Dad rushed us to his truck, opening the back door on the drivers’ side and forcing us both in there. “Brent, cover your sister for me. I’ll get us out of here,”

“Shouldn’t we wait for Dr. Sims?” Brent asked, crawling in awkwardly after me.

“He’ll catch up,” he reassured us.

Wasn’t sure how someone was supposed to catch up to a moving vehicle, but okay.

Brent’s shield was gone, but both arms were steeled now, covering my head and neck as he practically forced me to duck into his lap. I couldn’t see anything that was going on besides the shifts in light, but God, I could hear those protestors, louder than before and seemingly arguing with something. Did Dr. Sims…start a fight?

I peeked up from Brent’s lap just as the light shifted to see the protestors trying to fight their way into the parking garage against…eight tall, armored, blushed-blue winged angels.

“What the fuck?” I whispered, watching these angels levitate a mere ten inches off of the ground, refusing to part for the protestors — and cars — trying to come in.

“Get ready,” Dad warned us. Brent forced my head back down.

Dad honked the horn twice and there was a sudden collection of shouts from the protestors before Dad revved the engine and peeled out of there, throwing the truck so roughly right that I left Brent’s lap and nearly flew into the floorboard. There were more shouts, insults and curse words thrown our way that were drowned out by the truck’s roar and distance as Dad sped out of the area.

I stayed down for three minutes before Dad sighed hard and called back, “You’re good now, Jeanie.”

I could barely move. Those people, nearly a hundred people, came to the hospital to protest because I was there. Because of what I did.

“You okay?” Brent asked me.

I just stayed staring at the rock on the floorboard, the one aimed for me. How could I be okay?

We were well on the highway and nearly to the connection bridge that crossed to the other side of the Sound when the truck suddenly lurched as something slammed into the truck bed. Dad cursed as we both yelped, swerving in his lane so hard that the people beside us honked furiously as Brent and I spun around to see what happened.

Dr. Sims was in the bed face down, the groan audible from where we were despite the ambiance of rolling down the highway at 65 miles an hour.

“What the fuck was that?” Dad demanded, head whipping back to look at us and looking straight just as quickly as he moved to the right lane, slowing down.

“It’s uh,” Brent cocked his head. “It’s Dr. Sims? But he isn’t looking too good…”

He wasn’t looking anything. He hadn’t moved, face plastered in the lateral grooving of the truck bed.

Dad moved over until he was on the shoulder of the highway, putting the car in park and hopping out to check on Dr. Sims. “You good, Eugene?” he asked.

“Had to…couldn’t find you. Made an angel…fly me around. Out,” I could hear him groan through the window. “You’d think…I’d know how to land by now,”

“Well if your powers gave out, you couldn’t exactly stop it.” Dad shook his head. “C’mon, get in the truck,”

This was met by a loud groan that lasted for at least thirty seconds before Dr. Sims even tried to move a muscle.

Dr. Sims was now comfortably in the passenger's side seat of Dad’s truck, thanking him like a man parched when Dad sacrificed his phone for draining. “Does that not break it?” Brent asked.

Dad shook his head, glancing at us in the rearview mirror as Dr. Sims recovered. “Nah. Kinda just makes it short circuit for a while, but it’ll work again soon.”

Dr. Sims leaned his head back on the headrest, gasping out at the relief of the drain. “Thanks Del,”

“Sure. At least you have good aim,”

We were returning to Salmon Bay, but only for a moment; we were going to pack, maybe eat, and then start the thirty-nine hour drive to Louisiana. A multi-state trip that Dr. Sims and Dad began trying to plan as soon as Dad’s phone turned back on. “So it’s only a ten mile difference if we go right at Salt Lake City and take the highway to Denver,” Dr. Sims hummed. “Cuts through Wyoming,”

“We could make it a road trip?” Brent offered. “Yellowstone – could go to a Broncos game—”

“We’re…crunched for time, bud,” Dad said, casting a quick glance at me in his rearview mirror.

Right — I was the ticking time bomb now, the arsenal no one wanted around ‘cause it’d ruin days and maybe lives. I was holding the cool rock in my hand now that was aimed for my head, if what Brent chattered off at some point was true. I couldn’t even blame whoever threw it, not if they were impacted by what I did.

I was the cause of their discontent. They weren’t there to picket Dad or Dr. Sims, or Conduits in general with its two biggest leaders in the same place — but me. Not only for the deaths — people were screaming about losing their homes, their jobs. I may have killed one hundred and thirty-four — no, one hundred and thirty-seven, now — but I ruined the lives of so many more.

How many people were homeless now? How many people would have to scramble to live, to make money?

Salmon Bay wasn’t hurt, at least. That’s really all I could cling on to, was that they seemed relatively untouched. The Longhouse was roped off, and there were spots in the concrete that had been ripped up, but the wood chips and body were all wiped away.

Betty’s baby blue Beetle was in the house’s driveway, and it seemed the moment we turned down the street she was already racing out of the house, at Dad’s driver’s side in an instant and nearly yanking me out of the truck. “Oh, Regina!” She cooed, missing how I winced in pain as she gripped me tight around the abdomen. “You’re alright!”

Dad caught the grimace, gently peeling Betty off of me like you would a bandaid off of a toddler. “Okay, give her some room,” he chuckled under his breath.

Betty stepped back, shifting her hands to my shoulders and looking me over. She glanced over my shoulder at Dad with that look, that pathetically sad one that people reserved for children’s graves and oil-slick ducklings before wiping it clear off of her face and saying, “You need to eat! Come on, I made lunch.”

There was no convincing Betty I wasn’t hungry; she actually hovered near me until I took a bite of the grilled chicken she made before finally sauntering off, satisfied. The house was different; there was a new side table shoved in beside the couch, a television on the floor next to a propped-up mounting system. The kitchen had been entirely unpacked and had a bunch of unopened bulk cleaning supplies on the counters.

“Your family was meant to be the stars of the Potlatch,” Betty chimed in at some point. “A Potlatch is to share fortune among the tribe, and that’s what we planned to do for you all so that moving in would be more comfortable. Furniture, linens, the like — there were so many in the reservation that found something in good quality to donate. While you were…” She drew off, hesitating before going with, “In the hospital, I called in some favors and had everything moved in. In fact, I want to show you your room when you’re done!”

“We’re practically all moved in, now,” Dad added. “‘Course there’s probably a bunch of little things we’re forgetting, but for now, this is gonna be home.”

Yet another big change.

“Speaking of moving, though.” Dad added, taking a moment to chew on his food before continuing, “I found something when I was going through your stuff, Brent.”

Brent froze, fork midway to his mouth, and the blush from the cold outside almost immediately left his face as he paled. “Oh, really?” He tried to play cool.

Dad snorted, not ignorant to what he was doing. “Relax, you’re not in trouble. Not big trouble, anyways. But c’mon, man, why did you think having weed in a lawyer's house was a good idea? You know how deep of shit you would have gotten into if I found it before all of this?”

Brent blinked. “You’re…not mad?”

Dad barked out a laugh. “You really think I wasn’t smoking weed at your age? But Brent, son — it’s legal. You couldn’t wait till you were eighteen?”

Brent was still absolutely baffled at how this conversation was going, and I’m sure if we could hear the cogs in his brain, they’d be grinding so hard against each other that the sound would make us all cringe. “I’m…sorry?” he asked, not sure where he was supposed to go with this.

Dad shrugged. “Well, it doesn’t matter much, now. You have a higher metabolism, so getting high off of…regular stuff won’t be easy. That does not mean to try anything harder.” He stressed. “But if you plan on using dab pens, get ready to have to pull that fucker for a good eight minutes—”

“Delsin!” Betty chastised, Dr. Sims stifling a laugh from the couch.

Once they wound down and Dad mumbled his apologies, I spoke up, asking, “When do we leave?”

Dad hummed, thinking. “Tonight, probably. Less traffic, less people. We can all take turns too, since you two have your permit — well, you probably can’t Jean, but you could,” he directed towards Brent. “Eugene and I are gonna finish deciding which route we’re taking, and we’ll go after everyone packs.” He looked over his shoulder at Dr. Sims. “You’re sure you have everything you need?”

Dr. Sims shrugged. “For the most part. My laptops are still in your truck, and my go bag has enough supplies for a week without access to, say, washers or something. I don’t need much more.”

“I think I’m done,” I said, standing and abandoning the meal that was barely dug into. “I’m gonna go down to my room, start packing.”

“Oh! Let me show you where everything is—” Betty began, but I shook my head.

“It’s okay,” I assured her. “I can find it all. Kinda wanna lay down, too.”

Betty hesitated mid-step, shooting a look over to Dad, who seemed just as concerned. “You sure, Jeanie?” he asked.

I hated how they all were looking at me. “Yeah, Dad. I’m sure,” I said as lightly as I could, trying not to let my annoyance come through.

Dad slowly nodded, eyes not leaving mine. He was trying to analyze my poker face for something. “Alright. I’ll come check on you after we finalize a plan,”

Check on me. Like I couldn’t be left alone for too long without fear that I’d drop dead. “Yeah, sure,” I muttered, already turning around and heading down the hall. I ran away from their concern as quickly as I could, disappearing down into the basement and closing the door behind me, a small barrier between us all.

Betty really had put work into making the room feel less like squatting underneath a bridge and like an actual room; the mattress was now on one of those beds with storage cabinets underneath, my art chest sitting at its foot on the ground. There was a short, whitish dresser on one wall and a desk on the other, which I walked towards while pulling the rock from the protest out of my pocket, setting it on top of a bunch of random unopened school supplies.

Right! On top of everything, I was still in high school. Because things couldn’t get worse.

Well, no, they could. I knew exactly how they could, and how I could avoid it — but I didn’t. Why should I? I plopped down on the bed, threw off my arm sling, wrapped myself up in that woven blanket with Salmon in the middle and pulled out my phone.

Was it responsibility, curiosity, or just self-loathing that led me to wanting to look up more about the flood in Seattle? Probably all three. I needed to see what I did, how it impacted everyone because…didn’t I have a duty of care here? Didn’t I have a responsibility to care?

It would have been so much easier if I didn’t.

There was some footage from the fight from that helicopter, and that was really the only place I found anyone in my defense; the reporter, cameraman and pilot all lived, thank God, and it seemed like there were people in agreement that that was my initial plan. That’s where it ended, though.

There was a tag specifically for the tsunami everywhere, littered with people asking for donations to online fundraisers and if anyone knew which amnesty hotels still had rooms available. I hadn’t considered there would still be people missing too, unaccounted for in the chaos of recovery; .pdfs with faces and names and case numbers all littered the tag with family and friends begging them to come home. And the vitriol.

Another Rowe, ruining lives, one said.

There was a picture of my mom with a 289 above her, the image beside it of me at that art expo I won last year, side by side with the judges and Dad, 134 over it. The entire thing was titled apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

There were already politicians using what happened as their campaign fodder, speaking of how Conduits cannot be trusted to keep civilization safe if they’re able to live in it. “One Conduit has a bad day, and the body count is in the hundreds. A juvenile Conduit just killed over a hundred people in Seattle, injured thousands, and disrupted the lives of over seven hundred thousand people. This is a child who goes to school with your children, who doesn’t have control over their powers yet — what are we supposed to do when the next Conduit with absolutely no control over their abilities messes up? How can we trust we’re safe when these people don’t even seem to have control over themselves?”

Gotta get a new car because Tiger Lily flooded my brand new Mazda, one complained.

It’s gonna take more than identification, another tweeted. Pocahontas was stuck on a reservation and still managed to attack a big city. Biterrorists need to be carted off to some island.

He didn’t even spell Bio-terrorist right.

I could barely find the energy to get angry at the racism — how could I when the next post would be one for a funeral, or a wake, or just begging for someone, anyone, to tell the poster if their family member was alive?

And God, the obituaries. There was something bleak and horrifying about seeing one for a child that knocked the wind out of me so hard I began to hyperventilate to get it back. This was worse than the seven year old at COLE. There were dozens of children, old people and middle aged ones and people my age, barely adults. So many people died.

Waves began roaring in my ears as my breathing picked up, and while I was still looking straight at my phone screen, none of it made sense anymore. The words looked like nothing more than scribbles a child would do. That a child should be doing, not being lowered six feet into the ground or cremated or…

Oh, God, I couldn’t breathe.

I drew my legs into my chest and squeezed my eyes shut until they felt welded together, struggling to get in enough oxygen to feel like it was reaching my lungs. Fuck. A hundred and thirty seven people. All of this, all of this, was my fault. If I didn’t get caught by that Akuran, none of this would have happened. No one would be dead, our lives wouldn’t have been upended, maybe I’d even be able to heal without worrying why it was wrong — because if I didn’t know I was Conduit, I wouldn’t even feel like anything was wrong! My cast pressing into my chest wouldn’t feel like the squeeze of an anvil threatening to crush me whole. None of this would be happening, but it was, and it was my fault. My fault. My—

The bed moved, and someone settled in behind me, hands wrapping around the wrist dug into my hair and forcing it down to my chest, crossing it and grabbing my other arm the same way. I was gently leaned back, straightened from my curled form and pulled into a chest, and could barely hear Dad through the tinnitus in my ears. “You’re having a panic attack, Jean. I need you to breathe,” he commanded softly. “Use your stomach, not your chest.”

I tried to follow his instructions but it seemed to take two minutes just to get a neuron in my brain to spark hard enough to adjust how I breathed. Dad stayed there holding me, enveloping my little form, keeping me from doing anything else but concentrate on breathing.

My ears stopped ringing but began to sound like they were stuffed full of cotton balls, everything far away. Even as Dad’s soothing voice broke through my harsh hiccups, it felt like I was listening to him from underwater. His arms slackened their hold on mine, one leaving to pick up my phone as he whispered, “Oh, Jean,” before closing out the picture of a 10 year old’s obituary.

He shifted to my side, pulling me in so my ear was just over his heart. “I’m not sure,” he sighed. “It hasn’t gotten better for me.”

#infamous erosion #infamous second son #infamous #delsin rowe #Fetch Walker #sucker punch productions #eugene sims #who's busy being on the verge of passing out #We love him for it tho #YOU KNOW WHAT'S FUNNY #I WROTE THIS CHAPTER BEFORE MUSKS X BULLSHIT SO IDEK IF TWITTER WOULD BE AROUND IN 2037 #pretend it was bought out by Yahoo and abandoned or smthn idk

9 notes · View notes

oldguy56-world · 7 months ago

Text

The Way We Were

The older I get the more I like when things stay the same. When I was young (oh so long ago) I could roll with the punches and adapt to whatever came my way. Now I have rolls and am very punchy with neither of those being good. Perhaps you can stand the little things I find irksome but really I can't. I tried writing a letter to the 'Why the hell are there so many changes' department of the federal government but it was returned to me with I believe a tracking device embedded somewhere in the envelope. Not to worry. I put it in the trunk of a friend's car and because he never cleans it the envelope will stay there forever (or until he gets a new car) so the government can keep tabs on him instead of me.

I like the way things were, and sometimes are, but it is the constant changes that are hard to deal with.

Here are the things that bug me, really bug me, that cause a change in my daily routine.

The Hydro goes out. No matter what time of day this happens it interrupts my TV time and forces me to do...What? I have nothing else to do except on Mondays when I write. The rest of the week is down time to give my wrists time to heal. I can barely handle the remote but I cope. And don't get me started on having to reset things like my printer that seems to want to reprint old letters for some reason.

Cable out. You might think that this is the same as above but have you noticed that when the power is out and comes back on everything is ready to go except cable. This takes much longer for some reason.

Have you ever tried to go into your email or pay a bill and randomly you are asked to identify yourself? The gods of the internet can see I am using the same laptop as always and I am sure they also can see through my camera and know it is me. I would give them the finger but I suspect I would never be able to access anything ever again.

A few months ago my favorite pen rolled under the bookcase near my desk. It is still there as I am positive I would throw out my back retrieving it. When I was young I would have lifted the bookcase with one hand and picked up the pen with the other.

The first time I visited my hometown I tried to see some friends. It is a simple place to get around or should I say was a simple place to get around. Streets had disappeared, some were now dead ends, favorite restaurants now offered tattooing, and many other magnificent changes. Because of these things I left and went back to where i live now. My friends have no idea how close they came to a visit from me.

Why are there so many phone updates? Every time there is one I lose the ability to access one of the rare apps I have on my Apple 2. I can still phone or text but that is about it. There was nothing wrong with this phone when I got it so please leave it alone.

I hate smart TV's. There I said it. I used to enjoy sitting down and watching something uninterrupted (unless the power or cable went out) but now, in the middle of a show, my 'Smart TV' believes this is the best time to reboot itself. If it was really smart it would recognize it is getting close to being tossed from our balcony.

Finally, stop discontinuing foods I like. At my age putting out things with less sugar, no msg, gluten free, or anything else supposedly healthy is just a shock to my system.

THOUGHT OF THE WEEK: All the data shows that the largest growing segment of the population is seniors. Someone in marketing should smarten up and start listening to us.

3 notes · View notes

circulars-reasoning · 2 years ago

Text

"Teacher Therapy" -- JFC

Anyone ready for a break from my usual content? Good, stay with me.

A friend linked me this absolutely fucking god awful video, and I really need a good break to write about what I'm actually passionate about (Teaching). I cannot resist writing a live-blog reaction commentary to this. Below is Teacher Discourse, and the video is all about why this person quit teaching due to... a lack of corporal punishment in schools???? Boy howdy, let's get into this.

Timestamps are listed out, and those are when I paused to address what was just said.

TW for: Advocating for Child Abuse, mentions of trauma, and an entire ramble about, y'know. The American School System.

Timestamp 0:15 - Those of you who aren't teachers might be wondering what these behavioral plans are. She explains them later in the video, but I thought it might help you to see them described here.

Maybe you had them as a kid, maybe you didn't, but they're all the rage nowadays. She specifically mentions PBIS (which actually is not what the system is called anymore - this specific behavioral system is called MTSS now, or "Multi Tiered Student/Structural Supports." I'll be calling it PBIS, or "Positive Behavioral Interventions & Supports," for the purposes of this post, as what this teacher is specifically bitching about pertains to the structure of punishment.). I happen to work at a school which uses PBIS, so here's the breakdown of how it works:

Students receive positive or negative reinforcement for good behaviors. Positive Reinforcements (such as school currency, more recess time provided, or mid-month games for good behavior) and Negative Reinforcements (such as removal of assignments, removal of class-time, early dismissals) are given for individuals, whole classes, or entire schools in the case of good behaviors. Then, for bad behaviors, students receive positive and negative punishments. Negative punishments (removal of privileges, removal of peer attention, etc) are typically used less than positive punishments. Positive punishments in PBIS look like "Steps." Here's my school's step system:

At the start of the year, and throughout the school year, the values presented by the PBIS system are shown to students, with clear expectations. Students are told that they will receive steps when they have broken or ignored these PBIS standards. A student misbehaves in Semester 1 by speaking during a test during English, which goes against the Respectful standard. After many informal warnings about this behavior, the behavior continues, and the student receives a Step. This is Step One. Step One is a formal warning, and an email home. Then, they misbehave the next day in Math by breaking pencils - also against the Respectful standard (this one gets broken the most, I won't lie). They receive Step Two, which is a classroom reflection form and an email home. Step Three is a lunch detention. Step Four is a meeting with an administrator and a counselor. And Step Five is a referral. The student cannot get rid of steps, but they reset at the start of Semester 2. Students also cannot get two steps in one day unless the teacher who wants to give a second step contacts the counselor first. I've never seen a student earn two in one day.

To put it in perspective - the majority of my students, by this end of Semester 2 (when teachers and kids are more burnt out and volatile) currently have at most two steps. There are some who have, like, 12, but they are very rare and often have problems that a school management system cannot solve (disorders, trauma, etc) and are handled on a more case by case basis. Also, students who do bigger actions - for instance, punching another student or threatening another student - receive referrals and bigger consequences, bypassing the step system due to the severity of the broken rule.

The TL;DR: PBIS is a system of positive and negative supports that encourage students to follow well detailed rules. If students break the rules, they receive increasingly more severe consequences. Students are given more chances to learn from mistakes this way, and it genuinely works in the placement I am at currently. Let's see how this woman fucks it up.

0:22 - "I hate to say the quality of kids, but- haha" Oh so you're a mask off kid-hater. Awesome! Yeah, there's a reason you hate to say it, and it's because you're arguing that kids have value based on their behaviors. That a kid can have a level of quality, like they're a fucking watermelon that's a little overripe at the store. The elementary schoolers are not produce you can scrunch your nose at, Martha, that's a living person!!!

0:28 - "The moral development of the kids in our classrooms are at a totally different place." No? Coming from someone who went into teaching straight out of schooling, absolutely not. I see the same exact behaviors at the schools I teach at that I always saw, with some minor variations in sourcing of behaviors. For instance, when I was school, kids would vandalize because their friends dared them to. Now, the kids vandalize because TikTok told them to. Wow, big difference, still a problem (and I could rant about how social media is harmful, but that's neither here nor now).

0:56 - "If you were to go to other countries-" I"m going to cut you off right there. Your gripe is with the American school system. I don't give a fuck what it's like in other countries at the moment, because taking into consideration their behavioral supports also means dissecting the health care in that country, the poverty levels in that country, the socio-economic status of the individuals attending school, the rigor of the teaching degrees in those countries, the age of the goddamn students being spoken about-- this is such a useless point to mention, and we aren't even a minute into the video!!! If you have a complaint about the American school system, mention it, obviously, but not in your video which, thus far, seems to be about why kids are morally bankrupt.

1:26 - "Those out of control schools are the very ones that gravitate toward these kind of New Age discipline philosophies." Oh my god. Woman. 1, no, that's blatantly false; schools of all kinds are making the switch to these systems because it's shown a marked improvement on behavioral issues when done well. 2, NEW AGE DISCIPLINE PHILOSOPHIES?? PBIS was introduced in 1997. That's the year I was BORN woman! 3, it's not a discipline philosophy. PBIS isn't about discipline. IT'S IN THE NAME!!! PBIS is meant to be a behavioral intervention and support. Intervention and Support means to correct someones course in life to prevent negative outcomes. Discipline means, and direct quote from the Google Definition here because it's perfect in this regard: "the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience." So your issue with PBIS is that it doesn't condition students to obey you. At least tell it like it is.

1:59 - 'Here's my definition of PBIS for those who don't know-- anyways I made a poll for people to tell me if they want to bring back corporal punishment.' WHAT? Define the word!!! Define what it is!!! And god, what does the survey have to do with anything? How did your students learn anything when you jump tracks this quick?

2:15 - "People actually voted more highly in favor of bringing back corporal punishment, but it wasn't as big of a gap as I thought." That's disgusting, and I wish it were a bigger gap, in that I wish that there was .00001% of responders who said they wanted the punishment brought back. A teacher should never fucking advocate for the physical discomfort or distress of a child. Fucking hell. How did about 55% of people agree with hurting children? Disgusting.

2:31 - WHY DID YOU NEED TO MENTION THAT PADDLING IS STILL LEGAL IN SOME STATES??? Please someone fucking write to those senators of those 19 states (I should look up to make sure my state isn't one, jfc. EDIT: WHAT IN THE GODDAMN HOW MANY ABUSE VICTIMS ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? Oh my god I feel sick. It's not my state thank fuck but please consider writing to your senators to get this shit banned.)

2:51 - "They call that punitive and they say that's bad bad bad- hmhmm!" That's because it is. Do not half-chuckle at me, I do not agree with your thoughts that physical discomfort is somehow a good teaching tool.

2:54 - "Office referrals are completely off the table." Straight up lies. Unless you mean the extraneous referrals teachers who were salty were writing up for... throwing a pencil across the room out of anger? Y'know, she probably means that. She probably means that she isn't able to give a referral to that kid she hates.

3:21 - "The worst behaved kids are the ones getting all the rewards." That's because it's not rewards for behavior. It's conditioning. It's literally giving them rewards for the GOOD behaviors they have, to show them that these good behaviors have good repercussions, and the more things they do good, the better things are for them. The students who are already well behaved don't need a cheer squad celebrating that they sat in their chair that day instead of standing on it. This woman seems to think that showing kids that struggle with their behavior that good behavior has good repercussions is somehow rewarding the bad behaviors. (There's a lot I could say about this idea, and a lot of stuff I would love to discuss honestly, but I'm only 3 minutes into this dumpster fire.)

3:32 - The PBIS system actually has entire pages detailing why giving too many material based rewards (like the bag of candy she mentions) is actually a very bad idea. Instead, we should be giving them material rewards for behaviors at the start, but also positive affirmations and helping them see the consequences of their actions. "Hey, here's a [school currency], and look! Because you focused today, you turned in that assignment, which turns your grade into a B. I'm so proud of your progress today, keep it up!" The kid is going to correlate good behavior to good repercussions. You slowly stop giving out material rewards unless the kid still needs that support. But lord knows she never got to that point with her kids if she was only using PBIS as a punishment system, rather than behavioral management.

3:44 - If your best skill for "motivating students" was negative punishment (removal of privileges), then you should have been fired a LONG time ago. One of the biggest skills teachers need to have is learning how to motivate their students to learn simply because learning is amazing. My kids work hard, because I purposely choose books and curriculum alternatives that interest them. I give them surveys about how I can teach them better, and then I actively show them I am listening to them by actually doing the things they request. I discuss their requests! The form is 100% anonymous too. Treat the kids like people!! (Also? The kids still get detention, loss of recess, and especially in-school suspensions! It's just that we don't give them out for just any behavior we feel like -- we don't rule over the kids nearly as much as teachers like you would like).

4:00 - All of the attention is going to the kids who are acting out... as a means... to get attention they are lacking... and you're upset about this??? Does the attention really need to be going 100% all kids all the time full tilt, or are we able to focus on the kids who need more equitable attention? JFC, you're literally upset that kids who need more attention are now getting the attention they need.

4:17 - "The worst behaved kids got snacks!" Your kid was acting out because they were hungry. Full stop. A lot of the students you have actually experience a lot of food insecurity. That's exactly the kind of thing PBIS is helping to address; we show them through the step system that the way they're handling this situation isn't okay, and they need to change the behavior. Let's do a story here. I had a student who I gave a step to because he was playing games in class, which is against the school rules, and he'd already received his informal warnings. This led me to contact home. This led the parent to screen him for ADHD, because he had been reminded so many times to stop. This led to that student getting accommodations for extended time. We helped the student get benefits he needed. The snacks are no different; the student being sent to the office talks to a counselor, opens up about being hangry, and gets food because that's what they need to be successful. Punishing kids for being developmentally children, for being fucking human, is never going to work.

4:24 - Awww, someone's salty that the students told the principal how shitty she was. Newsflash, kids are oftentimes going to hate you because they're kids and you are in a position of authority over you. And that is 100% valid. I think that's fair of the student, because they're still learning to attribute their frustration of the system to the system. The student may hate you, and that's fine. Your job is not to make a child like you. In all honesty, I think students hating teachers is incredibly normal, because many of them have yet to realize that you are a human being and not just a cog in the authoritarian machine they're living under.

4:29 - This is the only point of hers that I agree with so far - A LOT of these systems are not being used the way they're supposed to be. Many teachers are using them as discipline, rather than interventions. They use them as a punishment - "be quiet or you will get a step." I've also found myself slipping down this path from time to time, and it absolutely is not helpful, to you or the kids. PBIS is an intervention system; it needs to be used to show students that the current behavior isn't working, and they need to tackle their problems by using the PBIS standards. I genuinely feel that PBIS needs a lot more clarity for the students, and that teachers need more training in it than they get. But let's see what her complaints are.

4:33 - BRIBE THE KID MODE??? Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh read a study on developing intrinsic vs extrinsic motivations in children you-- uuugh

4:47 - Classrooms would be silent, and "well-behaved," and absolutely no learning would get done. You would get your wish for perfectly behaved children because you'd be abusing them. This is traumatic. (This is also an overgeneralization - you would have longer stretches of quiet as you conditioned the students into being Perfect Angels, but you would inevitably run into the kids who have a Fight response to your punishment, and that is when you will be ill equipped to teaching that kid how to not try to kill you). You are talking about abusing children in the hopes of making them obey. Your job is to fucking teach them. Re-read the job description.

5:10 - HOW DOES SCRUBBING TOILETS HELP CORRECT BEHAVIOR OF BEING A JERK TO YOU IN CLASS? Genuinely, HOW? Even if you are going the punishment route, even IF you try to utilize that incredibly flawed premise... the punishment would need to correlate to the behavior you're trying to fix. This is why these people are awful teachers. They don't teach; they try to control, manipulate, and traumatize children into giving them the power rush they want.

5:19 - "And help beautify your school!" If the child is mouthing off at you, then you need to address that behavior. If the child connects mouthing off with "you are now being punished for that action by being a janitor" -- it's entirely likely they will then see those jobs as punishments, labeling those who have to do it as someone who did something "wrong." You're setting up incredibly bad associations, and now you've traumatized that child into believing that cleaning something indicates something is wrong. Source: I can't clean the bathroom without dissociating because cleaning = punishment, so if I'm cleaning, it's because I fucked up. Trauma fucks you up!

5:22 - My eyes have rolled so far that I got to see the inside of my brain melting from your rancid bullshit.

5:27 - The people cheering are child abusers.

5:33 - "We know at a deep internal level that it would work." It would traumatize them into obeying you. I'm so disgusted that you thought teaching was the best job for you. I'm so glad you quit. I hope everyone like you quits.

5:38 - Loosey Goosey??? It is well researched my guy. Like. It has been researched. (That last link is, sadly, the best I could find for that particular article.) You're just salty because it helps kids mental health instead of their "discipline."

5:43 - Bitch I was a long term sub for two straight years at both the middle and high school levels. I have been sliced open with nails, kids have attempted to asphyxiate me, and clocks/trash cans/phones have all been thrown at me. I get what you're talking about, and each and every instance of this was kids who had a disconnect between their behaviors and the reasons for those behaviors. Each time. 100%, I do not blame those children for their behaviors at all, because nobody had taught them how to connect their feelings to healthy actions. Their frustration about me asking them to sit led to them genuinely trying to kill me. That is how much people like you (and the exact opposite of you, but that might be for a different post) have hurt these children.

6:04 - Oh god if you're saying this is controversial NOW, I'm terrified for the upcoming escalation. Was the child abuse not controversial?!!

6:15 - T. Tiny little monster people. Ma'am. Ma'am that is an entire ass human person. That's just a living breathing individual. Imagine being the ex-student of this cunt. Imagine seeing her call you, someone who was in elementary school at the time, a monster. My heart goes out to everyone who had to suffer with this abuser in their lives.

6:19 - THE WORST OF HUMANITY THAT IS INSIDE ALL OF US? Honey, it's not inside you, you're wearing it like it's Gucci!

6:32 - The worst of humanity is not getting embodied in these students. I am so stunned that someone could even possibly suggest this. What in the goddamn. And you go on to describe behaviors like... oh no... they spit! Yes, the worst of humanity -- dictators, abusers, bigots, etc. -- clearly committed the worst sin of all: spitting. Shove a cactus up your ass and spin, and I swear, it would hurt less than me having to listen to you speak.

6:49 - I do not trust any single person who describes a student as manipulative. That is an Entire Ass Child.

7:15 - "They have them completely fooled." I am almost too disgusted for words... Reminder, this woman taught ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. Little ones, who are just learning school for the first time. And she is calling them, little monsters, "untrained," THE WORST OF HUMANITY???? How can anyone possibly agree with this woman? How do you get so jaded in a career that YOU CHOSE? If you ever, EVER, find yourself agreeing with what this woman says, then do not interact with a child ever again. I am so repulsed by her monologue here about how children are the scum of the earth when "untrained."

7:40 - Now you argue that right and wrong are being defined incorrectly? I do not trust this argument, ever. It SCREAMS puritan values. Tell me, what have we really 'redefined' about right and wrong?

8:11 - You've given no context for why the woman, a grown ass adult woman, was screaming at another. What was the context of the behavior?? Why did the woman need to have security called? Oh, that's right, your concern is to have people obedient, not actually fixing what's wrong in their life. Nice to see that extends to literal college aged students. Jesus christ how does anyone manage to hold a conversation with you without crying?

8:29 - Oooh so you're upset about riots huh? You're not a fan of people defending their rights. Unsurprising.

8:44 - Take a drink, she's used the word brainwashed! Hint: Children are not being brainwashed any more than this woman was brainwashed by HER OWN upbringing!

9:08 - Is. Is she suggesting that "Karen" culture is people... supporting Karens? Because genuinely, I have had to repeatedly remind my friends that politely requesting their food not be literally deadly for them to eat is not being a "Karen." Like, "Karen" culture is so blatantly negative and a Bad Thing that people are attributing completely normal behaviors to being a Kar- ooooh that's what this woman is doing. Oh. Oooooh. Yeah you're an asshole.

9:23 - Shocker of all shockers, when a student has a mental breakdown, an administrator, counselor, or parent, might want to know... y'know... what triggers them. That's why they're asking what you did. They're trying to get to the bottom of what caused the meltdown, and 9/10 times, it's caused by a figure in authority doing something that made them uncomfortable. Grow up and admit you make mistakes.

9:32 - THAT'S BECAUSE THEY ARE JUSTIFIED! The feelings they had are OKAY TO FEEL! Their feelings ARE VALID. The BEHAVIOR is not. WHICH IS WHY WE ARE TRYING TO PREVENT THE BEHAVIOR. (And the feelings, because genuinely, discomfort does not aid learning and actively negatively impacts it! So we want to prevent discomfort!!)

9:40 - Just realized this section is called "entitlement." =_= Gag me.

9:53 - Once again: not random. These random systems are not random -- they're well researched. For those curious, the "horrible" ideas she mentions here, like not saying no to kids, are also research based, and yes, they do work. It contributes to a growth mindset, where students don't feel like they're forever trapped in who they are in the moment.

10:10 - ... Should. Should the responsibility NOT be on the teachers? Like. You are in charge of (if you're like me) 140 students in a single day, each day, every day. YEAH I HOPE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THEM. It is YOUR responsibility to take care of them. Again, please, reread your job description.

10:35 - She brushes up on actually good topics here - administrators struggling under state standards, the fact that testing drowns out the relationship building and negatively impacts learning, etc - but she's using these points to somehow argue that... it's the kid's fault? I'm so tired of this woman. The system is broken, and that is a problem, but that will never and has never been the fault of children. And yes, that IS why teachers are quitting in droves -- because the system is fucking broken and awful and I swear it is legitimately bringing me to an early grave. Still not the fault of the kids tho.

11:11 - The kids can't do this, actually. Have you tried? Cause I have. I'm an English teacher, and yes, I start off the school year each year with students writing out the rules and expectations before I teach them. I tell the kids to write down "what do you think the expectations of classrooms are?" And genuinely, only the "well behaved" kids SOMETIMES get it. (Actually, a lot of the underprivileged quiet kids hit the nail on the head with my rules, but that's a story for another time and not a 7 page essay already). THEY DO NOT KNOW THESE EXPECTATIONS UNTIL YOU EXPLICITLY TEACH THEM, and even then, you need to remind them, because they need to ACCESS those expectations! GOD I am tired of this woman.

11:37: WHAT'S THIS? The. There's a lack of correlation? Between behaviors and the natural consequences of their actions? It's almost like, when done properly, PBIS helps to build those correlations! But no, go ahead, rant about how you want kids cleaning toilet bowls because they said something disrespectful to you in class.

12:18 - Do I even need to say it?? Remarkably, shame is not a motivator. It has been shown that shaming kids actively hurts their learning, mental health, and achievement in all areas. But she doesn't care, because all she cares about is having an easy time. Teaching isn't easy. Boot up, bitch.

12:53 - Here's an example of a model that I think needs reworking. "I'm not mad, and you're not in trouble" isn't a bad first step... but "I am angry, I won't lie, and I need a second to calm down my anger. I'm going to breathe, and then we'll discuss why this happened, and how we can prevent it in the future" has always worked a lot better for me. I do agree with her that this isn't the best, but she needs to understand that when the rules are bad, you break them as a teacher. Straight up. That's what I do. They wanna fire me for being not a child abuser, thank god, I wouldn't wanna work there anyways. (And guess what? Since the kids like how I speak to them and how I communicate my emotions, they behave better in class, which leads to extended learning time, which leads to improved scores, which leads to me already being marked distinguished repeatedly on observations because, surprise surprise, I'm a good teacher cause I break the rules. Go figure!)

13:19 - YOU NEED TO TEACH THEM HOW TO REASON. You can't have an intellectual conversation at the level of adults with a student at that age! You need to break down their feelings and thoughts! Jesus CHRIST DID YOU TAKE DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCH? This isn't an "unpopular opinion," it's straight up misinformation.

13:46 - Aww, am I a mama bear now? But no, thinking about the worst situation I've seen in a classroom, I think back to the worst school I've subbed at. The reason it was the worst situation? The teacher was strict as hell with her kids, and I was a substitute. They took one look at me and said "I GET A FREE PASS TODAY!!" (Note: that's the first time I ever had to fill out a physical injury statement at work, because that's the day a child physically attacked me for asking her to put away her phone!). And still I do not blame her, because I feel it was those in authority that failed that day.

14:03 - Now she's bringing up Catholic school. No, sweetie, I wasn't imagining that. I was imagining my abusive family. Cause that's what you sound like. You sound like the parents who wanted to be in control of every aspect of my life in order to "protect me" and "help me understand real life so I could have a good future." Gag me. Shut up, already.

14:17 - I really do think what we have now is still broken; but anyone within their right mind can acknowledge that we have a better system now than we used to.

14:33 - "That's how it feels being a teacher in a classroom of hostile little people." No. It's not. It might have felt that way to you, but that's because you made them hostile. You were the subject of their hatred. For me, when my students get hostile (and yes, it does happen), it's because they're frustrated by what they have to do. And 9 times out of 10, that frustration is fucking JUSTIFIED! And that's when I step in, and tell them, "I think it's bullshit too. I think you're right to be frustrated. But because the system sucks, we have to do this for the time being, and if you do this, I can do these things for you to help alleviate that frustration." A lot of the times, it's promises for a better future (which I have already made progress on, such as changing how the 6th grade curriculum was this year and moving a novel they hated to the 7th grade year instead, where they will be able to process it better with more experienced teachers who had a curriculum prepared already for said novel.) If a student is hostile with you, that's not a bad thing, and the fact that you felt fear shows you earned that hostility via your actions.

14:47 - Again, you're a bad teacher if you don't know how to handle a situation where a student gets hostile.

14:58 - Teachers see their students more than their parents do, full stop. Students are with you, for instance in my school, from 7:50 until 3:30, and that's barring you having a club after school. That's 7 hours and 40 minutes. Barring any after school activities, assuming a child wakes up at 6 to make it to school on time, to achieve 8 hours of sleep, that child is with their parents from 3:30 until 10. That's 6 and a half hours. No matter what, you are with those students more than those parents are. Yes. It IS our job to raise these kids. Furthermore, you're assuming the parents DO have the capability and tools to raise these kids. Many parents work after school, many parents have multiple kids they're raising, and surprise! Some parents are fucking abusive! REREAD THE FUCKING JOB DESCRIPTION!

15:15 - I'm not a parent myself (and never plan to be) but seriously, is there some sort of parent handbook she knows about that I don't? Is there really something out there that spells out "all the things your parents should've taught you"? If there is, can someone send it to me, cause mine certainly failed in a few aspects.

15:29 - A student thinks misbehaving is fun. Why? If they think it's fun, then there's clearly a disconnect there between what they should be doing and what they are doing, and it's up to you to help them reason. If that goes against your rules, then either they need to understand why the rule is in place, or the rule needs changed.

15:48 - 'Waaaa the 5 year old gets more chances than I, a grown ass woman, get!!! That's so unfair!!!!' GROW UUUUUP

16:19 - False. Yes, this is a thing - exceeding, meeting, approaching is the latest rubric scale being sent out. But grades are still a fucking thing. I think what she's likely getting salty about here is actually floor grades -- wherein students, in many more locations around America right now, cannot get below a certain grade. For instance, at my school, if a student just straight up never does the assignment, they get a 50% (Rather than a 0). This is research based and has improved both the student's AND my mental health so fucking much that I refuse to listen to any argument that this is bad.

16:40 - I would LOVE sources on this. A school that does away with grades entirely? SIGN ME UP! Oh wait, did you mean "I no longer can use grades as a punishment for my students, because America is making a big push to be standards based, and therefore all of my grades have to follow the set curriculum standard?" Bite me.

17:04 - Yep! Straight up, yeah. Even when I was in school, they were trying to do away with "holding kids back" a grade. They offered remedial courses instead. Ever heard of summer school, woman? The only time students were held back a grade in my school was when they were in 12th grade and did not have enough credits to graduate (at which point, they just... sorta dropped out.) That's why I was teaching 9th grade English to 10th grade students. Because they didn't get held back 'a grade' -- they got held back a class. And that's not a bad thing, why would it ever be a bad thing, you stinky wet noodle?

17:11 - Skill issue. Next!

17:28 - Ooo I hope you read mine next, you fucknugget! While you were busy studying posts from child abusers, I was busy looking at the research and being the best teacher I could be for these kids.

17:42 - 8 years? God, you were a teacher for 8 years. I feel sorry for the poor children you abused in that time.

17:50 - Why were you always in fear as a teacher? I've never been in fear for my job. I have never felt in fear for what I've done as a teacher. I've had administration come to me to speak with me directly over actions I've taken, and not once have I felt in fear. I have been accused of "crazy" things, and I laughed and explained what actually happened, and the students in those situations went "Oooooh I misinterpreted." And it was explained, and I changed my behavior and they changed theirs (in some cases). Wow! All of it worked out and I am still marked as Distinguished.

17:59 - DISCIPLINE ACTUALLY EQUALS LOVE??? Woman please see a therapist, please for the love of god, I think you have some really fucked up ideals that you need to talk through with a professional.

18:33 - Why does she assume that her students would live like this in their futures? Most of my students (I teach 6th grade currently) already have big goals for their futures. Yes, the majority want to be YouTubers, but just speaking with them, they understand the work that goes into that -- they talk to me about editing, they talk about making their own VTuber rigs on Blender -- they're super advanced! The kids who want to be game designers use their free time in class to program games on GimKit. Kids, when their love of learning is fostered rather than beaten out of them, will be productive because they love to be, not because they're forced to be.

18:47 - They are CHILDREEEEEEEEEEEEN

19:14 - POJKIHGUYFVBHKM??? "People are basically motivated by two things in life: love, and fear." Therapist. Please. I am not even trying to use that as an insult, I am being legitimate. Is that all you are motivated by? When I do the dishes, I'm not doing them because I love them or because I'm scared of them -- I do them because they need to be done! It's neutral! Motivation is neutral what are you smoking oh my god.

19:35 - If this was the fullest extent of what people were saying, then yes, she would be right -- If all you are trying to do is get kids to love you and your subject, then you will always, always fail. But the thing is, that's NOT the key to PBIS, and that's not what I do with my kids. The very first thing I do with my kids, when they come to class, is set up rules and expectations. And I tell them: If you hate English, good. If you love English, good. Regardless of if you hate it or love it, it holds these specific values in your life. I ask them what they want to do or be, and explain how they'll need to use the skills taught in my class for those specific things. I explain how they don't need to be GOOD at it -- they just need to try. And then I reflect that in my teaching and my grading. If they try, they pass, and they typically pass well (well being A-B range). If they earn a C, it's typically because, frankly, they're bad at English. And I make them understand, I FORCE them to understand, and I DO yell at their parents, that Cs are the Average Grade. They mean you are Perfectly On Point for 6th grade, and you are right where you need to be. And remarkably? The kids love me for it. If you treat the kid like a kid who is a living breathing human, you have almost no problems. I wonder where this woman went wrong.

20:22 - Students should not fear learning. Students should not fear making mistakes. She is making the assumption that every single misbehavior is a personal choice on the part of the student, when usually, that's not the case. Please, please, read up on frontal lobe development, I think it would really benefit your understanding of a small child's decision making abilities.

20:40 - False, but at this point, everything you're saying is just to paint yourself as a Goddess Martyr of Every Hurt Child Abuser Teacher Out There UwU. Thank god this video is nearly done.

20:46 - Causal Pink-Collaring of teaching, love that (sarcasm).

20:56 - I love my job. Again, sounds like a skill issue!

21:21 - Honey all you did in this video was advocate for abuse...

21:43 - For once, I agree with you! The vast majority of teachers are not absolutely bat shit. All teachers are actually just people, and some have issues that makes it so they shouldn't be teachers. You fall into the latter category of 'People who should not be teachers because they hate children.'

22:00 - The only difference you're making here is burning away my braincells.

Oof. The rest is the Click Subscribe ramble.

TL;DR: FUCK THIS WOMAN AND HER ENTIRE PRACTICE!!! I am SO RELIEVED she quit teaching!!!

#Teacher #Teacher Rant #Teaching #'Teacher Therapy'#Anyone who refers to a child like this deserves to be fired

11 notes · View notes

loremonster · 9 months ago

Text

Sorry About That, Technical Difficulties...

HOLY FUCK I'M ALIVE!

Sorry for the abcense folks. Long story short; my phone out and out died when I really needed it to make a mental health appointment, and hubby has head off to his next deployment. I take weeks to recover from unexpected upheavals, and those two getting stacked sorta put me in hibernation mode for a couple months.

Longer version;

Had a telehealth appointment with my meds manager. I remembered it, I planned my day around it, I'm on the web site and logged into the portal and ready to go 10 min early... for my phone to go black screened with no indicator lights when plugged in, and no response to forced restart buttons. It's hot to the touch so I legit stuck it in the fridge, and went to plan B to try and make my appointment- hop onto my laptop and join the video call that way.

My internet had gone out. I had to reset the router while getting progressively more panicked about being late because My Phone Is Dead so I can't call the clinic to tell them what happened and they can't call me to find out.

Thankfully, that is when hubby arrived home with some lunch. I was able to use his phone to call the clinic and tell them what was up, rescheduel my appointment, and attend that appointment to secure my next few months of refills.

My old phone was fully bricked. It cooled down, but plugging it in got nothing. Running down the battery to dead and then plugging it in did nothing. So hubby looked up what was on offer and ordered the new one I am using now, and it arrived a week later.

I really like the new phone. It's got a stylus! So I can art on the go even when I forget the trapper keeper with my traditional supplies in it :D

However, because I'm a paranoid bitch who refuses to make use of cloud systems because why wouldn't they copy every bit that runs through them? So I've been manually logging back into apps as I remember which of my six email addresses was associated with them 🤣 legit it took me until today to remember I made a new email for this specific Tumblr account so my notifs wouldn't set off my Professional Writer e-mail's notifications.

Today I just wanted to let folks know I'm Not Dead, tomorrow I'll answer asks that have been recieved while I was MIA. 💚

Big love to everyone, hope y'all are well

-Lore

#personal #oh hai #blog

5 notes · View notes

dea-certe · 7 months ago

Text

Where I work was affected by this and we had to roll out instructions to fix it (thankfully we've been having a small issue where about half the computers in each branch have a small error where it keeps saying windows isn't activated so each branch still had access to a computer where they could get into the email and get the instructions). Now the problem is a lot of the people I work with are not what anyone would call tech savvy. The company fully expected everyone to be able to reset the system when several of these guys have called IT for simple how to reset a router instructions.

This lead to shit like this:

We have a bitlocker key for each individual workstation that they had to search for on a notepad document (because we can't open Adobe about half the time but notepad always work). It was very simple, find it in the document, enter the key to get into the computer and have it reset in safe mode to stop the boot loop. Second problem happened when;

The CSR 0X is the end of the name of the workstation. It is not part of the bitlocker key. This is obvious, this is in the instructions they sent out that clearly said to enter the bitlocker key that followed your workstation's name. The number of people who kept entering in the the fucking workstation name instead of the key and then having to call me because "it's not letting me put in the letters"......I spent probably 3 hours yesterday walking people through the set up and wound up just searching the doc myself and reading them the key because it was the fastest way to handle it.

It was an absolute mess of a day.

idk if people on tumblr know about this but a cybersecurity software called crowdstrike just did what is probably the single biggest fuck up in any sector in the past 10 years. it's monumentally bad. literally the most horror-inducing nightmare scenario for a tech company.

some info, crowdstrike is essentially an antivirus software for enterprises. which means normal laypeople cant really get it, they're for businesses and organisations and important stuff.

so, on a friday evening (it of course wasnt friday everywhere but it was friday evening in oceania which is where it first started causing damage due to europe and na being asleep), crowdstrike pushed out an update to their windows users that caused a bug.

before i get into what the bug is, know that friday evening is the worst possible time to do this because people are going home. the weekend is starting. offices dont have people in them. this is just one of many perfectly placed failures in the rube goldburg machine of crowdstrike. there's a reason friday is called 'dont push to live friday' or more to the point 'dont fuck it up friday'

so, at 3pm at friday, an update comes rolling into crowdstrike users which is automatically implemented. this update immediately causes the computer to blue screen of death. very very bad. but it's not simply a 'you need to restart' crash, because the computer then gets stuck into a boot loop.

this is the worst possible thing because, in a boot loop state, a computer is never really able to get to a point where it can do anything. like download a fix. so there is nothing crowdstrike can do to remedy this death update anymore. it is now left to the end users.

it was pretty quickly identified what the problem was. you had to boot it in safe mode, and a very small file needed to be deleted. or you could just rename crowdstrike to something else so windows never attempts to use it.

it's a fairly easy fix in the grand scheme of things, but the issue is that it is effecting enterprises. which can have a looooot of computers. in many different locations. so an IT person would need to manually fix hundreds of computers, sometimes in whole other cities and perhaps even other countries if theyre big enough.

another fuck up crowdstrike did was they did not stagger the update, so they could catch any mistakes before they wrecked havoc. (and also how how HOW do you not catch this before deploying it. this isn't a code oopsie this is a complete failure of quality ensurance that probably permeates the whole company to not realise their update was an instant kill). they rolled it out to everyone of their clients in the world at the same time.

and this seems pretty hilarious on the surface. i was havin a good chuckle as eftpos went down in the store i was working at, chaos was definitely ensuring lmao. im in aus, and banking was literally down nationwide.

but then you start hearing about the entire country's planes being grounded because the airport's computers are bricked. and hospitals having no computers anymore. emergency call centres crashing. and you realised that, wow. crowdstrike just killed people probably. this is literally the worst thing possible for a company like this to do.

crowdstrike was kinda on the come up too, they were starting to become a big name in the tech world as a new face. but that has definitely vanished now. to fuck up at this many places, is almost extremely impressive. its hard to even think of a comparable fuckup.

a friday evening simultaneous rollout boot loop is a phrase that haunts IT people in their darkest hours. it's the monster that drags people down into the swamp. it's the big bag in the horror movie. it's the end of the road. and for crowdstrike, that reaper of souls just knocked on their doorstep.

114K notes · View notes

ethereousdelirious · 5 months ago

Text

Sicktember 2024 Day 9 - [ALT] Hospital Bed

Larry and Geetaaaa.

CW for emeto. (Non-graphic)

Larry had not dressed for the occasion.

Gone was the cheap black suit and tacky tie, gone were the scuffed loafers and inexplicably tailored slacks.

Geeta surveyed his jeans and the nondescript hoodie revealing at least two inches of his neck that she'd never seen before. “Larry. Dressed to impress I see.” Her keys jingled in her hand as she turned away to unlock the League door.

“After hours work means after hours Larry,” he said, his voice dull.

Geeta pushed the door open with her shoulder and strode down the hall, pocketing her keys as she went. Always the bare minimum with him, always the attitude that she'd asked him to walk to his death.

His footsteps shuffled against the linoleum, his sneakers no doubt leaving long black streaks for the custodian to clean up. Her own shoes announced her presence with a steady click-clack, not that there was anyone here to receive them.

When she reached the bullpen, she went straight for Poppy's desk— no point holing up in her office and leaving Larry unsupervised. She logged in to the Paldea Board website and her email account, reset her own password, reset Larry's and gave him administrator privileges… Then, and only then, did he shuffle in, his head low. Like he'd deliberately made her wait for him.

Geeta sighed and adjusted Poppy's pencil holder. “Pull up a chair,” she said evenly. No reaction was the best reaction.

Larry didn't say anything, but he walked with infuriating slowness to his own cubicle and grabbed his desk chair. The wheels rattled with the movement. He pulled it awkwardly, one-handed, with the other hidden in his hoodie pocket.

“We need to have this done by tomorrow morning,” Geeta said, studying him.

He wouldn't look at her. “I understand.”

Geeta walked him through the process of resetting passwords and he listened in silence. He didn't even ask why they were doing this. It spared Geeta the humiliation of having to explain that a pre-teen had hacked the LP system right under her nose. But it was always apathy, not tact, with him.

He didn't even acknowledge her as he talked, instead staring blankly through the desk with no light in his eyes but the blue glow of the monitors.

When she finished, he didn't say a word. Geeta huffed and crossed her arms. “I trust you understood all that? I noticed you didn't feel the need to take notes.” Never mind that she'd emailed him the workflow; he couldn't know that.

“Uh—” Larry shook himself like she'd startled him. “Yes. Yes.” His chest rose and fell with shallow breaths. “Excuse me.”

Geeta raised her eyebrows as she watched him go. Not 20 minutes into the evening and he was already taking breaks.

And there was nothing she could do but lead by example.

—

Larry's breaks grew more frequent as the night progressed, each with a revolving cycle of excuses: smoke break, coffee break, bathroom break, exercise break. As if he'd ever exercised a day in his life.

Through it all, Geeta kept working. Only the endless monotony of clicking and double-clicking accompanied her in the long stretches between her own breaks. Coffee and the restroom, that was all she needed. She could eat one-handed and keep working, and she did.

Through the stinging in her eyes and the pain in her wrist. The work needed to get done, so she would do it.

With or without Larry's help.

Although…

She tore her eyes away from the password reset form and checked the clock. Hadn't Larry been gone for a while?

With a sigh, Geeta planted her hands on the desk and heaved herself to her feet. Neglected muscles ached and joints cracked as she stalked down the hall to the breakroom. Yes, maybe she'd voluntold Larry about this enterprise, but if he couldn't make it through a late night of work, it was his responsibility to advocate for himself. She was his boss, not his babysitter.

Coffee-fueled resentments made her hands shake. This blatant disrespect really was getting out of hand. Larry could bemoan the state of his paycheck all he liked; it was his own fault. His own responsibility.

…Or lack thereof.

Geeta froze in the doorway of the breakroom and felt her gaze go hard.

Heedless of the bright fluorescents and the half-empty coffee mug in front of him, Larry had somehow fallen asleep with his face pressed hard into the vinyl tablecloth.

With Persian's grace, Geeta prowled into the room and promptly slammed one of the cabinet doors.

Larry jerked awake, but didn't sit up right away, nor did he say anything. He stayed curled over the table, his black hair gleaming as he shifted.

“Do you really think this is appropriate behavior?” Geeta snapped. “I wouldn't have asked for your help with this task if it wasn't important. I've been working all night, and—” He still wouldn't raise his head. “Larry! I can't tolerate this kind of disrespect from an employee. Look at me when I'm talking to you.”

At last, Larry raised himself from the table. He kept his posture hunched, stared up at her with lazy, red-rimmed eyes. “Better?”

“Are you trying to get fired?” Geeta demanded. “Nobody forced you to be here.” She buried her fingers in her hair, balled her hands into fists. “I just don't understand the reason for this level of disrespect.”

Larry remained silent, his face eerily still. His lips parted and then shut, and he stood slowly.

And walked away.

Geeta stared at the empty chair for a moment, mouth agape. Was he having a psychological breakdown? Was he trying to get fired?

“Larry!” Geeta burst out of the breakroom, tailing him as he took slow, shuffling steps down the hallway. “Don't walk away from me!”

His steps faltered. She stopped and crossed her arms. He'd better turn around. If he valued his job, he'd turn around.

Larry did turn, but only halfway. He pitched forward and his forehead hit the wall. A moment later, his arms came up to stabilize him, like his body was out of sync with itself. His back bent and he vomited onto the linoleum, eerily quiet but for the nauseating splash.

“Oh.” Geeta took a half step back, her own stomach turning. “Well…” Foolish, foolish man. “You're sick?” She advanced on him again as he sagged against the wall, threatening to collapse. “Why didn't you say anything?”

Before she could reach him, he staggered back, waving a hand to dismiss her. He sank to the floor, his face ashen, and huddled in on himself.

“I need to get you home,” Geeta said, mostly to herself, hovering over him. “And get this cleaned up… I can't just leave you sitting here.” She huffed and ran her hands through her hair, snapping pieces as she went. “Larry, why didn't you say anything? You could have spared us both—”

“Primera.” Larry's voice came hoarse, devoid of life. “Just call me an ambulance and leave me alone.”

She backed off at once, eyes widening. Well, fine. Larry could have it his way.

—

Oh, mercy.

How was anyone ever supposed to recover in a hospital?

Larry tried to raise a hand to his face and stopped dead at the pull of the IV line.

Oh. Right.

He raised his other hand to his face instead, unable to hold back a groan. Why bother, right? If there was a nurse in his room, he'd know by now.

Fabric rustled. “Larry?” someone said softly. Not a nurse

Larry opened his eyes.

White ceiling tiles greeted him, and the dim light of the morning sun choked by heavy curtains.

He turned his head. Slowly. To look.

There, with perfect posture— Geeta. She had her legs crossed, hands folded atop one knee, and she looked down at him without a hint of sentimality or concern in her eyes. Well, that was no surprise.

“What're you doing here?” Larry asked. His tongue moved slowly, sticking in his dry mouth. She hadn't been there last night, hadn't accompanied him in the ambulance, hadn't waited with him in the emergency room. “Come to apologize?”

“For what?” Geeta asked, arching an eyebrow.

Typical. Larry scoffed. Now wasn't the time for an argument, but if she started lecturing him again, he might just fake a seizure. “So what are you doing here?”

Geeta got to her feet and came closer. The proximity revealed a cold pallor to her face and dark rings under her eyes. She opened her mouth to speak and Larry interrupted her: “How long have you been here?” Her hair stuck up in the back like she'd repeatedly adjusted her posture against the back of her chair and she wore the same clothes she'd worn last night, the blazer that didn't quite fit and the shirt with the coffee stain on the collar.

“I came to see how you were doing,” Geeta said coolly. Almost half heartedly, she added, “And when you can return to work.”

“If you were worried about me, you can just say.” The notion spread an odd sensation through Larry's chest and stomach— not joy, but not quite discomfort, either

Geeta made for the door. “I knew the hospital would take adequate care of you,” she said.

“Right.” She was really leaving. “I appreciate the concern.” She hadn't even brought flowers.

In the doorway, Geeta paused. She looked at him briefly, then away. “I am glad you're alright,” she said. “And I hope you feel better soon.” And she vanished, her footsteps fading down the hall.

#sicktember 2024 #ethereous writes

1 note · View note