ms-demeanor:

seriesofnonsequiturs:

blue-author:

evilcoyote:

theblackoaksyndicate:

So i work as your friendly underpaid barista and currently we’re having problems with one of our regulars hitting on our women staff members. The first woman he hit one, he wrote a note to her….as in elementary school note passing. Now of course, she’s at work and the model in f&b and retail is that you do everything in your power not to piss off the guest.

So in hopes of not causing a scene, she kindly wrote on the note that she appreciate the interest but she’s a lesbian. Now, 1) she shouldn’t have to out herself to a complete stranger all to avoid a bad yelp review. 2) She shouldn’t be forced into a situation where she has to entertain a guests unwanted attentions to avoid at the least, a negative review on yelp. 

So once she passes this dude the note, he then starts jokingly exclaiming “I always fall for lesbians” in the middle of our cozy cafe, effectively outing her to anyone within earshot. Now my co-worker isn’t closeted, she’s out and proud etc, etc. However, that doesn’t give someone else the right to disclose her sexuality without her permission, and especially not after he effectively coerced her into outing herself in order to avoid his come-ons.  

Another one of our regular guests, hits on one of our baristas on a regular basis. No matter how much she casually brings up her boyfriend. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve had to literally stand in front of her so he can’t force eye-contact with her (Naturally we do this kind of thing in a low-key manner so that we don’t actively piss off guest and thus put our jobs at risk).

I’ve had to actively shut down people on behalf of my women co-workers (Nah dude, she’s seeing someone. She’s not interested in that sort of thing. Dude, chill out.) because they simply can’t understand the fact that they are at their jobs and simply just want to get their jobs done and go home. Stop taking advantage of the unequal power dynamics to force her to engage you. She’s seem nice? Of course she is, her job revolves around being nice. She seemed into you? No, I can promise she’s not, she’s doing her job and told me five minutes ago how you were clearly staring down her chest. 

“But how am I supposed to let her no I’m interested in her?” you might say. My answer, that’s not my fucking concern. There are plenty of opportunities to meet people in this world that don’t revolve around you forcing them into an uncomfortable position while they’re literally trying to earn a living. Not every person your interested in obligated to entertain that interest. 

Simply put, stop being goddam creepers and let people do their goddamn jobs. 

Fuck off. Some of us have a hard enough time talking to people without shitheads like you guilting us over it.

No one’s guilting you over anything. The point of this post is for you to stop doing it, not to do it and feel guilty.

If you feel awkward hitting on someone who’s not in a position where she can safely be honest with you or leave if you make her uncomfortable, that’s good. Listen to that awkward feeling. It’s telling you that you’re transgressing a boundary.

Now, if you feel like you’re always awkward and always crossing a boundary, then posts like this should be a gold mine. It’s telling you in clear terms where boundaries actually exist and why.

Story time:

There was this dude I knew through a monthly infosec meeting. He knew me and my fiancee and my friends through this meeting and he started coming to the coffee shop while I was working. He took a shine to one of my coworkers. He started asking me when she would be on shift and when I wouldn’t tell him he started showing up every night just in case. So she took on afternoon shifts and he started showing up in the afternoons. So she took morning shifts and he started showing up in the morning. So she started taking random shifts and he started showing up all day, from four thirty am when we opened until close at one am.

The thing is, while this is creepy in hindsight he wasn’t doing anything overtly creepy. The shop billed itself as “Smalltown’s Living Room” and there were a few regulars who hung out all day. And this guy bought endless iced teas and ate all his meals off our menu and bought ice cream for regulars and tipped extravagantly. He must have been spending close to a hundred dollars a day at the shop and never did anything beyond placing his order, chatting for a minute, and sitting in a chair where he could always watch the counter. Sometimes he’d talk to me after I locked up and asked if she liked him and ask me how he could get him to like her and no amount of “dude, it’s not going to happen, she’s not interested” could convince him. “But she’s so nice to me,” he’d say, “she smiles when she sees me and listens when I talk to her. No other girls do that for me.”

The owner felt a little hogtied by the whole thing - the guy hadn’t DONE anything, except spend more money than my coworkers and I made on a shift each day to have the opportunity to see her. At least five hundred a week on product. Almost the payroll of a full-time employee every week. And there was always a ten or a twenty from him in the tip jar at the end of every shift - five or ten dollars that represented about an extra hour’s worth of labor to everyone working there. So my co-worker and I felt bad too - he wasn’t really being THAT creepy, was it worth it to deprive our other co-workers of this extra income? (Spoilers: yes)

After a couple months of this (and yes, it was terrible that it went on for that long) my coworker got a better-paying, stalker-free job at her university and nobody was happier for her than me. It was my stupid bullshit that had infected her life and if I hadn’t told this acquaintance to swing by the coffee shop sometime she wouldn’t have had to deal with being scared and tense and having to hold a brittle smile every day at work just so that five or ten would reliably show up, so that someone’s hours wouldn’t get cut because of the dip in sales.

And when she left this guy was crushed. Didn’t show up for a month. Then he started coming in again. Started talking to me about how heartbroken he was, hanging out for my entire shift and thanking me for being such a good listener and marveling over the fact that my fiancee, his friend didn’t appreciate me the way I deserved. He’d follow me out on my lunch break and sit at my table. Eventually I went to the Smalltown Police Department and asked what I would need for a restraining order.

“Well, have you told him in clear words that he is not to speak to you and to leave you alone?”

“I can’t, he’s a customer and he only speaks to me in front of other customers.”

“Well, unless you tell him to cut off contact and he violates that there’s nothing we can do.”

And that was the real nastiness of this trick - always being in front of other customers. When you’re on register you can’t tell a customer never to speak to you again then casually move on to the next person in line. When you’re getting a muffin out of the pastry case you can’t tell a customer “go away and never come back” in front of some soccer mom who believes the customer is always right. You can drown someone out with a blender or an espresso machine, but only temporarily. There was a cubbyhole where we put our purses under the register - eventually it got to the point that if I saw him through the windows I’d let my coworker know then crawl into it to hide. Sometimes I’d spend half a shift doing dishes and making sandwiches in the back where he couldn’t follow me. At least we’d never run out of clean mugs, right?

It was too much. I told my fiancee and a couple other infosec friends what he was doing. He’d stopped coming to the meetings months before over a tiff with another dude so they weren’t seeing him. The had jobs to go to, they didn’t have the time to sit at a coffee shop with me all day. So they took a day off work in the middle of the week and when this guy followed me outside on my lunchbreak I texted them that he was there with me. I didn’t respond to anything that he said during that lunch, I only said “I don’t want to talk to you anymore, please leave me alone.” I said it quietly, but I said it in clear words, per what the police department had told me. He continued to talk while I continued to look at my book and try to eat my food when my fiancee and his friend showed up and joined us at the table. My fiancee (who is, by the way, over six and a half feet tall and built like a fridge) sat down next to him, our other friend sat down on the other side. They both very casually asked what he’d been up to recently. He didn’t say anything, just bit his lip, glared at me, and stormed off. He never came back to the coffee shop.

He DID email a friend of mine to rage about how I’d broken his heart and lied to him and misled him and sent mixed signals - how it was so nasty and two-faced to be smiling and nice one minute and turn on him the next, how he thought we had a connection, and why would I spend so much time listening to him and laughing at his jokes and smiling at him otherwise?

For two months nothing happened, then he showed up at the infosec meeting and as my fiancee and I were getting into the car to leave he charged at us and started trying to hit my (once again, goddamned enormous) fiancee and trying to push past him to come at me. This guy was about five ten and not terribly strong, and while we were scared we didn’t want to fucking KILL him, so my fiancee just sort of knocked him down instead of having a serious fight. The guy got into his car, rushed around  bunch of us in the parking lot, which was genuinely terrifying because we thought he might try to run someone over, then sped away into the night. We called the cops to file a report of assault. The cops didn’t want to talk to me, said I wasn’t involved in the altercation. They took a statement from my fiancee and two other guys who had been in the parking lot, then took down my number and a note that I claimed he’d been “close” to me. I told them he’d been harassing me but they just said that it wasn’t harassment if he just showed up at my job and didn’t actually DO anything.

Well, it turns out that while we were making our report this guy had driven to our friend’s house and rammed the house repeatedly with his Honda. He completely caved in the garage and tried to charge the living room but was stopped by a reinforced concrete wall. When the cops showed up there he was on the lawn raging about how we were all against him and trying to control him.

I missed all my classes the next day because I went to my college campus police department and said I needed a restraining order. I explained what had happened and their first question was how long I had dated the guy. Why did he think we were dating if I hadn’t been flirting with him? Had I led him on or tried to make it seem like I was interested in him? They escorted me to the women’s violence prevention center on campus and I spent approximately six hours filling out paperwork before the director of the center drove me to the county courthouse and made sure I was granted a temporary restraining order that day. It was made more difficult because I only knew this guy’s first name. At every step I had to reach out to my infosec friends or my fiancee to ask for his address, to check the spelling of his name, to confirm the make and model of his vehicle. This guy had chased my coworker out of a job, been showing up on every one of my shifts for months, and I didn’t know anything about him because to me he was just a customer who was an annoyance that had become a threat. But in his head I was the nice girl he’d had a meet-cute with at a fucking hacker hangout who blossomed into a romance in the goddamned coffee-shop AU he was scripting in his imagination, who spurned this rich, considerate, shy boy in favor of her lunk of a boyfriend who wasn’t good enough for her. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to explain a fifteen-year-old gray-hat hacker meetup to a judge in a way that doesn’t make it sound like you’re selling heroin? Calling it a professional infosec networking group didn’t work well enough to include it on the list of places on my restraining order. He couldn’t come to my coffee shop, my home, or my school but was free to return to the meeting where he’d attacked us that was full of my friends who DIDN’T have restraining orders so long as he left when I showed up.

I hate coffee-shop AUs, in case that isn’t clear. It perpetuates this idea that the person behind the counter is your ONE if only you’re persistent and sweet and generous and bashful enough to keep forcing them to endure your presence in their place of employment.

Look, it sounds fucking shitty to say it but most customer service jobs can be accomplished by machines. Automated phone trees can take the place of receptionists, you can get a latte as good as anything you’d get from a Starbucks out of a machine, cashiers can be replaced by self-checkout. Even bartenders can be replaced by some tubes and buttons if you have enough money to burn. The reason customer service still exists is because it is emotional labor that the customer is paying for. An automated phone tree can’t reassure you that it’ll pass your message along just as soon as possible and that we’ll make sure the tech gets back to you. An automated espresso machine won’t smile at you and ask if you’re having a good day. A self-checkout doesn’t make small talk about how great that ice-cream is or how nice the day is outside. A drink machine may be able to listen to your problems but it won’t say “I feel you,” and tell a funny story to make you feel better. We live in the fucking future, almost everything you could want can be accomplished with an machine an a cellphone. If you’re interacting with a human it’s because you want to interact with a human and you want that human to be nice to you. You are paying for their kindness, for their smiles when their feet hurt and their questions about your day when they haven’t had lunch yet.

Flirting with customer service workers at work, asking them out when they’re on the clock and paid to make you happy, telling them you think they’re attractive and expecting a gushing response - that’s breaking the rules. That’s a lose-lose situation that you’ve set them up for. If they continue to do their job and be nice to you they’re “leading you on” and if they react negatively and ask you to leave or to not speak to them that way it’s “bad customer service.”

A good rule of thumb if you’re thinking about asking someone out or flirting with them is to ask yourself this question: “if do this thing and it makes them uncomfortable can they leave this place without it impacting their livelihood?”

If the answer is “no” and you do it anyway you’re a jackass. That person is trapped. You have cornered them. You have put your desire to flirt with them over their ability to earn a living.

“Oh good, I’ll do it now, when they can’t get away” is not an effective dating strategy. It’s abusive, it’s creepy, and nobody is well-paid enough to put up with unwanted sexual or romantic advances while they’re trying to do their job.

Don’t pull this shit.

sharpestrose:

rottenbrainstuff:

quilavastudy:

medschoolandthreequarters:

cthulhucore:

korvys:

igeri96:

quilavastudy:

peccatopotpourri:

quilavastudy:

I get really confused when americans, when talking about universal health care are like ‘yeh but it’s not free sweaty :) :) you have to pay it through taxes :) so gotcha!!’

and I’m like ….???? That’s the whole point??? Everyone pays their fair share so that no one has to be turned away because they don’t have insurance??? And no one has to set up a Fundraiser page just so that they DONT DIE???? So people don’t put off going to the doctor because they’re scared of going bankrupt?? Because healthcare is a RIGHT and should be free at the point of access?!?

“So no one has to be turned away” she says hahaha go to a universal health care country and get a necessary operation in less than a few years and come back and talk shit.

Look at the cure rates compared to mortality rates in universal health care countries and compare them to ours, then talk shit.

Tear your ACL in a universal health care country and see what the people say if you should go to their hospitals or go to an American hospital, then talk shit.

I do live in a universal health care country, actually. And I HAVE had a necessary operation here myself. I broke my arm years ago - the ambulance came within 5 minutes. I was seen in A&E by a doctor within 20 minutes. And I had the operation to put my arm back in place within hours - despite my condition not being life threatening. Hmm, don’t see what was so hard about that? And oh yeah, it was all free of charge.

You don’t seem to understand about how it works. Firstly, operations are prioritised. If someone comes in with an emergency, such as a ruptured aorta and bleeding out - of COURSE they will get an operation STRAIGHT AWAY. Like what do you think doctors do here, twiddle their thumbs while patients die? 

And if someone has something that is not quite an emergency, but is serious, such as a bowel cancer, they will have their surgery within 1-2 weeks of seeing a specialist. And it’s free. The poor patient who is already stressed and worried sick about their cancer, will NOT also have to worry about insurance and bills and going bankrupt.

Sure, some operations that are not quite as urgent will have waiting lists. My gran just had her cataract operation - this is something that isn’t life-threatening, not causing her pain at all, but of course is still affecting her life because she couldn’t see very well. She had to wait a few months, which of course in an inconvenience, but she still got her operation, and she definitely didn’t have to wait years (and I have never heard of anyone waiting years for an operation, and as a med student I have talked to a LOT of patients) so I don’t know where you got that from (probably some right-wing american media, I assume). And like, I’m sure most people would rather wait a bit longer than have to pay, or not ever get their operation because they can’t afford it?

And I’m not sure what you mean by your last bit. Are you really implying that countries other than the US couldn’t repair an ACL tear? Like, really? Do you think countries with universal healthcare have no resources or money? Sorry to burst your deluded bubble, but other countries can handle an ACL tear, and many other operations (even neurosurgery - shock horror!), just fine thanks. I’ve never seen a patient shipped off to America. 

“I’ve never seen a patient shipped off to America” daamn, i love this post

Not to mention that in countries like Australia, there are *also* private hospitals. If you *want* to spend tens of thousands of dollars to avoid waiting, you can?

As someone who would be dead, many times over, without universal health care, GET FUCKED.

And for the record: the only private hospital in my hometown (apart from taking quick non urgent NMR because the ones in the public hospital have quite a long queue) really sucks. For every important/urgent/non-basic procedure you have to go to the public one, which is considered btw a national reference in certain departments. Years for an operation? Nop. Months, one year and a few months tops for non-necessary surgeries. Urgent and necessary? Hours.

Oh and about the talking shit thing…

But sure, the US wins it over in one thing: healthcare spending!

(Source here: http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2015/oct/us-health-care-from-a-global-perspective )

So yeah, tell me again why should i pack my things and move right away to the US where i’d die unless i’m shitting gold like a freaking Lannister.

Reblogging because I love this reply

My favourite was that free health care would create death panels where people would judge if you were allowed to have the life saving operation that you needed.

Like

Dude

You guys have that there already, and it’s called fucking insurance companies.

I live in Australia and at the end of November last year it was discovered that I had a fairly large and aggressively growing brain tumor. The only reason that I didn’t have neurosurgery until the very start of January (a whole month! after my diagnosis!) was because I requested to delay it until after Christmas for my family’s sake. Otherwise I would have had it sooner. 

Look up how much acoustic neuroma surgery costs in the US. Wait no, I’ll save you the trouble – it’s $100,000 USD. My mother would have lost her house, be hugely in debt, and I would have had a lifetime of guilt. 

Except! I wouldn’t have even KNOWN I had a tumor in the first place, because in the US the doctor would have gone “I can’t justify an MRI for these symptoms on your insurance plan” (yes, even if I’d been insured) and that would have been that, unless I felt like coughing up thousands for the test myself, which I wouldn’t have done because eh, if the doctor thinks the symptoms are nbd then it’s fine, right? 

I would be dying of a totally treatable disease right now if I lived in the USA, and I wouldn’t even know it. Or if by some miracle I did find out, my 68-year-old single mother would have no savings and no home now so that her daughter could have surgery. 

So shut the fuck up. 

sheisraging:

Did I post this already? I don’t care. I’m posting it again. I’ll post it every day for every time I see someone say “You should check out Jill Stein!” or “Jill Stein is the new left!” or “I’m voting for Jill Stein because I am voting my conscience!” because I will know that that person has not actually read or understood anything about the way the world actually works and probably lives in a field somewhere surrounded by imaginary butterflies.

I suppose many people who adore Jill Stein will not bother to read through this whole thing and stick with their good ol’ reliable jpgs promising free college, student loan debt forgiveness, no more war!, and a fully green platform. The thing is, those are the people who really should step back for a minute and look at Jill Stein’s policies from an outside perspective.

Jill Stein has no idea what she’s talking about.

This is, of course, my opinion. However, this is also something that should be immediately obvious to anyone who reads her policy plans or reads/listens to an interview with her, or watches her incoherently ramble about wi-fi being dangerous for children. Her statements on politics are little more than pandering to the lowest common denominator, frequently muddling ideas so as to appease one crowd without alienating the other – hence the endless back and forth on whether or not she is pro- or anti-vaxx.

And yes, yes, I know she’s come out and said she supports vaccinations, however, there is a huge difference between definitively saying “Vaccinate your kids” and “Well, vaccines are okay, but…” The latter is what she actually said, and keeps saying. As a medical doctor. 

One of these things is having a stance based on true, scientific fact and study. The other is pandering and fanning the flame of a theory and movement that has been debunked and is also a public health hazard. Additionally, the objection she raises to vaccinations is that they’re overseen by big pharma (aka. evil), which is false. There are two committee members, out of fifteen, who are from the pharmaceutical industry. The rest are, as stated in the advisory committee info page, from various medically related fields. This is not difficult information to look up. And yet, as noted here, she’s referred to autism as an “epidemic” and “a public health calamity” but said nothing about the outbreaks of diseases that, up until the anti-vaxx movement, had been a rare occurrence for years. Here’s a good collection of the many (many) “yes, but” statements Jill Stein has made on vaccinations. 

Jill Stein’s foreign and defense policy ideas show that she has very little understanding of such policies (which is actually frightening). In the same way that Donald Trump plays on the politics of fear mongering, Jill Stein plays on the politics of peace promising. It’s a nice dream, but it’s not a realistic one. Raise your hand if you believe that just because we suddenly decide to shut down 700+ military bases, de-militarize our borders, cut defense spending by 50% [source], and oh also, maybe pull out of NATO, those that are hostile toward the U.S. will suddenly look around and go “huh… well… I guess we should go home now. Call it a day, guys.”

Look, I’m not for war and I never have been or will be… but this is stereotype-level hippie nonsense. Nothing works this way. If you think it does, please slap yourself in the face until you wake up to reality.

On top of it being unrealistic, it would likely be shot down by any Congress she would face, as would most of her proposals, as there is no Green in Congress, and she would have minimal support.

Even her understanding of world politics is minute and wavering, at best. The Brexit vote is one example, where, using her own website as a source, she was quoted as having called the vote to leave a victory, and suggesting it was time to capitalize on its momentum, only to change the message after realizing the U.S. response, especially from progressives, was much more in favor of remaining (likely due to the actual impact and motivations behind the movement see: pandering). She’s since changed the post on her own website, however, the original was captured for posterity.

Her plan to forgive student loan debt raises skepticism that she’s not addressed – there is a good call out in her Reddit AMA that discussed this, which was never followed up. Quantitative easing has been, so far, her only explanation for how she’d forgive student debt and there’s been no actual proof that such a thing is possible or would work. 

In fact, and granted, it’s due to the fact that she has no chance and nobody cares, there has been little to no fact checking at all on anything Jill Stein says, which is why I can’t help it that my eyes roll so far back into my head whenever someone sings her praises.

Jill Stein is an opportunistic hack who has never held any political office higher than Representative at a Town Hall meeting. Her political experience includes two failed runs for Governor of Massachusetts and one failed run for President — two, if you count 2016. She has been trying for years and that is as far as she has gotten. Her talking points are often muddled and indecipherable because, again, she has no idea what she’s talking about. She is about as qualified as Donald Trump.

If you would not vote for Donald Trump, you should not vote for Jill Stein. President of the United States is not a learn on the job position. You need to be qualified. You need to be extremely qualified. That means you need to have, at minimum (and that’s pushing it), a base understanding of world affairs, working with our foreign allies and adversaries, domestic affairs, and hopefully, the actionability of your proposed plans for the country’s immediate future. Nowhere in any interviews or outlines Jill Stein has presented has she demonstrated any of this.

If you truly, truly care about your progressive movement and building a formidable third party, then build it. There are one hundred seats in the Senate. There zero Green Party members. There are 435 seats in the House. There zero Green Party members. That list goes on for a while.

Get rid of this woman, who has been trying and failing for years, because she cannot be taken seriously. Work on building up local government seats. Get your numbers up. Get your visibility up. Get into the House. Get into the Senate. Get a Governor elected, man. Stop showing up every four to eight years and acting like you give a shit.

Because that is the problem people have with the Greens (and third parties in general). Where are they right up until a Presidential election, when they suddenly decide to run some spoiler that has no shot at winning, but can ruin the next four to eight years for more than half the country? If the Greens want to be taken seriously, they need to do the hard work of actually organizing and building a solid foundation. The constant attempt to take from the top down is ridiculous. 

And for the first-timers, who don’t understand that this has happened before, please, understand: This has happened before. You are not the first, but you can be the last if you try to make a positive change rather than perpetuating the spoiler cycle. You can focus your efforts on organization, lower elections, strong candidates, and growing your party to the point where you’re actually ready to take the larger step. You can make that effort. That would be progressive.