What to put on a resume ifyou were a cashier
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2024.05.19 16:36 No_Pomegranate7134 Why people look down on about manual labor or minimum wage jobs when they exist for a specific reason and purpose? Would it mean they will replace EVERY job out there with robots, even doctors, lawyers and policemen for instance, as they are still done by humans?
Saying that "better" jobs exist is used as a mere excuse for some people not willing to work, like at all. Since people in the West always say that, but the truth is that they DO NOT want to work or burn some sweat, workers from poorer countries immigrating to Western countries that are desperate for employment don't care if the job is manual labor or sitting in an office cubicle for a long time, as long as it gives them a stable salary, since they exchange dollars, euros or pounds back into their local currencies to send back to their loved ones back home, so they remain indifferent if they are paid small, as like any other human, you need money to survive the contemporary society.
So, to put it, there is no point for people to talk shit or berate people who work minimum wage jobs (at the end, they will waste their own time for doing that), as they also play a part on maintenance, cleaniness or customer service and relations, it'll be completely stupid to get rid of garbage collectors or cleaners for example, as who else would tidy all of the mess up either on the streets or in your office? Robots can't do literally everything for you, as some interactions require humans to be around, like lawyers or doctors, since they need HUMANS (not robots) to have a more personal or clearer interaction with other people.
How can a robot be able to read your human emotions when you are upset, can it predict or assume if you have committed a crime, or what the verdict would be before the judge announces it? Are you going to lay off all human surgeons, doctors and nurses just to replace all of it with AI and robotics? People got to understand that jobs regardless if they are manual labor or not, have a purpose in their own way. (As why else have humans evolved through out history, it started from "manual labor" so there is zero reason to despite it so much.)
You might be surprised that jobs people consider "shit" have large salaries, for this reason: "It's niche, and no one wants to do it, only those who are willing to." as they are looking for those who willing choose to work in professions people consider "shit" by the masses.There is literally no reason for people to berate or talk shit about any job regardless if it is manual labor, minimum wage, or a white collar one, since human history they existed for their purpose prior to the industrial revolution and digital age, don't forget not all jobs can be replaced by robots and AI:
If no one replaced those who all left, overtime they'll start to lose money and the companies who employ those sectors become defunct, even for the highest paying ones that require specific skills, still need actual humans to fill in those spots, not robots. Have you ever encountered (any of) these in real life, like at all:
Put it like this, if people despite minimum wage or labor jobs so much, consider these factors:
submitted by No_Pomegranate7134 to NoStupidQuestions [link] [comments]
So, to put it, there is no point for people to talk shit or berate people who work minimum wage jobs (at the end, they will waste their own time for doing that), as they also play a part on maintenance, cleaniness or customer service and relations, it'll be completely stupid to get rid of garbage collectors or cleaners for example, as who else would tidy all of the mess up either on the streets or in your office? Robots can't do literally everything for you, as some interactions require humans to be around, like lawyers or doctors, since they need HUMANS (not robots) to have a more personal or clearer interaction with other people.
How can a robot be able to read your human emotions when you are upset, can it predict or assume if you have committed a crime, or what the verdict would be before the judge announces it? Are you going to lay off all human surgeons, doctors and nurses just to replace all of it with AI and robotics? People got to understand that jobs regardless if they are manual labor or not, have a purpose in their own way. (As why else have humans evolved through out history, it started from "manual labor" so there is zero reason to despite it so much.)
You might be surprised that jobs people consider "shit" have large salaries, for this reason: "It's niche, and no one wants to do it, only those who are willing to." as they are looking for those who willing choose to work in professions people consider "shit" by the masses.There is literally no reason for people to berate or talk shit about any job regardless if it is manual labor, minimum wage, or a white collar one, since human history they existed for their purpose prior to the industrial revolution and digital age, don't forget not all jobs can be replaced by robots and AI:
- If there are no HUMAN builders, who will construct all of the property?
- If there are no HUMAN doctors or nurses, who will treat you?
- If there are no HUMAN cops, who will enforce the law and arrest people?
- If there are no HUMAN lawyers, who will repesent you in court?
- If there are no HUMAN judges and jury, who will be present in court?
- If there are no HUMAN leaders, would would be in charge?
- If there are no HUMAN armed forces, what will the military consist of?
- If there are no HUMAN teachers, who will teach the students?
- If there are no HUMAN technicians, who will fix and maintain the equipment?
- If there are no HUMAN plumbers, who will be able to sort out the piping?
- I'll give you $150,000 annually if you work hard with all that labor 365 days a year.
- I'll give you $70,000 annually if you just sat inside the office all day staring at a screen.
So, which one are you tempted to take despite "manual labor" job having a higher salary by this employer, as they consider that people don't want to do it, or are looking for a specific canididate who remains indifferent to the public opinion on job seeking?So, people would only understand if "you've been through their shoes" as saying that someone working for minimum wage or manual labor is a "inferior" person to in comparison to somebody who is employed at a white collar job with a suit and tie, is just plain stupid. It's either that:
I'm saying "manual labor" as some sort of placeholder, but it could be a job no one expected to exist, but has a high salary than what you'd get within an office or any typical white collar job. (No, it is not sex work, it's not even related to that, at all.)
- Those people NEVER worked in minimum wage job in their lives, so they make assumptions of it being terrible. Only people who have worked in minimum wage jobs will TRULY know and understand what it is like first hand, rather than what people generalize the definition of that word, as they have never worked in that field, so they don't really know until they step into the same shoes as people working in minimum wage to find out first hand.
- They don't know what customer service ACTUALLY means. Other than them repeating the dictionary meaning of that word, they know nothing at all about what it is like first hand to encounter customers and being the front spectable of the general public, either nice or rude.
- Raised in a upper or top class upbringing who are brainwashed to talk crap about others. As they are from a neighborhood or familial upbringing full of rich folks who are accustomed to consider the middle class as peseants.
- They have "work experience" and "studied" listed on paper, but how does it really apply IRL? I mean, make them prove they are telling thr truth from their resume by making them apply the skills they've listed in real life, eg. You listed that you've worked for a michelin star restaurant, right? Cook me something I don't regulary encounter, but it better be good and an original recipe. If they can't apply the 'skill' they listed right there, they are liars, don't hire them.
If no one replaced those who all left, overtime they'll start to lose money and the companies who employ those sectors become defunct, even for the highest paying ones that require specific skills, still need actual humans to fill in those spots, not robots. Have you ever encountered (any of) these in real life, like at all:
- Robotic doctor, nurse, or surgeron
- Robotic police officer on duty
- Robotic CEO of a [company]
- Robotic head of an [organization]
- Robotic [President] or [Prime Minister]
Put it like this, if people despite minimum wage or labor jobs so much, consider these factors:
- If there were no garbage collectors, trash will just litter the streets making it dirty and smell bad
- If there were no custodians in any public facility or street, trash and debris will just remain there
- If there was no uber driver or an uber-robot (managed by humans), who will deliver your food
- If there were no bulilders or construction workers, that means land will just remain empty
- If there were no EMTs, who in the hell will operate an ambulance
- If there are no mechanics or automotive technicians, who will repair your vehicle
2024.05.19 16:04 APCleriot My Family Isn't In The Family Photos
What’s in the closet, Kirsty?
He knew I hid a secret.
I smiled, tried to look confused.
He waited, crossing his arms.
I worried that he'd already seen. He had.
What else could he think about the pile?
His wife’s a cheater. She has another life. Another husband. Children.
He’d never believe the truth: I’m not a cheater; there’s no other life; no other man; I don’t know who the children are who visit me at night.
But I did have a secret. And maybe it’s fair to say another life, even if was smaller and against my will.
I should have destroyed those frames, burned the photos within. Now it looked like I saved them, cherished them. The truth couldn’t be farther. I feared to touch anything to do with… whatever they are…with one exception.
“It started last Halloween,” I said to George, my husband, my real husband.
He stopped packing for a moment, working out the impossibility of this statement. “I’m taking the girls to my parents.” He resumed the tossing of shirts, pants, etc. into our big suitcase.
“It’s true,” I said, but weakly. The children in the picture are at least six and four respectively. They were born six months ago.
“They’re not… my kids,” I said of the boys in the photos. They’re not kids is what I almost said.
George stopped and squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Kirsty,” he said slowly, “there are baby pictures. I saw them.”
“That’s-”
He quickly raised his finger, exasperated, angry, done.
“The first picture is you holding a newborn, and…” He swallowed painfully, his throat gone dry. It always does when he’s upset. “And the father in that picture, with his arm around you, isn’t me.”
When I couldn't deny it, he nodded like he knew all along our marriage would end.
We were happy. We really were. George and I had managed to overcome the typical breakdown that often comes with raising children. Only since last Halloween had distance been made by me.
I should have told him as soon as it started.
“Girls!” he called as I followed him down the stairs to the front hall of our lovely home. We’d scrimped and sacrificed to buy and keep this place, our dream by the lake. He’d been so proud. I couldn’t tell him I wanted to leave the first night sleeping there.
Cara and Ella protested through play, ignoring the adults, continuing to jump on an old box they’d long since flattened. Rays from the western sun placed my daughters into an inspired, hallowed light, and I started to cry. He was going to take my babies away.
George opened the door, intending, I’m sure, to drop the suitcase in the car before returning to physically carry the girls out.
But he hesitated in the doorway.
“George?”
The suitcase fell with a solid thud on the floor. “There’s no way,” he said.
“What?”
“There’s no way,” he said, with emphasis on the last word, “you would have had time for…this…”
Not defining "this" as cheating was progress. “Yes!”
He glared, quieting my desperate enthusiasm. I wasn’t off the hook. “Tell me. The truth.”
“I can’t.”
He reached for the suitcase.
“No, not because I don’t want to,” I protested. “I don’t know what’s happening!” I sat on the carpeted steps and stared through blurred vision at my trembling hands. The shriek I’d filled the house with - “happening!” - had put a halt to the box's obliteration. Cara and Ella hesitated for a few seconds before leaping into action.
Cara, the oldest, six, punched her dad in the buttocks. “You have to be nice!”
Ella, four, sat beside me and patted my trembling hands. “It’s okay, mummy.”
Such lovely daughters. Nothing like the boys in those photos when they were this age.
George grasped Cara's wrists and gently walked her back into the house, using his foot to kick the suitcase from the swing of the front door.
"It's alright, girls," he said with weak resolve. "Go and play."
"No!" Cara shouted. She kicked at her father and he pulled her close into a bearhug. Gradually, the girls calmed and were convinced to return to the box in the front room.
"Kirsty," George said, "you have to tell me." He sat down on the step beside me. "Please." I would do anything to take away the hurt in his eyes. "Please."
"I can't. But… I can write it down. Maybe." I took out my phone. We shared Google Drive. When I made a new document, he reluctantly started his phone. The man was a dream. He watched his screen, and waited patiently for my words to appear.
Without preamble, I returned to the awful moment when it all began: a strange and disturbing dream. Words came like an infection from beneath a torn scab. The wound had been opened. Nothing could stop this now.
Sex with another man has never been a desire of mine. I love George. He loves me.
Plus, the man in my dream was a stranger, and not particularly handsome. He has a plain face set to unwavering boredom and unkempt male pattern baldness. Our dream sex felt obligatory, just something we had to do.
I awoke on the wrong side of midnight. November 1st and I was craving ice cream instead of the girls' gathered candy. The freezer left by the previous homeowners came with unopened ice cream. Freezer burned or not, I wanted some.
After retrieving a spoon from the kitchen, I intended to destroy a brick of neopolitan. He waited in his flannel pajamas, barefoot on the concrete floor. His arms were crossed.
"Cravings?" he said.
I dropped the spoon. It clattered down the basement steps. Before I could run away, he disappeared like someone had erased him from head to foot in one clean sweep.
Had to be a dream. That's what I told myself. The spoon stayed in the basement until daylight. Ghost or nightmare, there was laundry to do the next day.
I crossed the concrete floor fast and only felt safer when I'd closed the door to the more modern laundry room. Never thought builder's grade tiles and track lights would make me feel anything but sad.
His voice caught me sorting.
"Kirsty!"
I dropped the cup of detergent all over the floor.
"Shit."
I came out of the laundry room, figuring George had been looking for me in uncharacteristically rude fashion. He hated speaking between rooms. Shouting throughout the house was highly impolite. It must have been important, I figured.
As soon as I stepped onto the bare concrete, however, deep sadness, the kind that seems to physically leech the strength from your body, dominated the room.
"Hello?" I don't know why I said that. The basement is a low ceilinged rectangle. There are no hiding spots except for the laundry room I'd come from. After a deep breath, I walked briskly to the stairs.
"Any day now," a raspy voice breathed into my ear. I jolted and slipped forward, falling and clipping my chin off a step. It made my teeth click painfully. Nobody there, of course. I ran upstairs and George had gone outside with the girls to play hide and seek.
I wanted to tell him. He looked so happy. It's hard to convey in words the kind of smile he showed me through the window. Imagine contentment mixed with unreserved joy and hope. Yes, it's difficult to picture. So few of us can ever have such a moment. Sort of like finding a natural view completely untouched by humanity. Beyond rare and precious.
I’m rambling now to avoid writing about what followed. The point is I couldn’t tell him. I hoped it’d go away and stop.
But, of course, it didn’t, and things got much worse.
I awoke in a great deal of pain. Having already given birth to children, the feeling was familiar. Despite getting up and gasping, George continued to snore in our bed. He’s a deep sleeper, but a quick and early riser. I’ve never heard him complain about getting out of bed either, especially when there’s an emergency.
I might have woken him up but I was disoriented and confused. Part of me believed I was still pregnant with Ella. It wasn’t until I’d gone all the way to the kitchen to avoid waking up the girls, that my brain caught up: Girls. Plural. Ella was asleep in her bed upstairs.
“Ohhhhhhhh shiiiiiiiiiiit.” I knew the signs of labour. This couldn’t be happening. “Ohhhhhhhhh.”
I was definitely going to wake everyone up if this continued.
My phone was upstairs by my bedside table. We don’t have a landline. I should have called 911. I should have woken up George.
Instead, I went downstairs where I could vocalize pain without disturbing anyone. Such a pathetically passive response. But that’s how I was raised. Keep it down, don't you frown.
His hands seized mine as soon as I descended the last step. Serious and bald without dignity is how to best describe his physical appearance. Cold and cruel is what he is. The lights turned off and, in the perfect darkness of the basement, he was all that I could see.
He produces a red light from his body somehow but his touch is literally frosty.
"Kristy, it's time," he said. No joy there. Just straight facts. Something was coming. I was going to give birth to it. In the dull red glow of his being, the first boy came.
"His name is Hadad," the man said, placing a large, infant boy with a lot of hair and, I swear, a hint of beard, on the bare concrete. Hadad looked like a three month old they use as newborns on TV. He didn't cry. He hardly seemed to breathe as his dark eyes roamed the darkness. His light resembled the man's, a less intense red.
I felt another contraction, and winced.
"She comes next," the man said.
I felt so weak. "Who are you?" I asked him.
At last, he smiled and I wished he hadn't. It made me feel small, insignificant, and beneath his concern. "You know who I am," he said. "I'm your husband."
Pain wracked my entire body. Something didn't feel right. The birth of Cara and Ella had been without difficulty.
"Push," my "husband" ordered. "She is upset with you, and will kill you if you don't get her out now."
"It has to be a nightmare," I told him. Sweat poured in streams down my face. The unborn "she" in question writhed and damaged my insides. I screamed. I couldn't help it.
"Push!"
I obeyed and the second boy spilled onto the bare concrete, coated in blood and dust.
"It's a boy," I said.
The man looked displeased. "The body is male. She is Hebat. No wonder she is angry." Like the other infant, Hebat appeared aware of her surroundings and had far too much motor control for a newborn. The light pouring from her body was dull silver. Her eye sockets were two pits of concentrated despair. I had to look away.
The babies were pressed into my arms.
The man stretched out beside me. "Open your eyes and smile." I resisted. "Do it. Now." What choice did I have? The flash from his cell blinded me. They were all gone by the time my sight recovered. Only the sweat remained as evidence of the ordeal.
It had to have been a hallucination. Some very bad food poisoning maybe. The source could be as simple as an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. I had been stress eating since we'd moved in. I stood up and took some comfort in a Charles Dickens' reference.
"More of gravy than of grave about you," I said. My words seemed consumed by the dreadful weight of the air. "Whatever you are."
Whatever you are: something bad in any case. At best, I'd hallucinated prolonged and traumatic labour and needed medical attention. Yet, when I limped up the basement stairs, all thoughts of waking George vanished. There on the kitchen island sat a propped frame containing the photograph taken only moments ago.
The man looked happy. Only Hadad appeared in this picture, which meant another one was somewhere. I didn't panic. I worried more about what George would think if he saw the photos. I had to find them all.
Hebat and his father and I were mounted in a dark wood frame by the master bedroom. It'd be the first thing anyone saw if they woke up. I plucked it off the wall and, together with the first photo, tucked it under some blankets in the dresser we'd shoved in the small walk-in closet.
You might not believe this, but I went straight to sleep after. I climbed under the blanket in my sweaty pajamas, shut my eyes, and didn't have enough time to deny what had happened. I was unconscious until morning.
George placed a coffee on my nightstand. That's what I remember. He rubbed my feet while I slowly awoke. The girls were watching TV downstairs, munching on apple slices. There was forty minutes still before we had to seriously consider getting ready to take Cara to school.
George would drop her off on his way to work downtown. He chose his hours and always chose convenience for his wife and kids. Ella and I planned to spend the morning gardening. Then we would nap much of the afternoon away until George and Cara returned. A life so perfect is so very rare.
I didn't want to spoil things with a very convincing nightmare. Besides, I felt fine. Not so good that I wanted to look in the dresser to see if those photos really were there, but not ill. So I remained silent again.
November started fine. Idyllic days and nights filled with laughter and joy and television. Just as I started to believe in the dream we'd made, they came again.
The wail of a child's hunger is a powerful call for a parent. When it's a chorus, even of two, it cannot be ignored. Only I awoke to Hadad and Hebat's cries for their "mother" from the basement.
Half asleep, I drifted into the kitchen and searched for their milk bottles. When no bottles could be found, I remembered they were newborns. Milk swelled in my breasts and made my nipples ache. Just like when Cara or Ella would awaken in the night. It was a relief to feed them.
But what the fuck was I doing?
I was acting like the man in the basement and the devil babies were mine. It'd been less than a week since Halloween and that horrible nightmare illusion. I had already taken on the beleaguered newborn mother role without question.
Their cries intensified and flayed the weak resistance of exhausted reasoning.
Don't wake George. Don't wake my babies, my real babies.
"What took you so long?" the man critized, his voice monotone, the question unrhetorical.
"I… was sleeping. I went to the fridge first." Under his severe gaze, I stopped in the midst of the dark room. Hadad had quieted. Hebat cooed as if laughing at her own joke. I couldn't see them because the lights were off. They liked the dark better. Somehow I knew that about them and him.
"You should sleep down here," he said. "A mother should always be close to her babies."
The statement was nonsense but not altogether wrong. I wanted to be close to my babies, the daughters sleeping in bliss upstairs, away from the evil fermentation in the basement.
"Kirsty," he said. "Are you listening?" His hand touched the small of my back. The gentleness surprised me. I squawked and flinched away. "What’s wrong with you? They're hungry." He pressed on my shoulders until I sat on the cold floor.
They came from the shadows, already walking. I wanted to go, but I knew he wouldn't allow it. He pulled my cat t-shirt off over my head and their fierce mouths suckled, relieving the pressure of excess breast milk quickly. It felt physically good and psychologically alien.
I looked down at them once and immediately regretted it. Their emanated light had intensified to a point where perception of them hurt.
Each time I blinked my eyes were drawn to some isolated part of their bodies. The vision got closer to the point of disgust. Everything is gross if you're close enough. There is no beauty under a microscope. If you think there is then you're not using the right magnification.
Hebat's eye drew me in. At first, I saw the dark sphere, and then the strands of her eyelashes. Her gravity kept pulling until the creatures that live in eyelashes were revealed: Demodex folliculorum. I looked the microscopic horrors up.
The babies had more parasites than any child should. They wanted to show me and could somehow do so.
I asked him about it. "Why are they showing me these worms?"
He smiled, contemptuously as usual. "Trying to impress mother. Neither of them understand your horror and insignificance. You are the ant who knows they're an ant. Lucky you. They think you will be proud of the life their corporeal forms produce and host. Give them a few hours. It will pass."
"Why are you doing this to me?"
"I'm not sure what you mean. We're married. Now, prepare to smile." His cell reappeared and I noted the lack of features; it might have been a singed rectangle of spent firewood. He frowned when I failed to smile. "Smile, Kirsty. These are your children."
I managed to stave off the tears and hold the babies close. The smile was more difficult. In the inevitable aftermath of their sudden disappearance, the frames depicted an exhausted, wrinkly woman smiling painfully. It took a second to recognize myself.
The things in the basement sapped my strength. I looked dehydrated, beleaguered. The scale in the bathroom said I'd dropped six pounds. I'd weighed myself the morning before.
"Whoa, you've lost weight," George noted, thinking I'd be pleased. "This place has been so good for us, eh?'
To produce another smile proved as draining as the previous night. "Y-yes," I stuttered too late for him to ignore.
"Hey," he said, touching my forearm.
I flinched.
"Whoa, you okay? What's wrong?"
I should have told him. "Nothing. Bad sleep. A nightmare. I'll be fine."
A lie is an agreement. George wanted to agree, I think. He wanted life to be fine because he was happy for once. We struggled so hard before we came to Bridal Veil Lake. It was supposed to be our dream.
Guilty if I told him the truth. Guilty because I didn't. I began to resent his happiness, though he had done nothing but be the wonderful man he'd always been.
To Cara and Ella I became a body in motion, No brain left to guide them away from harm or answer their questions about nature and the universe.
"I don't know." That's what I told them often.
So they began to treat me like a kind of butler.
"Can I have some juice, please?"
"Sure, sweetheart."
"Mommy, can I have a snack?"
"Of course." And I'd run off to fetch it.
"Cookies."
"Yes, dear."
When Christmas came, I had two and they induced the same level of joy. Visiting the basement to feed and nurture Hebat and Hadad became a nightly occurrence. I'd learned to awaken, if I could get to sleep at all, and go quietly.
He berated me severely if I missed a night, and there were subtle threats made casually.
"I may have to squash you yet," he said, his tone as deep and cold as always.
"It won't happen again," I promised. "They’re getting big." In fact, they were no longer infants. Both had grown to the approximate age of six or seven in a few months. Still, they never spoke. Their dark eyes watched me as they ate food from the kitchen upstairs, food I'd hidden from my family.
"More meat," the man demanded.
"Of course." And I ran to the freezer and gave them frozen sausages in the package. They never complained or demanded the food be prepared a different way. No objections from my "husband" either.
Hebat tore the styrofoam and plastic wrap away and flattened the row of sausages stuck together between powerful molars. Hadad contented itself with licking them like a popsicle.
I'd stay until the photo. Then they'd release me by vanishing. Always with an exhausted breath, I'd trudge up the stairs and search for the frames and hide them in the same place.
They only smiled in the pictures. At no other time did they express any kind of emotion unless indifference counts.
My own children and husband weren't doing much better. Their concerns about my fatigue and ruminating slowly ceased as I repeated the excuse: I’m just tired. It'll pass.
Of course, I did not know when the nightmare would stop.
"When will it end?" I asked him one night, while Hebat and Hadad exercised like they had a mission.
"What do you mean?" he said.
I was surprised he answered. He usually didn't. "This. This. When can I go back to normal and not come down every night? I'm so very tired."
He frowned and I thought some punishment must be coming. Instead, he looked more confused. "I don't understand. You aren't happy? Your children grow into power and strength and will take their place in the world. They will be great and you - you, of all the tiny things, made that happen. Ask yourself what you want out of life, and see if Hebat and Haddad aren't your answer."
Too many words, all at once, for an exhausted mother. I didn't speak for the rest of the night. The infernal trio vanished, and the latter moments of the ritual I carried out with his challenge in mind.
I want my children to be strong, happy, and safe.
"Juice," Cara demanded the next morning, a Saturday, while she watched cartoons.
"Get it yourself!" I hissed, from tired to angry in a second.
"But I can't," Cara accurately pointed out. She didn't look away from the TV. Looking at me wasn't safe, and she knew it. Her and Ella held hands and sat a little straighter. It broke my heart. What had I done?
George came downstairs, attracted by my shouting. "What’s going on?"
Empathy became sadness, and the constant burden rekindled to anger swiftly. "Just children treating me like a servant."
He smiled. "Ah, yes, and how are the royal princesses this morning?"
His levity irked me. "You would know if you didn't sleep in so much."
The smile vanished from his face, and instead of the fight I seemed to want, he mumbled a quiet apology and joined the girls. They climbed onto him as he wrapped them into a cuddle.
"What are we watching?" George restarted his smile, his calm, for the girls. I hated myself. It had to end. Tonight.
After another dreary day of going through the motions, and the girls and George had fallen asleep, I went to the kitchen and chose the knife I thought sharpest.
"Kirsty," he said, his voice a whisper rising from the depths of the house.
"Coming," I whispered back.
"Mom," said another voice, a girl's, and I knew that Hebat had, at last, found herself and the wholeness of her being had been corrected.
I started to cry. I went downstairs and there she was with her brother and her father. He looked tired but some of the grimness had cracked to allow the first real contentment I've ever seen him express.
"Is that for the cake?" he asked. "We already have one."
I remembered the sharp knife. "Meat," I said. "There’s ham in the freezer."
He nodded, seeming to accept the answer.
"Mom," Hebat said, "Do you think I'm…" She gestured to herself, her face, and her body, and I understood the question, born from doubt and a desire to be validated.
I pulled her close. "You are the most beautiful girl in the whole world." We cried together. Hadad cut into a poorly made, asymmetrical cake by the light of his aura. No one cared that he did so on the floor. I brought out the ham from the fridge and we ate slices with our hands.
"It's almost done," he said. "They’re nearly grown. They are strong, and they are happy. You've done a good job, Kirsty." He watched our children fight to smear icing on each other's faces. "I'm sorry if I was mean. Or cold. I've never done this before." And he meant raising children. "It was the hardest, scariest thing anyone can try. I shouldn't have blamed you for… Hebat… It wasn't your fault."
Before I could pat his hand, he and the kids vanished. Darkness so familiar couldn't extinguish a new fear. I went upstairs and found the last frame. I held my daughter in the photo, my beautiful Hebat. He must have taken the photo without my notice.
I took it upstairs but couldn't bring myself to hide it.
I didn't see that one, George wrote into the document.
I forgot he was watching.
He typed again: Are you saying there is something in the basement?
Yes, I replied.
He stirred in the living room. I hadn't moved from the stairs, but I could tell by his stomping how angry he'd become. All of his negative, violent traits he saved for those in the world who would harm his family. George the Protector was fearsome to behold.
But he had no chance against my other husband.
"Come out! Come out you coward!" George bellowed. At first, nothing happened. The moment before calamity, even when the specific consequences aren't known, is still in slow motion. He carried on shouting. The girls rushed into the hall and didn’t hesitate to investigate.
"No!" I shouted. "Cara! Ella!"
Their feet padded down the steps. A violent commotion followed, screams and raging voices, both deep and childishly shrill.
The most unsettling quiet followed.
I chewed through the fear and the horror tearing me apart and finally moved.
No evidence of violence could be seen from the top of the stairs. The concrete looked bare and dusty and the light revealed nothing more. They were gone, all of them.
"Hebat," I whispered. "Cara? George?"
Him, I thought of, the nameless husband and felt no hint of his presence. He'd always been there. I know that now. It had nothing to do with the house. His absence was felt more than his insidious presence. Yet, I felt no relief. George and the girls were gone. I sat on the floor and cried for all my missing children.
When I finally emerged from the basement, the whole house had been filled with night. Their photos were everywhere. The others were upstairs. I gathered them on the kitchen island. How could I explain any of this to the police?
I needed help. I called my parents. It took twenty minutes before my father picked up.
"Kirsty? What's wrong?"
"Dad," I whimpered. "George is gone. Cara. Ella."
"What? What did you say?"
"They’re gone, dad. George. The girls are gone."
I heard his bed springs protest as he rolled out of bed. My mom said something I couldn't hear, and he shushed her.
"Kirsty," he said, "are you alright? Are you hurt? Are you in danger?"
Why was it so hard to understand? "Dad. George is gone."
"Kirsty, who the hell is George?"
It was my turn to be confused. "He's my- you know him. My husband…"
"Kirsty," he said very slowly, "are you on drugs? Did you take something?"
"No. Are you?"
"Excuse me?"
I hung up.
I have their photos. I have all of their photos. That's what I brought to George's parents before the sun rose. They wouldn't open the door and spoke to me through an intercom.
"George is gone," I said.
"We'll call the police."
"This is your son. These are your granddaughters."
I heard my mother-in-law say, "Who is she?"
"We don't have a son," my father-in-law said. "Go away."
I left.
Back to the house. Our dream sat empty and I live there, but none of the people in my family photos are my family.
I remember but the world never does. My parents think I'm ill and that I used AI to create the family I apparently never had.
How did I buy the house without a job or income? With deep concern for my mental health, they showed me a news story. I had won the lottery the day I turned eighteen.
His influence there, payment for services rendered.
A lie is an agreement.
What had I agreed to? I'm afraid I know the answer: I never wanted a family.
God help me. God help them.
I don't know what to do with these pictures.
submitted by APCleriot to nosleep [link] [comments]
He knew I hid a secret.
I smiled, tried to look confused.
He waited, crossing his arms.
I worried that he'd already seen. He had.
What else could he think about the pile?
His wife’s a cheater. She has another life. Another husband. Children.
He’d never believe the truth: I’m not a cheater; there’s no other life; no other man; I don’t know who the children are who visit me at night.
But I did have a secret. And maybe it’s fair to say another life, even if was smaller and against my will.
I should have destroyed those frames, burned the photos within. Now it looked like I saved them, cherished them. The truth couldn’t be farther. I feared to touch anything to do with… whatever they are…with one exception.
“It started last Halloween,” I said to George, my husband, my real husband.
He stopped packing for a moment, working out the impossibility of this statement. “I’m taking the girls to my parents.” He resumed the tossing of shirts, pants, etc. into our big suitcase.
“It’s true,” I said, but weakly. The children in the picture are at least six and four respectively. They were born six months ago.
“They’re not… my kids,” I said of the boys in the photos. They’re not kids is what I almost said.
George stopped and squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Kirsty,” he said slowly, “there are baby pictures. I saw them.”
“That’s-”
He quickly raised his finger, exasperated, angry, done.
“The first picture is you holding a newborn, and…” He swallowed painfully, his throat gone dry. It always does when he’s upset. “And the father in that picture, with his arm around you, isn’t me.”
When I couldn't deny it, he nodded like he knew all along our marriage would end.
We were happy. We really were. George and I had managed to overcome the typical breakdown that often comes with raising children. Only since last Halloween had distance been made by me.
I should have told him as soon as it started.
“Girls!” he called as I followed him down the stairs to the front hall of our lovely home. We’d scrimped and sacrificed to buy and keep this place, our dream by the lake. He’d been so proud. I couldn’t tell him I wanted to leave the first night sleeping there.
Cara and Ella protested through play, ignoring the adults, continuing to jump on an old box they’d long since flattened. Rays from the western sun placed my daughters into an inspired, hallowed light, and I started to cry. He was going to take my babies away.
George opened the door, intending, I’m sure, to drop the suitcase in the car before returning to physically carry the girls out.
But he hesitated in the doorway.
“George?”
The suitcase fell with a solid thud on the floor. “There’s no way,” he said.
“What?”
“There’s no way,” he said, with emphasis on the last word, “you would have had time for…this…”
Not defining "this" as cheating was progress. “Yes!”
He glared, quieting my desperate enthusiasm. I wasn’t off the hook. “Tell me. The truth.”
“I can’t.”
He reached for the suitcase.
“No, not because I don’t want to,” I protested. “I don’t know what’s happening!” I sat on the carpeted steps and stared through blurred vision at my trembling hands. The shriek I’d filled the house with - “happening!” - had put a halt to the box's obliteration. Cara and Ella hesitated for a few seconds before leaping into action.
Cara, the oldest, six, punched her dad in the buttocks. “You have to be nice!”
Ella, four, sat beside me and patted my trembling hands. “It’s okay, mummy.”
Such lovely daughters. Nothing like the boys in those photos when they were this age.
George grasped Cara's wrists and gently walked her back into the house, using his foot to kick the suitcase from the swing of the front door.
"It's alright, girls," he said with weak resolve. "Go and play."
"No!" Cara shouted. She kicked at her father and he pulled her close into a bearhug. Gradually, the girls calmed and were convinced to return to the box in the front room.
"Kirsty," George said, "you have to tell me." He sat down on the step beside me. "Please." I would do anything to take away the hurt in his eyes. "Please."
"I can't. But… I can write it down. Maybe." I took out my phone. We shared Google Drive. When I made a new document, he reluctantly started his phone. The man was a dream. He watched his screen, and waited patiently for my words to appear.
Without preamble, I returned to the awful moment when it all began: a strange and disturbing dream. Words came like an infection from beneath a torn scab. The wound had been opened. Nothing could stop this now.
Sex with another man has never been a desire of mine. I love George. He loves me.
Plus, the man in my dream was a stranger, and not particularly handsome. He has a plain face set to unwavering boredom and unkempt male pattern baldness. Our dream sex felt obligatory, just something we had to do.
I awoke on the wrong side of midnight. November 1st and I was craving ice cream instead of the girls' gathered candy. The freezer left by the previous homeowners came with unopened ice cream. Freezer burned or not, I wanted some.
After retrieving a spoon from the kitchen, I intended to destroy a brick of neopolitan. He waited in his flannel pajamas, barefoot on the concrete floor. His arms were crossed.
"Cravings?" he said.
I dropped the spoon. It clattered down the basement steps. Before I could run away, he disappeared like someone had erased him from head to foot in one clean sweep.
Had to be a dream. That's what I told myself. The spoon stayed in the basement until daylight. Ghost or nightmare, there was laundry to do the next day.
I crossed the concrete floor fast and only felt safer when I'd closed the door to the more modern laundry room. Never thought builder's grade tiles and track lights would make me feel anything but sad.
His voice caught me sorting.
"Kirsty!"
I dropped the cup of detergent all over the floor.
"Shit."
I came out of the laundry room, figuring George had been looking for me in uncharacteristically rude fashion. He hated speaking between rooms. Shouting throughout the house was highly impolite. It must have been important, I figured.
As soon as I stepped onto the bare concrete, however, deep sadness, the kind that seems to physically leech the strength from your body, dominated the room.
"Hello?" I don't know why I said that. The basement is a low ceilinged rectangle. There are no hiding spots except for the laundry room I'd come from. After a deep breath, I walked briskly to the stairs.
"Any day now," a raspy voice breathed into my ear. I jolted and slipped forward, falling and clipping my chin off a step. It made my teeth click painfully. Nobody there, of course. I ran upstairs and George had gone outside with the girls to play hide and seek.
I wanted to tell him. He looked so happy. It's hard to convey in words the kind of smile he showed me through the window. Imagine contentment mixed with unreserved joy and hope. Yes, it's difficult to picture. So few of us can ever have such a moment. Sort of like finding a natural view completely untouched by humanity. Beyond rare and precious.
I’m rambling now to avoid writing about what followed. The point is I couldn’t tell him. I hoped it’d go away and stop.
But, of course, it didn’t, and things got much worse.
I awoke in a great deal of pain. Having already given birth to children, the feeling was familiar. Despite getting up and gasping, George continued to snore in our bed. He’s a deep sleeper, but a quick and early riser. I’ve never heard him complain about getting out of bed either, especially when there’s an emergency.
I might have woken him up but I was disoriented and confused. Part of me believed I was still pregnant with Ella. It wasn’t until I’d gone all the way to the kitchen to avoid waking up the girls, that my brain caught up: Girls. Plural. Ella was asleep in her bed upstairs.
“Ohhhhhhhh shiiiiiiiiiiit.” I knew the signs of labour. This couldn’t be happening. “Ohhhhhhhhh.”
I was definitely going to wake everyone up if this continued.
My phone was upstairs by my bedside table. We don’t have a landline. I should have called 911. I should have woken up George.
Instead, I went downstairs where I could vocalize pain without disturbing anyone. Such a pathetically passive response. But that’s how I was raised. Keep it down, don't you frown.
His hands seized mine as soon as I descended the last step. Serious and bald without dignity is how to best describe his physical appearance. Cold and cruel is what he is. The lights turned off and, in the perfect darkness of the basement, he was all that I could see.
He produces a red light from his body somehow but his touch is literally frosty.
"Kristy, it's time," he said. No joy there. Just straight facts. Something was coming. I was going to give birth to it. In the dull red glow of his being, the first boy came.
"His name is Hadad," the man said, placing a large, infant boy with a lot of hair and, I swear, a hint of beard, on the bare concrete. Hadad looked like a three month old they use as newborns on TV. He didn't cry. He hardly seemed to breathe as his dark eyes roamed the darkness. His light resembled the man's, a less intense red.
I felt another contraction, and winced.
"She comes next," the man said.
I felt so weak. "Who are you?" I asked him.
At last, he smiled and I wished he hadn't. It made me feel small, insignificant, and beneath his concern. "You know who I am," he said. "I'm your husband."
Pain wracked my entire body. Something didn't feel right. The birth of Cara and Ella had been without difficulty.
"Push," my "husband" ordered. "She is upset with you, and will kill you if you don't get her out now."
"It has to be a nightmare," I told him. Sweat poured in streams down my face. The unborn "she" in question writhed and damaged my insides. I screamed. I couldn't help it.
"Push!"
I obeyed and the second boy spilled onto the bare concrete, coated in blood and dust.
"It's a boy," I said.
The man looked displeased. "The body is male. She is Hebat. No wonder she is angry." Like the other infant, Hebat appeared aware of her surroundings and had far too much motor control for a newborn. The light pouring from her body was dull silver. Her eye sockets were two pits of concentrated despair. I had to look away.
The babies were pressed into my arms.
The man stretched out beside me. "Open your eyes and smile." I resisted. "Do it. Now." What choice did I have? The flash from his cell blinded me. They were all gone by the time my sight recovered. Only the sweat remained as evidence of the ordeal.
It had to have been a hallucination. Some very bad food poisoning maybe. The source could be as simple as an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. I had been stress eating since we'd moved in. I stood up and took some comfort in a Charles Dickens' reference.
"More of gravy than of grave about you," I said. My words seemed consumed by the dreadful weight of the air. "Whatever you are."
Whatever you are: something bad in any case. At best, I'd hallucinated prolonged and traumatic labour and needed medical attention. Yet, when I limped up the basement stairs, all thoughts of waking George vanished. There on the kitchen island sat a propped frame containing the photograph taken only moments ago.
The man looked happy. Only Hadad appeared in this picture, which meant another one was somewhere. I didn't panic. I worried more about what George would think if he saw the photos. I had to find them all.
Hebat and his father and I were mounted in a dark wood frame by the master bedroom. It'd be the first thing anyone saw if they woke up. I plucked it off the wall and, together with the first photo, tucked it under some blankets in the dresser we'd shoved in the small walk-in closet.
You might not believe this, but I went straight to sleep after. I climbed under the blanket in my sweaty pajamas, shut my eyes, and didn't have enough time to deny what had happened. I was unconscious until morning.
George placed a coffee on my nightstand. That's what I remember. He rubbed my feet while I slowly awoke. The girls were watching TV downstairs, munching on apple slices. There was forty minutes still before we had to seriously consider getting ready to take Cara to school.
George would drop her off on his way to work downtown. He chose his hours and always chose convenience for his wife and kids. Ella and I planned to spend the morning gardening. Then we would nap much of the afternoon away until George and Cara returned. A life so perfect is so very rare.
I didn't want to spoil things with a very convincing nightmare. Besides, I felt fine. Not so good that I wanted to look in the dresser to see if those photos really were there, but not ill. So I remained silent again.
November started fine. Idyllic days and nights filled with laughter and joy and television. Just as I started to believe in the dream we'd made, they came again.
The wail of a child's hunger is a powerful call for a parent. When it's a chorus, even of two, it cannot be ignored. Only I awoke to Hadad and Hebat's cries for their "mother" from the basement.
Half asleep, I drifted into the kitchen and searched for their milk bottles. When no bottles could be found, I remembered they were newborns. Milk swelled in my breasts and made my nipples ache. Just like when Cara or Ella would awaken in the night. It was a relief to feed them.
But what the fuck was I doing?
I was acting like the man in the basement and the devil babies were mine. It'd been less than a week since Halloween and that horrible nightmare illusion. I had already taken on the beleaguered newborn mother role without question.
Their cries intensified and flayed the weak resistance of exhausted reasoning.
Don't wake George. Don't wake my babies, my real babies.
"What took you so long?" the man critized, his voice monotone, the question unrhetorical.
"I… was sleeping. I went to the fridge first." Under his severe gaze, I stopped in the midst of the dark room. Hadad had quieted. Hebat cooed as if laughing at her own joke. I couldn't see them because the lights were off. They liked the dark better. Somehow I knew that about them and him.
"You should sleep down here," he said. "A mother should always be close to her babies."
The statement was nonsense but not altogether wrong. I wanted to be close to my babies, the daughters sleeping in bliss upstairs, away from the evil fermentation in the basement.
"Kirsty," he said. "Are you listening?" His hand touched the small of my back. The gentleness surprised me. I squawked and flinched away. "What’s wrong with you? They're hungry." He pressed on my shoulders until I sat on the cold floor.
They came from the shadows, already walking. I wanted to go, but I knew he wouldn't allow it. He pulled my cat t-shirt off over my head and their fierce mouths suckled, relieving the pressure of excess breast milk quickly. It felt physically good and psychologically alien.
I looked down at them once and immediately regretted it. Their emanated light had intensified to a point where perception of them hurt.
Each time I blinked my eyes were drawn to some isolated part of their bodies. The vision got closer to the point of disgust. Everything is gross if you're close enough. There is no beauty under a microscope. If you think there is then you're not using the right magnification.
Hebat's eye drew me in. At first, I saw the dark sphere, and then the strands of her eyelashes. Her gravity kept pulling until the creatures that live in eyelashes were revealed: Demodex folliculorum. I looked the microscopic horrors up.
The babies had more parasites than any child should. They wanted to show me and could somehow do so.
I asked him about it. "Why are they showing me these worms?"
He smiled, contemptuously as usual. "Trying to impress mother. Neither of them understand your horror and insignificance. You are the ant who knows they're an ant. Lucky you. They think you will be proud of the life their corporeal forms produce and host. Give them a few hours. It will pass."
"Why are you doing this to me?"
"I'm not sure what you mean. We're married. Now, prepare to smile." His cell reappeared and I noted the lack of features; it might have been a singed rectangle of spent firewood. He frowned when I failed to smile. "Smile, Kirsty. These are your children."
I managed to stave off the tears and hold the babies close. The smile was more difficult. In the inevitable aftermath of their sudden disappearance, the frames depicted an exhausted, wrinkly woman smiling painfully. It took a second to recognize myself.
The things in the basement sapped my strength. I looked dehydrated, beleaguered. The scale in the bathroom said I'd dropped six pounds. I'd weighed myself the morning before.
"Whoa, you've lost weight," George noted, thinking I'd be pleased. "This place has been so good for us, eh?'
To produce another smile proved as draining as the previous night. "Y-yes," I stuttered too late for him to ignore.
"Hey," he said, touching my forearm.
I flinched.
"Whoa, you okay? What's wrong?"
I should have told him. "Nothing. Bad sleep. A nightmare. I'll be fine."
A lie is an agreement. George wanted to agree, I think. He wanted life to be fine because he was happy for once. We struggled so hard before we came to Bridal Veil Lake. It was supposed to be our dream.
Guilty if I told him the truth. Guilty because I didn't. I began to resent his happiness, though he had done nothing but be the wonderful man he'd always been.
To Cara and Ella I became a body in motion, No brain left to guide them away from harm or answer their questions about nature and the universe.
"I don't know." That's what I told them often.
So they began to treat me like a kind of butler.
"Can I have some juice, please?"
"Sure, sweetheart."
"Mommy, can I have a snack?"
"Of course." And I'd run off to fetch it.
"Cookies."
"Yes, dear."
When Christmas came, I had two and they induced the same level of joy. Visiting the basement to feed and nurture Hebat and Hadad became a nightly occurrence. I'd learned to awaken, if I could get to sleep at all, and go quietly.
He berated me severely if I missed a night, and there were subtle threats made casually.
"I may have to squash you yet," he said, his tone as deep and cold as always.
"It won't happen again," I promised. "They’re getting big." In fact, they were no longer infants. Both had grown to the approximate age of six or seven in a few months. Still, they never spoke. Their dark eyes watched me as they ate food from the kitchen upstairs, food I'd hidden from my family.
"More meat," the man demanded.
"Of course." And I ran to the freezer and gave them frozen sausages in the package. They never complained or demanded the food be prepared a different way. No objections from my "husband" either.
Hebat tore the styrofoam and plastic wrap away and flattened the row of sausages stuck together between powerful molars. Hadad contented itself with licking them like a popsicle.
I'd stay until the photo. Then they'd release me by vanishing. Always with an exhausted breath, I'd trudge up the stairs and search for the frames and hide them in the same place.
They only smiled in the pictures. At no other time did they express any kind of emotion unless indifference counts.
My own children and husband weren't doing much better. Their concerns about my fatigue and ruminating slowly ceased as I repeated the excuse: I’m just tired. It'll pass.
Of course, I did not know when the nightmare would stop.
"When will it end?" I asked him one night, while Hebat and Hadad exercised like they had a mission.
"What do you mean?" he said.
I was surprised he answered. He usually didn't. "This. This. When can I go back to normal and not come down every night? I'm so very tired."
He frowned and I thought some punishment must be coming. Instead, he looked more confused. "I don't understand. You aren't happy? Your children grow into power and strength and will take their place in the world. They will be great and you - you, of all the tiny things, made that happen. Ask yourself what you want out of life, and see if Hebat and Haddad aren't your answer."
Too many words, all at once, for an exhausted mother. I didn't speak for the rest of the night. The infernal trio vanished, and the latter moments of the ritual I carried out with his challenge in mind.
I want my children to be strong, happy, and safe.
"Juice," Cara demanded the next morning, a Saturday, while she watched cartoons.
"Get it yourself!" I hissed, from tired to angry in a second.
"But I can't," Cara accurately pointed out. She didn't look away from the TV. Looking at me wasn't safe, and she knew it. Her and Ella held hands and sat a little straighter. It broke my heart. What had I done?
George came downstairs, attracted by my shouting. "What’s going on?"
Empathy became sadness, and the constant burden rekindled to anger swiftly. "Just children treating me like a servant."
He smiled. "Ah, yes, and how are the royal princesses this morning?"
His levity irked me. "You would know if you didn't sleep in so much."
The smile vanished from his face, and instead of the fight I seemed to want, he mumbled a quiet apology and joined the girls. They climbed onto him as he wrapped them into a cuddle.
"What are we watching?" George restarted his smile, his calm, for the girls. I hated myself. It had to end. Tonight.
After another dreary day of going through the motions, and the girls and George had fallen asleep, I went to the kitchen and chose the knife I thought sharpest.
"Kirsty," he said, his voice a whisper rising from the depths of the house.
"Coming," I whispered back.
"Mom," said another voice, a girl's, and I knew that Hebat had, at last, found herself and the wholeness of her being had been corrected.
I started to cry. I went downstairs and there she was with her brother and her father. He looked tired but some of the grimness had cracked to allow the first real contentment I've ever seen him express.
"Is that for the cake?" he asked. "We already have one."
I remembered the sharp knife. "Meat," I said. "There’s ham in the freezer."
He nodded, seeming to accept the answer.
"Mom," Hebat said, "Do you think I'm…" She gestured to herself, her face, and her body, and I understood the question, born from doubt and a desire to be validated.
I pulled her close. "You are the most beautiful girl in the whole world." We cried together. Hadad cut into a poorly made, asymmetrical cake by the light of his aura. No one cared that he did so on the floor. I brought out the ham from the fridge and we ate slices with our hands.
"It's almost done," he said. "They’re nearly grown. They are strong, and they are happy. You've done a good job, Kirsty." He watched our children fight to smear icing on each other's faces. "I'm sorry if I was mean. Or cold. I've never done this before." And he meant raising children. "It was the hardest, scariest thing anyone can try. I shouldn't have blamed you for… Hebat… It wasn't your fault."
Before I could pat his hand, he and the kids vanished. Darkness so familiar couldn't extinguish a new fear. I went upstairs and found the last frame. I held my daughter in the photo, my beautiful Hebat. He must have taken the photo without my notice.
I took it upstairs but couldn't bring myself to hide it.
I didn't see that one, George wrote into the document.
I forgot he was watching.
He typed again: Are you saying there is something in the basement?
Yes, I replied.
He stirred in the living room. I hadn't moved from the stairs, but I could tell by his stomping how angry he'd become. All of his negative, violent traits he saved for those in the world who would harm his family. George the Protector was fearsome to behold.
But he had no chance against my other husband.
"Come out! Come out you coward!" George bellowed. At first, nothing happened. The moment before calamity, even when the specific consequences aren't known, is still in slow motion. He carried on shouting. The girls rushed into the hall and didn’t hesitate to investigate.
"No!" I shouted. "Cara! Ella!"
Their feet padded down the steps. A violent commotion followed, screams and raging voices, both deep and childishly shrill.
The most unsettling quiet followed.
I chewed through the fear and the horror tearing me apart and finally moved.
No evidence of violence could be seen from the top of the stairs. The concrete looked bare and dusty and the light revealed nothing more. They were gone, all of them.
"Hebat," I whispered. "Cara? George?"
Him, I thought of, the nameless husband and felt no hint of his presence. He'd always been there. I know that now. It had nothing to do with the house. His absence was felt more than his insidious presence. Yet, I felt no relief. George and the girls were gone. I sat on the floor and cried for all my missing children.
When I finally emerged from the basement, the whole house had been filled with night. Their photos were everywhere. The others were upstairs. I gathered them on the kitchen island. How could I explain any of this to the police?
I needed help. I called my parents. It took twenty minutes before my father picked up.
"Kirsty? What's wrong?"
"Dad," I whimpered. "George is gone. Cara. Ella."
"What? What did you say?"
"They’re gone, dad. George. The girls are gone."
I heard his bed springs protest as he rolled out of bed. My mom said something I couldn't hear, and he shushed her.
"Kirsty," he said, "are you alright? Are you hurt? Are you in danger?"
Why was it so hard to understand? "Dad. George is gone."
"Kirsty, who the hell is George?"
It was my turn to be confused. "He's my- you know him. My husband…"
"Kirsty," he said very slowly, "are you on drugs? Did you take something?"
"No. Are you?"
"Excuse me?"
I hung up.
I have their photos. I have all of their photos. That's what I brought to George's parents before the sun rose. They wouldn't open the door and spoke to me through an intercom.
"George is gone," I said.
"We'll call the police."
"This is your son. These are your granddaughters."
I heard my mother-in-law say, "Who is she?"
"We don't have a son," my father-in-law said. "Go away."
I left.
Back to the house. Our dream sat empty and I live there, but none of the people in my family photos are my family.
I remember but the world never does. My parents think I'm ill and that I used AI to create the family I apparently never had.
How did I buy the house without a job or income? With deep concern for my mental health, they showed me a news story. I had won the lottery the day I turned eighteen.
His influence there, payment for services rendered.
A lie is an agreement.
What had I agreed to? I'm afraid I know the answer: I never wanted a family.
God help me. God help them.
I don't know what to do with these pictures.
2024.05.19 16:01 SoulSurvivorr How do I move on from something I loved?
I graduated college recently and am not happy at all. During my senior year, I had the opoortunity to work with one of our college's sports teams and loved it. I didn't feel lonely, found something I was passionate about, and made solid connections. I became heavily invested in what they're doing by attending every practice, traveling with them on every road trip, and voluntarily cutting uo film for them. I was searching for jobs throughout this time, but considering I didn't have a car, my options were limited. Deep down, what I was doing won my heart over and I was really hoping that the work I put in would pave a path for me to return, even though it was a one-year commitment due to graduation (and likely a lack of budget). Unfortunately, that didn't happen.
There's mutual interest in a return, especially with the value I brought with cutting up film, but I'd have to do so under the condition I'm a grad student going for my master's degree - something I cannot afford out of pocket. I need to get a Master's Degree to pursue my dream of working in college athletics, but the debt I'd be taking on doesn't support the ROI. Unless I receive enough funding to make my return a reality (which feels unlikely at this point), there's no way it will happen.
I have no idea where to go from here. I'm considering taking a "gap year" which allows me to save up for a car, wait for next year's batch of GA positions, and get myself in the right place physically and mentally. I can do so as I have an internship I can place on my resume in the meantime. How do I move on from something I loved? What would you do?
submitted by SoulSurvivorr to mentalhealth [link] [comments]
There's mutual interest in a return, especially with the value I brought with cutting up film, but I'd have to do so under the condition I'm a grad student going for my master's degree - something I cannot afford out of pocket. I need to get a Master's Degree to pursue my dream of working in college athletics, but the debt I'd be taking on doesn't support the ROI. Unless I receive enough funding to make my return a reality (which feels unlikely at this point), there's no way it will happen.
I have no idea where to go from here. I'm considering taking a "gap year" which allows me to save up for a car, wait for next year's batch of GA positions, and get myself in the right place physically and mentally. I can do so as I have an internship I can place on my resume in the meantime. How do I move on from something I loved? What would you do?
2024.05.19 15:32 Bobby-Corwen09 What to do about accepting a job offer for a role I'm not exactly qualified for?
I left a very bad work environment and have been looking for something for about a month. Went through all of the interviews that I had lined up at other organizations, some that I was really looking forward to, and didn't make the cut. A recruiter reached put for a position from another company and by then I was thinking "What the heck? The others didn't work out." We did an initial interview, they told me to spruce up my resume, and now I've landed a job after 2 interviews and 2 face to face meetings with the boss and owner.
Now I'm a little worried because the embellishments worked in my favor but the job is director level responsibilities and I've only been like a supervisor or manager.
So now I'm scrambling to learn the tools of a director (Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, some internally used CRM and DAM software) and I feel like they're going to be able to tell on Day 1 that I fibbed a bit (at the recruiters advise). I'm sure I can stuff SOME training into the initial "getting to know the company" period and the person who had the position previously is being promoted so they'll be able to oversee the transition. I'm just worried since in the face to face portions they were clear that this is a show up ready to go on Day 1 kind of expectation.
submitted by Bobby-Corwen09 to careerguidance [link] [comments]
Now I'm a little worried because the embellishments worked in my favor but the job is director level responsibilities and I've only been like a supervisor or manager.
So now I'm scrambling to learn the tools of a director (Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, some internally used CRM and DAM software) and I feel like they're going to be able to tell on Day 1 that I fibbed a bit (at the recruiters advise). I'm sure I can stuff SOME training into the initial "getting to know the company" period and the person who had the position previously is being promoted so they'll be able to oversee the transition. I'm just worried since in the face to face portions they were clear that this is a show up ready to go on Day 1 kind of expectation.
2024.05.19 15:03 Patient_Show_5982 Old.. Still Petty
AITA.....You thought you had a vehicle
At the time of this incident I thought our marriage was going through the growing pains of having children ages 21,17, and 9. So when my 40th birthday rolled around I took a personal day at work to treat this newly "over the hill" woman to a spa day. The hubby was out of town and had left only the night before, KNOWING the next day I would be on my own.
At about 8 a.m. (not my idea of a personal day wake up time) the phone rings and it's hubby. He is desperate I complete the purchase of a gently used Cadillac Seville before it was snapped up by another buyer. I did explain that I had other appointments and he could do this from his location via FAX etc. He became unglued. So, I relented. While completing the paperwork at the bank, I mentioned to the loan officer (someone I knew) this was my 40th birthday and I'd had to put my plans aside for this. Her fingers stopped mid-air while typing the title/loan documentation. All she said was "Oh REALLY' (spoken in a true Southern accent), and typing resumed. When she passed the documents to me to review, all the blocks had the appropriate check and Xs. Then I noticed HIS name wasn't on the title/loan. I pointed this out and her response was a lifted eyebrow and a big grin. Conspiracy of two in place. Fast Forward: 18mos he files for divorce (another story) 24 and 1/2 years he flushed down the tubes. While he was playing Romeo, his best friend (whom I told about the Conspiracy) waited until a group of friends were in the car and he was bragging about picking up women with HIS caddy and being "all that and a bag of chips" quietly informed HE didn't own this Caddy. Hubby thought it was a joke until the title was pulled out of the glove box and the name clearly and indelibly typed was mine. Four grown men laughed until breathless and one was flumoxed, aghast, PISSED. None of these men liked what he was doing to me so there was no hope of it being secret. When he called me, I referred him to the attorney and hung up. He did receive the vehicle as part of the divorce settlement, however, everyone knew EXACTLY what had taken place because of records being PUBLIC! I was 42 at the time. I'm now 68. This always brings a smile to my face and laugh to my heart.
submitted by Patient_Show_5982 to CharlotteDobreFans [link] [comments]
At the time of this incident I thought our marriage was going through the growing pains of having children ages 21,17, and 9. So when my 40th birthday rolled around I took a personal day at work to treat this newly "over the hill" woman to a spa day. The hubby was out of town and had left only the night before, KNOWING the next day I would be on my own.
At about 8 a.m. (not my idea of a personal day wake up time) the phone rings and it's hubby. He is desperate I complete the purchase of a gently used Cadillac Seville before it was snapped up by another buyer. I did explain that I had other appointments and he could do this from his location via FAX etc. He became unglued. So, I relented. While completing the paperwork at the bank, I mentioned to the loan officer (someone I knew) this was my 40th birthday and I'd had to put my plans aside for this. Her fingers stopped mid-air while typing the title/loan documentation. All she said was "Oh REALLY' (spoken in a true Southern accent), and typing resumed. When she passed the documents to me to review, all the blocks had the appropriate check and Xs. Then I noticed HIS name wasn't on the title/loan. I pointed this out and her response was a lifted eyebrow and a big grin. Conspiracy of two in place. Fast Forward: 18mos he files for divorce (another story) 24 and 1/2 years he flushed down the tubes. While he was playing Romeo, his best friend (whom I told about the Conspiracy) waited until a group of friends were in the car and he was bragging about picking up women with HIS caddy and being "all that and a bag of chips" quietly informed HE didn't own this Caddy. Hubby thought it was a joke until the title was pulled out of the glove box and the name clearly and indelibly typed was mine. Four grown men laughed until breathless and one was flumoxed, aghast, PISSED. None of these men liked what he was doing to me so there was no hope of it being secret. When he called me, I referred him to the attorney and hung up. He did receive the vehicle as part of the divorce settlement, however, everyone knew EXACTLY what had taken place because of records being PUBLIC! I was 42 at the time. I'm now 68. This always brings a smile to my face and laugh to my heart.
2024.05.19 13:43 Count-Daring243 Best Cash Registers for Small Business
 | submitted by Count-Daring243 to u/Count-Daring243 [link] [comments] https://preview.redd.it/52g8ox6ped1d1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9378163bd73dad00cc7c06916ed9bc1220df433c Whether you run a bustling café or a cozy boutique, a reliable cash register is an essential tool for the smooth operation of your small business. With our comprehensive roundup of the best cash registers available, you can confidently choose the perfect device to manage your sales, inventory, and transactions. So, let's dive in and find the right fit for your flourishing small business. The Top 13 Best Cash Registers for Small Business
Reviews🔗Royal Consumer 500DX Cash Register for Small Businesshttps://preview.redd.it/wctlejeqed1d1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ed7d531bf7896343df44a326f8c386416d225cc2 As a small business owner, I can attest that the Royal 500DX Cash Register has been an absolute game-changer for me. The dual LCD displays provide clear visibility for both the clerk and the customer, making transactions seamless and efficient. One of the standout features is its capacity to handle up to 2,000 employees, which is more than adequate for a small to medium-sized business. Additionally, the unlimited messaging capability ensures that you won't miss any important announcements or updates. However, the product does feel a bit flimsy due to its predominantly plastic design, which might concern those who prefer a sturdier build. Another fantastic aspect of this cash register is the 999 Price Look-Ups, allowing for quick processing of transactions. Programming four different tax rates also makes the setup process incredibly straightforward. On the downside, the impact printer, although functional, occasionally feels outdated compared to more advanced models. Overall, the Royal 500DX Cash Register has proven to be a reliable and user-friendly addition to my small business. Its features cater to my daily needs and have undoubtedly contributed to the efficiency and success of my operations. 🔗Sharp XE-A102 Compact Electronic Cash Register with LED Displayhttps://preview.redd.it/4oocgzqqed1d1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7f386a4da0393e5ba582f1e06dcfdd64b55e6e0e I have been using the Sharp XE-A102 Electronic Cash Register for a start-up retail business, and it's been a reliable and efficient partner. The compact design allows it to fit easily in our small store, and the bright LED display makes it easy for us and our customers to see the transaction details. The 8 departments feature helps us organize our inventory, and the 80 PLU/Items capacity allows us to input all our products without issues. One of the standout features of this cash register is its ability to accept different payment methods like cash, cheque, and credit card, which has made it easy for us to cater to our customers' preferred payment options. Additionally, the time and date display feature ensures that our transactions are accurate and timely. However, there are a few minor drawbacks to the Sharp XE-A102. It can be a little noisy and slow compared to some other cash registers, which may be an issue during peak hours when we need to serve customers quickly. Moreover, the instructions provided are quite small, making them difficult to read and follow. Overall, the Sharp XE-A102 Electronic Cash Register has been an excellent addition to our start-up retail business. Its compact design, 58 mm wide reliable printing, and ability to accept multiple payment methods make it a valuable tool for any small retailer. While it may have a few minor issues, the majority of users, including myself, are satisfied with its performance and recommend it to others. 🔗Professional XE Series Electronic Cash Registerhttps://preview.redd.it/63z5wl2red1d1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=838a61378141c4d4aaebc4a889e25d11c1c90157 I recently added the Sharp XE Series Electronic Cash Register to my tiny boutique store, and I couldn't be happier. Before settling on this model, I spent a lot of time researching various cash registers, but the XE Series stood out for its advanced sales reporting capabilities and seamless tie-in with QuickBooks Pro. The moment I unboxed it, I was impressed by its sleek, professional appearance and built-in SC card slot for easy connectivity and data back-up. Setting up the register was incredibly easy, and within just a few hours, it was ready to go. Its intuitive interface made training my employees a breeze. The thermal printer was a pleasant surprise; it's much quieter and faster than traditional receipt printers. Plus, the customizable receipts with graphics and logos definitely give my store a professional edge. One of my favorite features is the automatic tax system, which not only saves time but also reduces the potential for errors and makes reporting so much easier. The locking drawer ensures security and comes with multiple bill and coin compartments, making deposits a lot more organized. The only downside is the rather complicated user manual, which could definitely be improved. It's not a complete deal breaker, though, as there are plenty of helpful YouTube tutorials available online. All in all, I'm thrilled with my purchase of the Sharp XE Series Electronic Cash Register. It's a perfect fit for my small business and a real game-changer when it comes to streamlining sales transactions and accounting. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this cash register to anyone running a small retail or service business. 🔗Casio Single-Tape Thermal Cash Register for Businesshttps://preview.redd.it/fj9sgulred1d1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=54574ad3b2350fad83a5af4e9ced9b7a3044e6a6 Casio's PCR-T280 is a fantastic single-tape thermal cash register that offers more functionality for medium-sized businesses than entry-level models. With the ability to track up to 1,200 price lookups, it offers a level of specificity in item sales tracking not commonly found in its class. It also allows businesses to track sales up to eight different operators, making it an excellent tool for business tracking and growth. One of the standout features of this product is its hygienic, antibacterial keyboard. In our current world, where cleanliness is paramount, this characteristic provides a measure of peace of mind for both business owners and customers alike. Furthermore, its multipurpose tray can hold money in four bill compartments and five coin compartments, ensuring the efficient flow of transactions. The PCR-T280 also boasts a high-speed thermal printer, which can be used either for customer receipts or as a journal printer for recording all the store's activities. Its mode lock with key control feature provides multiple operation positions through physical keys, providing a level of security usually found in more expensive models. Although it is not touch-screen, its simple and intuitive design makes it easy to program and use. Some users did find the manual a bit difficult to follow, but with a bit of practice, most find it quite manageable. With its ability to handle multiple sales tax needs and its capacity for PLU capabilities, the Casio PCR-T280 has proven itself as a reliable tool for various businesses, small or medium-sized. However, one minor drawback is the depth of the money/change drawer, which could have been a little deeper for added convenience. Despite this minor issue, the vast majority of users recommend this register for its performance and price point, providing an excellent value for businesses looking for an affordable, reliable cash register solution. 🔗Heavy-Duty Cash Register with Alpha Keyboard and LCD Displayhttps://preview.redd.it/rgcm3zured1d1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e90611839a08205344996bd346c4f76bb8e15960 As an avid user of cash registers in my grocery store, I recently discovered the Royal Alpha 1100ml Cash Register, and my experience has been quite satisfactory. This heavy-duty register is perfect for my high-traffic establishment, offering a reliable and swift cash management system that I can always depend on. The first thing that caught my eye about this cash register was its single fast and quiet alphanumeric thermal printer, capable of handling over 1 million lines. It's been able to keep up with the constant rush of customers, making it a reliable addition to my store. The large 10-line LCD user display and alpha keyboard ensure easy programming, which was a breeze, even for a beginner like me. The SD Card slot is another excellent feature, enabling efficient accounting data transfers to a PC, a necessity for any modern business. However, I will say that the software included with the register can be a bit flaky at times. While it is supposed to read the x and z reports that the machine puts on the sd card, I sometimes find myself having to use the sd card to transfer report data manually. Additionally, getting in touch with their tech support doesn't seem to be very helpful, as they often provide no real technical assistance. Despite these minor issues, the Royal Alpha 1100ml Cash Register has been a solid addition to my store. Its heavy-duty locking cash drawer with four slot bill and removable five slot coin tray, along with its automatic tax computation, has made managing funds and keeping track of sales much easier for me. If you're in need of a reliable cash register for your business, I'd highly recommend giving this one a try. 🔗Fast and Accurate Cash Register System with Thermal Printing and 8-Line Displayhttps://preview.redd.it/qu5h8dbsed1d1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cbccc254fa34615f87dd2812357e0f2a57027db4 I recently discovered the Sharp XEA407 Cash Register while searching for a reliable and feature-rich solution for my little grocery store. After trying it out, I must say it's exceeded my expectations. The first thing that impresses anyone who lays their eyes on it is the sleek eight-line display. It's not just a pretty face though; it's got brains as well with 7000 Price Lookups (PLU's), allowing quick and accurate entry. The inclusion of 99 departments is brilliant as it makes managing diverse product types a breeze. My favorite feature? Hands down, the microban keytops. They provide built-in antimicrobial protection, keeping those pesky germs at bay, which is particularly important given the current health situation. And let's not forget about the large 32GB SD card slot for computer connectivity and data storage. However, there were a few hiccups too. The lack of French documentation was a letdown for me, a French-speaking Canadian. Plus, a few customers have reported missing parts upon delivery, making the product unusable. So, while there are some minor issues, the Sharp XEA407 Cash Register has overall been a reliable and efficient addition to my store. It's fast, easy to set up, and offers more than enough features for most small businesses. If you're looking for a cash register that combines modern tech with dependability, this might just be the one for you. 🔗Royal 100Cx Portable Battery/AC Powered Cash Registerhttps://preview.redd.it/mpye61nsed1d1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=53410d259f67c2fbda2560e107147dca104e0317 As a small business owner, I've been on the hunt for a reliable, portable cash register to make sales easier at my farmer's market stand. The Royal 100Cx, with its compact design and battery-powered operation, has been a reliable companion for me. The automatic tax computation feature is a game-changer, allowing me to easily manage sales and taxes on-the-go. However, the initial setup can be a bit daunting, and the manual doesn't do a fantastic job of explaining everything. The preset department pricing and sales analysis by category of merchandise are standout features that have helped me keep track of inventory and sales trends. It's crucial for businesses like mine, where inventory and sales fluctuate frequently. The ink roll printer provides a receipt printout, providing a professional touch to every transaction. In terms of drawbacks, one thing to note is that the tax computation is limited to only four rates – VAT, Canadian, and a couple of others – which may not cater to everyone's business needs. However, for my small farm market business, it's more than sufficient. Overall, the Royal 100Cx is a dependable piece of hardware, and it's been a significant asset in streamlining my sales process. It may have a slightly steep learning curve, but once mastered, it's a powerful tool for any small business seeking a portable, autonomous cash register solution. 🔗Royal 435dx Cash Register with 16 Department Capability and 8 Clerkshttps://preview.redd.it/txxdg61ted1d1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=164bcd3d5dc97bc9b7528ca1c00673134ce19862 As a small business owner, I can attest to the convenience of the Royal 435dX Electronic Cash Register in my daily operations. Its 16 departments and 800 PLU's ensure an efficient flow of transactions, while the 8 clerk capacity and 4 tax rates enable seamless management, even for those serving in various locations or catering to international clientele. One of the highlights of this cash register is the front and rear LCD displays, allowing both the clerk and customer to see each transaction clearly. The memory protection with backup batteries provides added security to safeguard data in case of a power outage, a particularly valuable feature for businesses operating in areas with unpredictable power supply. However, a minor con would be the single station 57mm impact printer, which could limit the pace of transactions during peak rush hours. Also, the locking cash drawer tends to be a bit cumbersome, requiring more time than necessary to retrieve and return change. Despite these minor drawbacks, the Royal 435dX Electronic Cash Register has significantly improved my business operations, allowing me to keep track of transactions efficiently, even during peak hours. I would recommend this cash register to other small business owners looking for a reliable and feature-rich option that delivers exceptional performance at an affordable price point. 🔗Casio SE-S700 Cash Register: High-Speed Single-Station Thermal Printerhttps://preview.redd.it/v48cimbted1d1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9147acc58257ad1b649fd63e1da8c960a9a87046 I recently upgraded my old, heavy cash register to the Casio SE-S700, and I must say, it has made running daily transactions a breeze. The built-in rear customer display ensures that prices are accurate, while the 8 department keys and 999 PLUs make it a cinch to organize my inventory. One of my favorite features is the customizable receipt header, allowing me to print unique messages on each customer receipt. The large, easy-to-read LCD display ensures that no mistakes are made during sales transactions. However, there are a few cons to consider. The plastic construction doesn't instill much confidence in its durability, and I wish the cash register drawer featured a more secure locking mechanism. Overall, the Casio SE-S700 has proven to be a reliable and efficient cash register for my small business, saving me time and preventing any hassles when it comes to handling transactions. 🔗Clover Station POS System with Cash Registerhttps://preview.redd.it/01ab3vrted1d1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0dc914dd36488d910cdfc6d729888d81d4bd956f I recently picked up the Clover Station POS System for my little cafe, and it's been quite the rollercoaster ride. Imagine a sleek, brushed aluminum body with a 11.6" touchscreen display that's as responsive as a well-trained puppy. Sounds appealing, right? Well, it is. But let's dive a little deeper. First off, the touchscreen is large and bright, perfect for both me and my customers to navigate. The high-resolution camera embedded within the system makes scanning barcodes or QR codes a breeze, which is super helpful for keeping track of inventory. Plus, the swivel arm swivels smoothly between my side and the customer's, making transactions feel seamless and personal. However, there have been some hiccups. For one, the single power source for the display and printer can create a tangled mess of cords, especially when you're trying to juggle other peripherals. And while the connectivity options (Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth) are great, I sometimes find myself struggling with Wi-Fi lags. Moreover, the customer service has proven to be quite the challenge. You see, I bought the Clover Station from a seller who didn't provide much support. When things went awry, I was left to figure it out on my own. Needless to say, getting in touch with their customer service has been a nightmare. It feels like they're speaking a different language sometimes, and getting a call back is as rare as a winning lottery ticket. Despite these cons, I still find the Clover Station POS System useful for my small cafe. It's a stylish, reliable system that offers a range of features and connectivity options. However, be prepared for the occasional frustration and confusion, especially when it comes to their customer service. In conclusion, the Clover Station POS System is a mixed bag. While it boasts a sleek design, large touchscreen, and versatile connectivity options, it also has its fair share of challenges, such as the messy cords and difficult customer service. I'd recommend this product for businesses looking for a stylish and reliable POS system, but be prepared to face a few hurdles along the way. 🔗Casio PCR-T2300 Electronic Cash Registerhttps://preview.redd.it/1uu2h8zted1d1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4abee1a70906134d15e54eff47fffca50d24061c I recently got my hands on the Casio PCR-T2300 Electronic Cash Register and let me tell you, it's been a game-changer for my business. With its 10-line LCD display, it's incredibly easy for me to check the current transaction and eliminate errors. The raised keyboard with 30 department key locations makes inputting data a breeze. Plus, with the built-in pop-up customer display, I can ensure my customers always know exactly what they're paying for. One of my favorite features of this cash register is the ability to customize receipts with a graphic logo or programmable top and bottom messages, adding a personal touch to each transaction. The heavy-duty metal cash drawer provides more than enough space for five bill compartments and five coin compartments, making it perfect for a busy retail environment. However, there are a few drawbacks that I've noticed during my time using this product. The instructions provided for programming the cash register could be more clear, leaving some users (like myself) scratching their heads at certain points. Additionally, while the register performs well overall, I have found that there can be some issues with the tape feeding, which can be frustrating at times. All in all, the Casio PCR-T2300 Electronic Cash Register has proven to be a reliable and efficient addition to my business operations. With its user-friendly design and robust feature set, it's definitely worth considering for any small retailer or grocer looking to streamline their cash-handling processes. 🔗Square Register Touchscreen Display, Grayhttps://preview.redd.it/p75qt1dued1d1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d7961fd7f877439dcf756eb77fb73cfca5bb1bb2 I've been using Square Register - Touchscreen Display, Gray for quite a while now, and it's been a game-changer for managing my small grocery store. The system is incredibly intuitive, with a sleek touchscreen display that makes transactions a breeze. The customer display is perfect for keeping lines moving smoothly, and the compact design ensures my countertop stays clutter-free. One standout feature of the Square Register is its seamless integration with other Square services, like inventory management and customer feedback. This has made it incredibly easy for me to keep track of my stock and stay in touch with my regular customers. Additionally, the hardware is built to last, which is always a plus when you're investing in new equipment. However, there's one area where Square Register could improve – the lack of customization options. While the system works great out of the box, I sometimes wish I could tweak some settings to better suit my specific needs. Despite this minor flaw, the Square Register - Touchscreen Display, Gray has definitely helped streamline my operations and improve my customers' experience. 🔗Royal Alpha 583x Electric Cash Register for Small Businesshttps://preview.redd.it/ug2o5pxued1d1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4491905c43edb7ebe407895a6d30640aba8bf9b6 I recently purchased the Royal Alpha 583cx Cash Register for my small business, and I couldn't be happier with my purchase. This little gem has made managing sales transactions a breeze. With 99 departments, 1000 PLUs, 26 clerks, and 4 tax rates, this cash register is fully equipped to handle the needs of any small business. One of the features that I absolutely love is the alpha numeric single station thermal printer. It not only prints fast but also allows me to customize the receipts with my company's message, making it a great marketing tool. Another great feature is the serial port for PC connection, which lets me use an optional bar code scanner, making the checkout process even smoother. However, one minor issue I experienced was with the paper feed. It tends to jam at times, but a quick fix usually solves the problem. Additionally, the display that shows the purchase amount could be more visible, especially in bright lighting conditions. Overall, I would highly recommend the Royal Alpha 583cx Cash Register to anyone running a small business. Its user-friendly interface, customizable receipts, and reliable performance make it a valuable asset to have in any retail or service environment. Buyer's GuideImportant Features to Considerhttps://preview.redd.it/af6b9kcved1d1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fedd761e26c8f07e6ea71885537c0132309a1f68 When choosing a cash register for your small business, there are several features you should consider: Calculating Functionality
Security FeaturesProtecting your business's cash and card transactions is essential. Look for cash registers with:
Integration CapabilitiesMany modern cash registers can connect to other systems within your business. Consider the following:
Scalability and ExpandabilityAs your small business grows, you may need to expand your cash register's capabilities. Consider these points:
Consider Your Budgethttps://preview.redd.it/bngucb5wed1d1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e6e83701b0eaafdd0c8084815abb6e6b39debee9 Cash registers come in a range of prices and configurations. When selecting a cash register, factor in:
General Advice for Choosing a Cash RegisterBefore making your final decision, take the following steps:
ConclusionChoosing the right cash register for your small business is an important decision. By considering the features, security, integration capabilities, scalability, and cost of the options available, you can select the best cash register to help your business thrive now and into the future. https://preview.redd.it/m4gdrdiwed1d1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c5cefc5414f1ff56676303a1a5398c58e7414e75 FAQWhat is a cash register and why does a small business need one?A cash register is an electronic device used to process sales transactions at a point of sale, or POS. It stores sales data, calculates prices, and prints receipts. A small business needs a cash register for efficient inventory tracking, accurate financial reporting, and secure storage of cash on hand.What features should I look for in a cash register for my small business?Features to consider include a touch screen display, built-in scanner and credit card reader, programmable tax rates and discounts, inventory management, employee time clock, and multi-user capabilities. Additionally, look for a cash register that is simple to use, yet offers robust reporting options for better business insights.How much does a cash register typically cost?The cost of a cash register varies depending on its features, brand, and model. Basic models can start around $100, while more advanced systems with multiple functions may cost several thousand dollars. Always compare prices and consider the specific features you need before making a purchase.How do I integrate my cash register with my existing accounting software?Most modern cash registers can be easily connected with popular accounting software through USB or Ethernet cables or via Wi-Fi. Ensure that your cash register and accounting software are compatible before purchasing. After installation, you may need to configure settings to synchronize the two systems seamlessly.Are there any portable cash registers for on-the-go sales?Yes, there are numerous portable cash register solutions available on the market. These include handheld POS systems, mobile card readers, and compact cash registers designed for use in food trucks, markets, or kiosks. These devices often include wireless connectivity, rechargeable batteries, and lightweight designs for easy transport and handling.As an Amazon™ Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. |
2024.05.19 09:21 bumwine Interview was an apparent success. I am now being flown out for a meet and greet/discuss compensation/finalize reporting structure
This is one I'm having a hard time seeing articles or posts about for advice as this as much a final interview as it is a tour. I am under no delusion that I have this job, I am taking the approach of "this is mine to lose" as in I want to push the idea of being a good fit. But they're spending good money just to meet me.
We spoke maybe 30 minutes already about how we do mesh in our work ethic and approach toward end user and patient satisfaction. The resume, the qualifications and experience were not in question. So I don't want to go in puffing my feathers, I want to go in asking questions and seeming like I want to mesh with the overall team.
I can write a book on what I do but I'm ultimately an Electronic Health Care Systems Analyst/TraineImplementation Specialist. I know the process of healthcare from start to finish because it all touches databases and user interfaces now and it is my job is to make literally everyone's lives easier. Patient to Physician to Biller.
So to cut to the chase I will be flying out to another state and am being put up for a night in order to do a tour of the company sites (3 in close proximity in a major city), to meet the support team I will be interfacing with, and to sit with HR to discuss compensation and benefits. Yes, I'm not hired until I signed on the line which is dotted. But after taking this week to research and think of things I'm struggling to not just repeat myself in interview 1 beyond specifics (how does your team triage tickets?)
I'm definitely going to meet with HR, some clinical people (I've already spoken to the lead Physician of Informatics) but my role will need to make 1) Quality 2) Billing 3) IT 4) Accounting and Procurement 5) Senior Leadership 6) Doctors across multiple disparate specialties including ones that have differing reimbursement models like Dentistry and Optometry 7) And in many ways my favorite to bolster is the Front Line Staff.
I ask this because this shit is so uncharted waters, ust looking to bounce ideas.
If anyone doesn't have specifics in my niche ass field, what should a company sponsored on site visit to discuss pay and reporting structure look like?
submitted by bumwine to interviews [link] [comments]
We spoke maybe 30 minutes already about how we do mesh in our work ethic and approach toward end user and patient satisfaction. The resume, the qualifications and experience were not in question. So I don't want to go in puffing my feathers, I want to go in asking questions and seeming like I want to mesh with the overall team.
I can write a book on what I do but I'm ultimately an Electronic Health Care Systems Analyst/TraineImplementation Specialist. I know the process of healthcare from start to finish because it all touches databases and user interfaces now and it is my job is to make literally everyone's lives easier. Patient to Physician to Biller.
So to cut to the chase I will be flying out to another state and am being put up for a night in order to do a tour of the company sites (3 in close proximity in a major city), to meet the support team I will be interfacing with, and to sit with HR to discuss compensation and benefits. Yes, I'm not hired until I signed on the line which is dotted. But after taking this week to research and think of things I'm struggling to not just repeat myself in interview 1 beyond specifics (how does your team triage tickets?)
I'm definitely going to meet with HR, some clinical people (I've already spoken to the lead Physician of Informatics) but my role will need to make 1) Quality 2) Billing 3) IT 4) Accounting and Procurement 5) Senior Leadership 6) Doctors across multiple disparate specialties including ones that have differing reimbursement models like Dentistry and Optometry 7) And in many ways my favorite to bolster is the Front Line Staff.
I ask this because this shit is so uncharted waters, ust looking to bounce ideas.
If anyone doesn't have specifics in my niche ass field, what should a company sponsored on site visit to discuss pay and reporting structure look like?
2024.05.19 09:09 Masta-Blasta Just another friendly reminder that the alt right is on the sub
I will be the first to admit that politicians on both sides are up to their neck in criminal bs. I worked as a staffer and can verify. I’ve been behind the closed doors. Let me tell you something, what they won’t do, is send their staffers to order underage children for them. We get in and out. It’s a shit job you use for your resume. Come on, guys.. They don’t use their staff. That’s why they had Epstein (and presumably other “brokers”)
Staffers aren’t committed enough because there’s no job security in putting all of your eggs into the pedophile politician basket. You guys know this. You can never (usually) guarantee your boss is getting elected. Until you’re in the White House, there’s no protection. These jobs are simply a stepping stone to law and lobbying. It’s just not worth it. And even if they were clued in, it’s a literal insanity to think that they were using their government emails on their private servers to arrange that shit. Pizzagate is bullshit.
I’m not saying that couldn’t possibly be going on- I’m not personally aware of anything- but obviously they aren’t saints. Remember that people will try to co-opt a legitimate issue to muddy the waters. Politicians and celebrities abuse children. But pizzagate was a genuine conspiracy. Just like, realistically, some of this is going to turn out to be conspiratorial. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t something there. But please don’t let this turn you into a right wing conspiracy nut.
submitted by Masta-Blasta to DarkKenny [link] [comments]
Staffers aren’t committed enough because there’s no job security in putting all of your eggs into the pedophile politician basket. You guys know this. You can never (usually) guarantee your boss is getting elected. Until you’re in the White House, there’s no protection. These jobs are simply a stepping stone to law and lobbying. It’s just not worth it. And even if they were clued in, it’s a literal insanity to think that they were using their government emails on their private servers to arrange that shit. Pizzagate is bullshit.
I’m not saying that couldn’t possibly be going on- I’m not personally aware of anything- but obviously they aren’t saints. Remember that people will try to co-opt a legitimate issue to muddy the waters. Politicians and celebrities abuse children. But pizzagate was a genuine conspiracy. Just like, realistically, some of this is going to turn out to be conspiratorial. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t something there. But please don’t let this turn you into a right wing conspiracy nut.
2024.05.19 09:04 Charmed264 My first time getting scammed
I posted my resume on Craigslist trying to get some sort of work from home job.
A woman emailed me: “I am currently looking for a business personal assistant just for you to know the position is an home based job, I live in Toronto Ontario but currently out of the Country for roadshows, that's why I need someone reliable to help me with my tight schedule. Do you have a Laptop/PC you can be working on?”
I said yes, and asked about the schedule and pay. She replied and said: “Ok good. So we operate a custom home building company, android developer and into buying and selling of antiques and artifacts. I'm an extremely busy person just online here looking for a personal assistant who will be willing to reduce me from a multi-task I go through all day online. Your duties just entails sending and receiving emails from my clients, taking orders and making enquires, I’d instruct you on how to go through with them as time goes on.You'd be working for 3-4hrs daily; 10am-1pm or 4pm-7pm and the hours can be flexible. So about the pay, the payment is dependent it could be a direct deposit or a Cheque and the pay is $580 weekly. Which bank do you operate with?”
I then told her what bank I use and that my schedule is wide open. She then said: “Ok good, so you'd be having an online interview via text just Q&A processing. It would be performed on a telegram platform. I believe you have a telegram messenger app?”
Looking back that was a red flag but I was desperate.
She then said let’s chat on WhatsApp (which I didn’t have but I downloaded it to chat with her). Also a red flag🤦♀️
I emailed about five “clients” about various things that were consistent with the work she said she does. They discussed certain items, dates, payments, prices etc.
Well the job was a scam. She asked I get 2 $100 gift cards as a thank you for her clients. I emailed a bunch of her clients, she had a website and all this info to corroborate her story. So I stupidly believed her. She sent me two cheques each for $100 for the gift cards. I deposited them, went out and got the gift cards and sent pictures of them to each of her clients. Anyways everything seemed normal, then she asked I get another gift card for a different client I emailed with, again with a cheque. I finally said no and asked she send the money by e-transfer or direct deposit. She said she couldn’t for whatever reason. She said the cheques were good and they’ll go through. After I expressed fear that they wouldn’t.
Because they were Apple gift cards and they have codes you just scan. I checked and both of the cards are drained. I called my bank and they said because I deposited the cheques there’s nothing they can do. And when the cheques inevitably bounce/come up as fraud a hold will be put on my account and I’ll need to pay the $200. Money I don’t have. It seemed genuine at the time, I feel so stupid and disappointed in humanity honestly. 
I was already scraping change together just to buy food and I’m many months behind on rent; now it’s been made so much worse. Ultimately I’m just tired of all of this. I’m only 20 years old, yet I fell for it because of my desperation for money. My desperation made me blind to the obvious red flags.
My friends and family comforted me and said I’m not stupid, it was just an elaborate scam. I don’t really believe them, I mean looking back it was so obvious!! But they made me feel like a dumb kid and that’s something I already deal with in my day to day (why is a long story). I figured at least at this job I’d have people take me seriously. But instead I was made a fool.
Sorry for the novel!
submitted by Charmed264 to Scams [link] [comments]
A woman emailed me: “I am currently looking for a business personal assistant just for you to know the position is an home based job, I live in Toronto Ontario but currently out of the Country for roadshows, that's why I need someone reliable to help me with my tight schedule. Do you have a Laptop/PC you can be working on?”
I said yes, and asked about the schedule and pay. She replied and said: “Ok good. So we operate a custom home building company, android developer and into buying and selling of antiques and artifacts. I'm an extremely busy person just online here looking for a personal assistant who will be willing to reduce me from a multi-task I go through all day online. Your duties just entails sending and receiving emails from my clients, taking orders and making enquires, I’d instruct you on how to go through with them as time goes on.You'd be working for 3-4hrs daily; 10am-1pm or 4pm-7pm and the hours can be flexible. So about the pay, the payment is dependent it could be a direct deposit or a Cheque and the pay is $580 weekly. Which bank do you operate with?”
I then told her what bank I use and that my schedule is wide open. She then said: “Ok good, so you'd be having an online interview via text just Q&A processing. It would be performed on a telegram platform. I believe you have a telegram messenger app?”
Looking back that was a red flag but I was desperate.
She then said let’s chat on WhatsApp (which I didn’t have but I downloaded it to chat with her). Also a red flag🤦♀️
I emailed about five “clients” about various things that were consistent with the work she said she does. They discussed certain items, dates, payments, prices etc.
Well the job was a scam. She asked I get 2 $100 gift cards as a thank you for her clients. I emailed a bunch of her clients, she had a website and all this info to corroborate her story. So I stupidly believed her. She sent me two cheques each for $100 for the gift cards. I deposited them, went out and got the gift cards and sent pictures of them to each of her clients. Anyways everything seemed normal, then she asked I get another gift card for a different client I emailed with, again with a cheque. I finally said no and asked she send the money by e-transfer or direct deposit. She said she couldn’t for whatever reason. She said the cheques were good and they’ll go through. After I expressed fear that they wouldn’t.
Because they were Apple gift cards and they have codes you just scan. I checked and both of the cards are drained. I called my bank and they said because I deposited the cheques there’s nothing they can do. And when the cheques inevitably bounce/come up as fraud a hold will be put on my account and I’ll need to pay the $200. Money I don’t have. It seemed genuine at the time, I feel so stupid and disappointed in humanity honestly. 
I was already scraping change together just to buy food and I’m many months behind on rent; now it’s been made so much worse. Ultimately I’m just tired of all of this. I’m only 20 years old, yet I fell for it because of my desperation for money. My desperation made me blind to the obvious red flags.
My friends and family comforted me and said I’m not stupid, it was just an elaborate scam. I don’t really believe them, I mean looking back it was so obvious!! But they made me feel like a dumb kid and that’s something I already deal with in my day to day (why is a long story). I figured at least at this job I’d have people take me seriously. But instead I was made a fool.
Sorry for the novel!
2024.05.19 08:04 ijustneedsomeadvice7 19M, 5'9 155 pounds, chest pain and heartrate of 190 bpm, doctors have yet to determine cause
Hi, this is gonna be a bit long, but let me explain the entire situation so far: Going back about a year or so, I started noticing an elevated heart rate above what I usually would have. I have an apple watch that allows me to check my heart rate, and around this time I started to get notifications that my heart rate was above average (in the 120s to 130s range while resting as opposed to my normal 60-80 range). This happened a few times along with some very minor chest pain / tightness, however after laying down for a few hours / going to bed it would usually return to normal. Around the same time I got diagnosed with anxiety and ADHD and placed on an SSRI to help my anxiety after trying ADHD meds and not liking them. I never really had any incidents with high heart rate after that, so I had assumed it was just anxiety causing it (and that may still be the case). A few months went by and I ended up starting college and got myself a girlfriend. As I ended up finding out, SSRIs, while great, have the unfortunate side effect of erectile dysfunction, so I weaned off my meds so I could prioritize my love life. There were a few incidents after this where my heart rate was above average, but again I just chalked this up to anxiety, as it would usually go away on its own. At one point I went into my on campus doctor's office just to verify my heart was okay after an elevated heart rate the night before, and they gave me an EKG which came up clear. Months go by, and things are fine, besides a slight uptick in anxiety. Unfortunately however, my relationship began to crumble and my anxiety skyrocketed, and we eventually broke up, which led me to talking to my doctor and getting placed back on anxiety medication. However, I really didn't like how SSRI's impacted my libido, so after trying a few more SSRI's I was placed on Buspirone. I love Buspirone, and it's made a noticeable difference on my confidence / reducing anxiety. When I take my full dose at once (30 mg), I tend to get a bit dizzy / nauseous, however when split up into 10 mg taken at breakfast lunch and dinner I have no noticeable side effects. I will say (and I don't know if this is in any way important but I'm just naming everything possible), I have noticed that since stopping the SSRIs and starting Buspirone I tend to ejaculate VERY fast which is abnormal for me, and although I would like to fix that it is not my main concern. Moving on though, after about a month or two after being placed on Buspirone, we get to where my heart problems start. As someone who had never used any substances my entire life, leaving home and going to college gave me the freedom to try new things, and although I know it's not great, on weekends me and my friends will get together and drink or occasionally smoke weed / take an edible. I was worried at first about interactions with my medication, but after some research all anything online could tell me was that I may get drunk faster / more nauseous and dizzy, which wasn't too big of a deal for me. I had tried weed earlier in college and didn't like the way it made me feel, however after being placed on Buspirone I decided to try it again and actually enjoyed the feeling, so I started doing it more on the weekends as opposed to just drinking, which leads us to the incident. Me and some friends had just sat down to watch a movie, and all taken an edible. Time passed, and I started to notice that my heart rate was extremely elevated, way more than I was usually used to. I checked my heart rate, and found that my watch was displaying an average of 160 bpm. At first I thought I was just having a bad high and tried to calm myself. I laid on the floor and put some ice on my forehead, but nothing was helping. I checked my heart rate again and saw that my watch was displaying 190, which really freaked me out as that was way higher than I had ever seen before. I had my sober friend call Public Safety for me, and they came to my dorm room and did a basic check up on me. They said that I had a fever, and when they took my heart rate they got something in the 160s range. Their explanation was that my anxiety, when combined with being high and likely being sick made my heart rate elevated, which made sense at the time. I went into my college's health services to follow up the next day since my heart rate was still elevated (in the 120s-130s range), however they again told me it was probably just anxiety. A few days went by and my heart rate was STILL above average, so I decided to double check with my real doctor off campus. About a day before this I had also stopped taking my medication to see if it could be the cause for my elevated heart rate. The doctors took my vitals and immediately noticed that had very high blood pressure and an elevated heart rate, to the point where they sent in a second doctor to recheck my vitals and make sure it was correct. After talking to me and having me give a run down of my symptoms, they had me schedule an appointment with a cardiologist and told me that if I ever experience chest pain and a heart rate above 100 bpm that wouldn't go down to go to the hospital. I had also told them about how I stopped taking my medication and they told me that that was fine and to tell the cardiologist about it. About a week passes, and I have my cardiologist appointment in a few days. I had been up the night before working on my final exams, so I hadn't gotten much sleep, and besides a breakfast sandwich that I had for lunch I hadn't eaten much either. I had been experiencing chest pain all day, but I assumed it was being caused by my lack of sleep, so after classes I went and took a nap. After a few hours I woke up, and immediately noticed that I still had chest pain. I checked my apple watch, and my heart rate was displaying roughly 90-110 bpm while laying down, which on top of the chest pain made me worried since my doctor had told me that that was cause to go to the hospital. I called my parents to tell them about it, and they drove to the school and had me sit in the car and eat some food they had made to see if it would help at all. However, even after this, my heart rate was still above 100 bpm and I still had chest pain, so my mom made the call to bring me to the hospital. While on the way to the hospital, out of nowhere my heart rate increased to about 170-180 bpm, which freaked me out. We arrived at the hospital, and they immediately gave me an EKG to make sure I wasn't going to drop dead. During this time, I also was shaking a lot and couldn't make myself stop. Eventually they took me into a room and decided to run some tests on me. The tests they did are as follows: BASIC METABOLIC PANEL, CBC WITH DIFF, TROPONIN NH, D DIMER DEEP VEIN THROMB LEVEL, TSH REFLEX, X-RAY CHEST PA AND LATERAL, and ECG-12 LEAD. While I'm not a doctor, from what they told me and from what I can see, everything turned up pretty normal. My potassium was a smidge low, as well as my MCV and MPV, and my Monocyte (absolute) was a tad high, but generally nothing to worry about. The website where I'm viewing my test results display my ECG as abnormal and an attached document says I have left atrial enlargement as well as sinus tachycardia, but they only mentioned sinus tachycardia in the hospital so I assume that it was just the machine reading my test results and giving its own diagnosis. Long story short though, I left the hospital a few hours later, and although I still had a slightly elevated heart rate they said I was fine to go about life normally and to follow up with my cardiologist. Cut to the present, and I just met with my cardiologist a couple days ago. I gave him the general rundown of the above story (but didn't mention the edible as a precursor to the 190 bpm heartrate as my mom was in the next room over and the door was wide open), and after checking my vitals he told me that although I did have an elevated heart rate and high blood pressure, my chest pain probably wasn't a huge concern and that he wasn't too worried it was anything life threatening. He told me I could resume taking my meds (which I had temporarily replaced with ashwagandha supplements while I waited for the appointment and have since stopped taking), and had me wear a little device that monitored my heart rate for 24 hours, which I'm set to return in a couple days. He also told me that when I returned it he would check my results and give me an echocardiogram and go from there. So, with any luck, he should be able to figure things out then. However, I wanted to post this to see if anyone could help me get any ideas on what it could be that I could run by him to help speed things up. I also have a recent theory of my own that I want to hear advice on. I was doing research and discovered that Buspirone, when taken with other medication that increases serotonin, can cause serotonin syndrome. After another google search, I found out that weed can increase serotonin levels. The only hole in that theory is that I stopped taking Buspirone after the initial spike in heart rate / blood pressure but had no noticeable changes. Another theory I have is that it could be some form of dysautonomia, as I fit many of those symptoms. Oh and one last thing, if you can't think of anything in regards to what could be causing my elevated heart rate, I actually would like to know why I'm ejaculating so fast so I can fix it because its gotten to the point where I can't even enjoy masturbating because of how fast I cum.
In case I missed anything, here's a list of my symptoms (although I have no idea if they're all correlated):
submitted by ijustneedsomeadvice7 to AskDocs [link] [comments]
In case I missed anything, here's a list of my symptoms (although I have no idea if they're all correlated):
- High heart rate (anywhere from 90-190 bpm)
- High blood pressure
- Chest pain / tightness on my left side and does not hurt more when I breath in / out (every now and then pain extends to my neck and shoulder)
- Frequently tired
- Insomnia (could be correlated with the above symptom lol)
- Get out of breath faster than usual
- Anxiety (already had this though)
- Mild depression (probably from my breakup)
- Lack of motivation (probably from my ADHD)
- Very rare and random spasms in my neck
- About 10 pounds weight loss in the past few months
- Headaches (could be from the meds)
- Sexual Dysfunction (extremely fast orgasm)
- Probably something minor that I'm forgetting but if I can't think of it it probably isn't important (will update this list if new symptoms arise)
2024.05.19 05:36 0mni0wl My letter to every local news agency about ABQ police federal oversight possibly ending
Today I sat down and sent out letters to the media about how the independent monitor who is overseeing the APD's consent decree has announced that they have met all the requirements, and he is recommending that Albuquerque police be released from further review. A judge will decide if that is the case in early June.
The issue that I have with that??? The Albuquerque Police Department TOPS the nationwide list per capita for officer involved shootings. Population wise they killed more people last year than any other US law enforcement agency, and their rate of shootings has gone UP rather than down over the past decade.
APD is also currently being investigated by the FBI for the DWI scandal, which involves numerous corrupt officers not showing up to court (assumingly in exchange for bribes) over many years... offenses which were not uncovered by the committee put in charge of policing the police, nor the department supervisors.
These things do not suggest that APD is now REFORMED and can be trusted with handling investigations of their own department internally. If anything, it makes it clear that whatever oversight they have been receiving isn't working. Not only do they need the federal oversight to continue, they need someone else put in charge of monitoring their department... obviously anybody who thinks that the APD is currently 'all good' doesn't have very good judgement.
So here is the letter that I have been sending out to local news agencies and government officials. I encourage everyone to research this situation themselves and write their own letters or make phone calls voicing their concerns about the APD being released from federal oversight even though they are literally the countries #1 killer cops and their department is steeped in misconduct.
"I'm writing you today because I simply can not believe that the independent monitor that is overseeing the DOJ order for Federal oversight over APD has recommended that it come to an end because they have supposedly met their goals... The statistics say otherwise.
Albuquerque police top the nationwide list of officer involved shootings per capita - looking solely at population, they killed more people in 2023 than any other US city! Their rate of shootings has gone up over time rather than down, and the increase isn't comparable to a growth in population.
They also have an unreasonably high death rate of incarcerated people, an enormous number of unconvicted people being held for low level offenses while violent repeat offenders are left roaming the streets, and a disproportionate number of arrests of POC that reveal a department wide racial bias.
Albuquerque has an atrocious level of crime for a city this size, and APD has a horrible response time with many people across the city complaining that they NEVER SHOW UP AT ALL to 911 calls for assistance. When they do show up they are incredibly likely to murder people who are unarmed, experiencing a mental health crisis, acting out due to being under the influence of substances, or just because they are Black/Hispanic/Native.
The department has a high number of complaints against officers where nearly none are found in favor of the civilian victims upon internal review - it's an unusually low number in comparison to other places. There are numerous instances over the past decade when they have lacked transparency regarding misconduct, refusing to release the names of officers involved or hold them accountable for their actions. These things alone should be reason enough for them to continue being monitored... proof that they haven't improved enough to be released from review.
But the Albuquerque police are also literally in the middle of a FBI investigation due to the DWI scandal. That's a great big red flag! Why wasn't this independent oversight committee able to spot that multiple officers weren't showing up to court hundreds of times over many years, with all the cases connected to the same attorney? Instead it took a citizen doing their own investigation to break open the corruption, and it required the media covering the story to make sure that this controversy wasn't buried. If the monitors couldn't catch this misconduct and abuse of power, what else is going on in the department that has either not yet been revealed or is being purposely hidden?
None of this sounds like "REFORMED" to me - if this is how the APD behaves while under the microscope, what will they do when they have independent power over their own misconduct again? How can this monitor group see all of this happening yet still recommend that the consent decree end? They are responsible for overseeing a police department that is currently at the TOP of the list for police killings and one that is engulfed in a conspiracy involving many officers, yet they are giving the APD 'the all clear'? Make it make sense!
I'd like to see more news stories pointing out all the reasons why the consent decree shouldn't stop and how they need a new monitor instead - the current one didn't fulfill his promises and hasn't been able to bring the APD into REAL compliance. We citizens obviously cannot bring our complaints directly to the APD or the oversight committee and expect transparency or action, so the burden falls on to the local news agencies to investigate this topic and release their findings to the community.
I've recently seen some news articles that were critical of the head monitor Mr. James Ginger, saying that his office isn't accessible to the public, he's usually out of state, he's been paid many millions of dollars and wasn't able to get the job done in the amount of time that he originally stated.
So it seems suspicious that almost immediately after news agencies investigated his role and uncovered some pretty disparaging stuff about his job performance he suddenly declares the department to be in compliance of the consent decree and announces that his oversight role will end.
Is there a connection? Is he giving them a passing grade after years of putting in the minimum amount of work just so he can write down a win on his resume? Is James Ginger attempting to back out of his responsibility over this police department by painting them as "cured" when they obviously aren't?
Please talk about this issue more, the public really needs to see the facts about APD that suggest that they shouldn't be released from DOJ oversight. It's especially important that some articles about this get published before a judge reviews this claim of the department being in compliance and possibly signs off on it at the beginning of June. We cannot allow the nation's top killer cops, a department chock full of misconduct, to be responsible for policing themselves!
I would love to see the mayor, city council, or some concerned citizens petition the court for a continuation of the consent decree with a new independent monitor in charge, as well as an investigation into the current monitors' performance and reason for declaring the APD in compliance when it's obvious that they have not improved enough to be released from oversight.
But that isn't likely to happen without the media pointing out the facts about APD's performance and reiterating the failures of Mr. Ginger over the past decade. We've got to put some pressure on city officials to do the right thing and stop the APD from being given free reign over their own affairs again... literal lives are at stake."
Thanks for taking the time to read all of that! I really hope that we as a community can prevent this from happening and finally bring some meaningful and much needed change to our police department.
submitted by 0mni0wl to Albuquerque [link] [comments]
The issue that I have with that??? The Albuquerque Police Department TOPS the nationwide list per capita for officer involved shootings. Population wise they killed more people last year than any other US law enforcement agency, and their rate of shootings has gone UP rather than down over the past decade.
APD is also currently being investigated by the FBI for the DWI scandal, which involves numerous corrupt officers not showing up to court (assumingly in exchange for bribes) over many years... offenses which were not uncovered by the committee put in charge of policing the police, nor the department supervisors.
These things do not suggest that APD is now REFORMED and can be trusted with handling investigations of their own department internally. If anything, it makes it clear that whatever oversight they have been receiving isn't working. Not only do they need the federal oversight to continue, they need someone else put in charge of monitoring their department... obviously anybody who thinks that the APD is currently 'all good' doesn't have very good judgement.
So here is the letter that I have been sending out to local news agencies and government officials. I encourage everyone to research this situation themselves and write their own letters or make phone calls voicing their concerns about the APD being released from federal oversight even though they are literally the countries #1 killer cops and their department is steeped in misconduct.
"I'm writing you today because I simply can not believe that the independent monitor that is overseeing the DOJ order for Federal oversight over APD has recommended that it come to an end because they have supposedly met their goals... The statistics say otherwise.
Albuquerque police top the nationwide list of officer involved shootings per capita - looking solely at population, they killed more people in 2023 than any other US city! Their rate of shootings has gone up over time rather than down, and the increase isn't comparable to a growth in population.
They also have an unreasonably high death rate of incarcerated people, an enormous number of unconvicted people being held for low level offenses while violent repeat offenders are left roaming the streets, and a disproportionate number of arrests of POC that reveal a department wide racial bias.
Albuquerque has an atrocious level of crime for a city this size, and APD has a horrible response time with many people across the city complaining that they NEVER SHOW UP AT ALL to 911 calls for assistance. When they do show up they are incredibly likely to murder people who are unarmed, experiencing a mental health crisis, acting out due to being under the influence of substances, or just because they are Black/Hispanic/Native.
The department has a high number of complaints against officers where nearly none are found in favor of the civilian victims upon internal review - it's an unusually low number in comparison to other places. There are numerous instances over the past decade when they have lacked transparency regarding misconduct, refusing to release the names of officers involved or hold them accountable for their actions. These things alone should be reason enough for them to continue being monitored... proof that they haven't improved enough to be released from review.
But the Albuquerque police are also literally in the middle of a FBI investigation due to the DWI scandal. That's a great big red flag! Why wasn't this independent oversight committee able to spot that multiple officers weren't showing up to court hundreds of times over many years, with all the cases connected to the same attorney? Instead it took a citizen doing their own investigation to break open the corruption, and it required the media covering the story to make sure that this controversy wasn't buried. If the monitors couldn't catch this misconduct and abuse of power, what else is going on in the department that has either not yet been revealed or is being purposely hidden?
None of this sounds like "REFORMED" to me - if this is how the APD behaves while under the microscope, what will they do when they have independent power over their own misconduct again? How can this monitor group see all of this happening yet still recommend that the consent decree end? They are responsible for overseeing a police department that is currently at the TOP of the list for police killings and one that is engulfed in a conspiracy involving many officers, yet they are giving the APD 'the all clear'? Make it make sense!
I'd like to see more news stories pointing out all the reasons why the consent decree shouldn't stop and how they need a new monitor instead - the current one didn't fulfill his promises and hasn't been able to bring the APD into REAL compliance. We citizens obviously cannot bring our complaints directly to the APD or the oversight committee and expect transparency or action, so the burden falls on to the local news agencies to investigate this topic and release their findings to the community.
I've recently seen some news articles that were critical of the head monitor Mr. James Ginger, saying that his office isn't accessible to the public, he's usually out of state, he's been paid many millions of dollars and wasn't able to get the job done in the amount of time that he originally stated.
So it seems suspicious that almost immediately after news agencies investigated his role and uncovered some pretty disparaging stuff about his job performance he suddenly declares the department to be in compliance of the consent decree and announces that his oversight role will end.
Is there a connection? Is he giving them a passing grade after years of putting in the minimum amount of work just so he can write down a win on his resume? Is James Ginger attempting to back out of his responsibility over this police department by painting them as "cured" when they obviously aren't?
Please talk about this issue more, the public really needs to see the facts about APD that suggest that they shouldn't be released from DOJ oversight. It's especially important that some articles about this get published before a judge reviews this claim of the department being in compliance and possibly signs off on it at the beginning of June. We cannot allow the nation's top killer cops, a department chock full of misconduct, to be responsible for policing themselves!
I would love to see the mayor, city council, or some concerned citizens petition the court for a continuation of the consent decree with a new independent monitor in charge, as well as an investigation into the current monitors' performance and reason for declaring the APD in compliance when it's obvious that they have not improved enough to be released from oversight.
But that isn't likely to happen without the media pointing out the facts about APD's performance and reiterating the failures of Mr. Ginger over the past decade. We've got to put some pressure on city officials to do the right thing and stop the APD from being given free reign over their own affairs again... literal lives are at stake."
Thanks for taking the time to read all of that! I really hope that we as a community can prevent this from happening and finally bring some meaningful and much needed change to our police department.
2024.05.19 04:04 Uncle_Snake43 Questions regarding Direct Hire 2210 - GS-12
Hi everyone,
This is a fresh Reddit account, but I have been around here a LONG time. Got locked out of my old account. Anyways - I have some questions regarding a job offer I just got.
I am a veteran of the USAF -3C072 when I left service. I’ve been doing IT for over 20 years. I left my previous job in banking because the stress was literally killing me. Anyways I digress….I left at the end of January this year. I live in San Antonio and went to a USAF job fair a few weeks back. It was a zoo as expected and I just dropped a couple resumes, thinking nothing would come of it. Well lo and behold, I got a bite, and a supervisor emailed me about a GS-12 position at Randolph. I really was/am not looking for government work, as it just doesn’t pay enough. However I told him I was interested because I’m unemployed and turning down a possible 6 figure job is dumb regardless.
We set up a call for last week. He and I talked, but you could hardly call it a job interview. It was really me and him shooting the shit, with a little bit of the job description thrown in. He told me he had a few more interviews and if I didn’t hear back from him by the end of this past week I didn’t get it. Cool. Between then and today, I also got another job offer in the private sector making $72.00 an hour, but it’s just a contract position with the possibility for permanent hire as it goes on. I went ahead and accepted. Thursday I got a call and he told me I was his choice for the job, and gave me a verbal offer. Also, he was able to put me up to GS-12 Step 5. I accepted this one was well.
Questions:
I cannot find a legit source for how much I will make as a 2210 GS-12 Step 5 in San Antonio. Can someone please help me out?
After receiving a verbal offer from the supervisor how long does the whole process take? What should I expect? It is long and drawn out? Is it odd for it to go down like it did for me? I found it very informal, which is not a bad thing.
I’m leaning towards taking the government job for the job security and the ability to retire relatively soon due to my AF service. What would you guys do if you were in my position?
Thanks in advance!
submitted by Uncle_Snake43 to fednews [link] [comments]
This is a fresh Reddit account, but I have been around here a LONG time. Got locked out of my old account. Anyways - I have some questions regarding a job offer I just got.
I am a veteran of the USAF -3C072 when I left service. I’ve been doing IT for over 20 years. I left my previous job in banking because the stress was literally killing me. Anyways I digress….I left at the end of January this year. I live in San Antonio and went to a USAF job fair a few weeks back. It was a zoo as expected and I just dropped a couple resumes, thinking nothing would come of it. Well lo and behold, I got a bite, and a supervisor emailed me about a GS-12 position at Randolph. I really was/am not looking for government work, as it just doesn’t pay enough. However I told him I was interested because I’m unemployed and turning down a possible 6 figure job is dumb regardless.
We set up a call for last week. He and I talked, but you could hardly call it a job interview. It was really me and him shooting the shit, with a little bit of the job description thrown in. He told me he had a few more interviews and if I didn’t hear back from him by the end of this past week I didn’t get it. Cool. Between then and today, I also got another job offer in the private sector making $72.00 an hour, but it’s just a contract position with the possibility for permanent hire as it goes on. I went ahead and accepted. Thursday I got a call and he told me I was his choice for the job, and gave me a verbal offer. Also, he was able to put me up to GS-12 Step 5. I accepted this one was well.
Questions:
I cannot find a legit source for how much I will make as a 2210 GS-12 Step 5 in San Antonio. Can someone please help me out?
After receiving a verbal offer from the supervisor how long does the whole process take? What should I expect? It is long and drawn out? Is it odd for it to go down like it did for me? I found it very informal, which is not a bad thing.
I’m leaning towards taking the government job for the job security and the ability to retire relatively soon due to my AF service. What would you guys do if you were in my position?
Thanks in advance!
2024.05.19 03:47 EvolvedxPanda Old English, back to glass.
I vividly remember the day (or "night" in my case, to be specific) that old english switched it up and went to being in plastic bottles. I'm a person that typically "goes with the flow", but sighs and rants in my own mind, yet when doing my usual routine of getting off a begrudingly 14h shift and making the commute to Loaf n' Jug in my lamborfeeties before trecking home; I was perplexed and pretty irate enough to discover that Old English went from being in glass bottles to plastic. That night, in my adult life, I actually made a slight scene. Fortunately, there were only a couple of patrons in the store at that time, but still, to this day I feel embarassed for the charade, despite being a regular at that small town Loaf n' Jug; in that moment of exhaustion, confusion, and irritation, I had blasted out (not a complete shout, but by no means was it an inside voice) "what the f*** is this plastic bs?!?!? I wish I could have a fair warning to put on make-up, so I could at least look decent before I got completely f***** tonight." The cashier laughed a bit, due to my outburst but instantly took to my dismay and told me that he too was surprised about not only how long their shelves were out of stock of the product, but that when their shipment came in, that it was in plastic bottles.
On one hand, I understood that it most certainly was a cost effective tact to switch to plastic, yet the "quality" (regardless of it being a cheap malt liquor) of the product would be complete trash, and for being a cheap malt liquor, the taste, feel, and "save for later" factor would go down the drain. Despite the change, I did pick up the beverage, but not as often as I did before. Fast forward to now. I had made somewhat of another scene, only this time being a scene of excitement and pure joy upon finishing a long and crummy day. The liquor store I currently frequent had run out of OE for approximately two weeks, but when it became available, to my surprise and excitement, it was in glass bottles again. When I rolled up to the drive-thru, the clerk ducked inside the store only to briefly strut to my vehicle with a s*** eating grin and say "I got a surprise for you, and it's on me , bruh"... lt was BACK IN GLASS!!
i truly was overjoyed, yet I am still curious as to "why." Is it cause of numerous complaints, something going on with the plastic business, or what? I briefly tried to "google degree" this question, yet I have found nothing; so why is it that OE is back in GLASS?
TL;DR: OE (40 oz of Old English) went to plastic bottles, and after several years, it has now gone back to being bottled in glass. Why is that?
Edit: Grammer corrections.
submitted by EvolvedxPanda to NoStupidQuestions [link] [comments]
On one hand, I understood that it most certainly was a cost effective tact to switch to plastic, yet the "quality" (regardless of it being a cheap malt liquor) of the product would be complete trash, and for being a cheap malt liquor, the taste, feel, and "save for later" factor would go down the drain. Despite the change, I did pick up the beverage, but not as often as I did before. Fast forward to now. I had made somewhat of another scene, only this time being a scene of excitement and pure joy upon finishing a long and crummy day. The liquor store I currently frequent had run out of OE for approximately two weeks, but when it became available, to my surprise and excitement, it was in glass bottles again. When I rolled up to the drive-thru, the clerk ducked inside the store only to briefly strut to my vehicle with a s*** eating grin and say "I got a surprise for you, and it's on me , bruh"... lt was BACK IN GLASS!!
i truly was overjoyed, yet I am still curious as to "why." Is it cause of numerous complaints, something going on with the plastic business, or what? I briefly tried to "google degree" this question, yet I have found nothing; so why is it that OE is back in GLASS?
TL;DR: OE (40 oz of Old English) went to plastic bottles, and after several years, it has now gone back to being bottled in glass. Why is that?
Edit: Grammer corrections.
2024.05.19 02:24 LibraryGullible4679 Sibling is facing foreclosure, frustrating circumstances... how should I help?
Throwaway account. Genuinely, this is my sibling's situation, not mine. Much of the 'story' of this is what the sibling related to me. Sibling has had financial issues in the past. This may belong in FinancialAdvice, but I sense things may beyond money fixing...
Sibling is in Alabama, I am in Georgia.
Sibling is self employed in a profession that involves taking many direct payments, and uses Square to accept those payments. Sibling purchased a home in August of last year. They claim that they [attempted] to use Square to make the mortgage payments, however apparently the mortgage company never actually accepted them. Sibling and their spouse apparently ignored many letters before realizing the situation and were months past due. Between them and the mortgage company, it was finally realized the failure to make/accept via Square, so Sibling began the process of getting the money back from Square and succeeded.
Sibling apparently also banks with a non-mainstream online-only bank, so then getting the funds from Square to that bank was a process. The mortgage company apparently told Sibling that they HAD to overnight a cashiers at the time she was finally in possession of the funds. They get online bank to increase withdrawal/ATM limits, and over the course of several days they get the cash in hand... at this point I'm just going to round the amount to 15 thousand dollars.
Sibling takes cash to local, mainstream brick-and-mortar bank they have a car note with and get a cashiers check, takes that to FedEx, and send check and paperwork as instructed.
It takes two weeks for the mortgage company to come back and say "Got your FedEx envelop - and the paperwork - but no check." Commence cashiers check cancellation process... money is locked up for 90 days according to brick-and-mortar bank.
1-2 weeks later, the foreclosure notice is in the newspaper and they're getting notice of foreclosure. (Don't ask me what notices they've gotten or ignored, I'm aware these things don't happen overnight.) I would have thought all this is was a scam if I didn't find the notice in the newspaper myself.
Courthouse steps sale is in 10 days.
I am liquid enough to help my sibling - I've known about the situation for 48 hours at this point. After the initial story from my sibling, my spouse and I slept on the situation and decided that if there was something we could do, we should do it...
I asked sibling "If a wire or ACH could happen today, would it solve this problem." They waited until the end of the day to call/text me back (they were working, maybe I didn't imply strongly enough that I was willing to make a payment). That was Friday. Little/no contact since then from sibling.
So, I have two areas of questions:
I have redacted some known details or minutiae for the sake of length of this post. Happy to fill in any gaps I have knowledge of.
submitted by LibraryGullible4679 to legaladvice [link] [comments]
Sibling is in Alabama, I am in Georgia.
Sibling is self employed in a profession that involves taking many direct payments, and uses Square to accept those payments. Sibling purchased a home in August of last year. They claim that they [attempted] to use Square to make the mortgage payments, however apparently the mortgage company never actually accepted them. Sibling and their spouse apparently ignored many letters before realizing the situation and were months past due. Between them and the mortgage company, it was finally realized the failure to make/accept via Square, so Sibling began the process of getting the money back from Square and succeeded.
Sibling apparently also banks with a non-mainstream online-only bank, so then getting the funds from Square to that bank was a process. The mortgage company apparently told Sibling that they HAD to overnight a cashiers at the time she was finally in possession of the funds. They get online bank to increase withdrawal/ATM limits, and over the course of several days they get the cash in hand... at this point I'm just going to round the amount to 15 thousand dollars.
Sibling takes cash to local, mainstream brick-and-mortar bank they have a car note with and get a cashiers check, takes that to FedEx, and send check and paperwork as instructed.
It takes two weeks for the mortgage company to come back and say "Got your FedEx envelop - and the paperwork - but no check." Commence cashiers check cancellation process... money is locked up for 90 days according to brick-and-mortar bank.
1-2 weeks later, the foreclosure notice is in the newspaper and they're getting notice of foreclosure. (Don't ask me what notices they've gotten or ignored, I'm aware these things don't happen overnight.) I would have thought all this is was a scam if I didn't find the notice in the newspaper myself.
Courthouse steps sale is in 10 days.
I am liquid enough to help my sibling - I've known about the situation for 48 hours at this point. After the initial story from my sibling, my spouse and I slept on the situation and decided that if there was something we could do, we should do it...
I asked sibling "If a wire or ACH could happen today, would it solve this problem." They waited until the end of the day to call/text me back (they were working, maybe I didn't imply strongly enough that I was willing to make a payment). That was Friday. Little/no contact since then from sibling.
So, I have two areas of questions:
- What do you think the options for my siblings actually are at this point? The mortgage company has referred the whole thing to Brock and Scott for the foreclosure, and with them involved, it's not clear to me whether a payment is possible at this point, who it would be to, a deadline, etc... (Not that I'm trying to get directly involved). Apparently bankruptcy is an option to stop foreclosure? If the story is true, perhaps they could even exit bankruptcy before it's complete?
- If I do help my sibling, are there logical safeguards I should put in place? Some form of written agreement? Do you have recommendations on how to go about this? I want to verify the status of the cashiers check cancellation and that that money IS coming back, and if possible or logical draw up an actual contract with my sibling about this (if that's a logical thing to do?)
I have redacted some known details or minutiae for the sake of length of this post. Happy to fill in any gaps I have knowledge of.
2024.05.19 01:00 Start_over_dude How to rebuild after losing a parent
I (36m) lost my mom not long ago, just this past February. She had been chronically ill for a while, but never imagined it was life threatening. Inconvenient, poor quality of life, but not terminal. She started taking ill about 5 years ago in mid 2019, and since I had quit my previous full time job to go back to college I too care of her pretty much full time in addition to school and a part time job at Walmart. My dad travels too much to be able to help and my slightly younger brother left the house upon getting a job out of state. So I didn’t really complain about taking care of her. My mom and I were always super close,so I was glad to. It wasn’t even like I had a girlfriend at the time to have to split attention with. My last relationship ended pretty amicably, but I just didn’t have the self confidence to try again. This went on for the rest of 2019, and it was a pretty soothing routine, she could mostly help herself most days, but she had pretty major fatigue from time to time unpredictably. We imagined she’d get better eventually. I graduated at the end of 2019 and applied to jobs with that in mind. Then Covid hit and somehow she ended up getting worse. She never told me what she was ill with, if she even knew, she distrusted doctors except for vaccines and acute injury care. I still cared for her as best I could, she still had good days and bad so it wasn’t a burden. I even managed to get an okay job that let me work remotely thanks to my degree. It was a little stressful, but mostly sedentary, the occasional run to get food or something. During that time I was pretty glad to be not dating. It carried on like that all through the pandemic and I found myself becoming somewhat of a hermit, just working and taking care of my mom, keeping her company since my dad/her husband still needed to travel for work even if it was less. I naturally put on weight, picked up bad eating habits, resumed my gaming habit and that kind of thing.
And then she died. I assume it was peaceful since it was in her sleep.
Now I’m just alone. Dad, despite his best efforts was never wired to be especially emotionally intelligent or available. My brother, god bless him, has a fiancée and responsibilities across the country. And I’m just here. Fat. Alone. No real self esteem to speak of(not to disparage fat people or anything, I’m all about body positivity. For thee, anyway).
I don’t know how to rebuild myself. I’ve never been especially social. This whole thing has made it worse. I’ve always had negative self talk, but being able to give and care for someone helped quiet the inner monologue. But now the most important person in my life is gone, and I feel like the past five years were simultaneously the best and worst years of my life.
Funnily, while I’m sure I’m grieving still in some way, I’m glad my mom isn’t trapped in her body anymore. So this far out, not that it’s that far, I’m not shattered or wracked with grief over my mom. I miss her every single day. But I understand that she wasn’t living her best life. And I’d rather she go on to a better place than be trapped. So I’m not destroyed anymore. I was. I cried and was unable to get out of bed for a week. And I’m sure I deliriously talked to her during that time too. But that passed.
Now I just feel aimless. I work. I sleep. I eat poorly. I want to get back into life but I don’t know how anymore.
Hell. I don’t even know how to close this post out. I just need advice. So that’s the deal. Yeah. Sorry for the rambling.
submitted by Start_over_dude to Advice [link] [comments]
And then she died. I assume it was peaceful since it was in her sleep.
Now I’m just alone. Dad, despite his best efforts was never wired to be especially emotionally intelligent or available. My brother, god bless him, has a fiancée and responsibilities across the country. And I’m just here. Fat. Alone. No real self esteem to speak of(not to disparage fat people or anything, I’m all about body positivity. For thee, anyway).
I don’t know how to rebuild myself. I’ve never been especially social. This whole thing has made it worse. I’ve always had negative self talk, but being able to give and care for someone helped quiet the inner monologue. But now the most important person in my life is gone, and I feel like the past five years were simultaneously the best and worst years of my life.
Funnily, while I’m sure I’m grieving still in some way, I’m glad my mom isn’t trapped in her body anymore. So this far out, not that it’s that far, I’m not shattered or wracked with grief over my mom. I miss her every single day. But I understand that she wasn’t living her best life. And I’d rather she go on to a better place than be trapped. So I’m not destroyed anymore. I was. I cried and was unable to get out of bed for a week. And I’m sure I deliriously talked to her during that time too. But that passed.
Now I just feel aimless. I work. I sleep. I eat poorly. I want to get back into life but I don’t know how anymore.
Hell. I don’t even know how to close this post out. I just need advice. So that’s the deal. Yeah. Sorry for the rambling.
2024.05.19 00:59 GoAheadMMDay UPDATE 3: Torment Techniques Used by Canadian and US Militaries
 | Update #3 appears at the bottom. submitted by GoAheadMMDay to Liberty [link] [comments] Due to numerous disparaging comments by multiple individuals, I have reposted my article. Heckling does not change what occurred. People need to know these truths, especially those who have experienced the same. They need to know they are sane, that such things are indeed being perpetrated, and the perpetrators use shame to silence them and protect their activities. I write to encourage them not to listen to disparaging people who speak without knowledge. February 10, 2024 I am Joseph Cafariello, a Canadian citizen and ex-member of the Canadian military. Of sound mind, not on medication, not a drug user, not a marijuana smoker, not an alcohol drinker, with no mental disorders. I recently posted to this Liberty subreddit experiences of harassment by Vancouver's police and fire departments (Vancouver, BC, Canada). I’m the fellow who was repeatedly ordered by police to stay out of Vancouver’s Stanley Park, and was continually harassed whenever I visited the park (which I do every second day on my early morning walks). Immediately following that post, they changed some of the techniques they use in my case. They were either informed of my post or found it themselves, seeing as my internet activity, and phone activity for that matter, are under continuous surveillance (plenty of proof which I will not include here to avoid running off-topic). In this post, I would like to shed some light on other harassment which is still ongoing, since it occurs in private, away from potential observers. It involves the Canadian and US militaries. Havana Syndrome In 2016, numerous employees of the Canadian and US embassies in Havana, Cuba, started experiencing head injuries ranging from mild headaches to concussions. It happened in their sleep, and came to be called Havana Syndrome. Wikipedia explains (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana\_syndrome): “Havana syndrome is a cluster of idiopathic symptoms experienced mostly abroad by U.S. government officials and military personnel. The symptoms range in severity from pain and ringing in the ears to cognitive dysfunction and were first reported in 2016 by U.S. and Canadian embassy staff in Havana, Cuba. Beginning in 2017, more people, including U.S. intelligence and military personnel and their families, reported having these symptoms in other places, such as China, India, Europe, and Washington, D.C. The U.S. Department of State, Department of Defense, and other federal entities have called the events "Anomalous Health Incidents" (AHI). Of over a thousand purported cases, the majority of US investigative bodies found only a few dozen cases to be suspicious.” Ladies and gentlemen, I can tell you exactly what happens, because I have been experiencing this since I first joined the Canadian military back in 2002, and am still experiencing these “torments” (as I call them) to this day, already 3 years after leaving the military. I go to bed. In about 15 minutes, just as I am on the cusp of falling asleep, a hear and feel a heavy thud reverberate and ultimately strike my skull. My body releases a sharp burst of adrenalin, my heart starts racing, and my blood’s circulation speeds up significantly. Depending on the severity of the blow, it can take me anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to fall asleep again. Though there have been times I could not return to sleep for more than 2 hours. A strong headache is felt immediately, and lasts for hours. There have been times when my heart felt like it was going to burst, having been startled as such. The pulse to the head sometimes reverberates through the wall and my bed’s headboard. I distinctly feel as though I have been hit on the top of my skull. At other times, it feels as though the pulse has come through the air, striking the side of my skull. This is not a sleep disorder, for it does not occur regularly. At times, my sleep is disturbed in this manner 3 or 4 days in a row. At other times, there is no disturbance for up to a week. But they never let me go more than a week without such interruptions to my sleep. Neither is it sleep apnea, as I do not awaken gasping for breath. The pounding headaches, sudden release of adrenaline, and heart palpitations I experience are caused by external impacts of sound waves or air bursts. Sonic Weapons How these pulses are produced is not easy to identify. As Wikipedia explains: “Once the story became public, various U.S. government representatives attributed the incidents to attacks by unidentified foreign actors, and various U.S. officials blamed the reported symptoms on a variety of unidentified and unknown technologies, including ultrasound and microwave weapons.” Sonic weapons have been in use for many years by militaries, and by police in crowd control. As Wikipedia explains (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic\_weapon): “Some sonic weapons make a focused beam of sound or of ultrasound; others produce an area field of sound. As of 2023 military and police forces make some limited use of sonic weapons.” (Do not believe the 2023 timeline. The Canadian military has been using these weapons since the early 2000’s at the latest.) Wikipedia continues: “Extremely high-power sound waves can disrupt or destroy the eardrums of a target and cause severe pain or disorientation. This is usually sufficient to incapacitate a person. Less powerful sound waves can cause humans to experience nausea or discomfort.” The users of these technologies must also be using thermal detection equipment to monitor the target’s sleep. As I mentioned, I most often feel these blows the moment I am falling asleep. Body temperature drops when we sleep, and brain activity slows. Heat-detection equipment is likely being used to identify the point at which the target is falling asleep. Why they prefer to strike at the start of someone’s sleep as opposed to the middle of their sleep, I do not know. Perhaps their intent is to deprive the body of early sleep, limiting the amount of deep sleep available to the person before their alarm rings in the morning. Ordinary Hammers Not all such “torments” (as I call them) are caused by high-tech equipment. I have heard and felt distinct hammer strikes running along the 2x4 beams inside my walls. These strikes can be a single hard strike, or several strikes in a row. It is definitely caused by a person with a hammer because the intervals between strikes are equidistant in time; that is, the time spacing between strikes is not random and does not change from strike to strike, but is constant between strikes, exactly as when someone is hammering. And no, it is not someone hanging pictures at 1:30 am, multiple times a week, for years. On one occasion, when I was standing at my kitchen sink, I felt the floor-board directly under my feet pulse so sharply it felt like a brick had struck the soles of my feet. In this case, my military neighbour likely used a hammer to strike the floorboard on his side of the wall. It is the only plausible explanation. Surveillance This leads to surveillance of one’s activities at home. I have plenty of proofs of that. They seem insignificant on an individual basis. But when you put them all together, they present a clear picture of home surveillance. My laptop computer’s lid cracked one night, at the bottom left corner of the screen. The next day at work, I heard my military supervisor relate to another co-worker that the night before, his laptop computer’s lid cracked at the bottom left corner. I swear to the Lord in Heaven, I am being truthful. I tested my suspicion of being surveilled. At home one night, I blurted out-loud, “VW Passat. What an ugly sounding word, ‘Passat’”, I said. A few days later, my military colleagues at work started playing a card game at lunch, invented by one of them. The name he gave his game was “Passat”, and when he spoke it, he looked at me for a reaction. If you ever contact the Halifax military base, ask for the Claims Department and ask them if they are still playing Passat. On another occasion, at a time when I frequented the gym every second day for a few years, I suspected my van had been fitted with a listening device. I suspected so because a number of things I had spoken with people about on my phone while in my van (nothing illegal) were repeated by people at the gym in conversations among themselves. Too many times, parts of other people's conversations matched parts of conversations I had had with others while I was in my van. I already knew my phone was being tapped, but I also suspected my van was bugged. So one evening while driving in my van, I blurted out-loud a number of things I said I hated. "I hate (this or that)"; "I hate it when...". One of them was, "I hate when people chew gum with their mouths open." I then vocalized an exaggerated gnawing sound, "Gnaw. Gnaw. Gnaw." The very next time I went to the gym, 2 days later, while I was at an exercise, a fellow sat at an exercise directly behind me. And sure enough, he started chewing with his mouth open, vocalizing that gnawing sound, "Gnaw. Gnaw. Gnaw." I didn't look behind at him, because I knew what was going on, and I wanted to avoid playing into his hand. So he repeated himself again and again until I was done and moved to a different station. Now, honestly, who chews gum at the gym? You can't. Or you run the risk of choking for the heavy breathing, not to mention when laying down on benches. And with precisely the same exaggerated vocalized gnawing sound I had made in my van just 2 days prior. Their whole intent is to let you know you are being surveilled. They want you to know, as both a warning and a provocation. They want you to say something, to launch accusations, which they would readily deny, making you look paranoid. If you react too strongly, they could even have you diagnosed with some kind of disorder, and put you on medication, which further plays into their hand. (More regarding medications in the last section of this post.) This is why, as I mentioned in my previous post, they would park their cars shining their high beams on me as I walked past them during my morning walk. And why on some occasions, a group of 3 or 4 would exit their cars and stand on my path just as I approached, forcing me to go around them. They would then remain standing on the path until my return trip through, and after I had passed by the second time, then would then return to their cars - making it absolutely clear I was their interest. Their intent is not only to make me aware, but also to present themselves in close proximity to me, within easy reach, in the hope I would confront them, resulting in an altercation that could land me in a lot of hot water - 4 witnesses against me, all pleading innocence. Again, it is all designed to make you look bad, and to warrant some kind of legal measure against you - preferably a medical diagnosis, discrediting you in everything you say about them. If they can't refute your claims, their only remaining option is to discredit you. That's what all of these tricks are designed to accomplish. Who would believe anything you say, once you have been diagnosed with a disorder? There are plenty more examples. But who would really believe them? I’ll save them for the future. Home Invasion Both during and after my military service, I have had my apartments entered without any signs of break-ins. How? Lock-picking and duplicate keys. Indications? Missing objects; ie: money, phone adaptor, etc. Nothing major. Just something to make us understand we are being watched, and to make us understand what they can do. But it is always something small, something for which you would be ridiculed for divulging. Two more examples: I found my razor, which I always lay-down razor-end to the wall, turned around, razor-end toward me. Also, in one of my house slippers I found a small shoe sticker on the up-side of the heel. I had those slipper for years, and never had any shoe stickers on them. Yet there it was, clearly visible on the top surface of my slipper, not the bottom. Could I have stepped on a shoe sticker when barefoot in my apartment, only to have the sticker transfer itself to my slipper when I wore it? How many shoe stickers do you have laying around your apartment that you can accidentally step onto? If I had stepped onto a sticker in my apartment and had it stick to my heel, that means the sticky side was up against my skin. This means the sticker would have had to flip upside down such that the sticky side would then be down, allowing the sticker to stick to the slipper. Do you really think that happened? That sticker was not there when I left my apartment, but it was there when I returned. And it was the wrong sticker, wrong brand, wrong size. Again, what is their intent? To make someone look ridiculous so no one will believe them should they speak of other more sensitive things. Staged Incidents The above incidents clearly point to coordinated and staged events (at my work, my home, on my walks, etc). This is so frequently met with incredulity. "But that would require coordination on the part of so many people," the public dismisses. "They wouldn't do that." Oh yes they would, and they have, as explained in https://fightgangstalking.com/. Note the documented cases involving the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS, Canada's equivalent to the US' CIA) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP, Canada's national police force), which were reported in national newspapers. From https://fightgangstalking.com/ : “Disruption operations often involve tactics which are illegal, but difficult to prove. These tactics include – but are not limited to – overt surveillance (stalking), slander, blacklisting, “mobbing” (intense, organized harassment in the workplace), “black bag jobs” [home invasions], abusive phone calls, computer hacking, framing, threats, blackmail, vandalism, “street theater” (staged physical and verbal interactions with minions of the people who orchestrate the stalking), harassment by noises, and other forms of bullying. Many of these tactics were used by the FBI during its illegal COINTELPRO operations, as documented by stolen official documents and subsequent Congressional investigations. "Although the general public is mostly unfamiliar with the practice, references to “disruption” operations – described as such – do occasionally appear in the news media, even though that fact would apparently be news to the editors of The New York Times. In May 2006, for example, an article in The Globe and Mail, a Canadian national newspaper, reported that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) used “Diffuse and Disrupt” tactics against suspects for whom they lacked sufficient evidence to prosecute. A criminal defense attorney stated that many of her clients complained of harassment by authorities, although they were never arrested." She can add me to that list too. For the Benefit of Others The experiences I have recounted here seem so trivial, so insignificant, they make you look ridiculous if you talk about them. But if we don’t talk about such things, no one will ever know about them. Other people have experienced the same, and are forced to endure such torments in silence. They need encouragement to talk about their own experiences, and so I write about mine in the hope they will talk about theirs, even if I do look ridiculous. The perpetrators are more ridiculous for doing them. I remember a military colleague being hauled away by military police one morning, as she was struggling and having a violent fit. A fellow on her floor told me she was throwing chairs at her walls screaming, “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”. When he mentioned that, I knew exactly what they had done to her. She was considered unruly, and was being watched intently. They wanted her out, and that is how they accomplished it. Through wall tapping and sleep deprivation, they push you to the breaking point. And when you finally lose control and do something rash, they pounce on you, and you’re out. Now she has a criminal record, considered a criminal when in reality she was a victim. Welcome to the Canadian military, and other militaries besides, I am sure. There are dozens upon dozens of experiences I could present. But who will really read them? Worse still, who will really believe them? I overheard my military supervisor in Halifax whisper to another, “Do you think he knows?”, after I had mentioned one of the many “coincidences” I experienced, but with a tone of my being aware it was not a mere coincidence. As I turned my face to my computer screen, I whispered under my breath, but still loud enough for him to hear, “Yes, (rank) (name), I know.” A few minutes later, as he walked past my desk, he leaned in by my ear and whispered, “We’re trying to help you.” I should have pressed him for answers right then and there, but you just don’t know how much trouble you can get into when making such accusations in the military. So I let it go. But I will never forget. Should anyone reading this ever decide to launch some kind of inquiry, I can mention names of over 100 people to contact, including military personnel, family members, neighbours, building managers, and others who have been contacted by military personnel with false narratives about me. They flash their ID’s and other credentials, and people believe anything they say. They turn family, friends, co-workers and neighbours against you, even recruiting their participation. Your acquaintances not only participate, but actually feel justified and emboldened playing tricks on you. It isn't their fault, though; they have been misled. I would reference them solely for corroboration. As a final thought, here are explanations of two military programs in which certain persons (sometimes military, sometimes civilian) are kept under constant surveillance, and are in some cases subjected to conditioning in an attempt to turn them into what is called a “sleeper agent”. Almost all of the tactics presented below have been experience by me, including constant surveillance (ie: my previous post here regarding being harassed on my morning walks) and sleep deprivation (as per the top portion of this post, which other military members in Cuba and elsewhere around the world have also experienced). Pentagon’s Signature Reduction Program See Newsweek’s article: https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-inside-militarys-secret-undercover-army-1591881 Some excerpts from that Newsweek article, plus more background information on the Pentagon’s Signature Reduction Program, can be found here: https://fightgangstalking.com/ “The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade. Some 60,000 people now belong to this secret army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, all part of a broad program called “signature reduction.” The force, more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies. “…a little-known sector of the American military, but also a completely unregulated practice. No one knows the program’s total size, and the explosion of signature reduction has never been examined for its impact on military policies and culture. Congress has never held a hearing on the subject. And yet the military developing this gigantic clandestine force challenges U.S. laws, the Geneva Conventions, the code of military conduct and basic accountability. “…The signature reduction effort engages some 130 private companies to administer the new clandestine world. Dozens of little known and secret government organizations support the program, doling out classified contracts and overseeing publicly unacknowledged operations. "Federal spy agencies are using Americans to spy on their fellow citizens – the same approach to governance famously employed by communist East Germany." How to Develop a Hypnotic Sleeper Agent By Dantalion Jones / Masters of Mind Control The following “was” on the web, but has been removed. Surprise, surprise. But I saved its web files to my computer years ago, knowing that sooner or later it would be removed. I made a jpeg image of the web page as it once appeared, attached here. Note that I have experienced almost all of the tactics described below, including the stalking I mentioned in my previous post here (regular walks in the park), the sleep deprivation noted at the top of this post, and the surveillance and intrusions described here as well. Quoting the now-removed webpage: “How to Develop a Hypnotic Sleeper Agent” (from here to end of post): Amid all the conspiracy theories one of the most feared is that there exist "sleeper agents" in our society who are programmed to come into service when they are triggered by a phone call or key word. These alleged sleeper agents don't even know they are programmed to become saboteurs, soldiers, suicide bomber, etc because of the thoroughness of their programming. They are the feared "Manchurian Candidate" that the movies portray. The question is "Are they real?" If they are true sleeper agents there is no way of telling until they are activated. One can however theorize exactly how they are made. Indoctrination Using indoctrination a person can be made to embrace a religious or philosophical belief that would make becoming a sleeper agent possible. This would be a person so committed to an ideal they would be willing to wait patiently as a member of society until they are called into action. These people would know their mission and consciously hold it secret while interacting with the rest of society. Conditioning Conditioning is a repetitive process where the desired responses are enforced and rewarded and unwanted responses are punished. This can be done consciously as part of training drill and it can be done subconsciously using hypnosis or drugs to create amnesia. Hypnosis It has been demonstrated that hypnosis can create "amnesia walls" in which the subject has no conscious memory of what happened in the hypnosis session. It has further been demonstrated that hypnosis can give post hypnotic instruction to be carried out automatically in the waking state without the subject knowing it or questioning the behavior. What follows is conjecture and theory based on testimonials of people who were alleged to be sleeper agents and soldiers. Continuous Supervisions Continuous supervision doesn't mean that the subject is cut off completely from society. It means that they are constantly overseen and every aspect of their lives are managed (without their knowledge or consent) to support their hypnotic programming. This would include: • Repeated reinforcement of all hypnotic conditioning. • Handlers. Handlers are people who help maintain the subjects environment to maintain all the programming. They can play the role of family, friends, lovers, psychologists, coaches or any roll the subject perceives as supportive. The truth is the handlers are their to support the successful fulfillment of the programming and not the subject as a person. • Minimal sleep so that the mind/brain does not process all the sleeper conditioning during sleep. • Creating constant environmental challenges like unemployment or poverty. This gives the subject something other than their programming to focus on. • Frequent hospitalization. This gives overt opportunity to sedate the subject for conditioning. If the subject has a history of hospitalizations for mental disturbances all the better. No one will take them seriously. Joseph Cafariello PS... Today is the second day after this post (February 12, 2024). A garbage truck just slammed into my parked car. PPS... I finish writing this post because I am satisfied with its shape and content; not because of what happened to my car. It is similar to when you are reaching for your coat, and someone tells you, "Take your coat." Since you have to take your coat, your brain tells you it's ok to obey them, and you comply. They just created an instance where they led you, and you followed them. And your brain accepted it. It's a technique the military uses all the time. It trains you to accept instructions from that person or group. Done enough times, you become comfortable obeying them. I just say, "I take my coat because I choose to, not because you tell me to." It's important to make that clear, to block the conditioning and affirm our self-governance; not just to them, but to ourselves as well. Now our brain realizes we took our coat by our own choice; we are still in command. So too, I say regarding today's event. "Thanks for the warning, but I had already finished writing my post. I finished by my own choosing." UPDATES 1 & 2: February 26 & March 07, 2024: My apartment was once again entered while I was out. Either a key was used or the lock was picked. This may or may not have included assistance from building staff. Home invasions are included in the list of their techniques noted above, referred to as "black bag jobs". All tenants on my floor received new fridges a couple of weeks ago. I removed the tape securing the bins inside my new fridge, and also removed all styrofoam pads from the corners of the glass shelves when I repositioned them. The person(s) who have been invading my living space on a regular basis have struck again. As you can see in the photo below, the styrofoam pads on the corners of my fridge's shelves were restored when I was out of my apartment. I had removed all pads when I repositioned the shelves. Yet now they are back. It is a tactic used to undermine our observational awareness in an attempt to make us second-guess and doubt ourselves. The aim is to cause people to feel less sure not only of the things we have done, but also feel less sure of the things others have done. They want us to question the accuracy of our observations and memory. The idea is to train you to dismiss any anomalies you may observe as being your own misperception of things. Once they convince you not to trust your own judgement, they are free to do whatever they want to you, and you will simply accept it without questioning. UPDATE 3: May 18, 2024: Confrontations with individuals keep occurring, at times potentially violent. Following are just 3 such encounters as of late. 1 - Kick-boxer in the park: As I parked my car in one of the parking lots in Vancouver's Stanley Park one night, another vehicle drove up behind me and parked several spots away. A tall man exited that vehicle, and walked hastily along the path I always walk, down some steps to the water's sea wall path. I took my time and followed my usual walk, also down the steps down to the sea wall. The man knew my routine, and was in a hurry to get ahead of me. As I walked along the sea wall, I saw the same man sitting on a bench, playing a loud religious sermon in a foreign language on a device I did not clearly see. As I walked past him, he called out to me to stop and chat. I ignored him and continued walking past. He rose and started walking behind me. I opened my umbrella, turned, and walked past him the other way, returning to the stairs back to the parking lot. He also turned and continued following me. I started running. He also started running. I ran up the steps, as did he. Being taller than I am, his legs are longer than mine, and he quickly caught up to me on a grassy patch at the top of the steps. I turned to him and asked, "Why are you following me?" He did not reply, but stood profile to me, the same stance a kick-boxer uses when ready to kick someone. He was tall, thin, and in excellent physical shape as you would see in a kick-boxer. He did not speak at all, but was just waiting for me to make a move. I turned, entered my vehicle and left. The encounter continued with a chase through the park in our cars. Yes, that is correct. He chased me out of the park in his car. 2 - Told to keep quiet: The perpetrators need to operate with as little detection as possible, and they repeatedly warn their subjects to keep their mouths shut about their experiences. On another of my recent nightly walks, a man stood on the sidewalk ahead of me about half a block away, looked at me, and shouted into the sky at nobody, giving the appearance of being a homeless person shouting for no reason. He then started walking in my direction. I continued walking straight. As he passed me, he leaned into my face and shouted into my ear, "Shut the f_ck up!" I continued walking in my direction, and he resumed walking in his. The idea is to make it seem as though he is just a deranged man wandering the streets at night, shouting at nothing, so that when he shouts at me, any observer would simply dismiss his actions. But in reality, he was sent to send me a message to stop publishing posts like this, which I had done many times on many sites, and continue to. They don't like it when we reveal their methods. But the truth must be known. 3 - You'll be sorry: On another occasion, while returning from grocery shopping one afternoon, I walked past a man sitting by a storefront. He was clean-cut, wearing clean clothes, without any carts or wagons or any belongings of any kind. As I passed him, he asked me for some spare change. I replied, "I'm sorry," and continued walking past. He replied, "You will be." There are numerous other experiences, like two seemingly unassociated men standing on the sea wall about 100 meters away from each other, each of them spitting just as I walked past each one. There are too many experiences to mention. Looking at each experience individually, one would easily dismiss them as being unrelated and simply coincidental. But put them all together and a picture starts to form, like putting together the pieces of a puzzle. As I hand you each piece of the puzzle one by one, you dismiss each piece, saying, "This could be anything." And you discard it. You keep discarding each piece as I hand it to you. By the end of it, you look down at the table and say, "You have nothing." That's because you looked at each piece as a separate item and threw it away. But if you leave the pieces on the table as I hand them to you and do not hastily discard them, you will see they form a clear picture when put all together. We must look at all these events as a whole. Individually, each one could be anything. But when all of these experiences are put together and considered as a whole, they form an undeniable picture. Do not be quick to dismiss each piece. Leave the pieces on the table and look at the whole. The picture I present is sound. Remember, I have all the pieces; you do not. I see the picture more clearly than you do. https://preview.redd.it/we31ymcsm91d1.jpg?width=966&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3d56ac3dd3558a60d477ba9315104d1b66b139f8 |
2024.05.19 00:11 Dear-Cockroach-6979 Wouldn’t mind some advice…
(Sorry, it’s kinda long)
Hey everyone,
A bit about me: I grew up in a toxic household with an alcoholic abusive single mother. She had anywhere from 15-20 stray cats in our home that she spoiled and loved more than me. She sure made that clear! My father left me and my mother when I was two years old and he never came back. I was put into the California foster care system at age 13 due to my mother being reported multiple times by my junior high school counselor. From there I went to several mental hospitals, lockdown facilities and group homes up to my 18th birthday. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder back in my adolescent years. I haven’t been evaluated as an adult but I’m sure I would be diagnosed with MDD if I were.
I have spent almost my entire adult life doing nothing with myself. I spent a lot of time early on sleeping in my car and showering at my friends houses. My grandma in Arizona helped me out a great deal and let me stay with her and find work, and I was proud of myself although I was working a menial janitorial job at a casino. I’m pretty tech savvy and skilled with automotive repair but I never pursued further education. When my grandma passed away in 2007 I got severely depressed but I managed to get a place to live with roommates and held down a full time job, again at a casino doing janitorial work. Developed a gambling addiction and an alcohol addiction. Got a DUI in 2008 and that started my legal troubles. Lost my place and lost my job.
I slept in my car and worked at casinos doing menial work again. Met a woman at one of the jobs and got married April 2010. She had a few kids with a bunch of baby daddy drama, and I couldn’t deal with it so I just walked away and the divorce was finalized by the end of the year. I stopped drinking after that. From there I kept working until 2011, when I decided to quit my job, take my old Subaru XT and hit the road. Went all over the southwest US sleeping in the car and exploring, got a few tickets for no insurance, got my license suspended for said tickets and also for not paying my payments on the DUI. I got to Albuquerque NM and my car finally croaked on me. Transmission failure. Slept in it for a week or so in a mini-mall parking lot until the cops were called on me and unsurprisingly took my car. I was officially a street person at age 26.
I spent several years hitchhiking, panhandling, dumpster diving, hopping freight trains and finding spots to sleep or camp wherever I could. I was so depressed that I didn’t take very good care of myself and had no desire whatsoever to try to better myself and dig out of the hole I got myself into. I used to call myself an urban survivalist. I remained in this state of mind until late 2022 when dental problems nearly killed me. I finally found a place to stay in Nevada with a lady I called a foster mother but I had a very hard time getting used to being housed. I got all my teeth yanked and a set of dentures thanks to Nevada Medicaid. I got a job at a car wash for six months but gave up the job due to stress at home and workplace nepotism. I even got a few credit cards and got my score up to 719! Anyhow, foster mother was an alcoholic, she started to remind me of my biological mother and I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had a few thousand dollars saved up and moved back to Arizona a couple of months ago.
I am currently at a weekly motel and have been attempting to find any work I can. Managed to get interviews for dishwasher jobs, housekeeping jobs, janitorial jobs and night crew at a grocery store. Haven’t heard back from any of them though. I have half of my savings left and it seems inevitable that I’ll run out of money pretty soon.
I have a good feeling that the ridiculously long gap of employment looks terrible on my resume and that may be a reason I’m not getting anything. I mean, what do I tell the interviewer, that I was a damn bum?
I like to think I’m pretty smart. I was disassembling and reassembling IBM PC’s before I hit puberty. I was the computer technician for my high school back in the Windows XP era. Once I started driving I began teaching myself automotive repair with Chilton and Haynes manuals along with plenty of trial and error. It blew people’s minds when I, a dirty bum, helped get their car back on the road if I noticed they needed assistance. I helped a man I met at a park and did an engine swap on his Nissan Xterra over a couple weekends in exchange for new camping gear.
I can’t get work as a mechanic or do any driving related jobs unless I get my license back and it would take a LOT of money to get it back. On top of that I have to have an ignition interlock in any vehicle I drive. I wouldn’t mind getting into computer repair but I don’t have the certification to do so, and I’ve been out of the loop for a long time. I have a MacBook Air M1 and wish I could learn a way to make money with it like some sort of remote job but that seems impossible to me at this point.
For the record, I still don’t drink and I’ve never done a hard drug in my life. I haven’t smoked weed in months so I am able to pass a drug test if I were hired somewhere. Also, I have no felonies whatsoever on my record. Some people like to be stereotypical so I figured I’d throw that out there.
I guess what I’m asking is what should I do at this point? What path would you take if you were in my shoes? I won’t lie, suicide has been on my mind a lot lately. I don’t have many friends and I don’t have any family to talk to. I don’t like being a burden on anyone. Should I just accept that I’m gonna probably be homeless again, possibly for the rest of my life? Is there anywhere in the US that I could possibly get back on my feet with some sort of labor work and a place to sleep? I’d move anywhere if I knew I had a shot. Am I a lost cause at age 38? I’d love to hear some ideas!
submitted by Dear-Cockroach-6979 to depression [link] [comments]
Hey everyone,
A bit about me: I grew up in a toxic household with an alcoholic abusive single mother. She had anywhere from 15-20 stray cats in our home that she spoiled and loved more than me. She sure made that clear! My father left me and my mother when I was two years old and he never came back. I was put into the California foster care system at age 13 due to my mother being reported multiple times by my junior high school counselor. From there I went to several mental hospitals, lockdown facilities and group homes up to my 18th birthday. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder back in my adolescent years. I haven’t been evaluated as an adult but I’m sure I would be diagnosed with MDD if I were.
I have spent almost my entire adult life doing nothing with myself. I spent a lot of time early on sleeping in my car and showering at my friends houses. My grandma in Arizona helped me out a great deal and let me stay with her and find work, and I was proud of myself although I was working a menial janitorial job at a casino. I’m pretty tech savvy and skilled with automotive repair but I never pursued further education. When my grandma passed away in 2007 I got severely depressed but I managed to get a place to live with roommates and held down a full time job, again at a casino doing janitorial work. Developed a gambling addiction and an alcohol addiction. Got a DUI in 2008 and that started my legal troubles. Lost my place and lost my job.
I slept in my car and worked at casinos doing menial work again. Met a woman at one of the jobs and got married April 2010. She had a few kids with a bunch of baby daddy drama, and I couldn’t deal with it so I just walked away and the divorce was finalized by the end of the year. I stopped drinking after that. From there I kept working until 2011, when I decided to quit my job, take my old Subaru XT and hit the road. Went all over the southwest US sleeping in the car and exploring, got a few tickets for no insurance, got my license suspended for said tickets and also for not paying my payments on the DUI. I got to Albuquerque NM and my car finally croaked on me. Transmission failure. Slept in it for a week or so in a mini-mall parking lot until the cops were called on me and unsurprisingly took my car. I was officially a street person at age 26.
I spent several years hitchhiking, panhandling, dumpster diving, hopping freight trains and finding spots to sleep or camp wherever I could. I was so depressed that I didn’t take very good care of myself and had no desire whatsoever to try to better myself and dig out of the hole I got myself into. I used to call myself an urban survivalist. I remained in this state of mind until late 2022 when dental problems nearly killed me. I finally found a place to stay in Nevada with a lady I called a foster mother but I had a very hard time getting used to being housed. I got all my teeth yanked and a set of dentures thanks to Nevada Medicaid. I got a job at a car wash for six months but gave up the job due to stress at home and workplace nepotism. I even got a few credit cards and got my score up to 719! Anyhow, foster mother was an alcoholic, she started to remind me of my biological mother and I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had a few thousand dollars saved up and moved back to Arizona a couple of months ago.
I am currently at a weekly motel and have been attempting to find any work I can. Managed to get interviews for dishwasher jobs, housekeeping jobs, janitorial jobs and night crew at a grocery store. Haven’t heard back from any of them though. I have half of my savings left and it seems inevitable that I’ll run out of money pretty soon.
I have a good feeling that the ridiculously long gap of employment looks terrible on my resume and that may be a reason I’m not getting anything. I mean, what do I tell the interviewer, that I was a damn bum?
I like to think I’m pretty smart. I was disassembling and reassembling IBM PC’s before I hit puberty. I was the computer technician for my high school back in the Windows XP era. Once I started driving I began teaching myself automotive repair with Chilton and Haynes manuals along with plenty of trial and error. It blew people’s minds when I, a dirty bum, helped get their car back on the road if I noticed they needed assistance. I helped a man I met at a park and did an engine swap on his Nissan Xterra over a couple weekends in exchange for new camping gear.
I can’t get work as a mechanic or do any driving related jobs unless I get my license back and it would take a LOT of money to get it back. On top of that I have to have an ignition interlock in any vehicle I drive. I wouldn’t mind getting into computer repair but I don’t have the certification to do so, and I’ve been out of the loop for a long time. I have a MacBook Air M1 and wish I could learn a way to make money with it like some sort of remote job but that seems impossible to me at this point.
For the record, I still don’t drink and I’ve never done a hard drug in my life. I haven’t smoked weed in months so I am able to pass a drug test if I were hired somewhere. Also, I have no felonies whatsoever on my record. Some people like to be stereotypical so I figured I’d throw that out there.
I guess what I’m asking is what should I do at this point? What path would you take if you were in my shoes? I won’t lie, suicide has been on my mind a lot lately. I don’t have many friends and I don’t have any family to talk to. I don’t like being a burden on anyone. Should I just accept that I’m gonna probably be homeless again, possibly for the rest of my life? Is there anywhere in the US that I could possibly get back on my feet with some sort of labor work and a place to sleep? I’d move anywhere if I knew I had a shot. Am I a lost cause at age 38? I’d love to hear some ideas!
2024.05.18 22:20 PlumeyTail Physician, heal thyself..
 | This took place in 1990 when I was 18 and still living at home with my parents and siblings in a quiet suburb outside of Philadelphia. I had graduated high school and was about to start courses at the local community college. submitted by PlumeyTail to LetsReadOfficial [link] [comments] I was working part-time as a cashier at a local grocery store and had been since my sophomore year of high school. When you work in retail, particularly a grocery store, you often get to know the regular customers and become sort of familiar with their personalities. But all these years later there is only one family that I still remember clear as day, and I know that I’ll probably never forget them. I was pretty shy and typically would greet my customers with some pleasantries and then engage in ringing up their groceries, not paying much attention to anything but the task at hand. But when this one particular family of three entered the store, I would always find myself watching their every move, not because they were threatening or suspicious, but because of the strange dynamics and air of mystery that seemed to surround them. The family consisted of an Indian father and his two children, a boy and a girl who appeared to be in their pre-teen years. The man was quite tall and had a quiet, elegant air about him. He almost never spoke to any of the store employees, except for maybe a quiet “thank you” when his groceries had been totaled and the transaction was over. His son was equally quiet and I don’t recall ever hearing him utter a single word, even to his father. What kept everyone’s attention including mine riveted to this family every time they came in was the daughter. She appeared to be around 11 or 12, was almost as tall as her father, and was extremely overweight for a girl of her age. She always appeared disheveled in stained, mismatched clothing, and her shoulder length hair was usually an uncombed mess. Her eyes had a wild, unfocused look to them. She usually had candy or a half-eaten pastry in her hand that she had taken from the shelves that her father always handed over to the cashier to be included in his grocery total. Whatever it was she was eating at the time was always equally smeared on her face and clothing. Where her father and brother were unusually quiet and reserved, this girl was like the proverbial bull in a china shop. She would literally run up and down the aisles of the store singing and shouting unintelligible songs and phrases while she grabbed at items and frequently knocked over displays, generally leaving a retailer’s nightmare of a mess in her wake. Other customers would stare in horror as she ran amok and shouted random words at people. Her father and brother would trail meekly behind, quietly picking up or straightening the merchandise she had displaced. It fascinated me to watch them because the father never reprimanded or tried very hard to restrain her from this behavior, and I often wondered why there was never a mother figure along with them. I always felt sorry for this man as he silently trailed his wild, out-of-control daughter around the store with an air of quiet shame and resignation. It would usually take him an hour or more to navigate the aisles and collect his needed groceries while simultaneously performing damage control as he went. The boy always stuck to his father’s side, never saying a word or showing any signs of surprise or horror at his sister’s disruptive behavior. For 2 or 3 years I routinely observed this little family of three on a weekly basis, and one day in the summer of 1990 it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen them for a few weeks. That day in the breakroom I overheard another cashier mentioning their relief that this man and his 2 children had not appeared for a while, and to my utter shock a different employee asked this person if he or she had not heard the “news” about them. This got my full attention and I asked what had happened. The answer was so unexpected and shocking I actually felt physically ill after hearing it. This man, our regular, quiet customer and father of two, had made national news. He was Dr. A. Paul, a highly regarded doctor of oncology at a local cancer research and treatment center. He, his wife and 2 children lived in a beautiful 10-bedroom mansion in a very affluent part of town. On a hot Monday in July, he left notes for his workplace superiors before returning home for the day. When these notes were eventually discovered the police were called and the doctor’s house was forcefully entered. What the police discovered was horrific and unimaginable. Upon returning home from work that day, Dr. Paul had put sedatives in his unsuspecting wife and children’s food. The police found the 2 children and their mother slumped against the wall in an upstairs bedroom, dead from intravenous lines in their veins that hung from picture hooks on the walls. The doctor himself was found lying dead on the bed, though I can’t recall if he was hooked up to an IV or not. In his notes to his colleagues, he had explained that his financial difficulties, his wife’s health problems, and his daughter’s retardation were all too much for him to bear, and that he didn’t want to leave his son as an orphan, so he took their lives along with his in order to end the hopelessness. To say that we were all shocked is an understatement. For years this man and his children had been our regular customers, and I felt such shame that we had all openly gawked and secretly snickered at this poor, dysfunctional family. Looking back, I wish I had smiled at them more, and maybe attempted a little small talk with the father whenever they came through my line at the register. I know it wouldn’t have changed the outcome, but a little friendliness and empathy from a stranger certainly wouldn’t have hurt this man. Dr. Paul, wherever you are now, please know that, though the world has moved on and your tragic end is old news, there are still a few of us that remember and still think of you and your family. May all of you rest in peace. https://preview.redd.it/t68bdcs0u81d1.png?width=468&format=png&auto=webp&s=dff592fcb5d51da75c677be837406ab2eadabbe4 |
2024.05.18 21:52 Silent_Actress Marrying in Vegas?…here’s a lesson learned
Got married at Cosmopolitan on Thursday by a friend. The county clerk office is only open for filing the certificate Monday thru Thursday from 8am to 5pm. Not open Friday, like a normal government office. The certificate has to be filed within 10 days (and filed doesn’t mean mailed or postmark date…it means the day it is processed and filed).
Went to the FedEx in our hotel, they couldn’t mail anything to a PO Box. OK, what?!
We are planning to fly out of Vegas on Sunday and clerk’s office opens Monday at 8am.
Went to Concierge desk. He was ridiculously not helpful. He recommended we go to the FedEx upstairs. We explained why that didn’t work. Did he offer us an envelope? Nope. Did he offer to find a place to find stamps? Nope. Looked at his computer and told us the post office by campus is closed.
Went to our room and called the front desk. They said we should talk to Concierge. We explained that he was absolutely no help to us. We were put on hold for a bit, then the line got disconnected.
Asked a gift shop person if she knew where we could find an envelope or stamp, she didn’t make eye contact and just said that she did not know.
Went back to room and saw housekeeping in the hallway. Asked her if she were us and needed a stamp and an envelope, what would she do. She said she really didn’t know what to suggest.
We spent over $3000 for our stay at Cosmopolitan. So at this point, we are a little frustrated and incredibly disappointed that no one was able to help. People get married here every few seconds. How is it that no one is able to be helpful with mailing the certificate? Seems there should be a drop box at every hotel…but there is not even a drop box at the actual clerk’s office because it is a PO Box.
Of everyone we talked to, the Walgreens’ employees were the most helpful. If you go to the Walgreens at Planet Hollywood, the stationary section is aisle 22 (which is hidden all the way in the back behind cosmetics). $5 for a box of envelopes. The cashier can get you a book of stamps (cannot buy just one stamp). They are locked in a safe so it takes a while for the manager to retrieve them.
So we now have an addressed envelope with a stamp, but cannot find a USPS mailbox.
Had no idea it would be this challenging. Would have brought an addressed and stamped envelope with me had I known.
Hopefully this will save someone else from the stress we had today. Cheers!
submitted by Silent_Actress to LasVegas [link] [comments]
Went to the FedEx in our hotel, they couldn’t mail anything to a PO Box. OK, what?!
We are planning to fly out of Vegas on Sunday and clerk’s office opens Monday at 8am.
Went to Concierge desk. He was ridiculously not helpful. He recommended we go to the FedEx upstairs. We explained why that didn’t work. Did he offer us an envelope? Nope. Did he offer to find a place to find stamps? Nope. Looked at his computer and told us the post office by campus is closed.
Went to our room and called the front desk. They said we should talk to Concierge. We explained that he was absolutely no help to us. We were put on hold for a bit, then the line got disconnected.
Asked a gift shop person if she knew where we could find an envelope or stamp, she didn’t make eye contact and just said that she did not know.
Went back to room and saw housekeeping in the hallway. Asked her if she were us and needed a stamp and an envelope, what would she do. She said she really didn’t know what to suggest.
We spent over $3000 for our stay at Cosmopolitan. So at this point, we are a little frustrated and incredibly disappointed that no one was able to help. People get married here every few seconds. How is it that no one is able to be helpful with mailing the certificate? Seems there should be a drop box at every hotel…but there is not even a drop box at the actual clerk’s office because it is a PO Box.
Of everyone we talked to, the Walgreens’ employees were the most helpful. If you go to the Walgreens at Planet Hollywood, the stationary section is aisle 22 (which is hidden all the way in the back behind cosmetics). $5 for a box of envelopes. The cashier can get you a book of stamps (cannot buy just one stamp). They are locked in a safe so it takes a while for the manager to retrieve them.
So we now have an addressed envelope with a stamp, but cannot find a USPS mailbox.
Had no idea it would be this challenging. Would have brought an addressed and stamped envelope with me had I known.
Hopefully this will save someone else from the stress we had today. Cheers!
2024.05.18 21:40 Dry-Cardiologist-771 Cash Gift Question
I would like to preface all of this that I was in a very abusive marriage mentally and financially. Not looking for sympathy I go to therapy for that, but please keep this in mind when reading, and I would really appreciate if negative opinions are kept to yourselves. I will post the story then add the caveats at the end.
In 2015 my then fiancé and I went to purchase a home together. We live in the state of Nevada. I was told then that he had spoken to his friend, a loan officer, who told him that if we were to buy the house together we would be “fined” because we were not married.
I sold my home, and moved into his house while we waited to purchase our own. Once we found it, because of what his “friend” had told him, I gifted him $200,000 for a down payment to avoid the fine. I was young and didn’t have enough credit then, so it would have to be purchased under his name as we had a significant down payment, but needed to obtain a mortgage for the rest. He obtained the mortgage under his name only.
I wrote out paperwork for the gift of $200,000 and was able to have a cashier’s check made. After we were married in 2016- he refused to put my name on the house. I was able to finally do this in 2020, so my name was on the house.
In 2021 we refinanced due to the super low interest rates, and added my name to the loan. In 2022 we were divorced and he took the house, while I received two investment properties we had. The dollar value was pretty much identical so it was an easy solution to avoid selling everything and starting over. Which I wish I had done now.
He refuses to refinance my name off the loan, but has asked me to sign the title to him. I sold one investment property to obtain my own home and have down payment money. I cannot obtain another mortgage because technically I am responsible for one, and I don’t have enough cash to purchase something outright. So I am looking at paying capital gains which is neither here nor there. I took him to court, and basically our decree states that he is RESPONSIBLE for the loan, but it does not say to refinance me off of it so my motion was dismissed. So I am stuck with a loan for an asset I no longer have, that I purchased basically with my $200k gift. He does make payments on time for the loan.
submitted by Dry-Cardiologist-771 to legaladvice [link] [comments]
In 2015 my then fiancé and I went to purchase a home together. We live in the state of Nevada. I was told then that he had spoken to his friend, a loan officer, who told him that if we were to buy the house together we would be “fined” because we were not married.
I sold my home, and moved into his house while we waited to purchase our own. Once we found it, because of what his “friend” had told him, I gifted him $200,000 for a down payment to avoid the fine. I was young and didn’t have enough credit then, so it would have to be purchased under his name as we had a significant down payment, but needed to obtain a mortgage for the rest. He obtained the mortgage under his name only.
I wrote out paperwork for the gift of $200,000 and was able to have a cashier’s check made. After we were married in 2016- he refused to put my name on the house. I was able to finally do this in 2020, so my name was on the house.
In 2021 we refinanced due to the super low interest rates, and added my name to the loan. In 2022 we were divorced and he took the house, while I received two investment properties we had. The dollar value was pretty much identical so it was an easy solution to avoid selling everything and starting over. Which I wish I had done now.
He refuses to refinance my name off the loan, but has asked me to sign the title to him. I sold one investment property to obtain my own home and have down payment money. I cannot obtain another mortgage because technically I am responsible for one, and I don’t have enough cash to purchase something outright. So I am looking at paying capital gains which is neither here nor there. I took him to court, and basically our decree states that he is RESPONSIBLE for the loan, but it does not say to refinance me off of it so my motion was dismissed. So I am stuck with a loan for an asset I no longer have, that I purchased basically with my $200k gift. He does make payments on time for the loan.
- I cannot find my gift paperwork. I assume it is with the house paperwork which I left with him. Can I obtain a copy of that from somewhere?
- Am I legally able to get my $200k back even if it was a gift 9 years ago?
- I wanted to hire a lawyer for my divorce but this man threatened me and scared me out of it. I recognize I should have had a lawyer.
2024.05.18 21:26 TupluTV whores
A, B, C and D.
I want to start with the one I want to kill or beat up the most: A. He is a pro football player, and that's kind of where the problem begins. When we were in the same class my whole life, he always yelled at me whenever we played football, ever since elementary school. He is also (for some reason) the highlight of the class, like for every single girl. He even had his first kiss under a desk in kindergarten. Not that I have a problem with that; the girls are all his, I don't even want a girlfriend. But what I don't get is how every single girl STILL likes and praises him despite him always humiliating, teasing, and sometimes even hitting some of them, yet none of those girls can even stand sitting next to me (especially B, but I'll get to her later). It's like it has become a standard for every girl to not like me. They say they don't hate me and I'm just being dramatic, but I'm pretty sure of the truth; most of them dislike me, don't even respect me. Anyways, back to A. Its almost a part of his daily life to make fun of me or swearing at me. All i did was wear a lumberjack shirt on top of my school uniform and he still sweared at me about it. (Something like ''fuck your clothing'' as the google translate says) he occasinally pushes me out of the way, my fatass ''friend'' pushed me so i leaned against a side to avoid hitting his GF (not that i care that she is his girlfriend) and he still yelled something like ''stay away'' like some fucking dog protecting his mate. He always cuts me off when i ask something to the teacher and almost the whole class joins him like some hiveimind. The girls are so OK with him he always had girls following him like some kind of animal's harem before he had a GF ,they even made fun of THE WAY I THOUGHT(like,my hand was on my chin.), i also call the ones on his tails whores. My hate for him is so strong i get past kill/torture him, i sometimes want to push him to the ground and r@pe him so i can give him a trauma that he will never forget, ruining his life and maybe even suiciding if im lucky (or unlucky). Im trying not to give in,but if i ever did something like that and if someone asked if i regret it,i would probably say ''i would do it again if i had they gave me the chance to go to the past''. Everytime i see him walking down stairs,i want to kick his back,slam his head against the wall until his face bled. İ want to put him down on his knees and hold him by his hair on the streetcar rails,because that way,i would both suicide and also kill him,it would be pure bliss for a few seconds. But i get sad every time i remember that murder is obviously illegal,and it wouldnt be worth burning my life...i also think about if its actually worth it cause, i dont have much dreams,i want to be a simple cashier,not much would change the world if i died,but if i killed him or he died in some way,i would be eternally happy. He is probably one of the,if not the worst, of this list of people,i wanna strangle him to death.
Now for B, she has blue hair and trains in muay thai, she even joins tournaments, but she is half my height and weight, im pretty sure i could beat her up,but i dont want to let my ego get in the way. Anyways now for why i hate her. She is fucking annoying. She ALSO cuts my sentences to make fun of me, she would never sit down with me, she calls me weird, she mentions that has nothing to do with the topic while arguing with me, like the time she made fun of the pose i made for the school album where all the boys are in a single pic.(The pose was me leaning one one of my waist while putting my hand on the opposite side o fmy waist while doing the peace sign, which,sure,its funny,but not an excuse to make fun of me) I always regret the time when she punched my stomach and ran away to her desk. All i did was just raise my leg and slowly ''stomp'' her on the chest,which only just leaved a print of dust on her. If i could go to past,i would definetly beat the shit out of her. She also almost punched me just because i called her adolescent (everyone calls her that btw,she tried to hit JUST me) but i thankfully caught her fist in the air. The teacher of course warned her,but im sure as hell they wouldnt *just* warn me if i hit her,its just general teacher treatment. Anyways long story short,i hate her as much as A,if somehow not more. The things i wanna do to her are the same as A, torture,murder,beating up and rarely even r@pe blah blah.
Now C. He is...a bit egoistic, he will point and laugh at me, but uses force even if i call him a nickname everyone calls him. He even threatened me in elemantary school to join him in being naughty. The intimading about him is well,he is pretty muscly and also grew up in a bit of dangerous streets. He is usually cool but he is one of the people who always keep up with the making fun of me everytime i get a random boner trend (everyone in this list,except B keeps this up btw). Overall i still wanna kill him etc etc, the same.
D. D is...also loved by everyone but me.He also makes fun of me, like saying they will beat me up in highschool for random fucking reasons thats none of his business (Dumb shit like me liking old things btw). I think he is probably the weakest out of this bunch (or maybe B, idk). He studies all day (his mom kinda forces him to) but that doesnt justify his actions like slapping my cheeks (both kind of cheeks,yes). He is also weirdly handsome and kind of a soft. The same thing goes for him too. Murder, beating up, torture, r@pe etc.
Anyways,long story short,these are people that i wouldnt be sad at if they died or got hurt. Also the people who i would love to hurt if it was legal. But, yknow, my hate for A,or any of these people, teaches me something. No matter how much of an asshole you are, no matter what you do,if you are popular for a good reason, you will always be the one winning, its just the way society works. And honestly,classmates like these make me understand some school shooters and why they do it, of course, im not saying its justifyed at all, its one of the stupidest things to do,but i kinda have those thoughts too. Last words: I hope every one of these people i counted above a very unpleasent life and death,they ruined the most active moments of my life,puberty,and further boosted my sadness and p*rn addiction.
submitted by TupluTV to u/TupluTV [link] [comments]
I want to start with the one I want to kill or beat up the most: A. He is a pro football player, and that's kind of where the problem begins. When we were in the same class my whole life, he always yelled at me whenever we played football, ever since elementary school. He is also (for some reason) the highlight of the class, like for every single girl. He even had his first kiss under a desk in kindergarten. Not that I have a problem with that; the girls are all his, I don't even want a girlfriend. But what I don't get is how every single girl STILL likes and praises him despite him always humiliating, teasing, and sometimes even hitting some of them, yet none of those girls can even stand sitting next to me (especially B, but I'll get to her later). It's like it has become a standard for every girl to not like me. They say they don't hate me and I'm just being dramatic, but I'm pretty sure of the truth; most of them dislike me, don't even respect me. Anyways, back to A. Its almost a part of his daily life to make fun of me or swearing at me. All i did was wear a lumberjack shirt on top of my school uniform and he still sweared at me about it. (Something like ''fuck your clothing'' as the google translate says) he occasinally pushes me out of the way, my fatass ''friend'' pushed me so i leaned against a side to avoid hitting his GF (not that i care that she is his girlfriend) and he still yelled something like ''stay away'' like some fucking dog protecting his mate. He always cuts me off when i ask something to the teacher and almost the whole class joins him like some hiveimind. The girls are so OK with him he always had girls following him like some kind of animal's harem before he had a GF ,they even made fun of THE WAY I THOUGHT(like,my hand was on my chin.), i also call the ones on his tails whores. My hate for him is so strong i get past kill/torture him, i sometimes want to push him to the ground and r@pe him so i can give him a trauma that he will never forget, ruining his life and maybe even suiciding if im lucky (or unlucky). Im trying not to give in,but if i ever did something like that and if someone asked if i regret it,i would probably say ''i would do it again if i had they gave me the chance to go to the past''. Everytime i see him walking down stairs,i want to kick his back,slam his head against the wall until his face bled. İ want to put him down on his knees and hold him by his hair on the streetcar rails,because that way,i would both suicide and also kill him,it would be pure bliss for a few seconds. But i get sad every time i remember that murder is obviously illegal,and it wouldnt be worth burning my life...i also think about if its actually worth it cause, i dont have much dreams,i want to be a simple cashier,not much would change the world if i died,but if i killed him or he died in some way,i would be eternally happy. He is probably one of the,if not the worst, of this list of people,i wanna strangle him to death.
Now for B, she has blue hair and trains in muay thai, she even joins tournaments, but she is half my height and weight, im pretty sure i could beat her up,but i dont want to let my ego get in the way. Anyways now for why i hate her. She is fucking annoying. She ALSO cuts my sentences to make fun of me, she would never sit down with me, she calls me weird, she mentions that has nothing to do with the topic while arguing with me, like the time she made fun of the pose i made for the school album where all the boys are in a single pic.(The pose was me leaning one one of my waist while putting my hand on the opposite side o fmy waist while doing the peace sign, which,sure,its funny,but not an excuse to make fun of me) I always regret the time when she punched my stomach and ran away to her desk. All i did was just raise my leg and slowly ''stomp'' her on the chest,which only just leaved a print of dust on her. If i could go to past,i would definetly beat the shit out of her. She also almost punched me just because i called her adolescent (everyone calls her that btw,she tried to hit JUST me) but i thankfully caught her fist in the air. The teacher of course warned her,but im sure as hell they wouldnt *just* warn me if i hit her,its just general teacher treatment. Anyways long story short,i hate her as much as A,if somehow not more. The things i wanna do to her are the same as A, torture,murder,beating up and rarely even r@pe blah blah.
Now C. He is...a bit egoistic, he will point and laugh at me, but uses force even if i call him a nickname everyone calls him. He even threatened me in elemantary school to join him in being naughty. The intimading about him is well,he is pretty muscly and also grew up in a bit of dangerous streets. He is usually cool but he is one of the people who always keep up with the making fun of me everytime i get a random boner trend (everyone in this list,except B keeps this up btw). Overall i still wanna kill him etc etc, the same.
D. D is...also loved by everyone but me.He also makes fun of me, like saying they will beat me up in highschool for random fucking reasons thats none of his business (Dumb shit like me liking old things btw). I think he is probably the weakest out of this bunch (or maybe B, idk). He studies all day (his mom kinda forces him to) but that doesnt justify his actions like slapping my cheeks (both kind of cheeks,yes). He is also weirdly handsome and kind of a soft. The same thing goes for him too. Murder, beating up, torture, r@pe etc.
Anyways,long story short,these are people that i wouldnt be sad at if they died or got hurt. Also the people who i would love to hurt if it was legal. But, yknow, my hate for A,or any of these people, teaches me something. No matter how much of an asshole you are, no matter what you do,if you are popular for a good reason, you will always be the one winning, its just the way society works. And honestly,classmates like these make me understand some school shooters and why they do it, of course, im not saying its justifyed at all, its one of the stupidest things to do,but i kinda have those thoughts too. Last words: I hope every one of these people i counted above a very unpleasent life and death,they ruined the most active moments of my life,puberty,and further boosted my sadness and p*rn addiction.
2024.05.18 21:25 Spooker0 The Next Line Will Hold (Human Military Advisors)
Location: Defense Line Husky, Datsot-3
POV: Motsotaer, Malgeir Federation Planetary Defense Force (Rank: Pack Member)The shrieking whistle of incoming artillery shell was among the most terrifying noises known to living beings.
Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeew. Boom. Boom. Boom.
But it meant you were still alive.
Pack Member Motsotaer wondered if the poor pups in the forward trenches heard them coming as the enemy high explosive pounded into their lines.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
One of their anti-aircraft concrete bunkers took a direct hit; its roof collapsed on itself with a loud crumble.
Grass Eater artillery was voluminous, destructive, but scariest of all, it was incredibly precise. Their intelligence assets in orbit knew all, saw all. Their kill chains were short. Once they saw you, they would call it in, and the remainder of your life was measured in minutes and seconds.
There was nothing vegetarian about the efficient and bloodthirsty way the long-eared Grass Eaters fought, and the numerous intelligent predator species they’d exterminated on their way to Datsot… some of those tales gave even Motsotaer nightmares.
The defenders of Datsot had no choice. No choice but to defend their homes against the psychotic enemies pounding their lines to bits. And the ones who remained had learned the hard lessons of war, either through experience earned by blood or via the process of not-so-natural selection.
Motsotaer clutched his rifle against his chest as he laid in his own shallow hole, eyes closed. If the end was going to come for him, there was nothing else he could do but huddle in his freshly-dug grave.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
The blasts continued walking across the defense lines, undoubtedly killing scores of his comrades. But he accompanied each shockwave with a sigh of relief; they let him know that he was still alive. Still breathing.
One final rumble. And then there was silence across the battlefield.
Motsotaer waited a minute before he peeked out — another lesson that smart defenders of Datsot had discovered the hard way. A couple brave medics were already on the move, their shouts left and right, pulling bodies and the groaning injured alike out of the rubble aftermath of the shelling.
With a grunt, he pulled himself out of his hole, rushing towards the neighboring anti-air bunker. The concrete roof had collapsed, but he could still hear cries from the dark. He squeezed through the cluttered entrance.
It was a mess on the inside. The lights were all gone. Scattered sandbags. It smelled like blood and death, and he pushed aside the still body of a Head Pack Leader he only knew of, only to find the corpse of yet another Pack Member, her limbs sprawled in an unnatural position.
“Anyone still alive in here?” he asked in the dark as his eyes adjusted. “Hello?”
There were a series of loud coughs. “I’m here. I’m here.”
“Pack Leader Nidvid!” he shouted as he recognized the familiar shrill voice. “Keep talking! Where are you?”
“Here. I’m here. Help me up.”
As she continued to cough, he had the sense to fish a flashlight out of his pocket, fumbling around until he found the on button. As the light activated, he could see Nidvid half-buried in the dirt, her lower limbs trapped beneath some sand from the broken sandbags.
“Pack Leader!” He got onto his front paws and started digging. “Are you injured?”
“I don’t think so,” she shook her head in the dim lighting as she experimentally wriggled her legs. “Here, I think I’m loose. Help me up.”
Motsotaer grasped her under her arms, and with a heavy grunt, pulled her out of the dirt.
“Whew,” she said, checking her body again for wounds. Nidvid looked around at the other bodies splayed in the bunker. “Oh no… Head Pack Leader…”
“That was a close one. I can’t believe you lived through that!”
“Yeah, me neither… Wait a second,” Nidvid said as she began rummaging through a pile of rubble near the Head Pack Leader’s body. “The radio…”
“What are you looking for?” he asked as he aimed his flashlight towards where she was looking.
“Oh no, no, no…” her voice trailed off as she picked up the device she’d been looking for. “Our hardline communicator…” It was clearly broken from the strike, its shell perforated with a hundred holes and its connection to the landline severed. In disgust, Nidvid threw it back to the ground.
“What uh— what did you need that for?” Motsotaer asked. “Were we supposed to tell them we were being attacked?”
“No… It was— before the strike, we got a high priority order.”
“A high priority order?”
Nidvid recalled, “There’s a special platoon in our salient… We were supposed to get an important message to them!”
“Special platoon?” Motsotaer asked. “Are you okay, Nidvid?”
“Yes, yes,” the Pack leader replied, visibly distraught. “They only had a physical line to us because they’re supposed to be keeping in the dark. Emissions control or something like that so they can activate the flying machine swarm in time. They said this was life and death and our whole defense line hinges on it!”
“Emissions control? Flying machines? Pack Leader, we should get you to a medic,” he said skeptically.
“No! Motsotaer, this is important. We need to get the message to them now. They’re only a couple kilometers south from our position. If we run over to their position now, it might not yet be—”
He looked up at her face in alarm. “Run to another position? Outside the trench line?”
“Yes! We have to go!” she said, as she peeked out of the concrete bunker towards the barren zone ahead of the trenches. “Now! Before they start their offensive.”
Motsotaer began to protest, “But that’s no creature’s land. If we get spotted by their troops, we’ll be hunted down by the Grass Eaters ships in orbit…”
She was insistent, “Pack Member Motsotaer, get it together. We still have a job to do. Are you with me or are you going to sit here and die like a coward to the long-ears?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, straightening up. Death or not, he was no coward. “I mean… I’m with you.”
“Good. Then let’s go.”
With a grunt, she leapt out of the trenches and jogged south, keeping to the defensive side of it for the modicum of cover it provided, and Motsotaer quickly followed. As they sprinted away from the tattered defenses, they ran into a thick tree line that hopefully provided them with some concealment from the Grass Eater ships above.
After a couple more minutes of running in the forest, Motsotaer started to tire and pant. He weighed his burning lung and how embarrassed he’d be if he complained. Luckily for his ego, Nidvid gestured for them to stop after another minute and tossed him her canteen. “Take a break before we get going.”
He chugged as much water as he could in a single swig, and returned the canteen to Nidvid. He gasped out, “How much further, Pack Leader?”
“About one more kilometer south,” she said, aiming her snout up at the treetops. “I recognize the smell of this area.”
“What’s this even about? The message… what was it?”
Nidvid exercised her limbs. “That Grass Eater artillery strike… it was to prepare for their offensive on our lines. They’ve gathered an armored division on the other side of that,” she pointed out into the barren fields beyond the trees. “We have an hour at most before they roll over us.”
“An armored division?!” Motsotaer squeaked. The enemy’s Longclaws — their armored vehicles — were legendary. They could kill from kilometers away. And their thick shells protected them against all but the most powerful artillery in the Federation’s arsenal. He’d never seen one of them personally. If he had, he suspected he wouldn’t be alive to tell anyone about it. “What can we do against a Grass Eater armored division?”
“That’s why we have to get to the special platoon,” Nidvid replied. She pointed in the southern direction, “You ready? Let’s go.”
They galloped for a few more minutes. Motsotaer’s limbs tired and his breaths shallowed as his lung burnt. As he was contemplating whether to ask for another break, Nidvid pointed at a shape in the distance. “There, that’s their position!”
He squinted at it. It was not easy to see, but buried in the tree line was what looked like a bunch of out-of-place branches and leaves over a small vehicle. Buoyed by the anticipation of the end of the marathon, he managed to keep up with Nidvid’s pace.
As they approached, there was a loud shout.
“Hi-yah! Stop!”
They halted their steps and looked for the source of the voice.
“Not one more paw step, deserter! This is a restricted area! Turn around or you’ll be shot!”
Motsotaer looked up at the voice hidden up in the branches. After a moment, with some help from his nose, he found the yeller. It was a short, stout middle-aged male with strange-looking green and brown paint smeared all over his fur and face. He had a rifle aimed squarely at the duo.
“Don’t shoot!” Nidvid yelled back. “We’re runners. We’ve got an important message! For your platoon commander.”
The male in the tree looked suspiciously at them as he leapt down. He lowered his rifle, but didn’t seem any less on guard. “A message?”
“Yes, we’ve got an urgent message for Special Platoon Commander Graunsa. Take us to him right now!”
He sized the two of them up. After a moment, he said slowly, “I am Graunsa. Why are you here, and what is the message?”
Nidvid recovered some of her breath and explained, “The Grass Eaters hit us hard with an artillery strike. Our Head Pack Leader is dead. Our landline is gone. We ran all the way over from our lines north of you.”
Graunsa nodded and gestured for her to continue.
“The Grass Eater armored offensive is about to start. They’re moving into position and ready to go, and there’s a special message embedded—”
“Wait a second,” Graunsa interrupted. “Give me the special message exactly, without omission or your own interpretations.”
“Yes, Platoon Commander,” Nidvid nodded. “The message is: bunny water carriers are in play, red-five-zero-eight; come out of the dark and introduce yourself. Authorization is three-three-greyhound.”
Graunsa looked thoughtful for a moment as he pondered it.
“What does the message mean?” Motsotaer whispered at Nidvid.
“I have no idea,” she shrugged, whispering back. “The Head Pack Leader just told me to memorize it.”
The platoon commander seemed to have made up his mind. “Alright, that seems legitimate. Thanks for the message.” He turned around to leave.
Motsotaer shouted behind him, “Wait, what are we supposed to do now?”
Graunsa turned around. “I don’t know. I’m not your commanding officer.” He paused for a moment. “I wouldn’t recommend going back to your lines though. Might not be there when you get back…”
“What?!”
“You can’t just leave us! Where else are we supposed to go?” Nidvid asked.
Graunsa seemed to contemplate the question for a few heartbeats and sighed, “You said you’re from the position up north?”
“Yup,” they replied in unison.
“And you’re a spotter, Pack Member?” he asked, looking at the rank and position patch on Motsotaer’s chest.
“Yes.”
Graunsa relented. “Fine. We might find a use for you. Get into the bunker… before the Grass Eaters in orbit see us dawdling out here.”
“What? Where?”
The officer pointed at a patch of dark green leaves on the forest floor. As they approached it, he grasped a latch and lifted it to reveal a ladder. The three of them descended into the darkness and Graunsa secured it behind them. With a quiet swoosh, a lamp mounted on the wall lit up to reveal a small hallway leading to a heavy-looking door.
Graunsa knocked on it twice. He turned around and looked at Motsotaer and Nidvid. “What you’re about to see in here is of the highest secrecy level of the Malgeir Federation. If you tell anyone what you see in here, you will be executed for treason. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Platoon Commander.”
“Swear it, on your honor.”
“We swear,” they replied in unison, their voices infused with growing excitement.
“Good enough for me.”
The heavy steel door swung open, showing a room that was vastly different from what its primitive exterior suggested. It resembled a command center far more than a field base, and Motsotaer felt a blast of cold air conditioning in his face as he passed the door threshold.
At the front, a main screen showed a map of the defensive lines in the sector. Facing it, two rows of sleek, new computer screens lit up the dark. Their operators worked busily at their controls, and only a couple faces looked their way in mild interest as they entered.
“What is this—” Motsotaer started to ask. Nidvid grasped his shoulder and shushed him.
Graunsa cleared his throat. Several faces looked towards him in anticipation. “Platoon, we just got the message. Activate the FTL handshake and authenticate us in the network.”
“Yes, sir.” A young-looking communication officer near the front operated a few controls on her console. “I’ve got the advisors on the line.”
Motsotaer read his nametag: Gassin. She was a Gamma Leader, much higher ranked than he, but she looked not a day over twenty. He noted that many of the people in the room sported high-ranking insignias despite their apparent youth.
“On screen,” Graunsa ordered.
A communication window appeared on the main screen, streaming video of someone in a jet-black EVA suit.
Motsotaer stiffened. It was obvious that the subject was alien; at around 1.7 or 1.8 meters, it was far too tall for being a Malgeir. Too small for a Granti. And from the side profile of the suit, it didn’t bulge nearly enough for the tails that the Malgeir’s Schpriss neighbors were known for. A strange new species of aliens.
From the blackened visor, it was obvious that whoever that was… it was the reason for all this tight secrecy.
“Special Platoon Commander Graunsa,” it transmitted in perfect Malgeirish. The alien was either a trained-from-birth Federation Channel One newscaster with a perfectly inoffensive accent, or its translator was far better than anything the Malgeir themselves had invented. “This call is encrypted, but the enemy Znosians in orbit are trying to find your location from the signals, so we’ll have to make it as quick as we can. Have your defensive lines completed your preparations?”
Graunsa stepped up to address the screen directly, “Yes, advisor. Our fire support platoon is ready for tasking.”
“Excellent. Transmitting the first batch of targets in your sector now.”
A series of symbols scrolled onto the screen, showing a number of coordinates.
“We’re getting the enemy positions now,” Gassin exclaimed.
Graunsa turned to her and nodded his appreciation, “Sixteen armored targets. Weapons free.”
“Yes, sir. Programming the sequence.”
A camera on the main screen activated, remotely showing a small hole with some machinery in it dug a few hundred meters away just at the edge of the tree line.
“Launching flying machine swarm!”
As Motsotaer watched, a thicket of metal erupted from the hole in a blur, roaring into the sky.
The main screen was replaced by a four-by-four of windows of black and white images. It took him a couple seconds to realize that he was looking at the battlefield from above. The Malgeir had rotary wing, airplanes, and jet — some were even armed, but they were usually much bigger. And their air assets had been grounded since the early days of the battle for Datsot when the enemy took the orbits.
Not these tiny devices though.
He focused on one of the sixteen windows.
The ground sped past below the camera’s vision, tree line after tree line, the flying machine seemed to know where it was going by itself: Motsotaer looked at the other occupants in the room. None of them seemed to be directly controlling it.
He stiffened.
Is this controlled by a thinking machine?
“We’re getting in range of the target coordinates, Platoon Commander,” Gassin updated the room a few minutes later.
As if on cue, the flying machines flew higher, and the trees on the ground grew smaller, as if further away. Until…
“Targets identified!” Gassin reported with excitement in her voice.
As an infantry spotter, Motsotaer had been trained — barely — to identify enemy armored vehicles. As in, he’d been given a cheatsheet containing the silhouettes of the different types of vehicles the enemy drove. But even he couldn’t tell at this distance what the white-hot smudges on the screen were.
The machine had no such issues though.
Several red boxes materialized on the screen, clearly marking several enemy vehicles in the thermal imagery and adorning them with detailed information.
The one Motsotaer was watching said:
Hostile vehicle, Longclaw MK4 (top armor: ~25mm), 4.2 km.
No hostile EW detected.
Without additional prompting, the flying machines raced in towards their targets, each recognizing a different one as its final destination. Afraid to blink, Motsotaer stared intently at one of the video streams.
A new line of text appeared at the top of the screen:
ETA 20 seconds.
It counted down the seconds, number by number.
The enemy Longclaw got larger and larger until… the screen went black, replaced by static. As he looked around, the other windows were similarly replaced with static one-by-one.
Motsotaer frowned, wondering where the videos had gone.
Then, it hit him. The flying machines were on one-way trips.
The sixteen windows disappeared, and another one appeared, showing the enemy assembly area from a much higher perspective. And instead of the vehicles he expected, he counted sixteen burning wrecks, the black smoke from their flames reaching up into the sky in columns.
“Targets destroyed, Commander,” Gassin said. Several of the officers in the room looked at each other excitedly, but their celebration was muted.
Graunsa nodded. “Call our advisors again.”
The alien appeared on the screen again. “Excellent work, Platoon Commander. We’re assessing the lines and getting the second batch of targets to you now.”
“Understood.”
As the new target coordinates scrolled onto the main screen, Gassin didn’t need additional prompting, “Launching flying machines!”
Another sixteen of them flashed out from the pre-dug position. Another sixteen windows appeared on the screen, replacing the odd-looking aliens’ video.
“Wait a minute,” the aliens’ voice cut into the quiet hum of the control room’s operation. “Switch back to the high-altitude drone. Something’s happening.”
The main screen’s image was replaced by the previous camera looking down at enemy lines. There was a flurry of activity in the enemy base area. Numerous dots representing the ground troops moved to-and-fro. And worryingly, the red squares that surrounded enemy armor began appearing en masse as enemy Longclaws drove out of their covered positions into the open.
Dozens of them.
Then, hundreds. And more appeared every second.
“What’s going on?” Graunsa asked, his voice reflecting Motsotaer’s worry.
The alien took a minute to get back to him, its black helmeted face filling up the screen again. “They’re attacking. They don’t know what hit them in the last strike. But they must have realized that they’re not safe in their assembly area, and they’re doing the only thing they can… We estimate they’ll get to your first lines in thirty minutes.”
“Can we stop them?” Graunsa asked. “We can—”
The alien looked directly into the video. “Not sixteen drones at a time. And if you launch the whole swarm at once, it’ll reflect enough signal for them to sniff out where you are with their counter-battery radars and take you out from orbit.”
Graunsa swallowed. “That’s— that’s— The machines can fly themselves without us, right?”
The alien didn’t say anything for a few heartbeats. “Theoretically, yes. But even if you evacuate your position now, your people won’t get out of range from the orbital strike they’ll call in.”
“I understand. Feed us the enemy targets.”
“Delta Leader, we can’t ask you to—”
“I said, feed us the enemy targets,” Graunsa insisted.
Quietly, hundreds of coordinate pairs filed onto the main screen. Graunsa looked at the faces of the young officers under his command. Dozens of them. He turned around to look at his two guests. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s the right choice,” Nidvid replied, shrugging.
Motsotaer nodded at him.
“I know,” Graunsa said, turning back to the main screen. “Just doesn’t make it any easier.”
“Sir, we’re ready to launch,” Gassin reported.
“Weapons free. Release everything.”
“Yes, sir.”
The ground shook and rumbled, hundreds of flying machines leaving their canisters for the sky. They were close enough to hear the outgoing buzzing as the munitions launched. This time, more and more windows filled up the screen with the visuals of the outgoing flying machines — hundreds of them, and Motsotaer was surprised that the computers could even handle it all.
The visage of the alien returned to their screen. It said calmly, “Enemy orbital launch spotted. Multiple launches. High yield. Missiles incoming to your location, ETA twelve minutes.”
“Understood, advisor.”
“Scramble! Scramble! Scramble!”
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing.
“What’s going on?” Longclaw Commander Slurskoch sat up in his turret cupola as the sirens rang loud through the hull.
“We’re under artillery attack!” his Controller yelled back at him through the roaring startup sequence of the turbine anti-grav engines. “The Lesser Predators… they’ve got some kind of new weapon! Took out a whole battalion’s worth of Longclaws in the 194!”
“But we’re not ready!” his Driver complained. “Our artillery is supposed to pound them for another hour before we—”
Slurskoch shook his head as he checked the friendly force tracker on his screen. “Doesn’t matter! If they’ve got some new weapon, we can’t sit still while we get pounded to bits by whatever they have. We gotta get out there. Hurry it up!”
It took them another two minutes to fully warm up the engines, and with a roar, the Longclaw burst out of its camouflaged emplacement, kicking up a curtain of dirt in front of it.
“Let’s go! Go! Go!” Slurskoch yelled as his lagging Longclaw joined the armored formation already on the move.
The Controller spoke with one of her ears in the radio, “Their artillery just launched… something at us. We’ve pinpointed their location, and orbital support is on its way.”
His Gunner whooped twice, and Slurskoch nodded silently in agreement. That’d flatten those carnivorous abominations where they stood. He drew a few symbols and circles on the digital battlemap as the Longclaws drove toward the enemy lines. “Gunner, watch those potential trench lines in front of us,” he instructed. “Their anti-armor may not look scary on paper, but their infantry can always get a lucky hit in.”
Slurskoch was taught in training that it was better to overestimate the enemy than underestimate them. Luckily, the predators usually fell below expectations, which was why the Dominion controlled the orbits of Datsot now and not them.
His Controller frowned at something in her radio, “They’re saying something about the enemy artillery… The engineers at the base assessed the strike aftermath. There’s something strange in the rubble. The attack was more precise than anything we’d ever seen.”
“What does that mean?” Slurskoch asked in confusion.
“The sensor officer in charge of the assembly area has taken full responsibility. They didn’t see the incoming at all. Higher ups are speculating that the Lesser Predators have a new weapon in their arsenal.”
“The predators made new weapons?” Slurskoch snorted. “Useful ones? That’ll be a first. Well, whatever it is, maybe our Design Bureau will get a good look at it when we finally cleanse this planet of their filth. Make our next battle a little easier when we have to take their home planet.”
His Gunner agreed, “And then, the Prophecy shall be fulfilled.”
The Driver, in his open hatch, looked up at the cloud of them flying over the enemy lines. “Looks like it. A nice juicy feast for them in the coming battle. The irony of the barbaric carnivores being eaten by themselves.”
A few thousand years ago, winged predators would have curdled the blood of any natural-born Znosian. On the original plains of Znos, they were one of the most dangerous threats a lone Znosian faced. Now, that fear had been completely bred out of the gene pool, replaced with contempt for predatory primitivism, the courage to face them in battle, and the drive to exterminate them all.
Curious, Slurskoch stared up into the cloud of winged predators with his Longclaw commander optics. He frowned.
One of them shimmered.
Shimmered.
He zoomed in.
Then, he saw a metallic glint. His whiskers tightened.
“That’s— those aren’t winged predators,” he barely made out in shock. “Incoming!”
“Huh?” his Driver asked, craning his head up to look at the dark shapes in the distance.
“Get inside! Secure the hatch!” Slurskoch shouted at him.
His Driver was not very good at thinking on his own, but he had been bred to follow direct orders without question. He ducked into his seat, quickly securing the hatch above him close with trained claws.
He barely secured the Longclaw as other commanders began yelling out similar instructions on their radios.
“Incoming!” his Controller advised, about ten seconds later than necessary. “Enemy… artillery?!”
“Gunner!” Slurskoch gestured in the general direction of the sky.
“I can’t get a shot on them. They’re too high up!” she screamed back at him.
A trio of air defense vehicles next to him opened up with their six barrels towards the sky, lines of bright tracers stabbing out at the dark swarm. He saw one of the… flying machines hit and fall out of the sky. Then another.
It wasn’t enough.
As Slurskoch’s optics tracked the incoming, he saw them dive. They were fast, and they flew erratic patterns, almost organically, like actual winged beasts. If he hadn’t had that specific fear bred out of his bloodline hundreds of years ago, he would have been frozen in shock. Instead, he yelled out, “Brace! Brace!”
Boom. Boom. Boom.
The world exploded around his Longclaw.
Through his friendly force tracker, Slurskoch watched an entire battalion disappear off the map on his right flank, and two Longclaws in his line of sight brewed up in massive fireballs, throwing their turrets into the sky as their plasma ammunition detonated. One of the anti-air vehicles brewed up next to his, splattering its parts against his hull.
His Driver drove for all he was worth, ducking and weaving in the open field. So did the other Longclaws. Some deployed curtains of smoke in front of them in desperation.
None of it seemed to help.
The shockwaves hit his Longclaw in quick succession, knocking him around the armored cabin and rattling his teeth.
Boom. Boom.
More Longclaws exploded. Many more. They were disappearing off his screen faster than the software could update the signals. He closed his eyes waiting for the end.
It didn’t come.
It was hard for Slurskoch to tell when the last Longclaw near them was hit. His hearing organs must have been damaged some time during the attack. His auditory senses ringed as they returned to normal, recovering when his Controller shook him with a paw on his shoulder. “—Five Whiskers! Five Whiskers!”
“What is it?” he snapped, keeping the quivering out of his voice.
“We’re alone in our company, and I can’t contact the six whiskers! And I’ve been trying to reach battalion without success!”
“Try the regiment commander!” he yelled out against the noise of the anti-grav engine.
“Can’t reach them either!”
“What about division headquarters?!”
“I think division’s gone, sir!”
“What?!”
“Nobody there has been responding. All I’ve got is a seven whiskers in the reserve infantry division behind us! They’re saying they see black smoke in the direction of our division field command!”
“What in the Prophecy? How is that possible?!”
“What do we do, Five Whiskers?”
Slurskoch had been trained for a wide variety of combat scenarios and contingencies, including losing his immediate superiors, losing most of his unit, and losing his communication link to command. But he’d never been trained for all of those combined at once. That was just not something predators were supposed to be able to do to you.
He fell back to the next best thing.
“What’s the combat computer say?” he asked.
His Controller operated the controls on her console, and after half a minute of querying, she replied, reading off the instructions, “Absent orders, continue the attack. Maybe we can push through.”
“What? Did it take our losses into account?” he protested as he checked the battlemap. Of the nearly five hundred Longclaws that had pushed out of the assembly area, only a quarter remained. At most. Some of the signals on the map were flagging themselves as mobility or mission killed.
She shrugged, “It did. That’s what it says.”
He squinted at her screen. That was indeed what it said.
Slurskoch thought for a moment, sighed, and bowed in prayer, “Our lives were forfeited the day we left our hatchling pools.”
The other crew members all did the same, lowering their heads to mutter the familiar mantra.
That ritual out of the way, he drew up to his full height of 1 meter and mustered all the confidence he could into his voice, “Attack! Attack! Attack!”
The command center watched glumly as the hundred or so surviving Grass Eater Longclaws emerged from the wrecks of their comrades and slowly resumed their charge across the open toward the defense lines.
The flying machines had gotten a lot of them. Quite a few disabled too. And they were disorganized from the loss of their command. Yet they still charged. Diminished as their numbers were, they rolled towards the battered defensive lines with psychotic determination.
We’ve failed.
Graunsa sat down heavily into his chair. He brought up his communication console, connecting it to the advisor network.
The alien appeared on the screen, and though he couldn’t see its face, he could hear the sympathy in its translated voice, “You’ve done all you can, Special Platoon Commander.”
“It wasn’t enough,” he said, shaking his ears sadly. “They’re going to break through our line. Our infantry can’t stop them.”
It tilted its head. “I wouldn’t count them out completely, Delta Leader. They might. They might not. But your next defensive line certainly will hold them. The city behind you will be held.”
“Tracking enemy orbit-to-ground. ETA three minutes,” Gassin reported quietly from next to him.
Graunsa sighed. He looked at the alien, “I think I understand your people now, advisor.”
“You… do?”
“Yeah, at first, when we were picked for this mission, I wondered why your people were doing this.”
“Doing this?” the alien asked, seeming confused.
“Helping us. The weapons. The equipment. The training. The targeting. It was all in secret, but you didn’t have to do it. The other species around us didn’t do it. The Schpriss…” Graunsa snorted, “The long-tails can’t even find it in their spines to send us field rations. I thought your species… your people were just generous. Or perhaps you simply enjoyed the craft of war, being so adept at it.”
“Are we… not?”
“Those reasons may be part of it,” he conceded. “But more importantly, I think your people understand one thing the other species don’t… that we might stop the enemy here. Or we might not.”
“We didn’t set you up to fail, if that’s what you think—”
“But the next defensive line certainly will hold them,” Graunsa said, staring the alien in the eye. “You will hold them. Isn’t that right?”
It sighed. “I would be lying if that wasn’t part of the strategic equation. Our star systems are indeed next in line — sometime in the next decade or two, probably — if these bloodthirsty Buns conquered your Federation. That harsh astropolitical realism. But there’s something else too.”
“Is there?”
“Yes,” it nodded its head firmly in a familiar manner. “Yes, there is. We aren’t a particularly long-sighted species, Graunsa. We can plan, yes, but wars are fought by true believers. People don’t sign up to put their lives on the line for a hypothetical, potential invasion of our Republic twenty years in the future. They— we signed up for this because we truly believe what’s happening to your people… it shouldn’t happen to anyone, ever.”
Graunsa looked at the helmeted head for a while, then nodded. “I believe you, advisor.”
“I’m sorry this didn’t pan out, Graunsa. If I could, I’d be down there with you. We’d have made them pay for this.”
Graunsa smiled. “I believe you about that too. Thank you, advisor, whatever your name is.”
“You may call me Kara,” it said simply. A deft snap of its paws — he hadn’t noticed how soft its claws were before — and it released a latch on its helmet with a hiss. Lifting it from its head, it revealed a soft, smooth face without much fur except a bundle of long, brown strands on its scalp tied up in a neat spherical shape. Its hazel forward-facing eyes stared at him with the empathy that only other predators were capable of, filling him with mild relief. “Don’t tell anyone though,” it joked lightly, mirroring his smile back at him.
You’re not as ugly as I thought you’d be. Not nearly.
Graunsa’s grin widened at the thought. He put it out of his mind. “Ah. One last thing, advisor— Kara.”
“Yes?”
His mind drifted to his cubs at home. Perhaps they were still alive. He chose to believe that. “Our people’s clans and packs…”
“We’ll let them know,” she interrupted him softly. “And when the information quarantine is lifted, we’ll let your clans and packs know what you did here — everything.”
“Good. Thank you.”
Gassin sat down next to him, “Delta Leader, enemy missiles incoming. ETA thirty seconds, they’re entering—” She stopped her report and stared at the unmasked alien on his screen with equal parts wonder and sadness.
“Take a closer look, Gassin,” he ordered softly. “That… that is who will avenge us.”
On screen, the alien put its gloved paw up to its temple, forming a stiff triangle with its arm in a recognizable salute. “It was an honor, Graunsa.”
Graunsa returned it crisply, letting a primitive fire shine through his face. “Happy hunting, Kara.”
Location: Atlas Naval Command, Luna
POV: “Kara”, Terran Reconnaissance OfficeKara watched solemnly as the green signal blinked off the battlemap. She closed her eyes for a moment in silent prayer for the fallen.
Beep. Beep.
Another light on her console blinked urgently for her attention. Four thousand kilometers from the previous one. The war raged on — day and night — across four continents on the besieged planet. Fifty light years from the Republic, its defenders’ sweat, tears, and blood lined the fields and valleys of the beautiful blue sphere not so different from her own. Tens of millions of them: many who she knew would not see the end of this war.
They didn’t all know it, and some might not have cared, but fifty light years away, someone recorded their names, and someone felt a pang of loss for their sacrifice. In the cold, dark forest of the galaxy, somebody heard their trees fall.
Kara collected her thoughts, adjusted the bun in her hair, and lowered the tinted EVA helmet over her face once more.
She cleared her throat as she glanced at the screen and activated the microphone in her helmet, “Special Platoon Commander Treiriu. This call is encrypted, but the enemy Znosians in orbit are trying to find your location from the signals, so we’ll have to make it as quick as we can. Have your defensive lines completed your preparations?”
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Thanks for reading my story! This is a standalone chapter in my Grass Eaters story, meant to be enjoyable all on its own. If you're interested in more of my writing, please do subscribe to the update waffle bot or check out the rest of the universe in Grass Eaters.(Grass Eaters posts every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We are closing in on the end of Book 1.)