Adulting tip: before you move in with someone, sit down and have a discussion about what a clean living space looks like. Doing this would have saved me so much aggravation in my life.
“But Jaqui,” I hear you asking, “why should we have to talk about it? Clean’s clean, right?” No, it’s not. And thinking cleanliness is a self-evident concept is a great way for screaming fights to happen down the line.
Here’s an example: to my mom, clean means that all the things in the space are not actively dirty, and are free of crumbs and food stains and the like. It doesn’t matter to her where you put your shit, so long as no one has to worry about bugs or stains or diseases. To my once-stepfather, clean meant that everything had a place where it belonged, and things were neat and organized, and there was no visible clutter. He gave less of a shit about crumbs under the microwave than he did about random papers on the coffee table. So she could spend all day working to make sure you could eat off every surface in the kitchen, and he would come home and be upset because she’d spent all that time and as far as he could tell, nothing was clean. Meanwhile, his obsessive organization drove my mom batshit because he would blithely organize away things that weren’t clean by her standards. Needless to say, that relationship did not end well.
So yeah. Have the talk, and figure out what your “augh, this is unlivable, we need to clean!” points are. You may not always be able to get a shared living space exactly as clean as you want it, but if you figure out what everyone needs to feel like they have a reasonably clean space, you’re much more likely to correctly conclude that, when someone makes an offhand comment about the mess getting to them, you’ll know they mean the dishes in the sink are bothering them, and that they don’t give a shit about the dust on the bookshelves, and can act accordingly.
I really wish there was an option on those Customer Service Surveys that says specifically, “The representative I spoke to was lovely and helpful and deserves all of the raises but I think that you, as a corporation, should die in a fire.”
hey as somebody who works in one of those companies that sends out those surveys, never, NEVER mention how much you hate the company in them. just talk about the representative. then, go to the company’s social media page and blast your bad reviews there
those surveys decide our pay, they decide whether we get bonuses or not, they decide if we get to keep our jobs or not. i’ve read transcripts on surveys where it’s has been praising the representative but mentioned one bad thing about the company. that fell to the representative because they should have been enough to sway the customers opinion.
Hey just to add on, if you liked the representative, and the survey is asking for opinions on a scale of 0-10… please give the rep 10′s across the board. Don’t try to be thoughtful and detailed and put down a 7 or an 8 or a 9. A lot of times anything below a 9 or 10 counts as a zero (no, for real) and guess who it comes back to? That’s right, the customer service rep.
At my job anything below a 10 is zero and our store is graded on our survey % so if anyone even puts 9s across the board it’s a 0 in the end and heavily brings down our stores score- which can lead to firings,
My number one tip for straight men (I mean, it could conceivably work for other genders and sexualities, but you’d have to adjust it quite a bit) is: inagine they’re a man.
Imagine that you just randomly told some bloke in a pub that he has beautiful eyes.
That you walked up behind your coworker Jim and started caressing his neck and shoulders while talking to him about the budget.
That you just sent a large and unexplained bouquet of flowers to Darren in Accounting.
That instead of complimenting a coworker on her breasts, you complimented him on his dick.
Does the action now seem weird? Uncomfortable? Do you no longer want to do it now that it isn’t directed at somebody you are sexually attracted to?
That strongly suggests that your action has a sexual aspect to it and therefore probably counts as sexual harassment!
I have a large, colorful tattoo on one arm. I’ve had multiple strange men cross a room to tell me how awesome it is, frequently while I’m at work, and it has never made me uncomfortable.
A couple of weeks ago, someone yelled out a car at me ‘I FUCKING LOVE YOUR BOOTS’, which was awesome.
It’s just… it’s really not hard to compliment people in a way that isn’t creepy, if your goal is actually to compliment them and not to slide a ‘btw I’m thinking about fucking you’ under the radar.
And the fact that some guys have NO IDEA how to do this really shows what’s wrong with our society.
It looks like tumblr now automatically converts png files to jpg – if you have a fairly “clean”/simple digital art style that gets wrecked by jpg artifacts, you’ll want to put transparency somewhere in the image – tumblr will leave pngs with transparency alone (a single pixel border of transparency around the image works and is pretty non-intrusive).
Incidentally twitter has done this for a while, the same method of fixing it works there.
I’ve been doing this on twitter for months now; literally just adding a tiny border of transparent pixels is enough. .jpg does not support transparency, so adding it to the image forces Tumblr to maintain the .png file in order to maintain the transparency.
hey i see a lot of ppl sharing that “correction” to the service dog psa so let me make it clear that different SDs are trained differently, tailored to the handler’s needs!
NOT all SDs are trained to stand by their handler and bark to signal for help, and for some handlers, if the SD did bark it would worsen their situation (autistic handlers, handlers with PTSD, handlers having a migraine, etc).
just be aware of a service dog calling attention to itself in any way, because even if you’ve wasted time by following it and its handler is fine and just lost control of it or something, you’ve still made sure that someone is safe.
don’t share that correction without some kind of comment like this on it, because its total dismissal of another dog’s training could endanger people.
ps the guy who wrote the “correction” has a mobility service dog which is trained VERY differently than a chronic illness or psychiatric service dog (what the OP of the original PSA has).
not only that but he made up parts of the story to discredit the OP (like claiming the dog ran down 2 blocks when they were inside a grocery store and he only walked a few aisles, and that the dog wasn’t on a leash when he was, or that he was pawing and jumping on people when he was actually appropriately signaling with his nose).
don’t share that shitty correction, it will endanger people.
Several weeks ago a pet skunk came in to see me because it just wasn’t acting right. The skunk had been purchased from a breeder and had lived with the owner for five years. Although normally an indoor pet the owner had built an enclosed area in the back yard so that the skunk could be safely outdoors. When the owner first purchased the skunk it had gotten a rabies vaccine and a clean bill of health from a veterinarian but had not been in to see a vet since then.
I walked into the room and saw the owner with several blood soaked paper towels wrapped around his hand. The skunk was in a carrier on the table growling and biting at the bars. I asked him if he was ok and he said yes, the bite was very minor and it happened all the time. Slowly I approached the carrier and the skunk began screaming and biting the sides of the cage.
“Has anyone else been bitten?” I asked.
“Oh, probably my whole family. He’s never been very nice.”
Slowly I bent down to look into the carrier again and the skunk rammed the front snarling and snapping. I felt drops of saliva hitting me in the face. Gently I explained to the owner that I was extremely concerned this skunk was rabid and his entire family and anyone else that had been in contact with the skunk needed to get to a hospital immediately and get rabies post-exposure treatment. The owner was understandably upset and asked me to please look at the skunk close. Politely I refused and told him there was no way I was going to open that carrier nor expose my staff to a possibly rabid animal. After several more minutes of discussion he agreed to allow me to euthanize the skunk and have it tested for rabies but he wasn’t going to go to the hospital.
“What could happen if it is rabies?” the owner asked.
Very sternly I told him, “You’ll die. There is absolutely no treatment for rabies and the only possible outcome is death. You will die. Your family will die. Anyone who has been bitten or exposed to the saliva will die.”
“Is it expensive?”
“If you have insurance it should cover it. If you don’t, yes it can be expensive. But this is literally a matter of life or death. I understand being concerned about medical bills but the alternative is death.”
The owner said he would think about it. I sent the head off for testing and didn’t think anything more about it.
A few days later I got a phone call from the health department telling me that the skunk was positive for rabies. The phone numbers and information the client had given me, which I included on the submission form to the lab, were wrong and the department could not get in touch with the family to tell them they absolutely needed to get to the hospital. I got a little sick to my stomach thinking about the saliva that had gotten on my face and likely into my eyes as well. Luckily I had already had the pre-exposure vaccinations so would just need to get two booster vaccines and would be fine. If the family did not get medical help soon they would die of rabies. I gave the health department all of the information we had on the clients.
A few days later I got word that a man had gone to the hospital saying he had been exposed to a friend’s skunk that was diagnosed with rabies. Luckily that man was able to give the correct information to the hospital and the health department was able to get in touch with the family and they came in and were all treated for rabies exposure. I don’t think they ever really realized how close they came to dying.
There are a few lessons to take home here:
Skunks don’t make good pets. Leave them in the wild where they belong.
Rabies is not an old timey disease that people used to die from. It’s still here and vaccinating against it is still very important.
Give the proper information when you go to the vet! These people probably gave false information because owning a skunk is illegal where they live but vets aren’t interested in turning people in. We desperately needed to contact them to save their lives.
Finally, rabies is nothing to mess with. There is no treatment; there is nothing that can be done when symptoms begin. It is far better to pay for vaccines than it is a funeral.
Rabies spreads up the nerves from the site of the bite. It spreads at a certain rate a day, and will infect different people at different times depending on where the bite was. The important takeaway is that, once the virus reaches the brain, you will die. Once symptoms develop, you will die.
60,000 people die every year from rabies.
Fewer than 12 people in the history of modern medicine have survived it.
Rabies. Will. Kill. You.
And it will not be a quick death. You will slowly go insane. The best any doctor can do for you once symptoms have set in is put you into a coma so you won’t be awake to feel your own death.
If you have been exposed to rabies, GET TREATMENT. Infection without treatment is 100% lethal. Those <12 only survived with intensive treatment, and are statistical and medical flukes.
Rabies is arguably the deadliest virus known to man. Nothing else has such a high lethality rate once symptoms show up.
not enough tick hate on this website. everyone hates wasps or spiders but I rarely see issue with tiny undetectable blood sucking demons who hang out in beautiful plant-filled places and spread deadly disease with a single bite. wasps might punch you in the face occasionally but ticks will steal your lunch money and total your car and poison your food and use all the hot water and as the planet warms up these little devil suckpods are hitching rides anywhere their horrible little feet can plop themselves down and camp out for the next victim of their terrible curses.
I was a bare-foot goblin child who ran around in the woods all day, and have had ticks on me since I was a toddler. TICKS ARE HORRIBLE. Once when I was about 6 or 7 I had one on my head, under my hair, and I thought it was just a skin-tag or something but I finally noticed how BIG it had gotten. If you don’t learn to twist them off just right or use a special little tick-picking-spoon, the head of the tick stays stuck where it bit you, buries itself under your skin, and gets infected. They bite you in really sensitive and often hard-to-reach places. They travel from your pets to you, and even if you get the animals a flea/tick collar or some kind of repellent medicine, the ticks will still hitch a ride on their fur until they can crawl around and find somebody to bite
Seriously, if you have any cats, dogs, or other animals that go in and out, ask a vet what kind of collars or other kind of repellent to use (don’t use anything that might make your critter uncomfortable). Be super careful when you remove a tick, don’t just try to pull it out. Use a special tool, or twist it very slowly until it loses its grip. Don’t let them escape, these are bugs to kill (I’ve always either smashed them with a rock when they’re huge, or put them in an ashtray and burned them with a match). Also, check animals who have scabs; ticks will be drawn to the blood, and if they attach to a wound it won’t heal properly. Ticks tend to crawl around on bushes and tall grass, so this is at least one good reason to mow the lawn and trim what grows in your yard. Make sure your pets get their shots and vaccinations to avoid any of the diseases the ticks can spread, it will protect you too
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