Ugh same. My first name is very common, last name moderately uncommon. I’ve gotten loads of stuff. Various quotes and invoices (vet, mechanic, window installation), invitations to child care groups, family gathering invitations (that one I think was the person writing the email address, not the person with my name).

Most of the time I just immediately unsubscribe or block or whatever and move on, but there’s some (like the child care group) I had to reach out to because that could be potentially dangerous.

Get your own email right, people! It shouldn’t be my responsibility to manage your email. Some of that shit includes your home address too.

I guess I do also have my childhood landline still, but that’s been out of service for over 15 years. But it is one more phone number I have memorized.

It also blows my American mind how memorizable that long number is. It’s probably largely the jingle, but I can remember that cold without thinking about it for years. But I can only hold like 4 American phone numbers in my head. Without my contacts I can call: myself (helpful), my wife (I’d better), and both of my parents (good to have backups).

That’s the end of the list.

That’s so very Christian. Oh yes, this nice young kid who gleefully responded to let you sit next to him just isn’t interested in your religion and respectfully declined your unwarranted solicitation. That means he’s a sinner and you have to actively self-regulate not to hate him?

The effort you put into this is so impressive! What a lovely post to read.

Never underestimate stupidity. Though I do think it’s at least not normally people trying to connect two strands that are themselves already live. It’s normally people who are connecting several strands together and started at the end not plugged in with the male end poking out, not realizing that this means when they’re done stringing and go to plug in they’ve got the female end and no way to plug it in.

Left facing the daunting task of completely undoing all the work they just did, they try to look for something to bridge the gap without thinking through to the danger.

I appreciate a good “um actually” but this really is about Christmas lights. People really are stupid enough for this to be something posted specifically around December.

As far as I can tell from a reverse image search this is the original. (Not linking to the other place, DM me if you want the link for some reason).

I’m gonna guess winter, hanging Christmas lights. People string up their lights and then realize far too late that they put two strands with female ends facing each other and instead of restringing they look for a male-to-male cord to bridge the gap.

A little live wire shouldn’t stand in the way of holiday cheer, after all.

Same for me. When I need to, I like to go for regular checkout lanes without a bagger so I can move to the end and offer to bag my own things. It gives me something to do rather than just stand there awkwardly.

There’s one cashier at my local grocery store who will often add a 10% discount as a thank you. Which is actually a crazy wage for the couple minutes of work.

I also play a game at Trader Joe’s where usually I’m mostly stocking my freezer so it’s a lot of boxes. I make my cart the neatest damn cart I can and I win my game if the cashier comments on it.

Also 18. When it’s cold 16, lol. Never a shirt.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Funny, this is actually more specific about your birthday than just saying your birth year. This also encodes whether your birthday is before or after the current date within the year.

So… 1999 with your birthday later than May 10?

I mean… per the meme, very much not our first time.

Using the most common definition of those born 1981-1996: Oldest millennials turn 44 this year, youngest turn 29. Next year we’ll officially transition to “30s to mid 40s.”

I typed my comment above on my mobile keyboard. I’m just using the standard Google keyboard on my Pixel, nothing fancy. Em and en dash are available by holding on the hyphen, and the ellipsis is available by holding on the period (annoyingly, only when on the numbers/symbols page).

Hold on — why can’t you do proper ellipses and dashes on your phone? I don’t understand…

This message brought to you by Android.

I’m neurodivergent and messages are significantly more accessible to me, especially in a work context.

I struggle to take in audio information, so if it’s important then messages are much better because I can refer back to them. If it’s not important, it’s not worth the interruption because messages also don’t take me out of my workflow because it’s asynchronous so I can read and respond when I’ve got a moment. A 5 minute unscheduled call is significantly more disruptive to me than an hour long scheduled meeting.

No matter how many times I tell my boss all of this, I get at least one unscheduled no context “do you have a minute to chat?” every single day and it’s effect on my productivity is very problematic.

I do a lot of my wrangling in R for more ad hoc stuff.

I’m also confused, hasn’t he had plenty of roles that were typecast for little people? The two I know him most for are Game of Thrones (a character with dwarfism in the source material) and Elf (a character who’s entire written purpose seems to be “little person that Buddy mistakes for an elf”).

Is there ever not a mattress sale? And they advertise like crazy.