Teague Costas
Shared posts
Medicine and the Bodhi Tree
Well Just Thanks A Lunch!
(There’s this little old lady around my town is well known for cleaning the front of shops and the streets in exchange for lunch or pay. She is also known for playing the ‘helpless little old lady card’ to get free things. It’s lunchtime so I close the shop, head out the back door and grab some food. I’m gone five minutes, tops. I come back in through the back door and re-open and the day goes on as usual. What I don’t know is that my mother brought me lunch as a surprise in the five minutes that I was gone. She had put it on the front step and left. My mother explains to me that that night that she left me food. I suddenly remember seeing the little old lady pick up a brown paper bag outside the door window, which I now know held my lunch. I assume she threw it in the garbage. The next night I’m working and the little old lady comes in.)
Me: “Hi, how are you?”
Little Old Lady: “Good, good. How are you?”
Me: “I am well. Did you happen to see a brown paper bag full of food outside of the store last night?”
Little Old Lady: “Was it yours?”
Me: “It was but I guess it’s in the garbage now. Oh, well.”
Little Old Lady: “It was good. I saved some for tonight and I’ll think of you while I’m eating it.”
Incorrectly Prospecting Your Lack Of Prospects
(I work in a fast food restaurant to earn some extra money while at university; I work at a branch quite far from my university in a popular shopping area so no one in my class knows. Most of the other people in my class are fairly well off and I don’t really fit in. I have colourful hair and three facial piercings. One day a girl from my class comes in with her mother and she notices me but doesn’t say anything as the mother steers her towards my station.)
Mother: “I’ve told you time and time again that you have to stay in education. You can’t just quit university because you’d rather spend time with your boyfriend.”
Me: “May I take your order?”
(The mother places order for them both and as I walk to fill the drinks I hear her say to her daughter.)
Mother: “If you drop out of university you’ll end up like that girl there, all filth and metal with no career or future prospects.”
Girl: “Actually, mum, she’s in my class and she works harder than most of us. She helps us all with our work if we get stuck and is really nice.”
(The mum was stunned into silence and I pretended not to have heard as I gave them their meal. The next day the girl asked if I wanted to go to a party with her!)
This Is Why We’re In A Recession, Part 39
(A woman and her friend come up to my register to pay for her rather large order. She hands me her credit card and continues talking to her friend.)
Me: “I’m sorry, miss, your card was declined.”
(She glares at me before returning to her friend.)
Me: “Let me try it again. Still coming back declined.”
Customer: “How can that be? Are you sure you’re doing it right?”
Me: “It’s hard to do it wrong. I’ll key it in manually. Maybe my reader is broken.”
(I manually key in the card; it gets declined again.)
Me: “I’m sorry miss, your card was declined again. Do you ha—”
Customer: *to friend* “You know? I spend more money in this place than this guy makes in a week.”
Me: “That may be the reason your credit card is maxed out.”
Related:
This Is Why We’re In A Recession, Part 38
This Is Why We’re In A Recession, Part 37
This Is Why We’re In A Recession, Part 36
Credit Us With Some Common Sense
(I am working as a receptionist and we’ve been getting a lot of telemarketers. Since the message is a recording, I had started by just ignoring it, but after receiving calls from them twice a day for two weeks, I wait through the long message to see if there was an option to opt out of the service. There is and I choose it. Instead of a message saying they’ll stop calling, I hear ringing and someone picks up.)
Telemarketer: “Hello, thank you for contacting [Credit Card Service]. How can I assist you?”
Me: “Um, I selected the recorded option for you to stop calling us. Is this the right line?”
Telemarketer: “Uh…”
Me: “You’ve been sending us recorded messages for weeks. We’re not interested in accepting credit cards. Please take us off your list.”
Telemarketer: “Are you sure? In this day and age, more people are going to have credit cards than cash. You shouldn’t limit yourself!”
Me: “We are a law office that deals with bankruptcy cases. Most of our clients are already not paying off their credit cards. Why would we want to add OURSELVES to that list?”
Telemarketer: *long pause*
Me: “Please take us off your list.”
Telemarketer: “All right, ma’am. Have a nice day!” *click*
The Girl Who Played With Hellfire
(I’m the customer in this story. I’m a tourist in Stockholm looking for a book for my boyfriend at the time, who is learning Swedish. I don’t speak a word of it. I see a bookstore and just wander in.)
Me: “Hi there. I’m looking for a Swedish book that has something to do with crime. Could you help me with that?”
Clerk: *looks at me dumbfounded* “Uhm. What was that?”
Me: “You know. Something thrilling and exciting ?”
Clerk: “You do realise this is a Catholic book store and we only carry books on religion, right?”
Themes and plugins • Re: Larger Dilbert image plugin
I'm using this url: http://feed.dilbert.com/dilbert/daily_strip also there's I think http://dilbert.com/feed which should work too
Statistics: Posted by fox — 28 Jan 2015, 17:52
Help, My Friend Won't Stop Having Fibromyalgia At Me!
Carolyn Hax, 10 Feb 2010:
Dear Carolyn: One of my friends has had fibromyalgia for the past year. It makes me sad, and so I like to find alternative treatments and cures and tell her about them. She’s gotten really annoyed with me for doing this, but I am only trying to help and I think she should be more willing to listen to what I’ve found. She has a doctor she sees regularly and takes medication, but I don’t know why she brushes it off when I give her my advice. I feel really unappreciated and am starting to wonder if she even wants to feel better. – California
Dear California,
Your friend has put you in a terrible situation, without apparent regard for the degree of injury here. Sure, she lives with a painful, chronic medical condition that affects her ability to participate in the world and yadda yadda yadda, but you feel sad and unappreciated. Where, I ask you, is justice?
Just because your friend manages her condition with the assistance of medication and a trusted medical professional of her choosing doesn’t mean she’s getting the best care available to her, which is to say, the care recommended to her by a person who can use Google.
The bare fact is that your friend’s fibromyalgia is, fundamentally, about you. On the surface, that may seem counterintuitive–it may seem like your friend’s medical condition is solely her business, and that the management thereof is something she alone is entitled to, but that completely erases you, a person who read a thing about gluten one time, from the equation. And that isn’t fair–indeed, it’s even less fair than having fibromyalgia, which your friend could easily not have if she only read those 45 articles you just forwarded her from WebMD.
Why would your friend brush off advice–advice you heard from not one, but probably TWO yoga teachers–about managing her medical care just because she feels more comfortable treating her condition in the manner of her own personal choosing? It’s logically because she does not want to feel better, which is a direct attack on you, personally, the individual in this situation with the heaviest possible burden to bear.
If you stopped advising your friend about the miracle cures available according to pamphlets you picked up outside Whole Foods, who knows what might happen? She might continue to make the decisions that she feels are best for her own health, and you’ll be left with no one’s medical care to aggressively manage without their consent, an unimaginable travesty.
But the sorry truth is that we cannot fix everyone, can we?
January 03, 2015
See you at AEA, Bostonoids!