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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I think you’re right but for the wrong reasons - I think it would be an absolute net positive effect but I still think the lines should be drawn between policing and social work and healthcare issues. Fair warning, I’m from the UK which has it’s own issues with policing but nothing on the clusterfuck scale as it is across the pond.

    Sending police officers (and ambulance staff, maybe even coastguard - in the civilian sense, not the American branch of the military) to do two or four weeks of social work attachment would work wonders. It would provide a great insight into the difficulties and behaviours of those in social or mental crisis, and give more soft tools to recognise and resolve issues.

    That said, it shouldnt be policing agencies going to social work or mental health calls in the first place. People in crisis are often acting irrationally or unpredictably due to the very nature of the crisis they’re experiencing, and when a lethal weapon is an optional available to the responders, then you’ll have a less than spectacular outcome on occasions.

    Ideally, additional funding should be centered around social work and mental health teams - perhaps having first responders for both so you don’t have cops wading in with the best of intentions, and confronting something they aren’t the best people to be dealing with - where a mental health ambulance or a social work rapid response team would bring a welfare call to a far safer conclusion.

    I absolutely get that my view is very UK-skewed but if you keep putting armed cops into situations like that - then the public will get hurt, cops will get hurt, the taxpayer coughs up a fortune in legal costs … all of which could fund better ways to respond to the homeless, the stressed, the neurodiverse, and other non-criminal issues that people phone in with good intentions.


  • I’ve been threatening to do this for years. Irregular hours have meant that I’ve skipped this idea, and rugby. I guess I’d love to go just for the workout and for the extra circle of friends, but I don’t want to be wasting folks time when I’m not going to be able to make games consistently.

    I enjoyed playing roller hockey when I was younger and I know getting the skates back on after thirty years will be a challenge, maybe I’ll give this a go again.




  • In the late 90s, there were some monitors in our library that had some serious grounding problems. You could literally touch the screen with one finger, touch your victim with the other hand, and have your pal repeatedly turn the monitor off and on rapidly at the physical spring-loaded switch - and at some point, they’d get an uncomfortable-but-not-painful shock.

    Highly entertaining, guaranteed a bollocking, and after that it was back to the degaussing CHUNNNNNNNGUNGUNGUNG sound. Satisfying as fuck.



  • That’s beautiful. I love a bit of personal standards to fuck someone else’s day up.

    I typically change my responses on the form to Calibri if using MS Office. It’s not enough to pique anyone’s interest, but it’s different enough to spot what I’ve added to a form rather than the usual Arial additions if you’ve been told about it.

    Someone at my office tried to say I’d said something on a form when I hadn’t, and took great delight pointing out the slight difference in typeface on the field that wasn’t my edit.

    It’s satisfying as fuck coming back at someone with receipts.



  • A bit of both for me. Whenever I dropped a bollock in work or whereever, my head used to go down and I’d be waiting for the hairdryer treatment like I was waiting outside the headmaster’s office.

    Now, if some cockwomble decides to mass-email someone with a passive aggressive email about “could the person who…” and it’s quite clearly my mistake, I take great pleasure in absolutely owning it, smashing that reply-all button, and explaining in painful detail how yes it was my fuck up; yes I did do it with good intentions but hey things go sideways sometimes; and yes abso-fucking-lutely thank you for your shitty email that has had all the effect of a silent fart.

    I think the best part of adulting is that you can make no mistakes and still lose (yeah Picard boiiii), and realising that nobody’s going to care about it in a week’s time.


  • A colleague of mine is a nice bloke, but proper stuck in his ways.

    He’s done well for himself, lovely family, and has saved enough to treat them all to nice holidays across the world… but all he does is eat burger and chips while he’s there.

    He’s been across Route 66, been to Rome, Paris, and some of the Baltic states… even been on cruises to faraway places, but trying some of the amazing local cuisine is just a step too far for him.

    It’s wild. That said, he enjoys himself so good on him I guess.


  • Awesome. I am - at best, out of the loop in entertainment news: and at worst, culturally retarded - so I was sat at LCY with a colleague and he was pointing out famous chefs, golfers, public figures every five minutes.

    I was still trying to figure out how anyone affords either to eat or drink at the airport without being on business expenses.


  • For celeb-spotting and transit links: London City Airport. It’s nice being able to check your bags and fuck off into Stratford for a few hours. It’s super expensive though.

    For a chill experience: London Southend Airport. Not in London, but loads of seating, decent views across the tarmac, and loooaaads of room.

    For getting lost: Washington Dulles. Christ that place was designed by Stevie Wonder in a house fire. The sheer number of destinations is wonderous though fair play, a great place to feel like a tiny cog in a huge machine.







  • The chances of it being the filter were stupidly low, and I don’t think I ever had a case of the filter being at fault - but it was one of those potential issues that would make a customer look stupid (and £120 lighter) if BT tipped up and declared it a customer equipment fault.

    In newer homes (at the time), there were NTE faceplates that had a filter built it, with individual ports for telephone and for data telephony cables. They didn’t last long though. Maybe they were stupidly expensive in comparison, maybe BT could see the fibre future and stopped producing them.