• 3 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • It wasn’t exactly unexpected, but I didn’t expect it, if that makes sense. I was working at the call center of an insurance company on election night in 2016, and my team was half people from Connecticut in office and half remote people from non-Chicagoland Illinois, politically divided exactly as you’d expect. My shift went 13-23:30 EST, and the team chat was trying to be somewhat non political, but it was tough.

    When I went into work, it seemed like Hillary would win, but throughout our shift, my coworkers and I kept getting chirps about new states being counted while the office slowly emptied (most people in office were on core hours, so by 19, we were the only ones left, including cleaning crews). When the first firm-ish numbers came in, one of our remote team members just spammed the chat with a bunch of terrible r/thedonald memes and there was an audible groan from the group.

    I didn’t like Clinton, but I was certain she’d win, because I was pretty sheltered in a New England state. Hearing that trump won felt like finding out your foundation is full of mold. I don’t know how else to describe it, except that I was certain we’d choose the “chicken that’ll do” (I know that was a spoof from the democratic debate, but it feels on brand for her whole deal).





  • The best unexpected“perk” of a job I’ve ever had was at a restaurant where we served a beet salad. Twice a week, the kitchen would cook and mandoline the beets, then let them dry off a little on baking sheets. The chef was incredibly annoyed that I would regularly steal something that literally left me red-handed, but they were too good to resist.




  • I’m an adult learner of a foreign language, and I wasn’t able to read for fun until I had finished three semesters of grad school in (and on) the language. Before that, my reading level was so low that kids books for that level weren’t interesting (I was actually really excited to try out the Percy Jackson series, because I missed it the first time in English, but it was way too complicated).

    It’s an edge case, I’ll grant you, but I would have loved something like this at that reading level. I would have preferred to pay a real person to do it so as not to lose out on important context and make sure the wording wasn’t weird, but I didn’t find anyone willing to do it