Remember if you’re out at a store and someone says “This is a robbery” you can say “no it’s not” and then the robber will leave because theyre a robber and this is no longer a robbery .
You can not just say this without dropping the whole story
Ok so,
My dads coworker is at the front and this man comes Up and hands him a document.
The coworker took a Look at the document and while he couldn’t read the things written by Hand, because he wasn’t wearing his glases, he did notice the Logo of a different Bank so he’s like:
“Oh, sorry sir you can’t do that here! You have to go to the other Bank for this :)”
The man, visibly confused leaves, but dosen’t take the document with him.
The coworker, now just as confused as the Guy actually Takes Out his glases and reads the hand written part:
This is a robbery
Can you imagine trying to rob a god damn bank and the teller just cheerfully tells you to go rob the competition instead
I worked as a bank teller for several years and a few things you should know, bank robberies happen far more frequently than you might think and they come in waves. When a bank gets robbed a notification with photos goes to all banks in the area to be on the lookout. And there are two kinds of robbery, the pass the note and the takeover (what you see in movies).
So our branch had had a big takeover robbery as well as a note one. We also had a teller that had transferred to our branch after having been through a robbery. She was sweet as apple pie, hair up to the ceiling, southern lady who had just been through multiple robberies.
A guy comes in and hands her a folded note. Her immediate thought was “this guy needs to learn you don’t hand bank tellers notes. I am just not going to read that.” So how the conversation goes:
Her: how can I help you today?
Him: I’m here to get money
Her: great *hands him a withdrawal slip*
Him: all the information is on the paper
Her: to process the transaction I need you to put it on my piece of paper
SO HE FILLS OUT A WITHDRAWAL SLIP. Meanwhile another coworker is looking at her latest robbery notification email thinking the guy at the window looks a lot like him but the teller is calm and seems to be following standard transaction.
Back at the window the teller notices his name on the withdrawal slip doesn’t match the name on the account so she asks for his ID. He once again tells her all the relevant info is on the folded note but also gives her his ID and says it is his dad’s account. She tells him he will need a check from his dad to get cash. He grabs the note and leaves.
ONE HOUR LATER
Two new robbery notifications hit our emails, both branches within a mile. It is our guy. Teller goes over to the manager and sheepishly informs them he was here and the time. Security department is notified as are local police and the FBI. The FBI comes over believing that these poor tellers had been robbed for the 3rd time in a month and take her statement. She is completely embarrassed telling them how everything went down and he kept signaling to the note and telling her to read it but she was just done.
To which this FBI agent of 40 years who has been to the scene of many bank robberies (several at this branch in recent weeks) says: Ok. Let me see if I got this right, he came in fully intending to rob you. He gave you the note and you just…refused to read it? So he left and went to the bank literally across the street, handed them the exact same note, and they just handed him five grand? Do I have that correct?”
Her: I am so embarrassed
FBI: this is best thing I have ever heard. He even handed you his ID! Holy-
Her: I feel so dumb!
FBI: don’t! This is the best thing I have ever heard. This is going to be in training courses. (He sat there giddy for at least 5 more minutes)
[Image caption for juicedoesthings’ first addition: screenshot of tags by alonelybeemakingart reading: “#This is obviously a joke but #a coworker of my father kinda did this #(unintentionally) #And it worked.” End caption.]
i just love the concept of a narrative foil and by narrative foil I mean a soul mate and by soul mate I mean a mirror image, a photographic negative of your insides, whole in ways you are broken, broken in ways you are whole and by that I mean your fate and by that I mean the immovable object to your unstoppable force and by that I mean a star with which you are locked in fatal orbit, doomed to meet in cataclysmic fire with open arms. the person that makes you say I could love you everywhere in all the dark places that needed love, and I could love you so perfectly we would both be annihilated. the person that is your downfall because they’re your perfect shadow and you are the hero of this story but, hero, this was always going to happen, not because it’s written in the stars, but because you would choose it, again and again and again
Because why shouldn’t people later in life have a scene phase?
This may seem like a joke post, and I’ve headlined it in the most deliberately provocative way I could think of, but I’m completely serious.
We as a society seem to have decided that adults over about 30 are just Not Allowed to experiment with their identity or their personal presentation at all. If you come into work or a party suddenly looking considerably different, a lot of the time, people get upset about it - especially if you try something that does not “work”, in other people’s opinions.
At least some of this is directly tied to the fact that certain styles are considered “too young” for a certain phase of somebody’s life, and that it’s automatically “cringe” to not continuously broadcast awareness of the stage of the aging process you’re in (and, by extension, your waning relevance as an agent of social change, and your own proximity to your impending death).
And while there are certainly some elements of maturity that absolutely should be expected of adults (mostly related to not being an asshole or manipulating people significantly younger than oneself), harmlessly experimenting with personal presentation shouldn’t be one of those things.
So we’ve backed ourselves into a corner where you need a Profound Reason to decide to change things up in anything beyond a subtle way. It has gotten to the point where Halloween costume parties are basically our only relief valves on this particular societal pressure (and even those are considered somewhat immature), and where makeover reality TV shows exist specifically to lend structure to something people normally just can’t do.
It gets worse. You know what group of people really, really need the freedom to experiment with their personal presentation with as little judgment as possible?
Transgender people.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen people say about late transitioners, “I’d respect them more if they actually dressed their age”. And while I think it absolutely is possible to go to a place with that that’s genuinely creepy (i.e., actual predatory behavior), I think there’s an element of that criticism that’s inherently unfair, because we as a society have decided that experimenting with your presentation is something you’re expected to have finished when you’re an adolescent. And in the case of transgender people, that’s doubly unfair because they often just completely missed that window when they actually were that age.
Also like, autistic people often have idiosyncratic senses of fashion, and sometimes people just (for example) have a hobby doing period costuming.
There are lots of perfectly valid reasons to loosen these expectations, and I think we’re genuinely making life more miserable for everybody by not doing so.
Imagine if you met someone who can’t eat watermelon. Not that they’re allergicorunablesomehow, but they just haven’t figured out how to do that. So you’re like “what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon.”
And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they’d figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.
This goes back and forth. No, it’s not an emotional issue, they’re not afraidof the watermelon. They caneat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things (“it’s watery?” they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?
“It’sredon the inside?”
Wait, they’ve never seenthe inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they couldbite through the crust, there’s no way to get human jaws around it.
“Oh, you’re supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides.”
And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it’s easy, it’s ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there’s no way that someone just can’teat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.
If someone can’t do something after being repeatedly told to “just do it”, there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.
Yep.
https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.
If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. […]
I think my revised belief is that if you are stuck at how to get better at something, spend a little while assuming there’s just some trick to it you’ve missed. You can try to generate the trick yourself, but it’s probably easier to learn it by observing someone else being good at the thing, asking them some questions, and seeing if you have any lightbulb moment.
My fiance played the clarinet when he was in school. When he was first learning to play, he rented an instrument from the school to learn on. He was the last chair clarinet, had been for years, because he could not make notes that required the register key. For years, they kept making him do embrature exercises and he started to get a few notes, with lots of effort. Eventually he had to get private lessons to stay in band.
Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn’t been making much progress with the instrument.
When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school’s clarinet needed it’s pads replaced.
He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.
Sometimes you don’t need to brute force a problem. Sometimes your clarinet is just broken.
Not quite sure why the clarinet addition got me crying, but here you go people: just in case, let’s get you some new pads.
honestly junji ito was so right for everything about uzumaki. yes it’s about spirals in the sense of a downward decline. yes it’s about spirals in the sense of a vortex that pulls you in. yes it’s about spirals in the sense of hypnotic obsession. it’s about devoting yourself to a hobby or fixation at the cost of your health and sanity. it’s about become obsessed with someone to the point of losing regard for their personhood in your entitlement. it’s about phobias. it’s about seeking attention and losing yourself in your desire for fame. it’s about how fucked up it would be if people suddenly turned into snails.
this is the backgroundless version of an aphrodite i did back in january. personally i like this one more, im still trying to figure out how to background
