caledoniaseries:

reyn-lethran:

buddha-buddy-the-beardie:

rockatransky:

on occasion, i browse the clearance racks at overpriced hipster-y boutiques cause from time to time you can find amazing deals, but being in Rich People Places always makes me a little nervous– and today when i was picking up a layaway from one of these shops, my nerves resulted in a story the shopkeepers are probably gonna be telling for quite a while.

i’d just come from the feed store for lizard food (ie: bugs), and it was like 95F out so they were slowly being smothered to death in my backpack. so when the clerk, who i’d overheard was only on her second day working there, gave me my fancy sundress in a bag way too big for it, i pulled out two dozen crickets in a plastic bag and a tub full of mealworms from my pack and set them gently on the bag so they could breathe better till i got home.

this girl’s eyes go wide and she looks imploringly back at the equally startled-looking manager helping her through the transaction, and i realize that this might look a little weird to folks who aren’t reptile keepers. so, instead of doing the logical thing and explaining that i’m feeding leopard geckos, i sorta chuckled and shrugged apologetically, and just said “dinner, y’know?”

for the briefest of moments, there was an awkward silence so sweaty and suffocating you could drown in it, and then, in true daytime comedy fashion,

the fucking crickets started chirping.

so i guess i’m never going back there ever again.

This is gold.

We once kept a pet lizard who ate live crickets or locusts at different points of her life. The only issue is that I am from a tiny Scottish island so we had to order them in by mail.

When we went away on holiday our neighbours would collect the locusts for us and feed our lizard.

So we’re away for Christmas and at the time we were ordering locusts from a shop on ebay. We get a phone call from said neighbour who tells us that instead of 500 locusts we have received 5000 crickets. Said crickets have eaten their way out of the plastic sack and have escaped into our kitchen.

Through some kind of monumental effort our neighbour and her son manage to seal the bag and recapture the crickets. They call us and we decide the best thing to do is return to sender. Our lizard got picky and would no longer eat crickets at this stage of her life so they were useless to us.

Next day or so we get another phone call. Apparently these crickets had once again eaten their way out of their confines. This time they escaped from the post van to descend like some kind of biblical plague on our local airport. They had to close while an exterminator was contacted.

My father calls the airport to apologise. However, at the time he was the editor of the local newspaper. Also, the airport did not know that the crickets were ours. So their reaction was to say “oh no please don’t print this story”. He explained the situation and did not put it in the paper.

@thebibliosphere

jumpingjacktrash:

brunhiddensmusings:

mediaeval-muse:

batmanisagatewaydrug:

batmanisagatewaydrug:

so my campus is currently hosting an ENORMOUS conference of scholars who study medieval history. they’ve been completely flooding the tiny cafe where I work and drinking our coffee faster than we can make it, but the good news is that they provide some PRIME people watching, including: 

• the fact that all of their name tags include pronouns so that I won’t feel bad assuming anyone’s gender in this post
• the woman RANTING about one of her colleagues on the following grounds: “he thinks he understands it from some class he took in 1996! FUCK OFF, TOM.”
• the man who was loudly and earnestly discussing the “influence of the Harry Potter fandom on our modern political discourse” while he got a soda 
• before he was out the door he’d switched topics to his preferred methods for teaching students about elves 
• the two nice extremely polite young British lads who I could not tell apart to save my life. their name tags indicated that they were apparently not twins, but cloning does not seem impossible.
• the sheer number of people graciously volunteering to buy lunch for people they’ve just met 
• an unexpected number of very handsome soft butch women involved in medieval studies. I am bisexual and weak.
• the guy in the flannel shirt who had the coldest, softest, most feminine hands I’ve ever encountered. I fell in love with him for a good 60 seconds. I am bisexual and weak.
• people who aren’t from America being cheerfully confused by our money, including my favorite, a Canadian woman who told me “I’m slow with American money because it’s all the same color.”
• I’ve learned that people who aren’t going to be in the country for more than a few days don’t give a SHIT about their change and will toss all of it in the take a penny/leave a penny jar. I collected so many quarters, y’all.
• also a nice British woman called it the penny pot, which is the cutest shit I’ve ever heard and absolutely its new name.
• just in general the EXTREMELY good grace and patience with which everyone accepted that we only have 2 cashiers and that it takes about seven minutes to make more coffee.
• SEVERAL times after I apologized for the coffee wait (because this is customer service and minor inconveniences mean we have to grovel) the response was ‘lmao no worries this just means I get a fresh pot’
• a woman approached me to day with a fucking enamel pin of that old illustration of a nun gathering dicks from a tree (you know the one) and I said immediately “oh my god, is that a pin of the penis tree?” and she looked stoked and said “yes it is the penis tree! you’re only the second person to recognize it!” what kind of boring ass medieval scholars has she been hanging with???? she was probably so fucking excited to finally have company where she could wear that pin and nobody said anything??? rude.
• you know, this one

I have more:

• every single person who said “cheers” when I gave them their change.
• the painfully hip young man who was dressed entirely in standard academic business casual EXCEPT FOR his shiny silver doc martens. 
• me: “you boots are amazing.”
• him: “!!!! thank you!”
• the man who walked in, spotted the selection of high octane energy drinks, and nearly cried with relief. when he came to the register to pay for what was probably enough caffeine to kill a horse he looked me dead in the eye and said cheerfully “thanks, I’m jet lagged as shit and I can’t be expected to function right now.”
• the dude who overheard my friend Austin listening to Florence and the Machine, started chatting with him about it, and asked him out on a date
• I sold a hot dog to An Actual Nun

I love my fellow medievalists so much ❤

theres not one of them who picked that major for any reason other then they wanted to have fun and be cool

reblogging this so i have it in my ‘for later’ tag in case i can dig up my aunt’s email to send it to her. she is a history professor specializing in medieval stuffs and will Understand.

hunkish:

so we have these cookie jars that sit on top of the cupboard right. we’ve had them for years. you can record yourself saying something so when you take the lid off you it will make a noise so you can hear if someone is stealing your cookies or something anyway anyway we have 3 of them. a pig, a cow, and an owl. now i was left alone one day. mum and dad at work, my brother at school and my sister at her boyfriends house. so i had a thought. what if i recorded myself screaming? so i did. in all 3 of them. all 3 different screams too. one was an excited shriek, one was a terrified scream, and one was a long shout. these cookie jars recorded up to 15 seconds, so i took FULL ADVANTAGE of that. now…here’s the thing…i did that almost 3 years ago. and these cookie jars have been sitting on top of the cupboard collecting dust.

until today.

mum’s painting the kitchen, so she had to take everything off the top of the cupboard. and uh…you know how battery powered things…start dying? they……slowly run out of juice? she asked me to check inside one of the jars. the pig, to be exact. and…the pig was the terrified scream. i unsuspectingly opened the jar and as the lid came off the jar, i remembered what i did. but i didn’t remember in time, because in that next second, a fucking demon cry sounded from this Almost Dead Battery Powered Pig Cookie Jar. it was a sound i never want to hear again. everyone ran into the kitchen to see what that god awful sound was and i just stood there, holding this satanic wailing pig. i shut my eyes, and waited the full 15 seconds, until it was silent, before turning to my mum and handed her the pig, and then leaving the kitchen.

i’ll admit i’ve done some dumb things in my life, but nothing could’ve prepared me for the sound i heard today.

feynites:

prokopetz:

I just got one of those door-to-door evangelists, and I’ve gotta admit I kind of feel sorry for them – their pitch is, like, hilariously ineffective because they just don’t seem to realise that most folks have no point of reference on what they’re selling. It’s like watching someone try to convince people that they should play Pokémon, except they’re operating under the unexamined assumption that everyone everywhere is already familiar with the basics and just can’t decide which generation is best, so they’re standing there banging on about the finer points of the type matchup grid to an audience whose knowledge of and interest in the franchise begins and ends with “the monster goes in the ball”.

I once completely stumped an evangelist when I was a kid because he asked me if I knew who Jesus was, and I said ‘no’.

“No?” the poor dude repeated, looking dubiously at his companion.

Me being myself, I immediately doubled-down.

“No,” I repeated. “Who’s Jesus?”

This summoned up a long silence, followed by the evangelists asking to speak to my mother or father.

“They’re not here,” I said. Technically also a lie, but my father was sleeping from working nights, and I wasn’t going to wake him up for this.

“Well… um… so Jesus… Jesus Christ? Our Lord and Saviour, Who is the Son of God?” the chatty evangelist tried, looking at me like I was some kind of alien puzzle.

“You mean Hercules?” I responded, for some reason. I still don’t know why.

Another long silence. We were clearly off-script. The chatty evangelist started trying to go through the ‘died for your sins’ spiel, and for some reason, all I could think to do was roll with the angle that I was legitimately unfamiliar with even the concept of Jesus, and had somehow reached the age of nine or ten with only a thorough education on Greek Mythology to serve me in a religious context.

I think the second guy was well aware that I was full of shit, because he kept covering his mouth like he was going to laugh, but the first guy was just caught somewhere between horror and a weird kind of excitement. Like he’d been waiting to finally meet someone who didn’t know ANYTHING about Jesus, just so he could be the first to explain the whole Christianity deal.

Anyways long story short I ended up just trying to tell them all about the Trials of Hercules, like we were just exchanging fun facts we knew about demigods, while the first guy was just adamantly trying to be like ‘no that stuff is made up, but the Jesus stuff is true’, until his friend finally was just like ‘thank you have a good day’ and closed the door and made him leave.

glumshoe:

My dad used to work at an interactive history park in Indiana as an 1800’s reenactor and craftsman. Part of his job included apprenticing the blacksmith and creating iron nails. Park tourists would walk between different demonstrations of historical lifestyles and crafts, and he would speak to them as though he were a young blacksmith in 1820 and they were time-travelers.

Tourists often like to play smart, trying to catch reenactors up and get them to break character. It can get pretty obnoxious, but they’re trained to stay calm and indulgent. One day, my father was busy making iron nails and one woman scoffed and said, mockingly, “I’m pretty sure they didn’t have nails back then!”

My dad looked up at her. “Ma’am,” he said, “They didn’t screw Jesus to the cross.”

Apparently she reported him to the museum for being crass.

sodomymcscurvylegs:

Story Time: in 2012, when I still lived in Florida, I used to work for a credit union, and I had the absolute worst manager and assistant manager. They were sloppy, lazy, and offloaded their work onto other people. No biggie; I’m grown and I can handle my job and not stress because I’m damned good at it. Problem: the manager and assistant manager, who happened to be best friends in real life, also happen to be very, very conservative older women. I’m talking like, hardcore conservative Christians, the kind who are not very good people and are very unlike Christ. I don’t make it a point to tell people I work with my business because when you work, you’re busy and you don’t want to burden other people, right? At least, I don’t. Subject of my love life comes up after a while of me staying in my lane, and I’m also not a liar, so I casually mention that I happen to be gay and I’m dating someone at the time.

The change in my managers was almost immediate. From that point on they tried their utmost to make my life miserable, but I wasn’t going to break. Fast forward about a month after this mess and one of the tellers, Tanika, and I have become really good friends, and she pulls me aside one Monday morning to tell me that she overheard the manager and assistant manager talking about firing me, and she didn’t want to get too involved, but she didn’t think it was fair so she wnated to give me a headsup. Here’s the best part: these asshats are SO lazy that they literally say – or so Tanika tells me- that they’ll wait for the end of the week to do it, because otherwise they would have no one to cover my Wednesday shift, and they’d have to sit on the teller line, and no siree Bob, they’re too good for that! Too important! Too. Fucking. Lazy.

Immediately I type up a two week notice at my station, print that shit out, and take it to that sloppy ass manager in her sloppy ass office. They have no receipts on me, but these people will find anything and use it to get rid of you if they can, and I’m not having a forcible termination on my record and dealing with how that will look to future employers. Keep in mind that I’m not supposed to know that they’re planning on firing me, and I’ve done my homework on company policy about two week notices (they had just changed it in January, and it was February). I give her the paper, sit in front of her, tell her some cock and bull story about needing more time for school. She looks upset, tells me to leave the letter, and go back to my station. I pull out a second copy of the letter and say: “Sure! But, first, I need your signature on this one, which is my copy of the two week notice.” Her face was a Goddamned mask at this point, but I could tell she was burning up inside. She’s trapped; she has to either sign it and pretend everything is fine, or she refuses and I go in on her for her “suspicious behavior” and call her higher ups. She signs my copy. I go back and finish my day.

Day ends and the assistant manager comes to me and tells me they have spoken to the president of the credit union and they have decided to terminate me anyway. Tells me I need to turn in my drawer and vault keys immediately and leave the premises. I refuse; “I’m not leaving until we count my drawer down together, I have a printed and signed copy of my balance, and you have signed paperwork confirming that I have given you all keys back.” She has no choice. I walk out with all necessary paperwork, get home, and immediately email the credit union president telling him what happened and how I think it’s utterly unprofessional for an employer to behave this way. He calls me the next day to my personal phone, and tells me the manager and assistant manager both told him I had quit on the spot and walked out without so much as a goodbye. I tell him I have a signed two week notice from the manager, because this sloppy ho can’t even keep own story together for five minutes. He tells me to photocopy it and email it to him. I do. Tells me he is going to have a discussion with the manager and call me back ASAP. Calls me back, apologizes profusely, and tells me that I shouldn’t have been treated as such, so he offers to pay me for the two weeks I had give notice for, ON TOP of an extra two weeks of compensation, and I didn’t even have to show up to the branch anymore. He was paying me a full month for no work to make up for the situation.

First paycheck comes in, and I put on my best outfit. Pick out the hottest shit in my closet that says: “I look incredible” but also “I have free time and you don’t” and “enjoy working here while I get paid while napping at the beach,” and I walk my happy little ass into that bank to pick up my paycheck like:

Happily greet the manager and assistant manager, who are both there like:

Say hello to my friend Tanika, who is at the teller line like:

Enjoying the fuck out of this show, right? Like, she can’t say it out loud, but she’s fucking living for this goddamned circus and it’s written all over her face!

I talk to her and loudly tell her how amazing it feels to have four weeks off with pay, and how polite and nice the bank president is. 

Then I walk my happy little ass out of the bank like:

But not before saying bye to the manager and assistant manager and reminding them that I’ll be back in two weeks to pick up my next check, “probably right before I head to Key Largo for the weekend.” 

…and that’s the story of how I once absolutely wrecked two people who thought they could use their positions of power to come for me unfairly, and a story I’ll be telling my grandchildren so they know, as grandpa knew on one February morning of 2012, that you take bullshit from absolutely no one.