I fucking love this post. It should be printed up and given to middle schoolers. Sage advice.
Oh! I have a story that only a little bit fits, but it’s great so I’m posting it.
A few years ago the SO and I went to the grocery store, and were walking towards the entrance. As we walked through the parking lot, we saw a car with two middle age women waiting while a car backed out so they could pull into the spot. As soon as the car backing out got clear, a car being driven by a cocky teenager flew up and drove into the spot; stealing the spot from the middle age women.
Unfortunately, in order to pull off this “badass” move, the car was going way too fast, and the cocky teenager rammed into the car in front of them, smashing it up pretty good. Of course, this paragon of human virtue tried to flee the scene, but the middle age women followed him. As he drove out of the lot, I heard them scream, “You tried to steal our spot, you dumb motherfucker, but we have your license number!!”
We went in to do our shopping, and when we came out, the two ladies were standing by the smashed car with it’s owner and a police car, happily giving all the info necessary to find the punk ass kid.
He really shouldn’t have stolen their spot.
Yeah, I can’t see how giving a story about cross dressing prostitutes to middle schoolers could go wrong.
Hey, they need to know who not to fuck with.
Also, :rolleyes: to you!
It’s a good time for kids to think about what kind of career they’d like to pursue, so they should be aware of their options.
Years ago I had gone into a bar with a friend to throw some darts. We were minding our own business when a woman we knew approaches us at started yelling at me.
A little backstory; this woman had a feud going with two of my friends. I really wasn’t in on it and didn’t much care. I was known as being easy to get along with; not the kickass type.
So this drunk woman is in my face and I’m pretty much ignoring her as best I can when she spits in my face.
I honestly don’t remember throwing the first punch, when the dancing was over I’d blacked both of her eyes. Other than the hair she’d pulled out, I didn’t have a mark on me.
I am not a badass; that was the only fight I’ve been in since I was in middle school. But don’t spit in my face.
I’ve got one. I was actually being a bit on the petty side but I think there is a lesson here. I was taking a graduate level course. The prof had been in this field for 50 to 60 years. There were no course handouts (or at the least very few, I forget). There were not text books. There were no specific reference books. It was an overview of a large field of information. You got almost all of your info from madly taking notes while you saw slide after slide in quick sucession. And it was often info dense material. An hour and half of that and you were wore out. Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed the course.
Well, us handfull of students have gathered a few hours before the test and are going over our homework problems and notes. I say something like “remember X has properties A and Y has properties B”. Well, another student gets all pissy and says “MY NOTES say X has B and Y has A”. I politely note that she could be wrong or I could be wrong. Hell, I don’t know whose right or wrong. Shit, I certainly could be wrong. She gets even more buttheaded (which is funny because she wasn’t no straight A genius (and neither was I). And given how hurriedly you had to take notes who knows? Hell, the other students didn’t even HAVE notes on that particular point (and ironically they didnt seem to care either way).
Well, this is bothering me and I WANT to know one way or the other. So, I walk my ass over the profs office and ask him. Turns out my notes are right (not that I cared about that, I just wanted the RIGHT answer). Then he implies that its a very good thing I asked.
I come back to the group and very strongly suggest that my notes were the correct ones and noted thats how I was going to answer any question regarding that.
Well, Little Miss Couldn’t Be Wrong came up about 5 to 10 points shorter than she could have on that particular test. I think everybody else got the hint. And thats how I roll in the academic hood beyotch.
The same thing happened to me one night. There was a sheriff’s deputy who witnessed it. The deputy pulled next to me and addressed me over his P.A.: “Sir, please follow me and pull in behind me when I stop this guy.” When I pulled behind the deputy, he came to my window and asked me if I was willing to be a witness if the guy contested his ticket in court. I said of course, and gave him my name, address, and phone number. I never got called, so I guess the guy paid his ticket. But it was a sweet feeling watching the guy get his comeuppance.
BG: I was 17 years old, very meek and mousy, and weighed about 98 lbs. Never been in an altercation in my life. /BG
You know when teenage boys get drunk and fight? Yeah. My first boyfriend and I were at someone’s house when I heard a strange noise outside. I looked over the balcony to see our friend (much bigger than my then-BF) with my then-BF against the wall, pounding the shit out of him. I saw red - I ran down the stairs in my sock feet, jumped on my friend’s back and started punching him as hard as I could in the head (you know how girls jump on a guy’s back when fighting them? I HAD to jump on his back to reach his head - he was a BIG GUY!!) My friend turned, looked at me and said “Back off, Juicy.” then punched me square in the face. I staggered back and the only reason I fell was because I slipped on some ice, but that made it look worse. Long story short: my friend ended up on his knees apologizing to me. The next day he showed up with a big black eye and said to my then-BF: “I think your ol’ lady did this!!”
To this day (21 years later) he and I are still friends.
So you ended up taking a guy who was probably otherwise a functioning member of society and completely destroyed his life? Yeah, that seems like a fair trade for the ding in your truck. And you’re even proud of it.
Your actions helped take an educated, employable man and made him into a homeless drunk. You go ahead and gloat all you want, but realize your actions cost society a lot more than his ever did.
Drunk drivers kill people. Fuck 'em.
It sounds like this guy was hardly an upstanding member of society in the first place.
I think your definition of “functioning member of society” is a little different from most other people’s definition.
This.
It’s the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not drive drunk, else thou shalt be fucked.
Amen.
.
Years ago one Halloween evening as I was driving home, I saw something that still makes my blood curdle with rage every time I think about it even today.
A couple of neighborhood boys had gotten hold of a black cat, which they were tossing repeatedly into the air and sometimes catching it and sometimes not. By the time I did an unscheduled and unrehearsed vehicular slide into the culdesac where the little bastards were, their eyes had gone three times their normal size.
I got out of the car, all majorly pissed-off, 5’10” of me and snarled, “give me that cat. NOW!" I was in radio then, so I had far better voice control than I do now, and I seriously suspect that what came out of me would probably have made Tony the Tiger proud (I’m a woman, BTW :D).
Then - dead lying through my teeth - I told them I knew exactly where they lived and if they ever, EVER mistreated another animal on my watch I would make very sure the local constabulary would be paying their parents a visit AND I would personally be filing animal cruelty charges against their nasty little asses, parents be damned.
I laid it on thick and heavy and probably sounded like the end of the world on two legs. I sincerely, deeply, truly, hope that I did and that I scarred the little shits for life. Hopefully neither of them ever did something so irresponsibly cruel again. Exactly that kind of behavior is why shelters and other animal rescue outfits don’t let black cats out of their protection during October.
To their credit, they instantly handed me the cat, not much past kitten stage, and bolted like I’d set fire to them. Wish I had… I have no idea if the animal belonged to either of them, and frankly at that point, I didn’t care. The little guy came home with me, there and then. Who knows what might have happened to that cat if I hadn’t spotted what they were doing – literally out of the corner of my eye.
Spooky, as we ended up naming him, fortunately was undamaged, if rather spazzed out by his mistreatment. He recovered without mishap and lived with us for some time, and then when my sister got married, she took him with her to her new home. He lived to a ripe old age, lucky boy.
I’m proud of him, too.
How’d you conclude the drunk driver was “probably otherwise a functioning member of society?”
According to pullin:
-The drunk driver ended up getting his wages garnished, presumably because he was unwilling or unable to pay; productive members of society meet their financial obligations.
-the drunk driver’s “financial house of cards” collapsed. IOW, he was living beyond his means, and the consequences of his own decision to drive drunk put him into crisis.
-the drunk driver’s wife left him, having had enough of his shit. Most people wouldn’t choose to leave their spouse over a single incidence of driving drunk; it seems likely he was a habitual drunk driver, a habitual drunk, or otherwise just a shitty husband.
If society is going to punish someone, it’s going to cost us money to do so. Frankly, I think this case turned out pretty well. If he’s living under a bridge, that’s a pretty low cost to society; the alterntative is imprisonment, which is pretty darned expensive to society.
This is really mild but it’s so out of my comfort zone that it’s the only time I ever really did anything of the sort. Last year I was working in the back yard when I heard the sound of tin cans hitting the street and laughter. I went around to the front and saw two empty Sprite cans on the sidewalk next to my daughter’s boyfriend’s car, and two people walking away down the street. Now, this boyfriend was a loser, but that’s another story… I didn’t want that sort of thing starting up. So after thinking things over for awhile, I took the cans, got in the car, and headed down the street. I soon overtook the two young leaders of tomorrow, who were on the opposite side of the street walking away from me. I kind of swooped up next to them, screeched to a halt and said, “Hey guys, what’s the deal with the Sprite cans?” They were taken aback… they insisted the cans were already there and they just kicked them, but they also offered to dispose of them for me, obviously wanting to avoid trouble. So that one turned out OK.
I wrote up an elaborate defense proving that drunk drivers contribute more to society than any other class of person. I was astonished! But before I could post it and clinch this argument, some lousy drunk driver ran over my USB hub, and it was lost forever.
So there I was, driving drunk, and some moron had his USB hub out on the sidewalk. I ran over that fucker!
No one messes with me.
Doing a Corporate Valuation course, one of the projects was to form teams, and, over the course of a week or two, negotiate the strike price for an IPO with another team. My team was the Bank, the other team the Corp. The goal for the bank is to get the lowest price possible, the corp, the highest price. In any case, the lowest score goes to any group who can’t make a deal.
First meeting, we play a little footsie over who will give their estimate first, so our team proposes to write both numbers down and pass them across. The other team says “no, you’re the bank, you work for us, you’re the experts, give us a number” So we lowball them. They act all outraged and storm out. A couple of minutes later they come back, we have some fruitless discussion and one of them gives us his card to call later. My teammate tears the card up in front of him and throws it in the trash.
Fast forward to the class where we hand in our results, we have two documents in hand, one with “no deal” and one with a blank space. We place the “no deal” document on the teacher’s desk before the class starts and wait. They come up to us and ask to talk in the hall, we hammer out a deal right quick, got ourselves an A.