I have the exact same question about management. Several years back, my boss keeled over from a sudden heart attack (care flight, the works). As technical lead, the higher-ups put me in charge of our group and all his tasks for the 8 weeks he was out on medical leave. I handled all his tasks except for salary evaluations (those weren’t due during that time). Even hired an extra person while he was gone, with the blessing of the next management level. It honestly only took about 3 or 4 hours per week to do all the planning, budgeting and signoff tasks. I am completely in the dark about what managers do with the remaining 36 hours of their week. Our group met all their schedules during this period, but I must admit that no synergies were leveraged, going forward. Perhaps meeting the buzzword quotas consumes a lot of time. :rolleyes:
Mine is fairly simple: Is my sister gay? None of my darn business, but I’d sure like to know.
The City of Houston has a site showing Active Incidents for the Fire or Police Departments. Of course, many interesting details are missing! Maybe there’s one for your area.
My questions are, actually, my “business”–family mysteries. My grandmother was estranged from her sister. She said she “drank”–from my teetotal Grandma, that could have meant anything from falling-down alcoholism to the occasional glass of elderberry wine. She lost touch & asked the authorities to locate her; Great Aunt was in New Orleans & told Grandma never to try that again. Great Aunt had traveled, living in Baltimore a while; an Uncle stayed with her there. And she was into “the occult.” Nobody knows where or when she died.
Years later, somebody from my old neighborhood said he remembered my family–the one where twin girls had married twin boys. Investigation (with my Mother) reveals that Great Aunt was married to the stepbrother of my Grandfather (who died just as I was born.) I’d never known this; and even Mom wondered how my rather proper Grandma had met & married a fairly rough ex-sailor like Grandpa. Not that he was abusive, but he had tattoos!
Yes, I need to get into genealogy–hoping to find some interesting twigs & leaves.
I don’t consider it to be completely none of my business, but I still want to know what caused my niece’s death.
egad… I know someone who had that happen (I knew the husband, not the wife).
This was after she’d bailed on him once before, a few hours away from their destination wedding.
Last I heard, they were happily remarried and raising a family.
I’m curiously about what people think and feel in their minds, not thoughts and feelings that can easily be formed into words but the pre-verbal sensations of the mind. For example: what is it like to be a psychopath? They are not supposed to have any ability to empathize, to perceive others as being like them, to have any feelings of guilt, love, etc. What’s that like? Do you exist in some kind of vacuum where your thoughts have all the excitement and interest of computer code? What’s the mental experience like? People think serial killers are evil, I’m not sure they are human enough in their mental responses to be evil in the sense of someone who experiences joy and triumph when they harm others. But I just don’t know.
We all assume that because we have this tool of language that we understand each other, but I am just not sure it is true. One a less pathological level, I argue a lot with conservatives about how society should be ordered, and I often find myself wondering how they can be so indifferent to the fate of the poor in society. From the way they write they seem to have a healthy empathic sense, in fact, often seem to be reasonable, smart people, but they somehow don’t GET things in the same way I do. I’d love to have the chance to experience their mental processes, to understand exactly what the difference is between how they see things and how i do. Most of the arguments I have had with them, it is as if we are talking past each others, words maybe are not the right tool to get at the difference between us? I don’t know.
Basically, if I had telepathy I would be riding around in almost everyone’s brain, trying to see exactly how they work, how what they do and believe is colored by experience, emotion, etc. It would be a trip.
Sometimes I wonder what my cleaning lady thinks of me. I also know I might not want to know.
When I was a high school kid in grade 9, our class was asked to interview real-life scientists as a project. I asked my dad who would be interesting (he was a scientist himself, but interviewing my own dad would be lame) and he told me to ask an old semi-retired prof of his who was, as he said, “a real character”.
Well, I interviewed him, and it was intereting - he had a real gift for making science stuff exciting for teens, which is why my dad recommended him. After we got to talking about my dad, and all sorts of stuff. Somehow, he got on the topic of his experiences in WW2 as a sailor, in the merchant marine. Practically in tears, he confessed that he had killed a fellow sailor - allegedly, he punched him in the face when the sailor made a pass at him, and this knocked his head against a metal bulkhead; he thought the guy was dead, and tossed him over the side - at night, in the North Atlantic.
Needless to say, I was unhappy with hearing this revelation. I left as soon as I decently could, and told my dad everything. My dad said “oh yeah, he sometimes used to tell people that story. Nobody really believed it happened” - because he was, otherwise, a kind and gentle person who would not hurt a fly (other than in experiments). Everyone assumed for some reason that this was just his trauma from the war.
I wasn’t so sure. He certainly seemed to have a compulsion to confess to this. I got the impression that it was true, that he kept confessing out of guilt. Why would anyone make up such a story?
Anyway, I’d very much like to know if it was true or not - something I certainly will never know (the guy is long dead).
Let me give you one word of advice. Don’t ask. I was married to a Russian woman years ago and someone asked her. If looks and words could kill the entire room would be dead.
I’d like to know how my soon to be ex-wife can just walk away from two marriages and not seem to feel anything about it. I knew things weren’t all that great, but I thought it was just the kids and work. Then she tells me one day she doesn’t love me and walks out. She’s never told me why, will not talk about it, and refused to go to a counselor with me. She did the same exact thing to her first husband as I asked him. I just don’t get how you can do that and not seem to care one bit. I really hope she doesn’t do it again since we have two kids that will be involved yet again.
I snipped your post for effect, but this is a nice username/post combination.
This thread has reminded me of dozens maybe, and I also wonder about some of the others that have been posted, but these are the ones that stuck with me after reading the entire thread:
- I wonder about a woman I liked while I was in EOD school. There are literally dozens of people on facebook that share her name, and most of them don’t have any information or even a picture available to non-friends, so I have no way of knowing if one of them is her. I asked her out once or twice, and she told me, “Hon, I don’t date.” I just wonder if she felt any attraction for me whatsoever, or if she had had such a bad dating experience that no guy stood a chance at that point in time. Last time I bothered to look, a woman with her name was working at an AFB in California, but she was stationed in Georgia and originally from Ohio, so I don’t know.
- I’m absolutely terrified that he might find this post somehow, but I wonder if my brother is happy in his marriage. The rest of the family considers his wife to be quite passive-aggressive most of the time and downright unpleasant at others. They’re expecting now (my first niece or nephew, which I am genuinely excited about!), and as far as I can tell, he’s happy, but I don’t think he’s ever been as open about his emotions as I am, for example.
I want to know who is gay and who is straight. 
[gay man here]
I want to know if the really, really friendly worker at the Five Guys I went to a few months back was actually hitting on me. Because if he was, I’d like to be appropriately flattered. I’ve never been hit on by a guy before, and it sure seemed like he was flirting, at least.
I think some men need a neon sign. YES, he was hitting on you.
My understanding has always been that that means “Hon, I don’t date men.”
Another one. I’m really curious to know if the new-ish girl at work is a lesbian.
Off topic, but for some reason I always knew when a guy was hitting on me (for some reason I’ve always been gay bait) but never realized when a girl was hitting on me. As a straight guy, I would have gotten laid a lot more if I was a little more clued in about the girls.
Well, if girls hit on you the way this guy hit on Asi, trust me, you would know it. 
Mine are morbid too.
I had one friend who died a little while ago, and I suspect it was suicide but I didn’t want to ask at the funeral. It was kind of hinted at but nobody came out and said it and in fact I think nobody was entirely sure at the time because they were waiting on toxicology reports or something.
I also know of two other people who committed suicide and I have no idea why, but I sure am curious.
I’d like to know how Q.E.D. died. He was pretty young.
None of my business, obviously.
Well, I don’t know the man and obviously I can only guess, but about 10 years ago Keanu Reeves’ daughter was stillborn and his girlfriend was killed in a car accident a couple years after. That’s going to be hard on anyone. Also, he moved around a lot when he was growing up and that can really slant your perspective on things. I read somewhere that as an adult he lived in hotel rooms for a decade.
I can kind of relate. I lived in about about 25 different places prior to adulthood and in my last job I was staying in hotels 200 nights per year, for five years. I’ve really become quite detached from the idea of a “home” and I fail to develop any emotional attachment to where I might be living at the time. I’m at the point now where I really place no stock in where I live as long as I have a place to sleep, shower, and plug in my laptop. Hell, I’ve been sleeping on a couch for 18 months now, by choice. There is a bed in the next room but it really makes no difference to me. I don’t decorate or arrange. Literally, the only thing in my fridge at this moment is a jar of mustard and for cutlery/plateware I have one bowl and one spoon. That’s it. Kind of sad, really, but none of it really means anything to me.
But yea, I can see why he might be sad.