I had my school bus broken into one time. I called the police department, explained the situation, and asked the dispatcher if they could send an officer to make a report. This is how the rest of the conversation went:
"Nah."
"Nah?"
"Yeah, nah." click
I went to Walmart once because at the time it was the only grocery store in the area that carried plantains. I have honestly never shopped anywhere else where I felt that level of malevolence from the employees. It was as if they were all working there only because their children were being held hostage and tortured and they were right on the cusp of deciding they didn't really love their children that much. I thought I was close to getting stabbed by one of them, and I hadn't even asked anybody for help finding anything.
What really blows my mind though is why anyone shops at Target. At least stuff at Walmart is cheap, but Target is ridiculously expensive while still being shit, especially the grocery department.
On the flip side, I was at the Shop-Rite self checkout one time, and every time I put something into my own bags I got the "unscanned item" alert. I kept looking over at the employee in charge of the checkout area with an enraged face and he would clear the alert and look apologetic. After like the tenth time this happened, I finally realized it was happening because I wasn't actually scanning anything -- I was just taking shit from my cart and putting it right into my bags. I have no idea why I had this brain fart all of a sudden, but I suppose I could have gotten a bunch of free groceries if I hadn't apologized to the dude and put everything back in my cart and scanned it properly.
My dad died last year, and when I called the funeral home we'd picked out for him to come and pick up his body, the answering service was AI. It had the fake typing and background noises, and when I said dad's name the AI read it back to me for confirmation as "Bob common name, Smith common name". Like WTF? I was pretty much in shock from this and too flummoxed to tell it to fuck off and call a different funeral home. However mad you think this would make you in that situation, trust me it was worse.
I don't think it's fraud per se. The dates for the services are all from when he was still alive.
My dad went into hospice a year ago and died less than a week later. We keep getting letters from Medicare indicating that his hospice program keeps submitting bills for services to them.
I'm a school bus driver myself. We're unionized (Teamsters) and the district operates its own buses. We make about $34 an hour and get subsidized health insurance and a small pension (after 10 years) as well. A neighboring district privatized their school bus service a few years ago; their drivers make $22 an hour with no benefits at all, their accident rate is 4X ours and the drivers keep getting busted for positive drug tests and drunk driving, and their operating costs (as measured per student/per mile transported) went up about 50%.
It is such an absolute no-brainer to realize that the only advantage of privatizing a service like this is to put money into the pockets of the bus service owners (as well as the officials and school board members that they bribe), and the disadvantages are literally every possible other aspect of the deal. And yet surprise surprise my district is discussing privatization to "save money". It doesn't help that our newly-hired transportation director is a member of the family that owns the largest private bus service in the area.
My dissertation chair wrote a book partially on this subject. He pointed out that the Qamranites (like John the Baptist) preached that everything in the holy land belonged to god and nothing belonged to caesar. In that vein, "render unto caesar that which is caesar's and render unto god that which is god's" translates to "fuck caesar". Personally I have no dog in the fight, but this interpretation is a lot more fun.
I just don’t understand what they stand to lose by admitting that humans have demonstrably increased the global temperatures.
Cars.
C'mon now, we haven't overthrown the governments of every country in this continent. I think.
Make A Grave Already
Utter rubbish. They're acting like no bands have keyboardists any more.