• 5 Posts
  • 502 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: October 10th, 2023

help-circle



  • Nah. I never cared much for my dad. He was always someone for me to look at and think “this is what I don’t want to be” growing up. We were almost carbon copies, except I understood what ADHD meant. Impulse control wasn’t a concept my dad ever embraced.

    Imagine the worst behaviors of a hyperactive socially awkward teen and scale them up to a 45 year old man with disposable income. I saw him drop $1500 on a Damascus folding knife only to figure out minutes later that now his wife’s car payment would bounce, all while loudly complaining about how expensive it is to come out to CA even though he did every other year anyways. Not to see me, his only biological child, but to go camping at a specific campground he almost died at as a teen being stupid on a motorcycle.

    The best one was he won box seats to the last 49er game at candlestick park through some radio contest. Whole big thing all expenses paid for 3 people. Did he bring his wife? Did he bring his kids, adopted or biological? No. He brought his mother, who hated his kids, and his stepfather, who hated him. Lmfao

    Sorry bastard ended up shooting himself. Cold as it is, best thing I ever got from the man was an excuse not to work one day of the year. I always take the day to do something for me and something for a random stranger. He’d hate that shit.



  • Had a somewhat similar experience back in my high-school days some 15 years ago.

    I went to a specialized school for kids with learning disabilities (ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, visual and auditory processing disorders, etc). I was an exceptionally smart kid doing college level work across the board, but i never did homework. Why bother? I struggled with organization, but i took every test they put in front of me and blew it out of the water, so I clearly understood the material.

    With this understood, I was still not allowed to walk graduation with my classmates due to a “failure” to turn in an English research paper that was mandatory for graduation. My family had come out to watch me graduate from hundreds of miles away. I was mortified, especially because I was DAMN sure I turned that paper in multiple times (you were required to show drafts, I had done a first draft, a revision, and a polish). SOMEHOW, those papers never made it to the English teacher according to the school. But don’t worry! I could take a $3500 summer class to finish the credit and still get a GED!

    Well my dad, who drove out to CA from Texas, could smell the fish once he saw the net. He knew i almost never turned in homework, but I’d never fully blown off an entire assignment before. So he arranged a visit to see the school before he agreed to the summer courses. While he was there (the first Monday after the graduation ceremony none of us got to attend) he physically broke into the English Teachers desk and went through the papers. Tiny school, so there were only 20 students in my graduating class. Not exactly a gigantic number of students to sift through.

    Long story short, while the school was freaking out about the 6 foot 5 troll rummaging through school property, he managed to find my paper. All three drafts of my paper, in fact. Before the school could get around to figuring out they should call the cops, my dad took my paper to the Dean and the school director and asked extremely pointed questions about exactly why we were being recommended a summer course to finish up my credits.

    We were treated to a plethora of excuses and apologies, from the English teacher misplacing them to how their first graduating class had been “so hectic” that I just fell through the cracks. Again, 20 students in that graduating class. Between grades 9-12 and staff the entire program was less than 100 people. Really, what’s losing track of one person out of 100?

    My dad graciously agreed not to hunt down and eat anyone from the school in exchange for a full diploma. We reported them to the state, but as a charter school, it was basically a “private” institution and they could do whatever they wanted as long as they met the accreditation requirements.

    We ended up just spreading what happened through word of mouth in the parent network. The Dean quickly found new work at a different charter program and the administration board was voted/bought out by the parents of a girl in the grade behind mine. Heard some years later that her dad ran the entire charter into the ground in 3 or 4 years and the charter ended up closing down and reopening in a new city. Also found out our history professor ended up spending some 8 years in a Thai prison for the kinda shit that gets you on government watch lists even when you come back to the US. Bunch of us former students got some very curious calls about him from some very serious federal people about 10 years after graduating.

    All in all, I’d still spit blood on most of the staff involved some 15 years later. That kinda hurt never really goes away as a kid. If I were you, I’d push the teacher for a hand written apology or a zoom call face to face thing. Accusing a kid of not doing something in a serious situation isn’t a whoopsie that just gets shrugged off. That’s shit they carry with them for a long, long time.


  • Yes and no. The gravity of the sun will attract the rocket, but there are other things out in space besides the sun.

    The problem then is other planets will start whipping the garbage rocket around who knows where. Could even come back around and smash into earth. Same problem with the sun, actually. It’s quite hard to hit something that’s that big when we’re this far away. If you miss even a fraction of a decimal of a degree, the trash rocket will swing around and you’re back to planetary hot potato.

    It’s easier to sling the rocket past the south or north pole at a right angle to the solar plane. Up or down it’ll either keep going till it’s another suns problem or it joins the Oort cloud, which is kinda like a giant trash dump for everything that didn’t make it into our solar system when the sun formed.











  • Your math ain’t mathing.

    The stereotypical “9 to 5” is an 8 hour shift with a paid hour “lunch break”. This includes two 10-15 minute breaks, which are also paid. You come to work at 9, do work, take breaks, take lunch, and then leave at 5. That’s 8 hours.

    My job is 8 to 430. I come in at 8, work till 12, then I have a half hour unpaid lunch. The unpaid lunch means I cannot be required to stay on site, which can happen with a paid lunch. Then from 1230 to 430 I work until I go home. There are two 10 minute paid breaks in there. I work 8 hours total in an 8.5 hour work day.