I had what turned out to be a dangerous walking pneumonia, for a week, but the manager at Burger King wouldn’t let me off. My breathing was very loud and ragged. I was coughing on and breathing on the food.
I wasn’t allowed to leave. I was told if i called out, I was fired.
So Im shuffling around wheezing loudly swaying with my high fever as I work drive thru by myself, and a paramedic walked in to order dinner.
He goes ballistic, My friends. He demands to see the Manager. he chews him out at the top of his lungs so the whole restaurant can here. Guys working the back came up to watch. Customers staring and thinking hard about the infectious food they were eating. Dude losing his shit about how infectious I was and all the people management had been endangering for days judging from my breathing and I needed to be home on antibiotics RIGHT NOW and the health Department was going to hear about this.
I went home. i got the week off. Didn’t even need a doctor’s note.
Getting friends management doesn’t know to do this WOULD WORK.
Same manager not letting me take my influenza home a year later despite repeated vomiting? Threw up in front of customers. Customers demanded money back and started threatening the manager with lawsuits.
I got to go home and got time off until I stopped vomitting.
GO AHEAD and THROW UP in front of Customers. THEY will Complain.
Don’t be shy.
They are supposed to let you stay home when you are sick. Stop protecting management. (Hiding how sick you are protects management). They are abusing you. Let them reap what they sow.
i don’t really know how to relay the horrors that palestinians are describing first-hand, if you can speak arabic and follow people from gaza online there are some phrases i don’t think anyone will forget, some things for the arabic-speaking world will scar for life just like muhammed al-durra scarred me as a child. at least five of the people i followed since last week (journalists, photographers, students, artists, tiktokers) are dead now. it’s becoming terrifying to follow someone from gaza, because you don’t know if they’re going to be alive tomorrow. i don’t really know how to describe this feeling? what is it to follow some kid on tiktok who’s making jokes while planes drop bombs around him and think “i hope he stays alive?”
for those of you who don’t speak arabic, there are many many palestinians in gaza posting updates in english:
many of them are also translating other posts from arabic. you can follow them on twitter.
there are also many gazans reporting from gaza and recording vlogs in english for an international audience that you can follow on instagram
(yara eid is the only one who is not physically present in gaza, but her family is and recently lost her best friend, the photojournalist Ibraheem Lafi in the strikes. she has lots of good and informative videos & interviews on the situation)
please note that these are people living through an actual siege and genocide, experiencing hell on earth for the past fifteen days with no relief and risking their lives to even get these occasional messages through. the content they share is not easy to watch and even more difficult to forget.
I think parents should teach their toddlers the phrase “my will has been thwarted” for when they’re feeling frustrated by not getting what they want. I don’t think this would reduce the incidence of temper tantrums, but I do think it would make them more entertaining.
When I was a toddler I would declare people FIENDS if they didn’t do what I wanted.
One thing that’s vitally important to remember is that feeling “weirded out” is not a form of harm. It is a completely normal part of socializing. It is the feeling of encountering something unfamiliar. In order to be a kind person, you must learn to how to distinguish between “harmful” and “weird.” And then you must accept the weird.
