i know i frustrate god, who built me for endings

Kat Rosenfield, What We Sacrifice to be Seen

Gretchen Felker-Martin, What's the Harm in Reading?

and then in the summer of 2012, wtnv introduced itself to the world, proclaimed its main character gay in the first episode, and played it gay (pun intended) for years. Being gay wasn’t a trope, or a goof, it was normal. Cecil Gershwin Palmer was just a canon, gay character who fell in love and stayed in love and was happy. and that was that.

Time seems such a universal concept and then I find out the different ways people perceive everything and remember “it’s all appearances to consciousness”

But do you know how much of Amazon's warehouse workers are actually Amazon employees? Only about 60%. And that's not during the holiday season, when the number of contractors is exponentially higher.

I've worked in a distribution center. For every 30 pickers or packers, there is at least one manger. Those managers are all Amazon employees, meaning the remainder there is gonna be mostly contractors. Again, this is especially true around the holidays. When I worked there in 2017, the contractors had a three strikes rule. Call out for a shift more than three days (not consecutive, just three days any time at all) and you're fired. You have the flu? Fired. You lost your childcare? Fired. You have no transportation to work? Fired.

A truly horrifying number of warehouse employees were living out of their cars, sleeping at the truck stop across the road. A fellow EMT on duty was so incompetent that he gave a hyperglycemic man a candy bar and made him so sick he could have died. They will require their managers to 40 hours a week (over a 3-4 day period), but the second you cross into overtime territory you're made to leave the building or else. A manager once left in the middle of an active medical emergency because she was going to hit double overtime if she didn't, and she didn't want to lose her job.

Amazon is not an ethical company. They do not treat the vast majority of their employees well, not even their managers. I was an EMT on call in a distribution center and every morning a manager came in with steroid cream he needed put on his head because he was losing his hair from the stress. He wasn't even 30 yet. They do not give reasonable accommodation for disabled persons. They do not allow adequate rest times. They make every single employee clock out before they go through security upon leaving, which can take up to 20 minutes because everyone leaves at once. A Supreme Court justice literally decided that was legal--to hold employees in the building on time they aren't being paid.

Amazon is fucking bullshit. The price gouging alone should be enough to not shop with them whenever possible, but their treatment of warehouse employees is despicable. They treat the backbone of the company like worthless, replaceable drones. Fuck Amazon, fuck Bezos, eat the fucking rich.

I'm Thane of every hold in Skyrim, but all the Jarls hate my guts. They call me a miserable wretch and then offer me the nicest house in the city. I personally assassinated the Emperor, brought him back as a zombie and successfully negotiated a peace treaty with his generals while he wandered around the room snarling and moaning. I've gotten married to every single eligible bachelor and bachelorette in the country and they keep saying yes even though my previous spouses all died mysteriously while getting hit in the head with my enchanted war hammer. I'm pretty sure my horse is a daedra.

Everybody says the elder scrolls are powerful artifacts from before the dawn of time that have been lost to history, but I have two of them in my backpack next to my collection of severed witch heads and a couple of pies. The pies are a treat for my adopted children whom I love with all my heart, I haven't seen them in a while because I forgot which of my mansions I left them in. I have pledged my immortal soul to five different daedric princes.

I'm a serial killer. I'm a legendary hero. I'm an abomination in the eyes of gods, men and mer. I'm a delivery boy.

“What’s that, James? You tore your rotator cuff? Sorry, we have to let you go. What if the printer needed to be refilled and the other 200 people in this building were home sick? It just wouldn’t be fair.”

the first thing i want to point out is that the box of paper that @bransrath​ posted is not the weight of the box. the 20 lb in that description is the paper weight, which is the amount of force a piece of paper can take before tearing. i know this because it’s described as copy paper, and copy paper is by default 20 lb weight. so posting that picture as a ‘gotcha’ in response to this post is ignorant at best and intentionally ableist at worst. in reality, that box probably weighs no more than 15 lbs. 

secondly, i have never had to actually pick up one of these boxes ever. and i have to deal with them a lot, given that i’m a secretary who, prior to the pandemic, was printing off 1000+ pages of booklets per week. i’ve never had to pick these up because you can literally just open them, grab a ream of paper, and take it to the printer to load it in. there’s no fucking reason why you would need the whole box. most places, like my office, also store them on or near the ground because they’re heavy, so what i do is a just drag the boxes to their designated corner until they need to be used. 

Some desperate remnant of his soul knows what he needs. As soon as his debt is cleared, he goes on to live what many would call an utterly charmed life: working no more than 20 hours a week, travelling and spending time with friends (which he, at $150,000 a year and no mortgage, has ample money to do). He has a loving relationship also.

But his brain is so rotten that he cannot understand happiness anymore. He is incapable of conceptualising it other than in money.

A man who has everything except the ability to feel it.

How poetic.

Which means that when he says he regrets the months he didn’t pick up more hours to earn more money, what he’s describing here is boredom. He’s doing it in the crassest, shallowest, most income-obsessed and unattainable for most of us way possible, yes. But this man is expressing that once he achieved a certain financial goal he relaxed, enjoyed himself, got bored, realized on some level he was understimulated, and then started working more hours to meet whatever stimulated activity threshold he personally needs. 

This is infuriating because this man experienced the counter-argument to that nonsensical talking point that if we meet people’s financial needs with a universal basic income they’ll grow lazy and won't do anything. 

Anyone trying to develop $200,000 in passive annual income is not working three minimum-wage jobs to live paycheck-to-paycheck. This man’s basic financial needs were met. Working more hours to make more money is just his own personal code for ‘I still needed to use my mind to do things’ (using what might be the only metric of personal achievement he might actually have). This man lived the argument for universal basic income and I genuinely don’t think he realizes that. Once his basic income needs were met he still needed to do things to keep himself stimulated and engaged with his own life.