It's Much Better Living My Blog Than Looking At It

And *I* have this thing where I always always know when he’s there, because every time he’s not wandering around like the ghost of jacob marley and isn’t immediately visible it’s because he’s stopped moving to watch the film from directly behind me, which makes the back of my neck tingle like a dog sensing an earthquake

Which has on more than one occasion resulted in me interrupting the movie to tell him to just sit the fuck down and stop lurking in the shadows, Jesus Christ, it’s like I’m being haunted by the memory of ancient sins

Which has in turn been shortened to just “ancient sins”, every time I feel him doing it again

Class: Dentist!

Me: okay, so in this scene you are going to be a dentist. :)

Child 1: WHY DID YOU STEAL MY TEETH!

Like, if you see a Reddit post titled “Am I the asshole for buying my wife a new dress?”, the post is pretty much always something totally deranged like: “I (48) really dislike the way my wife (20) dresses, because I think it’s too revealing and makes her look slutty, which was fine when we started dating five years ago, but it makes me feel like she’s going to cheat on me now that we’re married. I’ve politely asked her to get new clothes multiple times, and every time she refused because she said she liked her clothes, and didn’t want to waste money buying new ones. Yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore so I threw out a bunch of her old dresses and bought her a new one that was more modest looking. She started crying because one of the dresses I threw out had been left to her by her mom who died when she was a teen, but I couldn’t have known that it had sentimental value. She said that I should have asked, but obviously if I asked she’d have just told me not to throw out any of her clothes, including the ones that weren’t sentimental. Also, the more modest dress I bought was pretty expensive, and she never thanked me for it. Am I the asshole here, or is she being unreasonable?”

Similarly, whenever you see a headline like “Woman Wins Millions From McDonald’s Because Her Hot Coffee Was Too Hot”, if you dig a bit, you’ll almost always quickly find out that what actually happened was: A 79-year-old ordered coffee which, unbeknownst to her, was being served extremely dangerously hot, because McDonald’s was trying to have coffee that stayed warm over a long commute without spending any extra money on cups with better insulation. The coffee spilled on the old woman’s lap, giving her severe third degree burns over a huge portion of her body, including her genitals. She got to a hospital and they managed to save her life with skin grafting, but she became disabled from the accident, and her genitals and thighs were permanently disfigured. She tried to settle with McDonald’s for her medical costs, and McDonald’s refused to cover any portion of her medical expenses at all, and so she sued. At trial, the jury discovered that this same exact thing had happened seven hundred times before, and McDonald’s had still decided not to change their policy because paying out individual suits was cheaper than moderately reducing their coffee profits. As a result, the jury awarded punitive damages designed to penalize McDonald’s two days worth of their coffee profits, in addition to the woman’s medical costs.

I think it’s largely the same phenomenon, but I know a lot of people who are familiar with the first case, but don’t know to look for the second. If you see some totally outrageous “how could a person ever sue over this stupid thing?” case, you should immediately be incredibly suspicious that that’s all that actually happened, because a lot of the time, it absolutely isn’t. The people who have the most incentive to make their opponent look not only wrong, but completely crazy for having any sort of grievance at all, are often the actually unreasonable ones. 

here’s a real photo of some charged lemonade dispensers from about a year ago i found online

apologies for the bad quality, but you can clearly see that next to the charged lemonades are just. normal drinks. iced tea. lemonade that doesn’t give you a heart attack. and that banner above it, well, it just says up the energy. “Well it also says caffeine in the banner-” how many of you read the last terms and conditions you agreed to? how many of you check the privacy policy of every single website you visit? how many of you see some new gimmicky lemonade that’s next to the normal lemonade, and the normal iced tea, and the normal green tea, and assume that it’s anything but a normal drink? Can you even see the labels on the machines that say how much caffeine is in there? Fuck no, the picture quality is shit, but if you didn’t look closely in person, you wouldn’t see shit either. But would you look at all? Or would you just choose a nice flavor and call it a day? Would you read the terms of service? Or would you just click the check box?

When I was in law school, we studied the hot coffee case and a number of other cases like it in the context of so-called “tort reform” laws. One thing that came up quite frequently as we dug into the actual lawsuits was that corporations adopted a sort of “well, what were we supposed to do about it?” attitude as part of their strategy to shift the burden of harm prevention onto their customers.

McDonald’s wanted their coffee to stay hot for longer in the cup so that customers with long commutes wouldn’t have their coffee go cold, and they wanted it to stay hot for longer in the brewer so that it would stay fresher and they wouldn’t have to throw out as much coffee over the course of the day. Their argument, when you really got down to it, was: “It’s an unreasonable burden on our business to not serve a dangerous product!” In class, our professor posed the question, is it? And within minutes, we’d come up with dozens of other solutions that they could have applied to their stated problems which would not have had the same risk to consumers: they could get better insulated cups; they could get cups with better lids, to reduce the risk of spills; they could add the sugar and milk for customers before serving them, so that people would not need to open their coffee in order to add them; they could offer a cardboard holder with single coffee orders as well as multiple coffee orders, so that consumers would not need to hold their coffee in their lap; they could let people bring their own insulated tumblers like Starbucks does; they could brew smaller amounts at a time so that there would be less risk of it going off before it could be used; they could buy brewers with better insulation; they could include warnings about the temperature that state that their coffee is served significantly hotter than normal coffee; and on and on and on. Once we got going, it was clear that there were so many things that the companies in these cases could have done to prevent these accidents.

Panera could have changed the color of their signs, or increased the font size. They could have used the word “caffeinated” instead of “charged”. They could have not served their caffeinated drinks right next to their non-caffeinated drinks. They could have not offered free refills beyond a lethal dose of caffeine. They could have reduced the caffeine content to a level that was more in line with what people might reasonably expect from a caffeinated lemonade, instead of putting the same amount of caffeine as three Red Bulls in a single drink. Failing that, they could have marketed it as one of the most caffeinated drinks being sold anywhere in existence, instead of prominently claiming that it had “as much” caffeine as their coffee, without making it clear that that measurement was by volume, not by serving. I could keep going.

1) Set off your smoke alarm or play the sound on your phone (if your home has no smoke alarms, pease get some!)

2) stand BY THE FRONT DOOR to hand out treats

Do this a couple times and then keep it up NO EXCEPTIONS. Accidentally set the alarm off cooking? Treats by the door. Smoke alarm sound on TV? Treats by the door. Changing your smoke alarm batteries twice a year like you’re supposed to? Give them a test run and your pets get treats by the door.

Most dogs and cats will clue in VERY quickly that hearing that specific sound means go to the front door and wait for treats.

If there’s an emergency and even if you leave by another way, you will still know the most likely place your pet(s) is and can direct first responders to help.