raising the dead is gay culture

A Nervous Old Man (right) and his Emotional Support Violence Machine (Left)

Been to Greenland

Been to Denver

Buried treasure in St. Louis (or St. Paul for that matter)

Been to Moscow

Been to Tampa

Been to Boston (only if you went during the fall, though)

Hoisted a mainstay

Swabbed a poop deck

Veered to starboard

You know what just DNI if you've ever sailed at all

Walked a gangplank

Owned a parrot (I shouldn't have to explain this one)

“Madeline adopts a dog”

“Madeline deals with her prankster frenemy neighbor”

“Madeline learns how to ice skate”

“Madeline is adopted by her long-lost uncle who turns out to be an actor hired by the owner of a lace factory who has a workforce of enslaved orphans forced to make lace out of their own hair until they go blind who kidnapped Madeline to steal her inheritance and to use her red hair to make extra-valuable lace”

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

“What… did you do?”

“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”

And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.

given they have LITERALLY been dwelling in my brain and show no signs of leaving, here's some scrappy tmbd fanart, the specifics of which i'll probably end up refining at some point. explanations behind designs under cut