back to this again

My dads coworker is at the front and this man comes Up and hands him a document.

The coworker took a Look at the document and while he couldn't read the things written by Hand, because he wasn't wearing his glases, he did notice the Logo of a different Bank so he's like:

"Oh, sorry sir you can't do that here! You have to go to the other Bank for this :)"

The man, visibly confused leaves, but dosen't take the document with him.

The coworker, now just as confused as the Guy actually Takes Out his glases and reads the hand written part:

So our branch had had a big takeover robbery as well as a note one. We also had a teller that had transferred to our branch after having been through a robbery. She was sweet as apple pie, hair up to the ceiling, southern lady who had just been through multiple robberies.

A guy comes in and hands her a folded note. Her immediate thought was “this guy needs to learn you don’t hand bank tellers notes. I am just not going to read that.” So how the conversation goes:

Her: how can I help you today?

Him: I’m here to get money

Her: great *hands him a withdrawal slip*

Him: all the information is on the paper

Her: to process the transaction I need you to put it on my piece of paper

SO HE FILLS OUT A WITHDRAWAL SLIP. Meanwhile another coworker is looking at her latest robbery notification email thinking the guy at the window looks a lot like him but the teller is calm and seems to be following standard transaction.

Back at the window the teller notices his name on the withdrawal slip doesn’t match the name on the account so she asks for his ID. He once again tells her all the relevant info is on the folded note but also gives her his ID and says it is his dad’s account. She tells him he will need a check from his dad to get cash. He grabs the note and leaves.

ONE HOUR LATER

Two new robbery notifications hit our emails, both branches within a mile. It is our guy. Teller goes over to the manager and sheepishly informs them he was here and the time. Security department is notified as are local police and the FBI. The FBI comes over believing that these poor tellers had been robbed for the 3rd time in a month and take her statement. She is completely embarrassed telling them how everything went down and he kept signaling to the note and telling her to read it but she was just done.

To which this FBI agent of 40 years who has been to the scene of many bank robberies (several at this branch in recent weeks) says: Ok. Let me see if I got this right, he came in fully intending to rob you. He gave you the note and you just…refused to read it? So he left and went to the bank literally across the street, handed them the exact same note, and they just handed him five grand? Do I have that correct?”

Her: I am so embarrassed

FBI: this is best thing I have ever heard. He even handed you his ID! Holy-

Her: I feel so dumb!

Because when the hypothesis is wrong we learn things and they're important like how the shit doesn't work.

Imagine a whole family of journals called We Were So Wrong In: Field and then the much anticipated We Were So Wrong In Science Annual which collects and reprints the best failures of the year with updates on where those failures led.

Wrongest team to lead to a discovery of gets the Innovators In Trying Again When You're Wrong Award which comes with a hilarious trophy inspired by the Nailed It! trophy and a nice piece of funding.

my bank just offered me a "high yield" savings account. high yield! just a fucking amazing APY! ...the APY is 0.4%. zero. point. four.

in 2006, i worked in a call center for $17.60 an hour and had a savings account with a 9% APY. not 0.9%, a full fucking 9%. i'd only been with the call center for a year and a half, i was 24 years old, my credit was middling at best, and that savings account was brand fucking new with a bank i'd NEVER banked with.

high yield. 0.4%.

my field is in-home healthcare now, and i get paid $9.25 an hour.

she/her -> she/they -> they/them -> they/he -> he/they -> he/him

Like

And then I scroll down and

You are not horrible. And I do not hate you. It is not your fault that it happened. But things that are marked as adult very clearly are not for kids, and if you read it anyway it is on the people who should have been supervising you and did not intervene, or, assuming that you were old enough to know what ‘adult content’ means and chose to engage with stuff produced by adult fans for adult fans, on you for ignoring the warnings.

If a ten year old child goes to a library right now, and walks to the romance section and pulls down a book, that child’s guardians are responsible for saying “Hey now that is not for you.” If that same child comes back at thirteen and, knowing there is content in that book that adults do not want them to read, furtively hides away from guardian’s eyes and reads it anyway, that is not the fault of the library for having that book, or the author for writing it.

BUT we cannot trust a thirteen year old to have the maturity and foresight to know what is and isn’t good for them. Yeah, their gaurdians should be the ones looking out for them and trying to stop them from getting hurt, but in your library analogy, when the library chooses to have that content it’s also somewhat responsible for restricting access to it - whether that’s putting those books somewhere the librarian can monitor most of the time, or having a slightly restricted sentence you need to be registered and have a verified age to go into, but there needs to be something - if you knowingly let unmonitored kids into your buisness, but especially if you encourage them like libraries do, you are responsible for their safety- it takes a village to raise a child and we are all responsible for their safety

There is literally no way to effectively bar children from accessing content they shouldn’t have access to, that doesn’t involve gross invasions of privacy. You can ban all children from a website and that STILL won’t work because there is no actual way to accurately determine who is and isn’t a child. In a lot of cases the bare minimum you can do is just outright ASK if they are a child, but then they LIE and there is no way to STOP them from lying or even figuring out IF they are lying. Hell, not even outright banning all icky things will work, as Tumblr’s disastrous NSFW ban has shown us.

‘We all have a collective responsibility to protect children’ only goes so far. If all children are invisible and can be literally anywhere at any point, ‘collective responsibility’ ends up meaning ‘in your day to day life, you must always act under the assumption that there MIGHT HYPOTHETICALLY be a child in the room’. We can’t help raise a child if we literally cannot see them and don’t even have any way of confirming their existence. And it is going too damn far to tell adults they are not allowed to do adult things with other adults because a child MIGHT POTENTIALLY be able to see them do it, even if they’re not supposed to, especially if they’re not supposed to. It’s also going too far to tell all websites that they are responsible for keeping track of legions of invisible, hypothetical, lying children.

All methods of reliably confirming people’s age online are immediately gross and dangerous invasions of privacy. All measures to try and prevent children from seeing things they shouldn’t are flimsy, at best. The MOST EFFECTIVE thing is the thing we are doing already: meticulously tagging and archiving content with extensive filters and multiple warnings, so that every potential viewer can make an informed decision about what they choose to look at.

No, actually.

That is the opposite of what libraries are supposed to do.

Public libraries do not–and CANNOT–restrict materials. At all. You hear every now and again of some that do. It is not a good road to go down. I live in a city with a lot of conservatives (the attempt at a drag queen storytime nearly got the library defunded by a lot). Whose judgement do you use? How do you determine that?

You could say “ratings” but honestly, that’s still not great, since LGBTQ things get rated higher than hetero things. Books don’t really have ratings, and they shouldn’t.

When I worked at the desk of the public library, one thing we HAD to practice was impartiality. It meant handing people hateful books like Anne Coulter’s drek without a side eye. It also meant that if a kid showed up at the desk with a library card and, say… Saw or the Godfather… well. I was going to check it out to them. That’s how public libraries run. Anyone can check out anything, and parental approval is not needed (for us. Parents might have other ideas. I still get mad remembering this woman who wouldn’t let her son check out Calvin & Hobbes or certain other books. But again, I did not say a word. Neutrality).

It’s crucial to a public library that we operate like that.

Libraries do not restrict material. We can organize it. Kids sections, teen sections, adult sections. But no librarian or library tech is going to monitor what children are checking out.

Yeah, kids won’t always know what they’re picking up. The first romance I ever picked up had sex and graphic medieval torture in it. I sure wasn’t expecting it. I stopped reading it. Then when the internet happened…hoo boy, you kids should have seen that wild west.

Comparatively now, I see folks really make every effort to use tags and warnings. Maybe you know what it means, maybe you don’t. But they’re there. They’re the best method we have for keeping content away from people who would be emotionally harmed by it, or who just plain don’t want to see it.

At the end of the day, if you’re old enough to go looking for content on your own, you’re going to have to accept that you might see things you don’t want to see. Yes, even as kids.

The books stayed where they were.

Libraries want children and adults to monitor their own consumption of materials, children with the guidance of their parents until they can make that decision for themselves. 

“whether that’s putting those books somewhere the librarian can monitor most of the time, or having a slightly restricted sentence you need to be registered and have a verified age to go into, but there needs to be something”

^^^^ This?? does not exist. Especially not the bolded part. There’s actually more monitoring in children’s areas for children’s books that are made for children than there is in the adult section. We barely watch those books and if a 8 year old wants to read The Shining? Holla. Mom signed off on his card, she better be watching. 

This scene here with Matilda could never have happened if Libraries required matilda to have a “rated access” on certain books. Charles Dickens, at the lowest, is usually sorted into YA. Remember, Matilda is going into kindergarten.

Were they appropriate for me? No. 

Should my parents have noticed me reading them, and stopped me? Probably!

Is that the fault of anyone outside my house? also no.

This year she discovered ao3 (please god don’t let her find me I’d never recover from the embarrassment and neither would she) and we talked about what the ratings and warning tags were about and for. I don’t police her reading but I give her the tools and information to make informed and (I hope) good choices.

As a parent that’s my real job. To provide tools and guidance, not police her content consumption or hide things from her.

Don’t make fandom censorship about “but think of the childrenz” becayse that’s not what it is. It’s not really about children - it’s about virtue signaling.

Every kid is different.

I was reading books WAY above my age level as a kid. And here’s the thing:

Agatha Christie, with all its murder and lying and people having affairs? I loved it. (Still love it.) Mysteries were my lifeblood and I still adore them.

Stephen King, who I now love? I was TERRIFIED of Stephen King. I picked up my first King at 17, and it was because I’d seen a tiny bit of The Tommyknockers as a kid (my mom recorded it to watch at night, I sneaked out of my room, this isn’t on her) and it scared the bejeezus out of me, and I thought reading the book might help. (It did!)

But on a “rating” system, King and Christie would probably be about the same. One was a favorite. One I wouldn’t touch for fear. Another kid might be the exact opposite—just fine with the monsters and horror, but horrified of the murder.

If something isn’t for you, put it down and walk away.

It’s no one’s problem but yours if you encounter content that upsets you.

Controlling impulses is the number 1 thing that adolescents are known to be, neurologically, bad at, and when things are working as they should, they would be getting that help, from the adults who actually know and love them.  But there are a lot of parents & other caregivers who have either abdicated that responsibility (sometimes for sympathetic reasons, such as being overwhelmed with other issues, sometimes for shitty ones), or go too far in the other direction and try to block their children from seeing/reading/hearing/watching anything they might have questions about, rather than genuinely helping them to understand their own comfort levels around certain types of content.  

If you’re a teenager and you don’t have anyone you can turn to for help finding content that meets your comfort level, or identifying what should go on your personal No Fly List, or working through your feelings when you inadvertently see something that disturbs you, that sucks.  It’s a shitty situation, and you deserve better.

You do not, however, deserve it from every random stranger on the entire internet.  For all the reasons that have been amply explained upthread, it’s just too big an ask to expect literally everyone else in the world to pick up the slack left by the adults who are actually supposed to looking out for you.  

If creators are tagging accurately, rating appropriately, and using content warnings, they are exercising the maximum level of care for your well-being that is appropriate to the relationship they have with you, a teenager they have never met or interacted with.  

If you see something and think, “Someone should have stopped me from seeing that,” you’re right.  But the person who should have stopped you isn’t the person who wrote or drew it.  That is not the relationship they have with you.  

As an emerging adult, you should be developing the critical thinking skills and emotional awareness to recognize when something’s starting to make you uncomfortable, and the self-confidence to nope out when it does.  If the people who are actually bringing you up aren’t helping you with that–or are actively hindering you from developing those skills–that really, really sucks.  Take a minute to be mad about it–and then start developing those skills on your own.