dog in a cafe

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

And for two, because adults constantly tell teenagers that every problem is the same amount of Catastrophic. When you're a teenager, you're constantly inundated with messages from parents, teachers, and everyone around you that you are living The Most Consequential Stage Of Life, during which any slight mishap can derail you FOREVER! If you get a bad grade on a test, you'll lose your GPA, and you'll never get into a Good College, and you'll never get a Good Career, and you'll be Poor Forever. If you befriend the wrong person, you'll Go Down The Wrong Path and end up Ruining Your Life. If you make one mistake, you might as well hold up a liquor store while snorting cocaine off a toilet seat.

Okay that’s real… and so the web weaving continues

the elf I just hooked up with, taking the lavender and honeysuckle lollipop from their mouth: An infinite scroll... most elfmaidens learn to enchant a scroll to never end before they're a mere 300 years old. It saves on paper.

me: oh see that's just writing, with social media it's really bad, it just leads to people doomscrolling all day

the elf I just hooked up with, spluttering and panicked: The Doomscroll! Be silent human, thou shoulds't not speak the name of that fell parchment

Let’s take a common example: someone who enjoys reading dubcon fic, and feels ashamed about it. They’re not going to read “proshippers DNI” and go “oh, it’s fine, they’re just uncomfortable with adult/minor ships.” They’re going to say, “that could be about me. I should either stay away, or hide it better.”

Very few people actually hold positions on either extreme of a debate. But DNIs very much erase the grey area and align the poster with the extreme position. It makes the reader either alienated or pressured to conform.

googoo gaga

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