No gender, only sleep

and then. My partner started it. And the SAME THING happened to him.

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.

She was trying to the best for her kids and just didn’t know how to interpret the validity of information or its sources, an actual skill that can be actually difficult and that is under-taught and a necessary first step to being able to trust vaccination research, so chose no action over taking an action she wasn’t sure of. She kept looking into it with family and friends and even eventually came to the right conclusion before her kids became sick, but it was still too late.

Honestly it was pretty brave of her to publicly admit she was wrong. She could have just quietly vaccinated her kids and not become a national news story, but instead she spoke out, even saying “I’m writing this from quarantine, the irony of which isn’t lost on me.” and also “I am not looking forward to any gloating or shame as this ‘defection’ from the antivaxx camp goes public, but, this isn’t a popularity contest.  Right now my family is living the consequences of misinformation and fear.  I understand that families in our community may be mad at us for putting their kids at risk.”

The movement is pushed by women, especially suburban moms, because they know damn well you cannot trust doctors. You cannot trust the medical industry, the billion-dollar corporate zone of “you should lose some weight and maybe the pain will stop.” Cannot trust the ones who keep changing diet advice - is it no sugar? No carbs? No fats? Is it dangerous to let kids eat things in wild colors? Food pyramid: good or bad? They cannot trust the BMI chart that says they should lose 75 lbs to be “healthy.” (Whether or not they “should” lose 75 lbs, they know damn well that “healthy” does not describe any part of the journey to getting there.) Cannot trust the ones who keep giving them incomplete and sometimes incorrect information about contraception. The ones who said “that’s false labor; you have two weeks more” 12 hours before they gave birth. And so on.

So they have their kids, and they want so much for their kids to be safe, and the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.

So they ask: What about if there’s complications? An allergic reaction? Side effects?

And the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.

This is… not reassuring.

And they ask, My sister-in-law’s cousin had a really bad reaction to the MMR shot and I want to know how I can tell it’s safe for my kids.

And the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.

Throw in the right-wing/libertarian faction yelling YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO and the insurance companies saying “hey um you need a specific type of coverage for that; we probably cover those vaccinations but you’ll need this special paperwork to be sure” - and then you have the actual anti-vax propagandists yelling some combination of cherry-picked statistics and outright lies, and you get a whole lot of moms willing to say BUGGRE ALL THIS FOR A LARKE.

There is no amount of facts that can fix this. They’re swamped with facts from 300 directions. What they need to fix this is empathy and the kind of connections that lead to trust.

Kindness doesn’t just matter because it’s more ethical - it'salso a more effective strategy.

The owner of the drone was so impressed by the brilliant attack that he suggested organizing a competition for bringing down “dragons” with short spears next year.

On the seventh day of May in the year of 2016 on hither spot the mighty warrior Ulf hath slain a dragon with his spear.

And the Stellar's sea lion, which are WAY bigger and live in Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska

“The notion that people panic and run screaming for the exits is a Hollywood fiction,” said Prof Stephen Reicher, an expert in group behaviour at the University of St Andrews.

“Characteristically, people stay and help each other,” he said. “We found this during the 7/7 attacks on the underground and the 1999 attack on the Admiral Duncan pub in London, where people looked after each other even though they feared other bombs.

“In our own research on the Leytonstone tube attack in 2015, there was an amazing level of spontaneous coordination by bystanders: some directed others away from danger. Some distracted the attacker. Some confronted the attacker. Each was able to act because of the others. Heroism was a feature of the group, not just the individual,” he added.

The problem is not bystander apathy (which is not a thing), but bystander confusion. There's this moment where everyone is sort of processing "fuck, that just happened, now what" and loses the ability to think logically about next steps. As soon as one person steps in and says "you there! Do this next step!" the confusion breaks and people begin to react to fix the situation. Literally all it takes is somebody basically going "yep, we all saw that, now let's move."

While the murder of Kitty Genovese was a bullshit homophobic coverup, if you're in an emergency situation where someone needs medical assistance and there's more than one person, you can help a lot by loudly but calmly saying "Does anyone know first aid?," giving a chance for someone to respond, and then singling someone out by something identifiable--"hey, you in the red shirt and Steelers hat"--and telling them to call 911 or your country's equivalent. Even if nobody there knows first aid, as soon as someone sounds like they know what they're doing people will start trying to help.

Also a few things for you to know that I learned many, many years ago as part of my Red Cross first aid training and haven't forgotten:

1) stay calm and encourage the injured person to stay calm.

2) for a stroke, ask the person to raise both arms at the same time, and to smile. If you observe unevenness in either motion, call emergency services IMMEDIATELY. Seconds count.

3) the "cough to stop a heart attack" thing is a myth. Call emergency services immediately and have the person sit down.

4) contrary to what Sherlock would have you believe, you should actually remove belts, suspenders/braces, and tight clothing from an injured person. Yes, if the injured person has breasts this may mean unhooking their bra. Now is not the time for modesty.

5) never, never give a severely injured person water unless instructed to do so by emergency services (spoiler alert: they're basically never going to tell you to do that). It can cause vomiting, and then you have more problems.

6) never move a severely injured person or someone who's hit their head even if they "seem fine." Your kind intention may kill. Wait for emergency services and keep the person calm.

7) never try to restrain a person having a seizure.

8) only move a person having a seizure if they're in immediate, imminent danger (for example, falling right next to a campfire they may seize into). Banging an arm into a chair leg is not imminent danger.

9) "swallowing your tongue" is a myth. Never put anything in a seizing person's mouth.

(Can you tell I had a classmate with epilepsy?)

10) bleeding injuries should be raised above the heart.

And finally,

Gideon The Ninth- mock dustcover

I draw book covers for freelance all the time. I feel pretty lucky to do so, and wanted to create one with all my free will and spare time, to make just for me. Well, and for you lot as well. But mainly, for me.

I will be drawing book 2 and book 3 as well. And potentalially have prints of them later this year.