Oh, yeah. It’s because In our historical environment it was actually super important to be able to do that. Even now its super handy sometimes. There was one time my foot had been fully down on the break for several seconds before I consciously realized I had seen the eyes of a deer in the bushes next to the road.

It’s actually a super important concept I teach in violence deescalation classes. Our human brain has a natural capacity for risk assessment you just need to learn to evaluate it properly. My two examples are:

• patient w/ dementia is asking a repetitive question. This makes me uneasy and I’m struggling to pin down why. After a bit I realize that if I was still working with criminally insane men, repetitive questioning means he’s not liking the answer he’s getting and trouble is coming. A dementia patient genuinely doesn’t remember asking. False alarm (but never call your brain stupid, always tell it thank you and make it a hot cup of tea or whatever your equivalent is).

• patient w/ severe Psychosis has a hair trigger. One day they slammed their body into the heavy hardwood exit door hard enough to crack it away from the maglock. About a week later I’m walking past them standing in the hall and my brain just started screaming at me that I needed to do something right that second so I went and pulled an ativan and offered it, which they were suspicious of but took. I was going to document that the patient looked tense, which was enough with how rapid their escalation pattern was, but when I sat down to document I also realized, they were staring at the door. If I’d waited a few minutes later they probably would have been doing something very dangerous and I would’ve had to do an injection and a physical hold which is so much more stressful and less safe for both them and us.

TLDR; there’s also a book called “The Gift of Fear.” Anxiety is not your enemy, but you do need to learn to ask it,“Why?” and you need to learn how to address your brain’s concerns in a way that’s safe and intelligent. And on a public scale there’s a LOT of people who will try to take advantage of your anxiety and you need to evaluate their motives very carefully.

Doesn’t matter how famous the architect who made the toilet was if there’s only one of them per 100 people at a tourist event compared to the one per 10 any other time of the year. I’ve seen lots of fancy toilets but none of them have been able to hold 10 butts at once.

right like this is a whole new level of unhinged

I think this is the best comment. It’s not impossible that they chose OP due to some demographic category but they had probably been annoyed at all the other people too. From what I’m reading in other comments about demographics they probably chose OP because she seemed less likely to fight back. So to sum up, the bus driver had a real gripe, but they took the coward’s way to address it.

This is largely unrelated to OP specifically but I’ve been thinking about the bus drivers a lot lately because I get on at the end of the line where they stop to take their break. There’s always someone standing there mad that the bus driver won’t let them on. And first of all break is sacred, but also specifically; having a public safety job myself though, I get it. My guess is that the bus driver is considered responsible for our safety while we’re physically on the bus and people don’t realize how stressful that is.

You just have this constant low level anxiety of “what are these people going to do that I’m responsible for trying to stop them from doing, and are they going to get violent with me for telling them to stop?” And that anxiety is mostly the good type that’s low level and just keeps you at attention but you can’t maintain that level of attention continuously. You have to shut it off at some point or it starts doing weird shit to your brain both on and off the job.

I tell people good evening while getting off shift at 7a and good morning while coming on shift at 7p and honestly I just roll with it because then nobody gets on me for not remembering their names.

Yeah I’m US and my parents were always at least annoyed if we wore our shoes further into the house than right by the door.

I use clippers to shorten my pits and bush because my pit hair pulls in weird ways and my bush will mat with blood clots and it helps trap less smells in both but other than that yeah there’s no reason. I once had an A&P professor who went on a mini rant one class about how "the leg and arm hairs are for detecting the movement of fleas ticks and other parasites and how could women be asked to give up such protection? "

☝️

My thoughts exactly. She kept you in control of this. What you do with that is up to you, although it sounds like maybe this is gonna be awful whether or not the authorities are involved so maybe you should just stop trying to own his bullshit and focus on keeping yourself safe. Start by trying to record his threats or get him to text them to you in writing. Start building up any little evidence you can get. Make a protonmail and email all the evidence you can find to it so you have timestamps on everything. If you can get a long trail of evidence it should make it easier to both get him arrested and might make you more eligible to receive services. A sibling can also count as a perpetrator of domestic violence in a lot of places. Ask your therapist what tips they have for helping you work on securing safe and stable housing and having an emergency safety plan. Any therapist should know how to make a safety plan, they’re usually for the outpatient management of suicidal ideation but they can be used for other safety reasons as well. Personal and interpersonal safety can be pretty interrelated.

Boost hands down

I bet at least one person was named UUUUUUURRRRR and he had two buddies named AAAAARRRRR and AAAACCCHK

I often use AI to break up my ADHD mono-sentence paragraph. I’ll stream of consciousness my reply then tell it to not change my wording but break up the excessively long sentences, and to reorder and split things into paragraphs that follow well. I’m still doing the writing, but having an advanced spell check is actually super useful.

A lot of the times our hospital security show up to my deescalation classes after leaving a job in corrections. One of the things we often commiserate on is that they got into corrections and I into the state hospital to try and help other people grow and heal but what happened is that we got caught in a loop of “what am I going to see next that I’m going to have to report?” I’m now working for a psych unit in a regular hospital which still has it’s flaws but none comparable to the state.

First you see a patient spit in the face of a staff member who has to be physically held back from hitting them (they actually told us we’re allowed to restrain our coworkers if that happens), then you see a staff member get called racial slurs and they get up in the patients face and yell at them and you have to get between them and tell your coworker to take a walk but it’s hard to get them to do that because it’s 2am and there’s no other techs on the unit and they know the nurse isn’t gonna come out to help you before it’s too late. And those reactions make sense and you wonder why they’re packing you in with so many patients that your coworker can’t just walk away. And then you see somebody posture and yell at a patient who’s just all around rude but again it’s 2am and you can’t make it to 7 with just one tech.

And you also know that you’re going to need to choose the moment that it’s too much and that’ll be the end. Because if you stay after that you become the “them” in the “us vs them” and one day you’re going to face a violent patient at 2am and the tech who’s with you will leave you alone with that patient because “I don’t want you to report me too.”

And if you’re smart, you get out before it gets that far. One day a nurse asked me what I’d seen happen and I told them (truthfully) that I’d been at lunch and had no idea what they were talking about and they cut the conversation off. And I had no idea what patient or staff member it would’ve been about (as far as I could tell all of the patients were the same as before I’d gone to lunch) so I couldn’t have reported anything anyway. But I had to ask myself if I had seen something what would I have been asked to cover up?

I said that to that hospital security worker coming from corrections and there was this instant look of recognition. Anybody who’s worked corrections or for the state will tell me something similar happened to them, or worse. And I just… You either get out or something awful happens. I’m so grateful I was able to get out before I personally got pulled into something. You think you’ll be able to be different but that system is just so much bigger than you. And it’s not because I’m a better person it was luck. Part of it was luck that I had enough formal and informal education to know what was coming but some of it was pure grace of the universe luck.

And people who are outside of it living their happy lives will tell you they want a better system, but they will never truly be willing to put in the work needed to change it or even give you the resources to do it yourself. Like I’d been a patient at that state hospital previously and went back as a staff member to try and help and being a staff member was just so much worse somehow. I’m grateful that it gave me the experience to do what I do now and be an authority / teacher in the management of violent patients but it was hell while it was happening (I was also in therapy for other stuff at the time and was sooo fortunate to be given that opportunity to properly contextualize the experience as it was happening). No one who’s never been through that will ever really understand.

My most recent meaningful conversations at the bus stop in the past year were:

• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with a middle aged gentlemen who struck up a conversation having seen my work badge
• a guy who’d had his phone stolen reflecting on the ways it had allowed him to be more mindful of his own thoughts and disengage from toxic people
• a homeless woman who lived at the bus stop for a while with her husband discussing her personal safety as a homeless woman (her husband needed to go do something that wouldn’t take long, and he had waited for me to come out and wait for the bus to go do it, and came back before the bus arrived).

And I made friends with the homeless guys outside my last apartment by stopping to pet their dog (and later stealing wound care supplies from work for it).

I find other people interesting for the most part, and have a large enough breadth of knowledge to at least ask interesting questions about most things. Tradespeople in particular know some fascinating things

I once asked a man in a work vest who was marking the road what the colors were for and he said the different colors were different utility lines (water, power, etc). My follow-up question was how he knew where they were and it turned out the pole with the paint sprayer also had a special metal detector that could pick up on each line’s unique type of tag.

And the guy who fixed my dryer had an utterly wild list of things that he’s pulled out of vents and explained that the little vent covers on the outside of the building were specifically designed to safely prevent endangered birds from nesting in them since they like the warmth but can get injured or damage the vent in doing so.

I generally find that tradespeople like being asked questions about what they do. I don’t think a lot of people ask. And if they don’t I apologize and keep it moving.

And honestly a lot of these would probably need to be tested top see what works best, but the core point is that in an ideal world there would be an ongoing effort to make sure the worker is given as much power over the situation as possible.

And unionized, and the employer pays for (without touching employee pay):

• PPE (including gloves, dental dams, and male and female condoms, which are mandatory for any and all physical contact that includes genitals, mucous membranes, feet, or non-intact skin).
• regular STD testing
• vaccinations
• optional pharmacologic prophylaxis
• building security
• both bedside and wearable panic alarms
• identity monitoring and protection / assistance removing their personal information from publicly accessible records.

Every room should be required to have a poster listing employee rights.

Aside from pricing differently for specific services (handjob vs blowjob etc) tipping is illegal.

No employee (particularly owners or supervisors) are allowed to receive service at their own location or any owned by a same parent company.

The owner and any shift supervisors are required to take a class on these regulations and sit for and pass a licensure exam.

Independent workers can receive a special, less restrictive license (that includes basic sex ed but mostly focuses on informing them of their rights and that independent means independent not “your boss just doesn’t want to get a license” and keeping people with intellectual disabilities or low educational level from being misinformed of their rights as a sex worker).

They worker will never face charges for not having a license but their boss or any John (Jane?) / client who can’t prove the sex worker or company was licensed (or that they were significantly or intentionally misled) can.

Years ago when I first bought one of those multitool hairclips it mentioned it could be used as a trolley coin and I had to look that up. I discovered that in a lot of European countries it’s customary for carts to be locked together with a lock that takes a coin to unlock then returns the coin if you correctly return and nest the cart. Now, it does take a decently curated social milieu to design systems that promote prosocial behavior. That said, that particular prosocial behavior not only had to be mechanically encouraged, but has also led to the development of something called a “trolley coin” to circumvent the mechanism for people who are diametrically opposed to that prosocial behavior.

Who do you trust more, the neighbor who keeps his blinds closed, or the neighbor who goes around trying to look in everyone’s windows? What do you they have to hide?

Retirement was never a thing before the 50s or so. That’s why even at the time they had set it to roughly the average total lifespan. It was supposed to be a coinflip to begin with. And honestly one of the shared facets of societies where people routinely live to 100 is actually the lack of a concept of retirement. And part of that is that work isn’t something you either toil at physically for extended periods or being trapped behind a desk. It’s physical but not to excess and they have regular breaks at least weekly and plenty of holidays. You’re not supposed to grind grind grind for years then just stop. You’re supposed to have work that’s accessible and fulfilling that you can maybe slow down a little on with age but not just cut off at some point.