experience that makes me research local customer service supervisors for a global corporation and tag them in a LinkedIn post, to fall upon their mercy.

long story short i have worked for a call center in customer service before and i knew something was not working out. i've had to call about this issue 5 times in 4 weeks because it's still not resolved, and each time the conversation has ended i've asked for an email confirmation of our conversation and a ticket number so i can call back and reference it with a new representative.

well every time i've called, the new representative has been like "i'm so sorry, but there's no ticket by that number. i have no record of you ever calling about this. i'll start a ticket for you."

finally, the fifth time i nearly burst into tears of frustration and i said "i don't want you to start a ticket for me, because it will be the sixth ticket created for this same issue. every week, one of your colleagues tells me they'll create a a new ticket for me, and then nothing happens."

they said, "i'm sorry but i have no record of those tickets existing." and i was like i KNOW. but they doooooo what is happening.

finally i got transferred to a supervisor's supervisor.

if you've ever worked in online customer service, you know that when a customer calls with a problem, you create a "ticket" that puts that issue into the system. if you can't resolve it, it goes into a ticket queue, where other people with the ability to resolve it select it, put it into their personal working queue, and resolve it.

well after 30 minutes of searching, this supervisor tells me, dumbfounded, that she's discovered a completely unique queue she's never seen before, where my tickets have been going somehow. a pocket universe queue that no one has access to or can edit or select from, not even her. she has no idea what's happening. she's like "yes, here are all your tickets, and no one can open them or comment on them or resolve them.....this is crazy......" and it's JUST my tickets in there. no one else's. of tens of thousands of customers.

all professionalism fell by the wayside. i told her i've worked with those queues before and also found that totally wild. she was like "what the hell is going on...." and talked me through everything she was seeing and how gobsmacked she was. we were both like "this is one for the books truly"

tells me she's going to have to bring this up above herself because this is a really big error on like, a coding level, that she has no idea how to resolve. tells me she will personally call me back tomorrow to update me.

four days pass with no word.

i call customer service again. random agent. explain the entire situation, including that last bit.

agent says "i'm sorry but i have no record of those tickets existing. i'll have to start a ticket for you. rest assured, it will be resolved."

i said, "no it won't be. it never will be. because they're in the special queue."

clearly not believing me, they said, "i've heard nothing about that. i'll start a new ticket for you."

Sometimes the rest of the team gets handed a once in a lifetime opportunity to do the funniest thing, and all they have to do is keep their mouths shut long enough for it to go to print.

this is still so funny to me

Playing porn on full volume without headphones on the train: that's like 12 layers of wrong starting with you are playing any video on full volume without headphones on the train the fact thats it's porn just adds to the rudeness

Reading a pornographic story on your phone quietly and feeling vaguely aroused: idgaf

Thinking about stuff that makes you feel aroused: how tf would I know unless you tell me? I don't care but I don't want to hear about it

Seeing your fetish in the wild and getting a bit squirmy and turned on: again I'm not going to know unless you tell me. I don't care! Just text your friend about it like the rest of us

As long as you aren't irritating me I don't give a shit what you're doing or thinking about or how aroused you are

Just don't like, masturbate or watch porn videos on the bus where people can see and hear it. And my objection to that is not that it's horny it's that it's objectively rude

I would also get annoyed at someone picking their nose and flicking the boogies about or playing non porn videos loudly on the bus

Respect shared spaces but the inside of your head is not a shared space

the inside of your head is not a shared space

#yknow theres this video that is blowing up in brazil youtube now called 'adultização'#it's a great video that exposes how social media sexualizes children for profit#at one point the author of the video interviews a child psychologist who says that#'children who grow up on the internet have no clue what's private and what's public'#'these are things that we're taught'#all this pearl clutching around sex and porn that's been going on around lately exposes exactly this I think#people have no idea where the line between public and private lies anymore

This is an idea I will be chewing on. I find it compelling, that the greatest abuses of kids wrt to the internet is not via exposure to inappropriately 'adult' material, but the dissolution of their boundaries and boundary-setting skills. Think there is something to that.

i would bet this is connected to the thing where the same kids have been brought up under constant surveillance at home and at school and by the tools they use to read and research. the internet is for sure a major location and medium for that surveillance, but it goes way beyond there.

your music player remembers the day you listened to the same song fifty times in a row, and at the end of the year it roasts you for it. you do a weirdly worded search for something and the top research is somebody's blog, and they do a periodic "search terms weirdos" bit where they answer the questions you and other people typed into google before clicking on their blog in the results as though you were directly asking them a question. your parents watched you through the baby monitor when they left you with the babysitter, to make sure you were okay. your parents liveblogged your toilet training. your parents posted your meltdowns to youtube. your parents track your location on your phone while you're at school. your parents track your location on your phone while you're at college as a full legal adult. your digital pet counts how many steps you take. your language-learning flashcards make ha-ha funny jokes to you about stalking you and getting you in trouble if you miss a day, and they really do track your practice. your maths textbook talks to your teacher. your school has security cameras. your online exams monitor you through the webcam. they track the motions of your eyes. the billboards in the mall have cameras in them, and they track the motions of your eyes. you're monitored for unauthorised movement. the books you read monitor which pages you read, and for how long. your teacher runs your assignment through software to analyse the prose and decide if you really wrote it. your peers more informally analyse your fanfic to decide if you really wrote it. the stranger on the bus is taking photos of you with his eyeglasses. you can prove this to the police because the bus took photos of him doing it.

i'm in my mid-40s, and it was bad enough that my psychologist mother kept an infant observation diary about me and used a traumatic and stigmatising story about my preschool years as a teaching story; and i managed to pick up all those same ideas about thoughtcrimes on my own (despite my parents' conscious efforts not to give me hangups about sex) just from being an weird undxed autistic kid with undxed ocd trying to figure out the rules from half-understood books. but at least i had time alone. at least the judgemental gaze was not automated and at scale. i cannot imagine what it'd be like growing up in a digital panopticon like so many young people do now.

My mom, who is a left-leaning, generally feminist woman has many times expressed opinions that she thinks men and boys are more likely, based on biological traits, to be more violent and rude.

It bothered the shit out of me because my sister and I are both assigned male. And when I'd express that to her she'd say she's not counting us, or something to that effect, but that always felt like a copout. She couldn't except that it was a learned, cultural thing, she just thought my sister and I were exceptions. If anything, it was a little othering.

It was especially bad when she applied this to children, which she did because she worked in childcare. And I can kind of understand her viewpoint, assuming she saw patterns in the ways boys behaved in her years working with them. But the thing about that is that biology is not an adequate explanation for that behavior, because, prior to puberty, there is very little difference in the levels of sex hormones of males and females. She would use the word "testosterone" a lot, as if young boys had significant testosterone in their blood. They don't.

Hearing her bullshit time after time has only radicalized me. If you want to make social progress for women, for trans people, for people as a whole...

You need to accept that male and female humans really aren't all that different from each other.

People are also really prone to confirmation bias when thinking about groups they see as distinctly separate.

One example I have mentioned before is that my father used to believe women are worse at driving than men. Whenever he saw someone driving badly he'd try to look at who was behind the wheel. If it was a woman, he'd make some misogynistic comment that reinforces his worldview, but if he was a man he often just didn't say anything (even if he was like "I bet that's a woman" before) and just didn't think about it further.

People are also very prone to making generalizations about groups while ignoring differences within groups.

They feel comfortable saying stuff like "Boy children are very different from girl children" but have they noticed that the boy children are also very different from each other, for example? It ends up sounding really sketchy to lump huge and diverse groups of people based on something like gender and treat them as if they share one personality regardless of their individual circumstances.

There's also the thing that has been shown over and over again that the exact same video of a baby will have people reacting differently and assuming different emotions depending on whether they've been told the baby is a boy or a girl. Article

That parents of babies will consistently underestimate the physical development and motor skills of their girls, and overestimate them of their boys. Study

It's not even an observed difference in behaviour! it's gendered assumptions being applied to the same behaviour. Like when people anthromorphise animal behavior except it's a human baby doing normal human baby things, being twisted to fit gender expectations.

There IS no real difference between infant boys and girls behaviour or development before they're old enough to respond to expectations. There's a fair amount of variation between individual babies, but it does not map to gender.

soysaucevictim's tags: #gender #sociology #biology #politics #linguistics
#the only differences are old and misguided perpetuation of the social construct of gender
#and the thing abt social constructs is that they're inherently arbitrary - there can be some utility to have like working language for shit
#but like it's also wrapped up in old as hell power structures that really really don't want you to peak behind the curtain
#that makes you want to not be curious abt your assumptions abt sex/gender
#and this also kinda slots into like - humans aren't all that sexually dimorphic a species
#compared to the other sexual lifeforms on this rock
#(the funny thing abt shit like language and categories is that there will always be fuzziness everywhere)
#(and some people really don't appreciate that fact)

OP you can't just say this and then not show us the really ugly ones

As you wish

No need I think

​I see this one going places

Yeah. The bathroom

ah but which bathroom

the one with the shortest line did you not read the post

please stop making stuff up to fit this nonsense separatism and read what hill actually has to say

I do not believe in 50 years. I don’t. Maybe I’m in denial but I still kind of don’t believe that I’m actually going to serve out this whole sentence and I think there’s a little reason for optimism in that regard. There is a big movement of support for a political pardon for us from the next Democratic president of the United States. My mother told me that my father said that the next time a Democratic president is in office, he’s going to write him a letter to ask for a pardon for me. And that was the first positive interaction that I’ve had with my dad in five years. And when I heard that, I just burst into tears and, like, just became hysterical for five minutes because it was just the perfection of the absurdity of the time to me. My arch-conservative father, who I can’t really stand to be in the same room as right now because of his transphobia, that he would do this thing, right, like appeal to a Democratic president on my behalf. And it really shows this bipartisan sentiment that this is obviously unjust, this is obviously political. You know, if this arch-conservative and I can find common ground over the belief that this is a political persecution, I think that there’s a very strong chance for some future good thing to come our way out of that.

...

[interviewer]: Is there anything else I didn’t ask you that you want to get out, that you wanna say in this context? Obviously, people will see this and I know you have limited connection to the outside world.

AH: I would say the same thing that I’ve said before, which is: Be brave. We’ve been accused of being terrorists, but terror is the power that this administration wants to ply in order to keep people quiet, in order to keep people content. Fear of incarceration, fear of homelessness, you know, it’s this fear, this fear that we’re going to lose our privileges, that we are going to use our comfort, that keeps people docile, keeps people from speaking the truth. Don’t be afraid.

https://www.unclosetedmedia.com/p/autumn-hill-speaks-from-jail-after

i have to bring this up every time I see this: nobody died at the protest Autumn Hill was at. A cop suffered minor injuries. Autumn Hill wasn't even present when that happened.

as for the tweet that was screenshotted: her fellow protestors are in prison alongside her, that's why they're not protesting to demand her release. Here's a website with more information about the whole case. We're still trying to bring them all home, regardless of gender

i hate constantly seeing this fucking post on my dash spreading misinformation to make trans women feel like they will be abandoned.

There has been a lot of organising and protesting and fundraising and solidarity around the prairieland defendants, and actually autumn hill has been one of the main people in the spotlights for that, out of all the arrestees.

I dont know what the original post is meant to do except spread misinformation (no cop died) and giving activist left-wing trans women a false sense of abandonment and defeatism.

i live on the other side of the country from autumn hill and we've been organizing letter writing and support for her and her co defendants. i know plenty of anarchists in various places around the World that have been doing the same to support these folks before during and after the trial. maybe if someone's entire media diet is their own personal tumblr feed they might believe that there's no support but if that's the case id strongly encourage y'all to connect with the many, many, many folks who are fighting fiercely and maybe getting involved in that work can help get out of the doomerism rut.

and we are what exactly?
everything we interact with is a jigsaw puzzle of atoms.
everything that effects or heals us in made of atoms and vibrations.
negative ions from moving water affect our mood so why wouldn't crystals?

you are getting scammed

I own a rock shop. A lady came in about three years ago and asked me which crystals are best for healing, I gently explained that they didn't have powers or healing properties. She started crying. She had late-stage cancer and no medical treatments were working. A crystal-healer had told her the only thing that would save her were crystals, then proceeded to convince her to spend $2000 on what realistically was only maybe $50 worth of Arkansas Quartz. She had two months to live, and was being strung along by scammers who gave her false hope in exchange for her life savings. I had indirectly just told this woman she was going to die, and it was hitting her all at once.
Unfortunately, stuff like this is a regular occurrence. Maybe that’s my worst story, but it’s something I encounter on a weekly basis at least.
Rocks, Minerals, and crystals are cool as hell but they don’t have powers. They aren’t mystical or special. I’m sorry for going off on a rant about this but it’s frustrating and it can ruin people’s lives.

If someone told you that crystals have powers, you got scammed.

If you tell other people that crystals have powers, you are scamming people.

Stop fucking scamming people!

To be fair, there are some minerals that have powers, but those minerals are Uranium and Plutonium and the powers are Radiation Damage