apparently someone left their iphone in our store. the phone was found by a woman, henceforth known as “Terrible Lady,” when Phone Owner set off the “find my iphone” alarm. the alarm is accompanied by a “please contact this # if found” message. Terrible Lady utilizes this number to text Phone Owner, demanding $100 in return for the phone. Phone Owner says they can’t afford it, there’s some back and forth, etc. etc., and eventually Phone Owner threatens to call the cops.
Terrible Lady brings the phone (which is still making the obnoxious “find my iphone” noise, and continues to do for the duration of the encounter) to my register, complaining about the audacity of Phone Owner, as if refusing to pay the $100 is an egregious personal insult. i “mhm” a lot, silently judging her, but relieved she has sensibly decided to release the phone into the store’s custody so we can return it to Phone Owner without further drama.
LMAO WRONG
fifteen minutes later, after she has checked out, she comes by my register just long enough to say “make sure she pays the $100, i’ll call to see when i need to come pick it up!” and is out the door before i can even process the fact that this women genuinely thinks that the burlington fucking coat factory is going to be the middleman for her definitely unethical and most likely illegal lost iphone extortion scheme. (side note: i looked this up once i got home from work, and it turns out that, yeah, it’s totally illegal in our state)
sure enough, an hour later, Terrible Lady calls: “hi, is this cashier #5? [that’s not my name but thanks] has she brought the $100 yet??”
there are like 2 cashiers on duty and 20 people in line. i beg my manager to take the call, which: smart move. because my manager ends up on the phone with Terrible Lady for 20 minutes, telling her that we will, under no circumstances, require Phone Owner to pay $100 before we give them the phone. eventually, Terrible Lady realizes we mean business, and SHE threatens to call the cops on US because we took the phone from her “under false pretenses”
manager hangs up on Terrible Lady /end
What did I just read?
One of the most accurate depictions of how awful customers can be.
I was reading this story thinking that OP works at an Apple store or a phone store, which would make this almost make sense, and then they casually drop in that all this is happening at a Burlington Coat Factory.
People say that old games dont look as good as they remember
Its because they legitimately dont.
The “fuzz” from CRT monitors was something that was definitely accounted for and taken advantage of back in the day when it came to video games! While this effect is noticeable in 3D games, it’s MUCH more visible when it comes to 2D sprites:
Just look how much more depth these simple sprites of Princess Peach and Bowser from Super Mario RPG seem to have when seen through the “dots” of a CRT TV screen!
I somehow did not know this!?!?!?
One of the clearest examples of this is using the effect for transparent waterfalls in the MegaDrive Sonic games
My absolutely favourite example of this is with Dracula’s eyes in Castlevania
On the one hand this is legitimately really cool and fascinating and on the other both versions still make my eyes hurt.
I used to be a grader and an occasional substitute prof for an introductory astronomy lab. That means that the majority of the people in this lab are only taking it because it’s a requirement and about half of them think it’s an astrology class.
I was grading midterms and this one girl. She was so nice and I think she was a business major. Fuck. The question on the midterm was to draw a diagram of the solar system and this poor girl. This fucking girl had drawn a Mars-centric solar system. As in every planet and the sun were orbiting Mars. I now actually have a custom Cards Againsy Humanity card I got at a con that says “A Mars-centric solar system”
I had a boy argue with me that there was liquid water on the moon (this was around when they had found liquid water on Mars in ~2015) and he wouldn’t believe me that he likely meant Mars and not the moon. After I marked his answer to the relevant lab question wrong, he took it to the department head who had promptly laughed him out of the office.
And there was another boy who, during a lab in our observatory where we would look at certain things in the sky, asked where the sun was. At 10pm in November. After some questioning it was revealed that he thought the moon and the sun were the same thing.
My friend, whom I love dearly, found out that the moon orbits the earth as a 20-year-old in an upper-level political science class, and was utterly and completely flabbergasted. When questioned, her defense was that she doesn’t have anything to do with the moon, so why would she have needed to know?
i was once talking to a friend of mine about how at that point in time you could see mars, jupiter, and venus at the same time, which was pretty cool, and she said “where’s pluto? wait, it was destroyed” and that’s how i found out that my friend, who is in her third year of a medical degree, thought that pluto stopped being a planet because it was eaten by a black hole.
When i was in physics class my sophomore year of high school, the teacher drew a simplified diagram of a person standing on the planet earth as part of the explanation for how it was initially discovered that the earth was round. And one girl sitting in the class said “wait… we live on the OUTSIDE???” she had spent her whole life thinking that the earth was a hollow sphere and that we lived on the inner walls of it
i had a coworker in his early twenties who, when i mentioned seeing admiring how bright mars was that morning on the drive to work, laughed and said ‘mars? like the planet?’ and i was like ‘yeah mars the planet. it looks like a very bright star, it was supposed to be extra bright and close lately.’ and he got quiet and oddly worried and he said, quietly, carefully, ’…are planets… real?’ like he was checking to see if i was completely insane.
i experienced a brief moment of crisis and said back ’yes. planets are real. did you…. think they weren’t real?’ and he looked even more disturbed and said, ‘no. they’re just made up for movies and shit, right?’ and i was totally horrified by this point and said ‘planets are real. the solar system has nine of them. the universe has billions of them. we make up fictional planets for movies but there are definitely real planets that actually exist.’
he said, like he sincerely thought i was fucking with him, ‘how do you know planets are real?’
i said, ‘i’ve seen them. i’ve seen saturn through a telescope. you can go outside right now and see mars and venus in the sky. i swear that planets are a real thing.’
he said, muttering now, ‘well, maybe that’s just what you think.’
the conversation did not get any better from there.
