Is there anything else that the world wants me to deal with? I already can’t cope with what has happened in the last 48 hours.
I wish we had alerts like this, though. It might make people think harder about their behavior. Most of the recent outbreaks in my area have been caused by indoor gatherings.
I just attended my second Zoom funeral this year. Both were sparsely attended in person and everyone was wearing masks. Still, there were 20-30 people indoors vs. 60-80 people online. Now I’m worried about the folks who were in the church and not distancing as they should’ve been in the pews.
Holy shit!! This is fucking horrible!!
I just had a conversation with the guy delivering oil to my house. We observed that the world had become a strange place this year and he seemed normal enough until he volunteered that he had told his wife that “if she ever saw a crowd of people crossing the road at her, black people, she should just kill them. Run them over.”
I was stunned. In the space of one sentence we went from the equivalent of “interesting weather we’re having” to contemplating racially motivated murder.
I said that we must be getting our news from very different places, and he replied that I obviously never heard about the truckers that are being pulled from their cabs and beaten to death “ ‘cuz the news won’t tell you.”
This is in Massachusetts. Fucking hell.
I hope his wife never visits a downtown Boston crosswalk.
I’m amazed she has driving privileges at all. /s /sort of
It’s probably a manifestation of my privilege that I expect people to not be racist homicidal nutjobs. No doubt Mrs. F will have a different perspective on the interaction, but for now I’m finding it profoundly upsetting.
And I really didn’t do enough to counter him. That shit needs to be pulled out at the roots and all I could say was “we must be getting our news from very different places.” Weak fucking sauce.
Confronting some guy who’s angry or who might pump a thousand gallons of oil into your basement may not be the best move for safety.
But you can always change suppliers going forward.
And call the company and tell them about the conversation, so when this guy or his wife run over some people they can’t act all surprised.
Oh, like this guy?
I’d argue that hauling a dude out of his truck who just tried to commit mass murder is pretty fucking justifiable. This isn’t like what happened to the guy in the LA riots, Reginald Denny.
It also brings to mind this story:
Where an islamophobe terrorist drove into muslims praying, killing one and injuring 10 and then was dragged from their car, only to be saved by the imam of the mosque who kept the crowd calm until the police arrived to arrest the person.
I’m not sure I could have done any better. That’s just so awful. I would have probably stood there gaping. It’s so easy to freeze in the moment and it takes practice, like role-playing, to counter that.
Definitely call the company and report it. That’s some virulent racist shit and his hate will come out during his job in other, worse, ways.
Mrs. F’s response, loosely paraphrased, when I told her the story:
You know how sometimes when women have been sexually harassed they say that they ‘just froze’? That the behavior was so inappropriate and unexpected they couldn’t react at all, never mind confront their harasser? Now you have a tiny window into what we mean.
And I guess I do. The world is full of wake-up calls if a person will only listen for them.
That sucks.
At least they aren’t burning the place down?
This is from last year, and there have been plenty more since. Fuckers. Extracted all the profit they could while avoiding investing in basic maintenance.
I’ve got a failing disk on my laptop. I should be able to recover most of the data from it, but it is just more hassle that I don’t need.
At least I now know what the intermittent USB errors I have been getting for the last few weeks are.
