drbluefall

Usually I'm willing to share more when I can tell a customer is engaging with me earnestly, and believe me when I say that I do strongly appreciate it. Feels like a pressure release, especially on busier days or when I'm on my own at the counter.

I'm gonna just go on a brief tirade here—

It's probably just me, but I despise "how are you doing?" as a greeting.

To put this in context, I work in a customer-facing position, handling returns at a counter. When people come up to me and ask "how are you doing?", 95% of the time they don't actually care. And it bothers me in particular because I instinctively want to answer the question honestly, but a) that would result in me going into a non-trivial emotional ramble because of the... everything going on in the world right now, and b) being that open with a stranger is weird.

It's why I've settled into using "fine, relatively" whenever I'm asked that question in a context that demands a terse response. It's as honest as I can be, captures a decent range of emotions, and at the very least can get a rise out of people who aren't expecting the standard "good" or "great" or "alright."

The open-source repository relies on internal APIs at the IRS. It's not really meant to be run by your average John Doe.

That's a valid response in the long term, but in the immediate/near term, it's reasonable to want to restrict a treatment to those it'll help most.

ruledy :)

There are acts which deserve severe punishment. Perhaps multiple lifetimes of the most severe punishment one can imagine.

But there is no such act that, in this finite world, by finite humans, merits infinite punishment.

It is from a Zohran Mamdani, but not the NY State Assemblyman Zohran Kwame Mamdani (who is @zohrankmamdani on Twitter)

The end of it absolutely killed me as well.

Well, hopefully he made some new friends during the endeavor too. ^~^

EDIT: Too used to Discord markdown, where ^ doesn't have semantic value.

It's a reference to the TF2 animation "Expiration Date". In it, during the three days Soldier (thought he had) left to live, he did nothing but teleport bread for three days.

yes pls

I always like to say "in between and beyond", for all our friends off the standard gender spectrum :)