Tourists are fucking up the Giants Causeway in Ireland by wedging coins between the rocks which are then eroding and staining everything and in some cases causing the rocks to crack.
For any Americans on here planning to visit Ireland: There is a mystical and ancient Irish tradition says that when you visit any of our places of natural beauty you should speak at a normal volume, leave no trace you were there and fuck off home. Tell your friends and family.
Itâs five answers to five questions. Here we goâŠ
1. Can you reject someone for including âservant of godâ on their resume?
I recently saw a question come up somewhere else about receiving a candidateâs resume that included the phrase âservant of godâ prominently under their name, with no connection to work experience or job-relevant context. I understand that religious identity cannot be used as the basis for hiring decisions, but can you consider a personâs judgment in including something like that on their resume or must you entirely disregard it?
Technically you should disregard it. I completely get what youâre saying â you wouldnât be rejecting them for their religion, youâd be rejecting them for their bad judgment in injecting religion somewhere it doesnât belong â but you risk being on shaky legal ground if youâre trying to split those hairs in court one day. If the person otherwise would be someone youâd advance to an interview, theoretically you should do that and then probe into how well theyâll be able to work respectfully with people with different beliefs. (That said, in my experience the people who include stuff like this on their resumes tend not to be the strongest candidates anyway, even when you remove that.)
2. Iâm new, my team is leaving, and Iâm alone with super important work that I canât do on my own
I work part-time for local government in the UK doing a very niche job. My colleagues, Amy and Clara, have been here for 20-30 years. I was brought in, initially temporarily, because new legislation meant the amount of work might be a stretch for two full-timers, but wouldnât quite justify three. I was made permanent at the start of this year.
About 60% of our work needs to be handled immediately or as close to it as possible, definitely on the day it arrives. 25-30% can be delayed slightly, but there is a 28-day statutory time limit so not by much. The rest is ânice to haveâ but can be ignored indefinitely. Iâm still learning to do parts of the job â when I started, there were no process documents because Amy and Clara had been doing it so long. Iâm writing them as I learn.
Unfortunately, Clara had a medical emergency this spring. Sheâs currently signed off until September, but she may end up being medically retired. Until we know for sure, her job canât be replaced. Amy and I have been working alone since then and itâs busy but just about manageable. Amy applied for partial retirement for this year, working part-time with a job share coming in to make up the full-time role, but was refused so she will be taking full retirement come September. Her job wonât be advertised until she leaves. That means come September I might be the only one in the department.
I have a couple of energy-limiting disabilities which mean I canât do more hours and management is aware of this. I had to spend a week alone at the beginning of this month and Iâm still recovering from it. There were draining things happening at home as well, but a couple of times I closed my laptop for the day and burst into tears because I was too tired to stand up. Trying to keep up with work that was a stretch for two full-timers in my 21 hours a week will be almost impossible and could lead to a terrible physical crash. I know my boss, River, will support me any way she can. She tried to getting our professional contacts to only call during set hours and either email or leave a voicemail if I couldnât answer, but they just wouldnât stick to it. Hiring moves at a snailâs pace so I could be alone for a while. We deal with bereavement so not everyone wants the job, though I love it. I donât want to drop any balls when we deal with people at the worst time in their lives.
Iâm fortunate to have time for us to plan. I know if I ask for any accommodation River will fight to get it for me. I can already WFH whenever I need to. But I donât know what would help other than more staff sooner. What can I ask for that will help protect my health and keep at least a skeleton of the service running?
There are only two real options that will solve this, and that’s how you should frame it to River: they either bring in more temporary help (like they did with you originally) or everyone accepts that the amount of work being produced will be one-third what it was when there were three of you (or, more realistically, less than one-third because youâre still learning the job). If there are statutory requirements for when things must be handled by, the only option is for them to bring in more temporary help. If they choose not to, that does not mean that you need work yourself to exhaustion to somehow handle an unrealistic workload; what it means is that you need to be very up-front with your management about what will and wonât be getting done and let them decide how to handle that.
Anything else will just be a band-aid on the problem, and not even a very good band-aid.
3. I think one of my employees might be trans â how can I signal support?
I have reasons to think one of my reports might be trans. Without going into too much detail, I discovered this entirely by accident. I went to YouTube looking for streams of a video game I enjoy, and found a small channel was streaming that game. The streamer had their camera on, and I recognized both their face and their voice; but when I know them as, shall we say, Jane, the chat called them Tarzan. The chat referred to them with he/him pronouns, and their bio said that they were called Tarzan and used those pronouns.
I didn’t reveal myself, first because if I were streaming in my free time, I certainly wouldn’t want coworkers to pop into the chat, let alone someone I report to. Then because if they are actually a trans man, and not a cis woman as they present themselves as at work, I wouldn’t want to cause them anxiety by telling them I know.
I believe it’s everyone’s right to reveal their gender identity in their own time, or to not reveal it at all. The company we work for is known to lean on the conservative side, although the workers themselves have progressive views.
There is no reason to fear they could lose their job if they came out; we are not in the U.S. and there are strong laws against such discrimination. However, they could have a multitude of reasons not to come out. At the same time, I assume forcing yourself to be closeted at work would be terrible for your mental health, and I’d like to let them know it’s safe to do so. I’m not sure how to balance “wanting to let them know it’s safe to come out” and “respecting their privacy”. What would you recommend?
Yeah, definitely do not tell them what you found or put them in a position where they have to talk to you about it if they didn’t choose that 100% on their own. However, you can certainly do things to indicate that youâre a safe person and an ally â which could include putting up a rainbow sticker, wearing a t-shirt with an equality message, adding pronouns to your signature, making sure your whole team knows your company offers same-sex partner benefits and trans-affirming healthcare if they do, or so forth (and obviously making a point of speaking up if someone says something bigoted and of not tolerating bigotry on your team).
These are good things to do regardless, because you may have other LGBTQ+ employees on your team who would appreciate knowing youâre an ally.
4. Colleagues complain to me about RTO when I have no control over their area
I work at one of the largest national telecoms. About 2.5 years ago, there was a company-wide mandate for return to office three days a week. The policy, which we all had to sign and was rolled into our yearly code of conduct training, very explicitly called out that there was no proration. If you missed a day because of vacation, holiday, or illness, you still had to go into the office three days a week. How the three days worked was up to each VP, and if the VP didnât care, their directors would make the decision for their org. My VP has taken the coffee badge approach and as such, my org has a very easy “go into the office three times, stay for a meeting, and then just go homeâ practice. My VP has also directly call the lack of proration stupid to his boss, who has agreed but is not wasting his time on trying to change that. Other VPs have taken a firmer stance of specific days.
Recently, HR announced that they would be reaching out to every employee and their VP who are under 60% year-to-date in office presence. They will have to get enough in-office days until they are at 60% in office by the end of the year.
My org is spread out across the country in different offices, and I go to a small office where there are a lot of different orgs. One is a small cluster of a back-office team for the customer care team. Their VP has very specific days in office and those who are below 60% will be put on a PIP. The six members of this team have complained heavily about this. Their leadership team is physically located elsewhere but appears to heavily involved with them remotely.
Due to the lack of their leadership’s physical presence, they have targeted their complaints at the senior leadership in the office, although none of us are in their orgs. We have no overlap, oversight, or knowledge on how their org works.
I have suggested telling their manager, their director, or HR their complaints. I have advised them that the policy has said that since day one, and while it hasnât been enforced, itâs not unknown or a surprise. I know other people in senior leadership have explained this as well.
I got accused of writing their complaints off and not helping them today. Which is true. Do I think their VP is overly strict with the policy? Yes. Is the VP within their rights? Also yes.I have no desire to get involved in this and wouldnât appreciate the outside involvement from a director not in my department in my org. Besides just repeating myself, is there any other way to handle this? Iâm literally just a director in the same physical office space â we say hi at the coffee station.
âLike Iâve explained, I have zero ability to influence this in your org. Youâd need to take it the people who can do something about it â your management or HR.”
If you say that a couple of times and the same people keep raising it with you anyway, you might need to just keep saying, âAgain, I donât have any control over this, and it doesnât make sense to raising it with me.â
5. How do I network in limited time?
I am currently one of the many federal employees searching for a new position. I have heard of the 80% / 20% rule — that when looking for a job, you should spend 80% of your time networking and 20% applying for positions. However, I never know how to keep in contact with someone new I meet networking other than offering to volunteer for them. As I’m looking mainly in the environmental and climate fields with a lot of nonprofit organizations, this makes sense as an offer. However, I only have a limited amount of time to volunteer and am already involved with multiple organizations! How can I build and continue a professional relationship with people that I wouldn’t have in my current job without making endless offers of my limited time?
Whoa, no! Volunteering is definitely one way to network â and itâs a great one â but it canât be your default offer to everyone you want to network with or youâd have no time for the rest of your life.
The idea that 80% of your job search should be networking isn’t true for the vast majority of fields. (I do think itâs true in some, but not most.) You should spend some time networking, but you definitely donât need to aim for it to be 80% of your efforts, or even 50% of them.
Keeping in touch with contacts mostly means checking in periodically, seeing how theyâre doing, giving them an update on your own work, helping them out when you can, and letting them know what youâre looking for when youâre searching. With some people, itâs only going to be appropriate to do that once or twice a year and more frequently would be annoying â and thatâs okay! You can aim for once or twice a year with most people unless something specific comes up that makes them an obvious person to get in touch with again.
(1) YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN. [Item by SF Concatenationâs Jonathan Cowie.] Monday saw me travel 35 miles into and out of London to Radlett in the leafy country of Hertfordshire for a small reunion of my former college SF … Continue reading →
fascinating thing about sinners is how absolutely doomed the narrative is.
like okay if sammie hadn’t gone to the juke joint, remmick probably wouldn’t have shown up. but then the klan would have. okay smoke took those assholes out solo, if it was him and stack maybe they could have handled it. well the juke joint would have shut down in a month because no one had any real fucking money because of the sharecropping scrip. not to mention two seperate mobs are on their way to fuck the twins up (what do you MEAN you robbed al capone??). okay maybe they covered their tracks, well they’re still in the fucking jim crow south and stack and mary have a cool 35 years until loving v virginia so best case scenario is he’s broke and watching the love of his life from afar until he’s 70. plus annie implied the twins were on borrowed time anyway since she’d been quietly protecting them the whole time they were gone.
idk it both adds to the horror that there was no way out and just solidifies sammie saying it was the best day of his life, like that one little perfect moment was all they were going to get anyway
With a character like Sophie, who is so inherently charismatic and sexy (which is like 90% of her job), it was such a Choice to introduce her with her terrible stage acting fr. Truly unmatched.
Parker is first on screen hanging upside down and then shouting with unfettered glee as she launches herself off a building (ahead of the count). Let alone the little flashback of her as a child blowing up her childhood home and running off with her thieved Bunny.
It’s something I love about the Leverage pilot is that like. Yeah, Parker and Sophie are hot but they’re also Freaks and you HAVE to be down for them as Freaks to get on this train. They’re not just hot hypercompetent genre cliches, they’re unhinged messes in their own ways. Just. Women.
Parker isn’t ahead of the count. Parker goes on the original count, not the restarted count, because Nate didn’t announce that they were resetting their start time. It’s a very early, very key character beat.
Two years after being tasked with commissioning a review of medical evidence surrounding gender-affirming care for trans youth, Utahâs own state health department has concluded that trans healthcare bans âcannot be justified.â The Republicans who commissioned the study arenât too happy about it.
Back in 2023, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a bill that placed an indefinite âmoratoriumâ on doctors prescribing gender-affirming care like hormone therapy and puberty blockers to trans youth. That bill ordered the Utah Department of Health and Human Services to compile their report in order to produce recommendations for the state government on whether or not to lift the moratorium.
This week, the department delivered their long-awaited, over 1,000-page report â which is dated August 6, 2024 â to Utah lawmakers. The reportâs authors found that âthe consensus of the evidence supports that the treatments are effective in terms of mental health, psychosocial outcomes, and the induction of body changes consistent with the affirmed gender in pediatric GD [gender dysphoria] patients.â
The authors added that âthe evidence also supports that the treatments are safe in terms of changes to bone density, cardiovascular risk factors, metabolic changes, and cancer.â Trans youth who had received gender-affirming care were within the bounds of normal, non-pathological ranges for these conditions.
yâall this is huge. please donât âwater is wetâ all over it! I understand that we all already know this⊠The point is that the world doesnât know or care or believe and so these studies really fucking matter!
i see posts here about how people are so mortified when they are acknowledged as being a regular customer somewhere that they never return. cowards. the employees at taco bell treat me like a celebrity. like royalty. i am their strange little pet customer who gets traded along as staff comes and goes. they know my car before i even speak in the drive-thru speaker. today i was 2 hours late and she ran over and squealed that she “thought i’d left them!” and that she “made my order with extra love!” and you what, she did
it’s funny that this is getting notes again, because last night i went to the thai place in my neighborhood. it’s run by a family and during covid times i ate there literally almost every day. later i cut back on eating out so much and hadn’t been there in two years but last night we went and ate inside for the first time ever and the owner ran over to say hello and ask how i was, and repeated our old regular order. it was sweet. it’s so easy to feel like you are an island, but stuff like this reminds you that you are part of a community.
Being a regular is fucking awesome. I’ve only had that status a few times, but I always feel kind of honored. These people see humans all day every day, and they remembered me?! And not for something bad (as far as I can tell)! I’m flattered af!
Let’s talk about the best ways to support authors, indie publishers, and the literary community in general, rather than just big retailers.
I made this blog post talking about platforms and royalties. Have a look. Please tell me where I’m wrong or what I missed!
Feel free to reply to me on here or in the comments on the blog postâyou can sign up for free, your info remains private, you won’t be spammed. I promise that I care about privacy!
That’s one reason Google is on my own don’t-buy-here list.
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seananmcguire_tumblr_feed at 10:58pm on 09/07/2025
