I thought of this question because someone joked about double-dipping their hands in the chocolate fountain at Golden Corral and boy did that invoke one of my least favorite paying-for-college memories.
Yes, someone did dip his hands into the chocolate fountain at the Golden Corral. Worse, he was a repeat offender, a man that was at least in his 30s if not older slurping it off of his fingers and all, sometimes while making eye contact with me or my coworkers. Worse, there was no enforced rule against doing so, at least at my location, so my manager just told me to let him do it, don’t make a big deal out of it, and hope he doesn’t bother anyone else.
That same manager once insisted on me making the place extra clean a little before Christmas, so they insisted that I use double the amount of cleaning bleach in the same bucket. I explained that’s not how cleaning works or how OSHA compliance works. I got a write-up. I said that wasn’t an offense that qualified for a write-up, and what they said was “thanks for the tip, I’ll find something that is. Your word against mine.” 
That same manager punched me out early without telling me, because the place wasn’t perfect enough before I left over an hour late, missing my family waiting to pick me up outside by that long to go out to do holiday stuff. I did call that in on the supposedly anonymous tip line later, but you can guess what happens when an anonymous tip about wage theft is called in on a manager that already knows who would call in that tip in a “right to work” situation. 
That same manager was fired a week later for embezzlement, and not the cool kind. They were writing up and firing people for months for money missing from the register. I found out when collecting my last check and noticed someone new. 
CW: Death/suicide/violence against women
When I was in my twenties I worked at a 7-11 for several years, now the experience of being promoted to assistant manager was its own radicalizing experience, watching all the corporate training videos full of casual racism. But that is not what this story is about, this story is about my friend [redacted]. We worked together for a few months and bonded over growing up poor as shit, hating cops etc. I even went to her boyfriend’s house with her to help him harvest his weed plants. She didn’t smoke herself, because she had recently graduated from a rehab program. One morning I get a phone call from a former coworker/friend who’s aunt had come in to shop and found the store was empty, but the bathroom was locked. I lived across the street at the time so he asked me to go check on her, we both worried she had relapsed and maybe passed out in the bathroom.
So I go over there and there is now a cop who asks me if I can open the door, saying since there is no sign of foul play he can’t kick in the bathroom door without a warrant and asks me to open it. I check the handle and sure enough it is locked. I knock a few times and call her name, but don’t get any answer. So I give the door a firm shove with my should, it’s a shitty thin plyboard door with a latch that is fairly easy to force open. I immediately knew something was really wrong because I felt a weight on the other side of the door and it shut itself on me as I jerked back in surprise.
At this point a thick pool of blood flowed out from under the door and I immediately lost my shit and retreated from the back room, figuring now officer fuck face can actually do something and my mind just collapsing on me.
I would soon learn that an ex-boyfriend who she met in rehab and who didn’t graduate the program had come in and forced her into the bathroom and shot her and himself in a murder/suicide. Now here comes the exact moment when I decided I would dedicate my life to destroying capitalism: This happened at about 11:30 AM. The crime scene cleaning company was in and out in a few hours after their bodies were taken away and the store was open again by 8PM that night. My boss told me “you don’t have to come in tomorrow if you need some time away”. No offer of any counseling, no empathy for the poor girl that had been murdered in his store just hours before. That guy died of heart failure a few years back and I hope it was the most painful possible way someone can die of that. I hope it was fucking slow.
And on top of all that the cleanup crew didn’t even do a very good job, months later I went to fix the soap dispenser on the wall and it still had dried blood behind it.
Bathrooms, particularly public ones all smell like that place on that day to me now.
spoiler
ugh. i feel for you. i never had to deal with finding a friend like that before, but ive been active in the local trans community long enough that ive had many people die on us and its always heart wrenching to see such kind people die to shit like this. its always worse cause usually when one suicide or bad thing happens there is a big spat of them that ripple through and you gotta be very vigilant. i dont wanna be too detailed because ive already had enough things on here to identify me, but fuck cops and fuck how they handle anti-trans violence. i regularly think about how many intelligent, kind, thoughtful people die or are traumatized so early in life and how that effects social progress. death to america.
I think of this quote by Stephen Jay Gould often.
yep, thats the one. it haunts me
That quote stays with me more than most other quotes.
I truly don’t know how to properly respond to that; that kind of experience is very personal and life defining.
I had a similar one that has lead to some of my own strong opinions, no matter how trivial they seem on the outside.
Without going too far into the details, (CW: death, some morbid details)
spoiler
I had a close friend, a coworker actually (tying this to the topic thread, if only somewhat) take his own life, only minutes after I thought he was fine when the call ended, and I was very, very wrong and failed to see the signs. I was there when the noose was cut on the freeway overpass. He was a tormented, hurt, but wonderful young man that had nothing at the end but those that cared about him enough to show up but we were all too poor to put on a funeral, instead doing an impromptu vigil on the spot before the county coroner took the body away.
Later, I had to watch several people die that did not want to go, were not ready, and would probably never have been ready, both in pain and afraid. They did not have a cinematically touching final few moments, only wails of terror and labored rattling breathing until the breathing stopped. I then had to clean up what their corpses expelled not long after that, bowels emptying out as a matter of course. The smell never fully left those rooms.
That’s a big part of why when someone tries to play internet tough guy and say something I watch for entertainment is “for babies” because there isn’t enough death or killing in it, underneath it all, I sort of envy them because I wouldn’t wish them the experience of scrubbing fecal matter and lung fluid out of wallboards, nor the smell of already-decaying flesh wafting out where the flies can get it, or for that matter the unforgettable stench of bowel-sludge, black as tar, no matter what pompous asses such Vincent Adultman tryhards sound like to me.
Life’s brutal and cruel and most of all indifferent for many at the end, many that are forgotten and ignored because that reality is frightening to those that still have time left and they avoid the actually dying no matter how “mature” they otherwise claim they are. For that reason I don’t derive much pleasure from cynically gratuitous death/killing spectacles on screens.
Yeah another more recent thing was when I was at work and a local unhoused guy was buying some food, and began to have a major seizure. I accompanied him out to the bus stop outside the store and sat with him watching his convulsions get stronger, until I was sitting on the sidewalk after he started to slip off the bench and just did what I could to make sure he didn’t smack his head on the pavement.
I asked if he wanted me to call him an ambulance and he managed to get out the words “can’t afford”. So I sat, and I waited, and I made sure it had passed and that he was safe for the moment before I had to go back inside.
I’ve volunteered to do org work for the unhoused.
Being untrained as an orderly and trying to pull an old man having a seizure out of a bus while his limbs were each individually fighting me and my team was unforgettable.
I didn’t know his full medical condition and perhaps never will, but all he wanted when he came to and was hydrated enough to be stable was his pineapple-shaped plastic drinking vessel which still reeked of the little bit of booze still sloshing in it. Fuck it, I gave it back and lied about its contents because he had gone through enough.
I’m drifting off of my own topic, but that reminds me of one more moment. One unhoused woman cried, I mean wailed, because I actually stopped and listened to her while working for the same org and gave her an extra pair of socks and helped her fill out some replacement paperwork for what had been destroyed by some fratboy assholes that wrecked her shopping cart and left her and her stuff stranded when she couldn’t drag it any farther. To paraphrase what she said that night, she said that was the first time she felt human in a while.
In the future, you generally only need to pay for the ambulance if they take you somewhere. It is usually gonna be helpful to have a paramedic assist you even if getting to the hospital is going to be an issue.