When I read it, I agree with you - but when I say decimate, it sure sounds like it should mean near total destruction.

Using “decimate” to mean “completely destroy” is not a misuse of the word. The word’s meaning has simply changed.

When I was 14 I tossed a piece of packaging for the chips I was eating on the ground. I don’t know why I did that, I’d been so against it as a good little kid, I think my mind was just experimenting at the time with whether I really needed to give a shit about this anymore. Probably some kind of “edginess” I was cultivating perhaps. Anyway, some middle aged teacherly guy picked it up in front of me and put it in the bin. Then he gave me a statistic about how our city was the “nth cleanest in the world and we should keep it that way”. I was by myself but kinda scoffingly shrugged it off as he walked away to show I didn’t care what he thought. But being called out like that and feeling that hot flush of angry embarrassment and being forced to pay specific attention to my actions instantly and dramatically recalibrated that drift in my values on the issue of of littering in a permanent way. It wasn’t because they made an especially good point, in fact I didn’t find the statistic particularly compelling I mean of all the reasons to do the bare minimum of decency that seems like one of the worst, like it’s some sort of competition or something. Nevertheless it was just a reminder at the perfect moment that no, this isn’t going to be acceptable even if there’s no obvious consequence and you shouldn’t start to feel okay about this.

The fact that the guy was kinda lame and had such middle aged dad and teacher vibes about him I think made all the difference, there wasn’t an angry confrontation, but it was still firm. He backed off and walked away straight after he said his piece rather than giving me the chance to turn it in to an argument where I might feel rebellious and victorious about it, he just calmly left me to stew in the fact that whatever bravado I might have put on for him, he didn’t care and I was going to have to reckon with why I ever thought this was going to be a good habit to start.

I bring this up because maybe if you have the opportunity to you actually should say something, though obviously carefully and not too aggressively. Sometimes it makes a difference even if by their response the person would appear to indicate that it didn’t.

I understand where you’re coming from, but it might just have been a simple accident and they’re too poor or don’t have the time to get it fixed. I went around with a shattered screen for about six months.

How dare you accurately describe me 😤

I have the same theory. Anytime I see someone having a phone call on speakerphone it’s almost 100% because their screen is shattered and they just walk around screaming into their phone.

Makes sense that these are also the type of people walking around just raw dogging life with out a cell phone case.

I think it’s a particular skill to phrase requests for help in such a way to list as many relevant steps that you tried as briefly as possible and judiciously decide not to mention all the steps you’ve tried tempting though it may be. I had for a long time in the context of tech support questions written very long help requests because I was so afraid of getting a glib response to try some extremely obvious thing that takes 5 seconds and would definitely fix some well known easily solvable issue but not the harder more obscure issue I was experiencing that happened to have characteristics of that simpler issue.

I learned though that the longer your request is the less chance you have of receivingany help and if it’s a captive audience who are required to help you, the more chance you’ll have of them getting rid of you by deliberately misinterpreting the issue by focussing on any random part of the very long description (could be the opening sentence, could be something several paragraphs in) and pretending the request was all about that. They’d hone in on steps I described taking to try and fix the issue I wrote the help request about in the first place, re-contextualise those steps as a different, unrelated help request and then give an unhelpful response on how to solve that issue that I was never experiencing to begin with. More innocently, long lists of what’s been tried also just make it harder to understand the problem when someone is trying to assist by virtue of the sheer volume of text produced and how boring and tedious it becomes for them to read. There’s also another issue in being too fixated on listing what’s been tried which is that, although the whole idea is to filter out responses that involve solutions that have already been attempted, often it transpires that you didn’t actually attempt the solution in the right way and something dismissed as ineffectual actually would have worked after all. Sometimes it’s actually better to let people suggest something you already tried and anticipated they might suggest, just so you can double check that you actually really did try that approach properly and didn’t have a faulty understanding of how to apply it.

That said though, obviously I try to make sure to include the things I’m very confident I don’t need to try again to show that indeed I’ve worked on the problem and have tried the more obvious solutions already.

Ahhh, dude. For real. Have your fucking ID or ticket out before you get to the front of the line.

I’m sometimes super slow at the start of self checkout. If the bags are stuck together, not open, and if I didn’t bring my own, sometimes it takes me 2 minutes just to open a plastic bag. I’m trying my hardest!

I don’t even know what you’re talking about.

Not only this annoyance you mentioned, but my personal little saying is that turn signals aren’t just for the benefit of who you see, but more importantly for anyone you don’t see!

You should have already made sure you’re clear of everyone before you think about leaving your current path. Using the indicator is a preventative measure for the sake of yourself and anyone in a blind spot or that you failed to notice.

Just not using turn signals in general and lack of road etiquette is enough for me to judge people pretty verbally in my car, though nobody else ever hears it, so I guess it counts as a secret. You’re driving a machine that can kill people out of negligence, the least you can fucking do is show some common courtesy and signal what you’re intending to do with it and what direction you’re going to move. People have more common courtesy when they’re walking on the street and no danger to others, yet they moment they’re behind a wheel and much more dangerous, it’s like they have nothing but middle fingers for everybody else around them.

It doesn’t even make sense.

I got you’re back, bro

Semi colons are for winks only.