I can't figure out why so many people of a certain age cohort seemed compelled to 1) constantly produce photographic and video evidence of themselves committing felonies, and 2) then post/distribute it for easy discovery. I mean, apart from the asshole question: how many examples are needed before the lesson starts to sink in?
I'm imagining the Apostropher family off-to-college conversation. "And when you teabag your friend, for the love of god, don't post the picture to Facebook."
Heh. Last spring he tweeted: "Nothing like a birthday to remind you that you still have a Facebook account."
I found a polaroid of a guy with another dude's balls resting on his head. Naturally it was near frat row. I still have it somewhere.
I'm sure the fine police department of State College, which has done such bravura work in the past, is on this case like white on rice.
Once again, time to flip the number back to "Over _0_ Days With Out A Violent Sexual Assault Or Racist Fraternity Incident" in the Penn State President's office.
Recently my "why are there so many assholes?" reflex has been triggered by the volume of "I don't think that poor people are suffering enough and this makes me sad" Op Eds written by rich white middle aged douchebags.
I suppose the bros in the linked story will grow up to be the target audience for those Op Eds, if they aren't already.
Once again, the solution to the Penn State problem.
I have been putting off for, depending on perspective, a few months or over a year the process of mastering a terrible piece of software for a project at work. I have finally started the project and lo, it is even more monumentally shitty than I thought it was going to be. I'm thinking of asking to work from home for the duration so that my screaming rages are confined to a mostly-uninhabited zone.
Anyone have any good spectacular-colleague-meltdown stories? I remember that there was one a few years back: someone had a client who was way out of control or something...
9: I remember that story. Some sort of consultant (I think) showed up incoherently drunk and the unfoggetarian in question (I don't remember who) liveblogged it while hiding in the room next door.
Anyone have any good spectacular-colleague-meltdown stories?
I saw two senior partners literally get into an old-man fistfight over a poker game, collapsing onto the floor before having to be pulled off one another.
Another partner (I wasn't physically there for this, this was in another office) walked into work one morning with a few bottles of wine, handed them to the people who were working on his cases, and said he was leaving immediately and wanted to thank people for working for him. He then got into his car, drove off, and went into hiding. Turned out he was not only a cocaine addict who had spent all of his money on cocaine, but was a bigamist running two separate families at once, neither one of which knew about the other, and both of which then tried to claim his remaining partnership assets after he left.
Interesting that they were more interested in claiming his assets than finding him. But that's a great story.
Come to think of it, I'm reasonably sure that all of the lawyers involved in both stories were once fraternity members.
I am very impressed the partner got out while it was still possible. Seems like most people delay until it is too late to skip town. Good foresight and follow-through, PartnerMan!
I don't think other than bigamy and cocaine use he'd actually broken the law in substantial ways (he wasn't embezzling money from the firm or anything). He just didn't want his families, former colleagues, or former clients to find him.
12.2 is spectacular. A story like that you could option as a film script and recoup your partnership losses.
I am very impressed the partner got out while it was still possible. Seems like most people delay until it is too late to skip town. Good foresight and follow-through, PartnerMan!
That's the kind of thoroughness you're paying for with BigLaw.
I don't think other than bigamy and cocaine use he'd actually broken the law in substantial ways
Not a sentence I ever expected to hear.
Keep these coming. I might get into a fistfight with an old man over the software -- can't rule it out -- but I don't think it's going to get to the level of cocaine and bigamy or even drunkenness. That's reassuring.
I have become unsportingly humorless about men failing to support families, though. I wonder if there are existing studies on the effects on the net worth of other female family members, because who else is going to pick up the slack other than, when you're lucky, the state? I can mostly avoid being furious at the deadbeat dads of my niece and nephew, but when I think about how my insanely hardworking mother has to cover for them that peaceable resolve disappears pretty fast. (This also makes it hard for me to contribute to the cause, because the idea that the guys get to spend down everyone's assets but their own fills me with unhelpful blind rage.) These are white middle-class guys with lots of social capital who have just figured out that they can get away with not paying, think it's a fun game, double down out of guilt, who knows. There is no stopping them.
on this case like white on rice
Racist?
20: Isn't that basically how the MRA people started.
Why be a solo asshole when you can scale up?
Isn't that basically how the MRA people started.
And finished, really.
I am slightly calmer after finding a useful help file but let's steer this back towards workplace shenanigans. I have no good stories! I once cancelled a college class because I was having a panic attack. I still remember the students' sad faces. They were, for reasons I will never fathom, looking forward to the class, maybe because it was sanctioned peaceful sleepytime. That's hardly a meltdown, though.
I once just barely missed witnessing a fight between two white-haired art historians, an American conservator, and a French conservator, all women. Voices were raised and curses thrown in two languages, over whether a nondescript bit of glass went on exhibit, or into storage. I got back from lunch to find the most senior historian on a stone wall outside -- not sitting on it, lying flat on her back in her tweed suit and glaring at the sky. I thought she'd had a stroke.
A former colleague said that at big corporate company where he used to work, which is notorious for repeat acquisitions, massive layoffs, and restructurings, he personally witnessed one guy who got laid off drop his pants and take a shit in the hallway.
If the colleague stayed to watch the whole thing, he must enjoy that type of thing.
I never witnessed any, most were well before my time, but I heard many tales of some legendary fistfights among the faculty of the philosophy, religious studies, and English departments at SB.
AIMHSHB, I once witnessed a magnificent screaming match between the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford and Erich "Love Story" Segal. Sadly I wasn't clear as to the casus belli as it had begun before they entered my department in the bookshop where I worked. I followed them around at a discreet distance in case they started throwing our expensive stock in trade, but eventually they fucked off, still roaring at each other. The other customers were enthralled; I wish we'd sold tickets.
I keep forgetting what AIMHSHB means.
32: When I google AIMHSHB there are only 4 hits and 2 of them are unfogged.
I feel Ogged just doesn't love America the way that other FPP do.
"as I mentioned have surely here before".
BTW, there's a reception welcoming our school's new fundraising wizard in a few minutes. It would be rude to mention the shooting that just took place 4 blocks away in broad daylight, right?
"After I made hotcakes, sausage, ham, and bacon"
36: It's got a paperclip avatar that will pop-up and say, "It looks like you're trying to fund a liberal education."
32: I suppose that there ought to be another "I", but having asked the question myself, I'll say "As I am sure that I have said here before."
As I Monitored Him Shitting in the Hallway, Bro
It's a crude anglicisation and abbreviation of "Hamish Borthwick",.
I think it's pronounced "Cumberbatch".
In other Penn State news, it looks like there'll be a job opening up in the sociology department.
Sociology departments usually have tenure.
44: I don't think she's up to Paul Frampton levels of weirdness quite yet.
Maybe US professors should just stay away from Latin America?
Workplace meltdowns? Oh man, where even to start. Some of this before my time.
A narc/vice sgt who ends up getting addicted to meth and fired after a drug test. He's been busted multiple times in the last several years for possession and distribution. He also got popped propositioning an undercover female cop during one of our prostitution stings.
There was another officer who the dept suspected was addicted to drugs and so they arranged a fake "found briefcase" call to have him dispatched on. In the briefcase they'd put a gun, five grand in cash, and a substantial amount of coke. The evidence booked by the officer? A briefcase and a gun.
One of our motorcycle cops decided it would be a good idea to sleep with a woman he arrested for DUI...at her house on the same night after she was released. They carried on for weeks and then she went to the dept and claimed she'd been coerced the whole time. He quickly resigned before they could fire him and her DUI went away. In the last year or so he suddenly announced on facebook he was henceforth going to be living as a woman.
An officer in a neighboring dept was called in by a citizen who saw him smoking heroin in the parking lot of a sporting goods store. In uniform. In his marked police truck. And he was a K9 officer.
And of course there was this dillhole.
48.5 - Wait, does "K9 officer" mean that he was someone in charge of one of the dogs, or is SLC really awesome?
Oh yeah, a good one from my telecom days. There was a guy at that job who most of us suspected was a bit of a fabulist as he told way too many improbable stories about himself. A girl in another dept was selling her jeep and let this guy take it for a test drive for a day. He comes back sans jeep with a story of getting carjacked by polynesians. The police find the car a few days later up on blocks and missing stuff the guy said he'd had in the jeep like his work issued laptop. He tells the girl he feels bad about her jeep being undriveable and offers to buy her wheels to at least get the jeep rolling again. When he shows up with a set of wheels she can't help noticing that they're the wheels that were originally on the jeep. She calls the cops and the cops subsequently find the other missing property in the guy's mom's storage unit. He goes to jail on felony insurance fraud (he'd filed a claim) among other things. And leading up to all this he'd also managed to get his wife to leave him with their two kids after he knocked up a 19 year old co worker.
49: Is that a tech joke? I'm hopelessly uncool and don't get it.
I think the question is whether "K9 officer" means that the dog was an officer.
Making things explicit is ok now?
Officer Byrd was a real officer, and a bird. He had a fucking badge and a number.
There is a shocking lack of Officer Byrd content online, but I swear he was a real LAPD parrot officer.
Here. Specially appointed in the Daryl Gates era to the force. Personally responsible for the 1992 riots? Who knows.
52: Ah.
55: You and I tried telling these nerds about Officer Byrd years ago.
If only they'd listened to him, they wouldn't have grown up to be nerds. "Don't be a nerd, listen to Officer Byrd."
God, how awesome is it that Judge Judy's bailiff, the "longest running court show bailiff in history", is also Officer Byrd
And speaking of workplace meltdowns and LAPD, in the last week one of their cops was caught smuggling a woman across the border in his trunk and another stopped showing up for work because he shot a dude during a fight out in Pomona and they have a warrant out for him.
Which I guess aren't technically workplace meltdowns, but still, wtf.
Where's Officer Byrd when you need him?
The link in 56 seems to be broken, btw.
Here's some high quality local TV parrot policing.
This one has the anti-geek-culture "don't be a nerd, listen to Officer Byrd" tagline.
A guy in my history grad school had a meltdown whose widest impact came in the form of an email he sent to the grad student listserv. I don't remember the whole thing, but highlights included a bit about not being cruel to squirrels and he ended with an invitation drop everything and ride a bike across the country. I think he also denounced war - this was around the time we invaded iraq, so it wasn't just a general statement - and the corporate university.
I saw him a year or two later; he hadn't taken that bike ride. He was either working as an assistant to a professor or a teacher in a high school. I know he did both of those things, but don't remember the order.
Now I'm waiting for Officers Bull and Gibbons.
Officer Byrd appears to still be going strong, which is not really surprising given how long macaws live.
Needless to say, the quality of these PSA's is based on 80's technology, rest assured that we have contracted one of the leading producers of animated films in Hollywood and the finished movie will be superb both in quality and in content.
Holy shit the book looks awesome. Officer Byrd turns into a six foot tall magical super-parrot working for the LAPD and goes to town clawing some badguys with his talons for the force.
The book is on Amazon. I don't think I'm going to be able to resist ordering a couple.
Just purchased. Best $3.50 I could ever possibly spend.
You do deserve one especially given your fear of birds.
Heh. All I did was follow links from the links you found, actually. But if you do want to reward me, feel free to donate some money to the Berkowitz for Mayor campaign. He's already been targeted by the Koch brothers, so you know he's good people.
I think the question is whether "K9 officer" means that the dog was an officer.
I thought the question was whether it was a robot