Catch Your Man With Donuts: A Roosh-Free Open Thread

@ Nikki

Nope, I’m even going to encourage you. Sure the movie is dumb (the plot has more holes in it than Swiss cheese), but I found it fun nonetheless. Also, at least for Hollywood blockbuster standards, the film’s treatment of its female characters isn’t that horrible. It even passes the Bechdel test!

@ Nequam I’m so sorry to hear that. As a cancer patient (in remission: medicine – yay!) I know how scary that diagnosis must be. All the very best to you and your family.

@ Viscaria

Men can refuse? Dang, there goes my plans for the 29th – get my hostess trolley, a pile of sugary snacks and a ball and chain. I was just worrying I might snare me a diabetic and put him in a sugar coma before I could drag him to the altar.

(I’m happily married actually – to a diabetic, and neither of us care much for doughnuts. Pancakes, now… that’s another story. Especially if there’s maple syrup).

On the hostess trolley thing, I have some activist friends who always take a hostess trolley, teapot, cups, tea making gubbins, doilies and cakes on protests. Nothing defuses a potentially confrontational situation like a cuppa and a cake presented neatly on a frilly doily. We are British, after all.

This 29th February will be my grandfather’s 31st birthday.

@EJ

Right? Weirdly, he’s also married, so sometimes in the past we’ve had to deal with explaining to his wife why he’s been messaging another woman for years. Fuck, some people are infuriating.

Yeah, I’m probably sticking with this name. I’ll keep the “formerly” in there for a while but I’ll remove it eventually.

@ EJ – I think they also handcuffed themselves to it during an anti-fracking protest, though not with a ball and chain.

@ Imaginary Petal – that is a great name! And what a relief for you both. (I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you to stay cautious and keep safe still, but a reduction in tension and being reminded is going to be welcome).

@ Sunny – the very best to you. If you can clearly identify your skills, and explain how they are relevant to your target job, you’ll be some jumps ahead of a lot of applicants, based on CVs I have seen.

I might be job hunting myself, I now discover. The beloved and I have an annual earning frenzy in the summer, returning to teach on the same 12-week course year after year (we met on the course in 2003).

Last year there was a change of management, someone put in to run the course who had little knowledge of it and who dealt with some aspects of it (IMO) poorly.

One of the longest running colleagues on the course, who had written a great deal of the materials, was bullied so badly she had a nervous breakdown (there were other issues, but the bullying we all witnessed certainly contributed) and has been hospitalised.

There was also a safeguarding issue which I raised with the manager, who denied there was a policy regarding it – which of course there was, so I emailed her the link. I asked if we could all be reminded of it at the next weekly meeting (no need to single out the guy who seemed to have been taking creepshots of students). But nothing was ever said or done about it, except I was singled out by name as having “found a policy” in an email to our bosses.

Well, at the end of the course there was the chance to give feedback on how it had gone. Lots of anxious discussions among staff about how frank they should be. The feedback forms, in the past, were to be put in a box in Reception so as to be anonymous, but this time were to be emailed directly to the manager who was running the course. I basically argued for being as frank as you can decently be, otherwise the higher management would never know what had happened, and that feedback is meant to be – has always previously been – confidential.

In any case, as I was documenting the safeguarding thing, it would be obvious it came from me anyway. So B and I gave our feedback (unsigned) to the line manager (above the course manager) and both mentioned the confidentiality aspect.

So – nothing happens until January, when the course planning starts. We heard that the same manager is going to be in charge again. Someone we know quite well in the management team rang us at home and said they were assured all the issues raised in the feedback had been dealt with and please come and work on the course again.

Then we read our emails: my husband has been offered a place on the course, but I have been vetoed.

The course manager read all our feedback and decided I am motivated by personal animus, and has vetoed me. It appears now to be on my written HR record that I am negative, critical and personally motivated.

It’s rather ironic, because by the end of the course, B and I were the only teachers still on speaking terms with the manager, unless it was strictly work related.

But if I’d like to come in and discuss my options I’m welcome to do so. (I’m 55, a zero-hours contract employee, and a cancer patient in remission, so my “options” may possibly involve the expression f*** off and die).

So – I seem to have made a tactical error, and I’m suspicious it relates to the safeguarding issue I raised. The management seems to have endorsed the bullying that went on, too.

One thing seems likely – they’re not going to get any accurate feedback next time.

So… I am rapidly looking at other courses I can apply to work on. Unfortunately there are none near us: I’d have to spend the week in London at the nearest. On the other hand, they are better paid and for longer periods, and I could spend some time with the grandsprogs. On the third other hand, what will my references be like?

On the other, other hand, my husband doesn’t want to work with that manager this summer, knowing she has vetoed me. On the fifth other hand, we need the money! On the sixth hand, we don’t want to spend the summer apart, but we can’t both leave our house and cats.

And in the seventh hand there’s a cup of tea, so I’m going to drink it now and stop fretting.

And there we are. All advice gratefully received.

@EJ (The Other One): I don’t even know what Rogue Trader is, but yes please. I would be very interested. Please no one judge me for my bad gaming and inability to use Skype properly!

@ kupo – Mary Somerville might be on a banknote before long.

I wonder if her appearance as a character in the film Mr Turner might have sparked a bit of interest. If you haven’t seen it, she explains a science thing about light and magnetism to two men, who have asked her to demonstrate it. Nothing at all is made of the fact that she’s a woman in a bonnet, they are blokes and this is the mid-Victorian era.

I think it may be the first time I’ve ever seen a scene of that kind.

@Viscaria:
Think Firefly crossed with Call of Cthulhu crossed with Event Horizon, but set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Your intrepid group of explorers, traders and renegades, equipped only with a second-hand spacecraft and a few tens of thousands of followers, voyage out into the stars where terrifying creatures dwell and the ruins of pre-human civilisations can be found.

@kupo:
On the one hand, science is full of misogynists and has been for all of its history, and I’m not going to deny that. On the other hand there’s tremendous progress nowadays on exposing that, and on using sunlight as a disinfectant. Even if we ourselves live in a difficult time, there’s hope that our daughters and granddaughters might not.

@bluecat:
That sounds awful. Those people deserve to have exactly zero good staff working for them, and by the sounds of it they’re trying hard to make that situation come about.

@Valentine:
All my best wishes for her treatment.

@Paradoxical Intention: Congratulations on the job! Have you heard of the throat spray called “Entertainer’s Secret?” I’ve heard professional voice actors recommend it when talking about coping strategies for “throat-ripper” screams and voices.

@ EJ

I’d be up for that, too! I don’t have any experience with Pen&Paper, but know the D&D system from Baldur’s Gate et al. and Warhammer universe from some of the recent tablet iterations of their strategy games. I’d really like to play around a bit with both.

@Nequam, my dad is going in for surgery for the same sort of cancer on Tuesday. We are extraordinarily lucky in this regard – caught early, they will be using a top-of-the-line surgical robot, and the surgeon is by chance one of the top ten in the world TMJ specialists. We have caught a lot of luck; I will do what I can to send some of that your way. You too, @Valentina. <3

I have an American friend who is convinced that the Canadian health care system is terrible. He can go walk on legos 😉

@bluecat, I hope you get a good job! That's terrible circumstances, and I don't know what the job market is like around you, but you've got experience and that's worth a heck of a lot. Awful that you were tarred like that :c There are plenty of distance universities that need course co-ordinators and tutors and whatnot, I've known lots of teachers that have filled gaps in their paycheques that way. I work for Athabasca University and they're great. Take a look there?

I like the idea of a Mammoth roleplaying group! I am not much for the Warhammer settings, mind you – I find them a bit too grim and oppressive for my taste. But I have had fun with Rogue Trader in the past!

I can't promise that I wouldn't intentionally misspell it as Rouge Trader all over the place though.

EDIT – Oh, I wanted to add, I like the nickname change, Imaginary Petal! That is a good minecraft name. I like it.

Rouge Trader would be quite a fun game – or a good title, at least, which is something.

@bluecat, a game about cosmetics marketing? :O I got a critical success on my foundation pitch, everyone gets a free raise to all their rolls this quarter! Sell, sell, sell!

Personal gripe moment, unrelated to the high-stakes world of makeup trading. My brother-in-law has been absolutely tormenting my nephew and niece. My sister separated from his abusive butt last summer, and he’s been laying the biggest guilt trips on the kids for every visit, three times a week. My three year old niece comes home to her mother bawling about how she wants Daddy to come live with them again – he’s using their misery to try to twist my sister’s arm into taking him back.

It’s disgusting and it blinds me with rage that he could do this, instead of protecting his kids. Sorry, no question or comment about it, i just had to vent about it a little bit. So angering.