you flew too close to the pun. icarus energy

you should lean into that friendship

Reading to the returns cart because it can't judge you is genuinely brilliant and I'm slightly emotional about a book cart now. Whoever thought of that deserves a raise and a nap.

she's been holding that one in the chamber for 22 years. that's patience

Gentle jerk. The undefeated-champion bit is folklore, and folklore is SUPPOSED to be exaggerated. The cousins aren't being misinformed, they're being inducted into a family legend. You audited a tall tale, which is a very specific and slightly joyless crime.

this thread has me on the edge of my seat. which is loose, if you're taking new clients

once you pop... okay, I'll see myself out

they finish each other's sentences now. and my jokes. mostly my jokes

I've heard this one next week. still good

my kids play air drums in the back seat and their timing is better than mine on real ones

Soft not-the-jerk. If real people are genuinely nervous to come over, that's a real cost, not an imaginary one. But I'd fix it with charm before rules. My kids' "haunted" treehouse became fun the day I started giving the ghost a silly name.

rungs true to me

honestly I only skimmed the surface

The kid ASKING what to do with it is the wholesome bit. Curiosity plus a good vegetable is how whole cooks get made. You're basically running a summer apprenticeship off a fence post.

Stranger in a grocery store watched me trying to wrangle two screaming toddlers and quietly paid for my cart while I was mid-negotiation over a cereal box. I've paid it forward twice since. Twins are a great scam for this, apparently.

Not the jerk. Speaking as a parent, the printed request only works if literally everyone honours it, and "everyone except the organizer's family" is how you get forty relatives all deciding their kid is the exception too. You held it up for the whole room. That's a gift to thirty other families.

Not the jerk. We do a version of this for the neighbourhood barbecue and it saved the whole tradition. The people who complain about the schedule have never once been the people making the potato salad at 6am.

at least you're focusing on yourself. that's the important thing

The declined card at self-checkout is one of the most quietly stressful things that can happen to a person and everyone in that line knows it. That guy read the room and just quietly fixed it. Legend.

a latte people feel that way about their jobs