Not trying to be contrary, but I’ve gone down this rabbit hole a lot over the years

As far as the donation goes, the argument I keep running up against is usually that they want me to “have something to unwrap” that isn’t just cash or a gift card (no matter how many times I tell them that I don’t care about that) I feel like a little “a donation has been made in your name” note would probably feel like even less of a present to them

maybe point out that it is tax deductible.

Unfortunately I don’t think any of my family are itemizing their deductions.

And as far as vouchers and gift cards go, I hate those things enough that in retrospect they probably should have been point 10. I never remember to use them, I have probably over $200 in various gift cards sitting around in my house right now that I’ll probably never think to grab when I’m running out to the store or making an order online. And I hate being forced to shop at specific places. And of course the amount always ends up not being exactly what I need, so either I’m left with like $2.37 left on a card that I’m really never going to bother using, or I still have to pay something out of pocket in which case I’d really rather I be able to shop around to get the best deal possible but can’t if I want to use the gift card.

Cash would be great, but again they want to give me something besides cash or a gift card.

And as far as personal vouchers go, my home/family life is mercifully pretty harmonious. Except for Christmas I don’t have many complaints, I see everyone pretty much exactly as much as I want to, get to do the things I enjoy doing, etc… About the only thing I would want there is a “get out of Christmas free card” which feels like a weird Christmas present.

And we’re sort of the cooks in the family, so I am the source of good bread and cookies and such, and I don’t really go through a lot of snack foods. I just recently threw out a bunch of candies and such from last Christmas to make room for what I surely have incoming this year, and my soap and such needs are pretty minimal, my preferred brand comes in gallon jugs that lasts me a good long time, and other consumables tend to last me a long time and I never seem to run low around the holidays, nor do I have the storage space to really stockpile a bunch of extras.

And my family is already really good at moving around stuff we’re not using, my brother in law (sisters husband) was kind of astonished at how often we end up moving furniture from one relatives house to another and handing off random things to people who can use them. We could maybe save some of that for Christmas, but then it becomes a problem of “where do we store this second couch we bought in August until we can give the old one away in December”

And handmade stuff I don’t need is still stuff I don’t need.

1. Deep down I’m still an edgy militant atheist, and really want nothing to do with religious celebrations.

2. The only things I really want are things I’m not realistically going to be gifted. No one’s going to buy and install a new heater/windows/deck for me for Christmas, or pay down my credit card, etc. I have too much junk already, I have all the clothes I need, I don’t really need more snacks in the house, and I’m pretty much set up with everything I need/want for my hobbies. I don’t need gifts. Inevitably I’m going to get a bunch of junk I don’t need or want, and I’m gonna take it straight home and throw it out or donate it or otherwise I’m going to spend the next eternity shuffling around my house because I don’t have anywhere to put it.

3. I’m probably a bit autistic or maybe just a bit dead inside, so even on the rare occasion I get a gift I’m really excited about I don’t really have much of a reaction to it, which I feel is disappointing to the people giving it to me.

4. I really hate decorating and then having to take it all down a month or so later, having to haul all this crap down from the attic and then back up again is a real drag. It’s part of the reason I get a real tree, it’s easier to just strap it back onto my roof and haul it to my friend’s house to burn in their fire pit (which is very cathartic) than to try to wrestle it back up the ladder. My wife likes it, so I suffer through it, I just wish she’d do more of the work.

5. I don’t want to spend money. I have things I want to save for and dropping a couple hundred bucks on presents isn’t helping that. I don’t mind getting people gifts if it’s something I think they really need or wound like, but thats usually not why I’m buying them stuff for Christmas, I’m getting them stuff because I feel obligated to get them something.

6. Family gatherings suck. As far as families go mine isn’t too bad, I’d even say I kind of like most of them, but getting all of them in the room together and having to spend most of the day with them is too much. There’s too many people, it’s too loud, and while they’re generally all good people, I don’t really have enough in common with most of them to make it worth the aggravation, they’re best enjoyed in small doses. My wife’s family is smaller and quieter, which would be great, except they want the gathering to go on all day, my wife is bringing stuff over to make breakfast and it sounds like they plan to keep things going until at least dinner, so thats probably gonna be a 12+ hour ordeal when you figure in the time it takes to go over the river and through the woods to grandmothers house. Also, most of our family just aren’t great cooks, and even if they were there are some picky eaters in the family, so family meals are pretty lackluster. I think my wife’s family’s dinner plans are a stouffers lasagna. Luckily I have to work this year so I have a good excuse not to go.

7. Christmas music can be good, but not the stuff that’s been piped into every single fucking store I’ve had to go to for the last month, and I’m sick of it.

8. This is mostly just a me-problem, but I have way too much shit going on this time of year. My anniversary is in November, then thanksgiving which we usually do with my father in law who’s about an hour away, my wife’s birthday, my mom’s birthday, christmas even which is usually with my family, usually about 45 minutes away depending on who’s hosting, Christmas day is usually with my mother in law about an hour away, and then after that I usually host a new years eve party and between work and holiday obligations it’s kind of crazy trying to get my house ready for that.

9. I work in 911 dispatch, we always get some really crazy/sad calls around this time of year. I deal with it just fine personally, but it doesn’t exactly put me in a holly jolly mood.

10. I don’t know, I made it this far and just kind of wanted to leave it on a nice round number I guess… Maybe I find tinsel distracting?

Occasional nudist/naturist here

Depends a bit on the beach you’re at, but generally yeah, that’s pretty inappropriate and would get you thrown out of or even arrested at any of the places I go to. Nudism isn’t about sex, it’s just about not wearing clothes, there are people with kids who enjoy nudism as a family, etc.

The resort I normally go to has a very lively swinger community, sometimes it almost seems like my wife and I are the only couple there not part of the lifestyle, but even still any sort of sexual activity stays out of the open, you go back to your room/tent/RV for that.

There are definitely some places that will turn more of a blind eye to it, but in general unless you’re specifically at some sort of a lifestyle resort where that sort of thing is officially condoned you shouldn’t be doing it in the open.

Personally, I wouldn’t be too bothered by it, I’d think it’s trashy as fuck and would judge you pretty harshly for it but it wouldn’t ruin my day. I can’t speak for everyone else in the nudist community though, and if you search around you can find a lot of horror stories of someone finally convincing their friend to try out nudism only to have the bad luck of that friend immediately encountering some creep or someone having sex out in the open and being immediately turned off by the experience never wanting to try it again

It’s been quite a while since I used it but I remember kind of liking the smell.

There was a tiny undertone of some sort of funky rotten garlicky smell, but predominantly I thought it was more spicy and piney smelling

Most veggies in grocery stores are bred for things like appearance and shelf life more than actual quality.

I think tomatoes are a prime example of this.

Tomatoes bruise easily, and people kind of want to buy the perfect, round, bright red tomatoes, not a weird lumpy-looking, funny colored bruised up one.

So big farmers grow tomatoes that look pretty, and are sturdier to better handle being shipped thousands of miles, that will last better on grocery store shelves, etc.

But there’s trade-offs there for things like texture and taste. That perfect-looking tomato may be bland and watery.

They may also be doing stuff like picking them before they’re fully ripe and artificially ripening them with ethylene gas or something later in a warehouse.

When you get tomatoes from a smaller, local farmer though, they don’t have to be shipped as far, or sit around in a warehouse or grocery store as long, so they don’t need to pick varieties based on shelf life and ability to stand up to shipping, and can instead grow varieties that taste good. And they can pick them at their peak ripeness because they’re going more directly from the field to the consumer and they don’t have to rely on tricks like ethylene.

My wife isn’t a picky eater, but when we first started dating she thought that she didn’t really like tomatoes.

But she had only ever had regular grocery store tomatoes.

Until we moved in together and I grew some myself. Then she discovered that tomatoes can actually be really good. Now she can’t get enough of them, as long as they’re good tomatoes.

And I didn’t even grow any particularly fancy tomatoes. That first year that I made a convert of her I just had some regular ol’ beefsteak, Roma, and cherry tomatoes that I picked up as pre-started plants from Walmart or home Depot or somewhere like that, and grew them in pots on the patio of our apartment. Basically entry-level gardening, but that was enough to blow her mind.

Another year I grew, I think the variety was called something like “mucho nacho” jalapenos. We love jalapenos to begin with, but holy shit. That particular variety was everything we ever wanted a jalapeno to be. We had one or two other varieties going that year to have a comparison, but that one stood head-and-shoulders above the others, bigger, a little hotter, and just plain tastier.

And farmers can probably get their hands on even better varieties than whatever I could get at a big box hardware store, and have the know-how to really give them ideal growing conditions.

Married 7 years, wouldn’t trade it for the world

That said, being single is easier/less complicated.

Marriage is all about compromise, it’s basically impossible that you’re going to 100% agree on absolutely everything with your spouse, and you’re both flawed humans odds are once in a while you’re gonna do something that pisses each other off, you’re going to have to occasionally put your own stuff on the back burner to help with theirs etc.

And that’s hard for a lot of people.

And arguably might be even harder for a lot of men with toxic masculinity, societal expectations, gender roles, etc. not gonna pick that apart too much right now.

Also, in a lot of cases, it may be worth not taking things too seriously, everyone’s got a different sense of humor, and jokes don’t always land the right way. My wife and I pretty regularly joke about wanting a divorce, but it is absolutely 100% a divorce. I usually get threatened with it over making a stupid pun or dad joke, for example, hardly serious grounds for a divorce.

It was around 2016, I was about 25, and I went camping with some friends for a few days.

Up until that point, I felt like I had managed to stay relatively “with-it”

But we had little to no Internet access for a few days, because that’s how camping works.

I came back and dat boi was all over the internet.

I had no idea what was going on with that meme, it never quite clicked for me

And from there it was all downhill, more and more new memes just stopped making sense to me.

Also, funny story, I’m back at work tonight, and had an off duty officer calling in a reckless driver

Wanted to keep following them

Crossed over the border of 3 different towns

And no officers available anywhere near where they were

It’s like he had some kind of reckless driver bingo card he was trying to fill out

Not exactly the soundtrack, it was fine, but nothing special and overall forgettable

But I want to give a small shout-out to Morbius for having really good sound mixing. I definitely expected it to be a “whispers and explosions” kind of movie where you couldn’t hear the conversations, and action scenes blew your eardrums out, and the background music was all over the place

But no, everything was at a reasonable volume, I could hear everything crystal clear.

There was just nothing worth hearing unfortunately.

This varies by state, but where I am if no one’s hurt and the cars are driveable, it’s considered a “non-reportable accident”

Generally speaking, we’ll still send cops to take a report if you really want one but it’s not really necessary for anything. Mostly it’s only needed if you’re it a company vehicle or something and your employer wants it for your file or something.

Otherwise, you just exchange info and let your insurance companies sort it out, the police don’t really have anything else to do with it at that point.

I believe some areas and departments have an online form you can fill out to generate a crash report.

If the police are very busy, they may tell you to just exchange info, do the online report, or go to the station later to file one, otherwise you might have to sit out on the side of the road for sometimes several hours waiting for an officer while they deal with higher priority incidents.

If there are injuries, or if the cars aren’t driveable, that does require a police report and will have a higher priority response because of it.

Again, that varies a lot from one state to another, I’m only speaking about the situation where I work.

I work a bit of a weird schedule

I do 12 hour shifts on a 2-2-3 rotation

So week 1 I work Monday, Tuesday, and Friday-Sunday

Then Week 2 I only work Wednesday and Thursday

Technically for payroll purposes I think technically that Sunday I work is part of week, but that’s a stupid way to think about it day-to-day

So basically one week I work 5 days, and the next week 2

Or if you’re a payroll bean counter, 4 and 3

So on average 3½ days a week, or basically a 4 day work week.

And I really like it despite the fact that I actually work slightly more hours than someone with a normal 40 hour work week.

I never have to work more than 3 days in a row without a 2 day break

I have days off during the week to squeeze appointments and such in

Sure I have to work every other weekend, but every other weekend is basically a free 3 day weekend.

And if you plan your vacations and such carefully you can get a whole week but only need to take 2 days off. That gets a little funny because our PTO is mostly based around 8 hour days since most people here have a normal workweek and they dont change it for those of us who work 12s, it mostly averages out, especially since we work less days overall, but it’s not exact and I’m usually left with a handful of hours left over that don’t add up to a full shift at the end of the year. A lot of it can carry over year-to-year though, so not a huge deal.

This also all happened less than 1/4 mile from a police station

It’s also worth considering that most of the time there’s usually not a whole lot of officers just loitering around the police station, most of them are out on patrol somewhere else in their town.

They might have someone on desk duty, but generally they’re kind of needed there in case someone walks in, or they’re handling dispatch duties, paperwork, etc. or may be injured and on light duty so really can’t be out responding to incidents.

In my county most of the time the people in the station are just office staff and not cops at all.

They may be in and out of the station a few times during the day, but often that’s because they’re doing something there, like dropping off evidence of meeting with a complainant where they can’t exactly drop everything to go respond to another call unless it’s a big priority.

One time coming back from work late at night there was a car stopped in the road about 2 houses down from my house. There was a couple arguing, one of them standing outside the cars the other one inside.

They were yelling and making a bit of a ruckus, but nothing that was exactly going to wake up the neighbors (although that may say more about how few fucks anyone in that neighborhood gave than about how loud they were being)

And honestly I would have been happy to leave them to it, even though it was like 11pm, except that they were blocking the road and I wanted to go to bed.

They were oblivious to me sitting behind them, flashing my high beams, I may have even honked at them, it’s been probably 15+ years so I can’t remember for certain.

So I called 911, gave them the details, turned around and went around the block to get home.

Sat on my porch for a few minutes watching the show to make sure it didn’t escalate (didn’t really think it was going to, my neighborhood was pretty chill overall, we just had a few loudmouths who didn’t know how to shut up) until the cops arrived, then I went in and went to bed. Don’t know what happened from there, I assume the cops basically just told them to shut up and go home.

If they just pulled over they could have kept arguing all night for all I cared. I would’ve slept through it.

Yeah that’s kind of the goal. At my dispatch center we have this big tacky sign by one of our entrances “The calm voice in the night”

To which I always kind of add in my head “asking you to please step outside and talk to the officer knocking at your door”

To get to your main question, my first time calling 911 was for my parked vehicle (well technically my dad’s vehicle, I was about 18, still living at home and using my parents cars since they had 3) getting hit and ran at my job (different job)

Nothing too special there. I didn’t see it but a couple other people did. It was a work truck that did it, and they were able to get the company name for me. Gave them the location, description of the truck, and waited around for an officer to come take a report. I take a good handful of calls like that every single day now.

Parents still have that vehicle too. 1993 Ford ranger, just recently rolled over 100k miles, I’m proud to have been driving it when it happened, had to borrow it to move some stuff and the timing worked out. I love that truck.

The other guy of course denied everything, and there wasn’t really any conclusive evidence that pinned it to a specific person or vehicle for that company, so nothing much came of it, and all the damage was a broken tail light, not really worth making an insurance claim over or making much of a fuss about. Another guy I worked with worked part time for a mechanic and hooked me up with a good deal on a new tail light assembly. Swapped it out right there in the parking lot of the pizza shop I worked at one night.

I did chime in with some thoughts and rants on some of the other replies here in case you haven’t seen them.

These days at least some voice assistants can do it, I’ve gotten 911 calls that way. Might depend on the phone and software version.

Also fall or accident detections from someone dropping their phones.

And some phones have a setting where it’ll initiate a 911 call if you press the power button 5 times or something like that.

Always a good idea to take a few minutes to go through your phones settings to see which of these features you have turned on and whether you actually should have those turned on. You wouldn’t believe the amount of butt dials we get.

Also a reminder that deactivated phones without service can still call 911, a lot of people give their old phones to little kids to play with and we get a lot of calls that way. And little kids sometimes say some wild stuff, so you might just get fire engines showing up at your house because a kid said some magic words and we have to err on the side of caution.

And since I’m on that topic now, every agency varies a bit. Until fairly recently where I work, we could ignore most butt dials if we didn’t hear anything suspicious, but they recently changed that policy, so now as long as we have a decent location ping from your phone, we’re dispatching officers to all of them and have to call them back. I don’t think most of our departments put a whole lot of effort into trying to track people down, mostly they drive through the neighborhood looking for anything suspicious, and maybe try calling back themselves, but it’s still kind of a waste of time in most cases.

At my agency though, if you call accidentally but stay on the line and confirm there’s no emergency, we can still ignore it as long as we don’t hear anything suspicious going on. The second you hang up though without making contact, we have to enter the call, and try calling you back.

Protip- if we call you back, you don’t really have to answer or answer any questions if you do. But if you answer we have to try to verify your location, and if you give us that, a cops may still gonna come knocking at your door even if we tell them you said there was no emergency. Some cops and departments will take it at face value and disregard from there but it’s out of our hands at that point.

You’re not gonna get in trouble for an accidental call, it’s not a big deal, I get dozens, maybe hundreds of them every day. But if you want to avoid the aggravation, either stay on the line or ignore any incoming calls.

Again, those policies will vary a bit from one agency to another, I can only speak for where I work.

At the dispatch center I work at, we have a nuisance caller “fishbowl guy”

He calls in on one of our 10-digit non emergency lines, blocks his number and is probably using some kind of VoIP app on a burner phone, so real pain in the ass to try to trace.

He hangs up if a male dispatcher answers, so I’ve never gotten to hear him myself.

But if a female answers, he goes into some long convoluted story about cleaning his fishbowl and accidentally swallowing his fish and how he can feel it swimming around in his stomach

And it’s a fetish thing for him, he’s jerking off while he’s doing it.

I hate that guy.

911 dispatcher here, it’s wild to me sometimes that sometimes that exactly thing happens, and other times something crazy goes on in a public place and we get exactly 1 call about it.

I had a lot of your sort of situation tonight, we had a lot of strong winds causing a lot of downed trees and power outages and such. At one point I answered probably 10 calls in a row for the same transformer sparking, then a call about something else, and then a few more calls about the same transformer.

It’s kind of fun sometimes because it sort of makes us look really on the ball to already have help started. It also makes us kind of feel like dicks because we’re kind of rushing people off the phone, but honestly after the first 2 or 3 calls there’s usually not too much anyone has to add to it, and we’re probably swamped with incoming calls that need to be answered.

I had one person call in downed wires tonight, got all the information I needed, phones were ringing off the hook, but they were getting really indignant because I “wasn’t letting them speak.”

And then there are times where there’s maybe an overturned vehicle on fire on a busy highway, and we get one call, and we sit there waiting for police and fire to get out there feeling like we’re being punk’d, because surely someone else must be seeing this, why hasn’t anyone else called? But sure enough, things are exactly like it was described. The bystander effect is real sometimes.

I work in 911 dispatch, reckless driver calls are one of the more annoying calls for us to handle

And to be clear, I’m not saying don’t call for a reckless driver, I’ve done it myself a couple of times since I’ve been working here. They are an emergency and we do treat it as such, but they’re still a pain.

This isn’t directed at you specifically, this is just a general rant on the topic.

First of all, we never want anyone to follow a reckless driver. If they’re speeding, aggressively weaving through traffic, running red lights, etc. and you’re trying to keep up with them guess what, we’ve got two reckless drivers now.

And of course if they think you’re following them, they’re probably going to drive even more recklessly, or worse they do something stupid like try to run you off the road or pull a gun on you or something. Crazy shit happens like that all the time, I live and work in what I’d consider a pretty safe area, but barely a week goes by where I don’t see a call go in about someone waving a gun in traffic. This week it was a fucking shotgun.

But of course no matter how much we tell people not to follow, some idiots want to play at being an action hero and won’t stop. The worst about this is probably off-duty officers, it’s like dude you don’t have flashing lights on your personal vehicle, you’re not in uniform, and you’re not getting paid for this shit, the fuck are you doing? You look for all the world like some crazy wannabe vigilante, and that’s kind of what you actually are right now.

At least at my agency, if you just happen to be heading the same direction as them, we’ll stay on the line giving our cops location updates, but again, we really don’t want you following them.

The other issue is that often there’s just not a cop conveniently nearby and available. In the area I work, we have some semi-rural areas, with towns that are physically large, but low population so nothing much ever happens there, and there might only be one or two officers on duty at any given time, and that’s all they really need. If they’re tied up on something or just happen to be on the other side of the town, odds are they can’t catch up in time. They might make a real effort to do it, but the odds aren’t in their favor.

Then we have smaller, denser towns with a lot of officers, but a lot of those towns keep their officers busy. Is it worth diverting an officer from a domestic for a reckless driver that they may not be able to catch up to? Probably not in most cases.

And sometimes you’re crossing jurisdictions, so even if we’re giving them constant updates, we can only get the information passed along to the next department down the roads so quickly and we don’t know where they may be turning up ahead to try to get someone in position.

There’s one highway in my county where different stretches of it are covered by different departments. Depending on traffic you could pass through parts of it covered by 2 different state police barracks and 4 different local departments across 3 counties in the space of about 10 minutes, and you can add in a few more departments if they get off the highway at certain points and make certain turns. Trying to get someone in a position to intercept there is a nightmare, and you might have to get transferred between a couple different dispatch centers along the way.

There’s also location. Yes we get a location from your phone, but it’s not always super accurate, and it doesn’t always update quickly, which makes it almost useless when we’re trying to pinpoint a moving vehicle. If they’re flying along at 60mph, they might be a half mile away from where we got our last ping before it updates again, and that ping might only be accurate to within a few hundred meters which could put them somewhere on any number of different roads.

So we’re really relying on our callers to give us a good location, and frankly people just never have any clue where the hell they are, the name of the road, an address a cross street, a nearby business (that’s something identifiable, because dude there are like 5 Sunocos along that main road in that town, you need to be a little more specific) and of course trying to get a direction of travel is like pulling teeth. I don’t need north/south/east/or west even, just something like “they’re heading towards the mall” wound be great.

And even getting a vehicle description from our callers is an adventure sometimes. You wouldn’t believe how many people out there can’t tell if they’re looking at a sedan or a pickup truck when it’s right there in front of them, let alone a color, make/model, or license plate number.

And let’s say we actually manage to get a good description, we get a cop out there and he’s following behind the vehicle. How many of them keep driving like assholes with a cop right behind them? Not many. At that point it’s your word against theirs, and the cop isn’t witnessing them doing anything wrong. Sure, sometimes it happens, but most of the time there’s nothing actionable going on by the time the cops get out there. Maybe they can drum up enough of a reason to pull them over, but if they didn’t see anything serious and the driver doesn’t appear visibly intoxicated, what can they really do from that point?

And of course you also get the really delayed and vague reports like “a red car cut me off somewhere near a Starbucks at about 8 this morning” when it’s like 9 pm and they have no other description. What are we honestly supposed to do with that?

But man, when the stars align and we can actually get a cop out to pull over a reckless driver, at least I personally think that’s one of the most satisfying calls I can take.

Just commenting so hopefully I remember to check back in on this thread later, I work in a 911 dispatch center.

Currently I’m on my break, but we’re dealing with some high winds knocking down trees and power lines and such and things so things are kind of blowing up for us (sometimes literally, more than a few transformers have popped) if things die down later I’ll try to chime in, answer questions, maybe share some stories.

That’s a map of the magnetic “dip” pole not the geomagnetic pole. They are slightly different things.

I’m a bit out of my depth, so I’m not gonna try to explain the distinction because I don’t really understand it very well myself, it’s just a fun fact I picked up somewhere.

But AFAIK, the geomagnetic pole is still supposed to be somewhere around Canada/Greenland

Also, not for nothing, but those are two different map projections so with how things get distorted around the poles in the OPs map,it’s a little hard to directly compare them. Remember that with cylindrical projections the whole top edge of the map basically represents a single point (the geographic north Pole) so things are often a lot closer together than they may look on the map. Just from eyeballing the two maps as an amateur who uses maps more than the average person but doesn’t exactly study them, I wasn’t 100% confident that the dip pole wasn’t in one of those higher spots of the puffin’s range (it’s not, I confirmed on a couple other maps, but it’s closer than you might think just from casually looking at these two maps.)