An Elderly Man’s Moving Advice to a Grieving Woman Went Viral for Good Reason

Sadly, we will all go through the experience of losing people we love. It’s part of life, but that doesn’t stop it from being incredibly painful and gutwrenching.

A woman on Reddit lost someone important in her life and she turned to people on the Internet to help her get through the tough time. The title of her post was, “My friend just died. I don’t know what to do.”

Photo Credit: Pexels

That’s when the self-proclaimed “old” person offered up their advice. Be sure to read his entire post, because it is pretty incredible.

“Alright, here goes. I’m old. What that means is that I’ve survived (so far) and a lot of people I’ve known and loved did not. I’ve lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can’t imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here’s my two cents.

I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don’t want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don’t want it to “not matter”. I don’t want it to be something that just passes.

Photo Credit: Flickr,michael_swan

My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can’t see.

As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

Photo Credit: Pexels

In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.

Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.”

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

People were deeply moved by the old man’s eloquent words.

“I’m reading this now as I lay bedside by my mother who has had cancer for 6 months, and cancer won. She’s been on a morphine drip for the last few days. I’m trying to cope, and came across this. Thank you.”

“This is beautiful. You have helped more people than you know by posting this. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.”

“As much pain as it’s caused, the memories I have of my friends and family are much more pleasant. And when I feel like I’m floating, I hang on to those memories like a life preserver, and you know what? They work really well.”

Thank you for your thoughtful words, sir. I think they brought comfort to many strangers who needed them at exactly the right time.

The post An Elderly Man’s Moving Advice to a Grieving Woman Went Viral for Good Reason appeared first on UberFacts.

Even More Tweets from ‘Thoughts of Dog’ to Give You Some Perspective in Life

The “Thoughts of Dog” Twitter account has more than 2.5 million followers for good reason. It’s good for your soul to read tweets from a wise doggo who’s great at dishing out advice.

Here are 15 more great examples of the deep thoughts from this very worldly pooch.

1. That’s all he needs

2. Let everyone know

3. You are the party

4. Life partners

5. The bar is high

6. One paw at a time

7. That is life in a nutshell

8. Not a crook!

9. That’s all I need

10. FOCUS

11. It means more

12. Don’t break the law

13. A fun game for all

14. All by myself

15. Don’t disturb the artist

Ahhhhhhh, I needed that…

The post Even More Tweets from ‘Thoughts of Dog’ to Give You Some Perspective in Life appeared first on UberFacts.

Even More Tweets from ‘Thoughts of Dog’ to Give You Some Perspective in Life

The “Thoughts of Dog” Twitter account has more than 2.5 million followers for good reason. It’s good for your soul to read tweets from a wise doggo who’s great at dishing out advice.

Here are 15 more great examples of the deep thoughts from this very worldly pooch.

1. That’s all he needs

2. Let everyone know

3. You are the party

4. Life partners

5. The bar is high

6. One paw at a time

7. That is life in a nutshell

8. Not a crook!

9. That’s all I need

10. FOCUS

11. It means more

12. Don’t break the law

13. A fun game for all

14. All by myself

15. Don’t disturb the artist

Ahhhhhhh, I needed that…

The post Even More Tweets from ‘Thoughts of Dog’ to Give You Some Perspective in Life appeared first on UberFacts.

21 People Explain How They Got Their Bosses Fired

This question on Reddit was quite intriguing:

“People who’ve gotten their bosses fired: how?”

Some stories were funny, and others were pretty shocking. How can people do those kinds of things in the workplace?

Here are 21 of the most interesting tales about someone getting their boss tossed out the door.

1. What an asshole!

He grabbed the back of my neck and said “If you ever say I’m wrong in front of a customer again I will beat your ass.”

I went to the GM and told him and my supervisor was relieved of his duties about 5 minutes later

2. Caught red-handed

I took a cell phone video of her taking money from the safe and putting it in her wallet. I knew she was doing it, and I also knew that the moment it came out that money was missing she’d blame it on me.

She was so stupid that she didn’t realize she should stop doing that while I was standing ten feet away with my phone out and facing her.

3. Well, that backfired!

The CEO publicly praised me for completing a task that my boss had struggled with, so my boss retaliated by forwarding all of his tasks to me in an effort to overwhelm me with work.

I actually found his job pretty manageable, which the CEO also noticed and fired him, giving me his job and office.

4. How do people think this won’t catch up with them?

It was my supervisor.

It got to the point that I had decided to quit. I had my resignation letter in my purse, but decided to let his boss know why I was quitting. Supervisor would talk about all the people on our team constantly, but only behind their backs. I got so sick of telling him to cut it out. My husband and I happened to work at the same place (different departments) and my Supervisor would make sexual comments about threesomes (with him – ewww), what hotel we picked for our afternoon delight, shit like that. It was so bloody uncomfortable. Apart from this he spent most of his supervising time outside smoking. Problem was Supervisor was “one of the guys” and I was the only girl.

Turns out his boss was disgusted, told his boss who lost his mind. They started an investigation which took three days. They interviewed staff – they corroborated what I said. They checked the security cameras, saw he was spending most of his work day outside smoking. And was fired.

When he was told he guessed (wasn’t hard!) that I was the person who complained and tried to get to me to “apologize that I took it the wrong way”. The best feeling was my co workers surrounding me as he was waled out. That was a lovely ending to it all.

5. Document everything.

Was working maintenance at an ice rink.

The rule for anyone who knows how an ice rink works is if the zamboni doors open, you get the fuck off the ice. Some dick-head decided to ignore the fact that they were open and that I was standing in the doorway, and decided to rip off one last slap-shot. The puck bounced off the glass and hit me in the head.

I was OK, but reported it to my boss, because we have to fill out an incident report for things like that. The boss asked “Are you OK?” I said I feel OK, then he responded with “Well, we don’t really have to report it then do we?” I reminded him of the protocol, but it was clear he didn’t want to do it. Since he wouldn’t do it, I sent a descriptive email of the incident up to the administration, because I felt there should be some sort of documentation/paper trail in case god-forbid I ended up having a brain hemorrhage or something a few days later.

The boss was fired by my next shift.

6. He doesn’t know how sound works?

Our desks were separated by a 5 foot cubicle wall. He was under the mistaken impression that it totally blocked sound. Thus I got to hear all his loud phone conversations, primarily his booty calls including those with his boss’s fiance. I figured it was none of my business and tried to ignore it.

Well there was a position in another department that I was interested in and as per procedure I handed in an application to my talkative boss. Didn’t hear anything further and followed up a couple of days later, only to be told that something must have happened to the application. Filled out another one and handed it in. As I return to my desk I hear the boss on the phone with a friend laughing about how he had just trashed my application again and how he was never going to let go of me.

I go to boss’s boss and angrily offer my resignation, telling him what I had just overheard, explaining that I was constantly hearing his phone calls like his booty calls like with <woman’s name> and <woman’s name> and <boss’s boss’s fiance’s name>. He got very quiet and told me to go back to my desk and he’ll take care of everything. The next day I come in and boss is gone. The day after, I have an interview with the other department (got the position).

I tend to avoid office drama, but really, he should have stuck to screwing his boss’s fiance, and not tried to screw me as well.

7. Damn! This is actually pretty vindictive…

Phoned him to tell him I won’t be at work for the rest of the week as my mum is terminally ill in hospital.

The next day (about an hour after she passed away) he phoned and asked why I wasn’t at work, I just hung up on him so I wouldn’t say anything that would get me in trouble.

The next day I sent the area-manager a Whatsap message explaining what he’d be done and attached a video of him breaking the freezer door while having a tantrum which cost the store nearly £5000 in lost stock and the repair costs (which he’d told the AM it broke on its own).

He got fired that day and I got 2 weeks off with full pay

8. Creepers gonna creep…

In college I worked in a take-out restaurant just off campus, and we were all employed by the school.

I was 17-18 years old (back in 2007/2008) and my boss, the manager, was a 40-something creeper. Hitting on me, touching me inappropriately (trying to massage my shoulders, tickling me, putting his hands on/around my waist) despite me asking him to stop. Then he friended me on Facebook, I declined, and suddenly my work schedule was changed. I was on shift during hours when I had class, and when I explained that problem, I got taken off the schedule altogether.

I told the assistant manager what was going on (which I was explicitly told by the manager not to talk to the assistant) and he reported what was going on to upper management– boom, manager was fired. I worried for a while if he was going to come after me for that.

9. Yeah, this isn’t gonna turn out well for you…

About 13-14 years ago, I was working as a web designer for a dot com. In our immediate group were a creative director, a creative manager, and 2 of us who were designers and we were all part of the marketing dept.

The creative director was a joke. Brought in by the previous VP of Marketing who he was friends with, he hardly did any work himself, and just played online poker waiting on us to send him things for approval. And he’d never stick around late when the rest of us needed to stay late to hit a deadline or deal with a crisis, etc. The creative manager, who’d been in charge for a couple years before the creative director’s hiring, still ran the day to day.

So the creative manager gave his notice that he’d accepted a new job, and when I met with the current VP of marketing to discuss transition, I mentioned that the creative director would need to step up and pull his weight. I guess a similar message was expressed by a number of people, and less than a week after the creative manager’s last day the creative director was fired!

This kind of sucked because we went down from 4 to 2 people in our group. I was appointed acting creative manager, and we eventually did hire one more designer. I left the company a couple months later, too, after the latest VP of Marketing was let go and there was going to be a 10th different person overseeing marketing in my 5 years there.

And the asshole creative director? He’d reached out at some point (looking for files for his portfolio, I think?), and it happened to be in the 2 week window where I’d accepted my next job but hadn’t yet started so I mentioned my new position. Well, he fires off a copy of his resume to the company president and tried to poach my new job out from under me! On my first day at the new job, the president mentioned that somebody else from that same company also applied for the job and forwarded me the application email to see if I knew him… saw that the date was after he and I had last communicated!

10. Turnabout is fair play!

I was fired because I “abandoned my job” while on short term disability, because wile on approved leave, they are a date for me to return, never informed me (by their own admission), and when I obviously didn’t return to work… i was fired.

The locker I had at work had my work boots in it that the company pays $90 a year towards. However there isn’t a pair under $100 available. So you always end up having some come out of your paycheck. At that point they are yours regardless of the company line. They disagreed and said they were thrown out, I reported them stolen, and the HR director responsible for getting me fired was fired.

11. A happy ending…

About 15 years ago, I worked at a major university in the IT department. After I was hired, it took me a couple of months to realize my boss was a sociopath as was his #2 guy.

Once I realized what I was dealing with, I just tried to keep my head down because I didn’t want to job hop so soon after leaving my last job. But they made that impossible.

We had a database administrator and I was interested in becoming a DBA so I talked to him a lot about what I should do to transition from a programmer to a DBA. The VP of IT, my bosses boss, would stop by and talk to me and ask me about my aspirations, so I told her about wanting to be a DBA and that I was actually taking night classes so I could. This was a woman who my boss referred to as “she who must be obeyed” in a totally disrespectful manner.

As the months went on, I saw more and more egregious behavior by my boss and his #2 toady. We had a large corporation consulting on transition to their database. This included a young guy who was doing the database install including ordering the right equipment and migrating the data.

We also had student workers in our department. They were students who worked part time hours. One of these was a young woman. The big corp young guy and the young woman started going to lunch together. Apparently this was offensive to my boss, who threatened both of them with termination for “fraternization”. The university had no such rule, my boss was just making it up as he went.

About 6 months after I was hired, the DBA quit. I went into our weekly staff meeting and at the end, my boss announces that I’d been promoted to DBA. My spidey senses were tingling because of his tone of voice and because this was the first I was hearing about it.

After the meeting, I went to his office to thank him and tell him I really appreciated the chance. He was very angry. Apparently, his boss had made him promote me. I had no idea.

The next thing I know, I’m being called into my boss’s #2 guy’s office. He tells me that performance reviews were coming up and I would have to be reviewed on job description of DBA rather than the job description of my old position. That is, unless I turned down the DBA position. Yep, he was threatening me to get me to turn down the promotion. I asked him to see the written description of my old position as well as the one for DBA. He couldn’t give them to me because they didn’t exist. Now, I can be a pretty stubborn bitch, and this really pissed me off. I didn’t do anything wrong and now my job was being threatened.

Part of my job duties during the 6 months of my employment involved working with the head of every department of the university, including the legal department. I had a good working relationship with every head of every department.

So I made an appointment with the university’s head counsel. I explained the situation to him including my boss’s boss making him promote me and my boss threatening me with my performance review. I told him that, although I was studying to be a DBA, I was really not qualified to be one without some hard work and if the university didn’t want me to take the position, I would absolutely turn it down. I also mentioned my boss’s nickname for his boss and the issue with the student worker and the big corp guy. Apparently, the student worker had already filed a harassment complaint so the head counsel knew about it.

He told me I had been promoted by someone (boss’s boss) who had every right to promote me and I should not worry about anything. He said if my boss gave me any more trouble that I should let him know.

A week later my boss and his #2 toady were fired. My boss ended up working at a small city college and is there to this day. I pity his employees.

I left the university about 2 years later and had a successful career as a DBA.

12. Boss gone AND more money?!

My manager wanted to prove I’m slacking off so he could write me up. So he watched CCTV footages then wrote, printed out and SIGNED a detailed 17 pages worth of Word document what did I do in the past two days. With timestamps (like, 07:59 arriving, 08:01 speaking with co-worker A and B, 08:07 sitting down to my desk, etc.). He told me that he’s not happy with my work ethics if I won’t improve my efficiency, I’m fired.

I took the papers and showed to his boss and told her that I’m not happy with my managers work ethics and his efficiency might be better if he wouldn’t watch 17 hours of CCTV footages to spy on an employee. She was terrified (it would’ve been a rock solid lawsuit for me – but I love my job) and we had to search for a new manager.

Also, my salary raised.

13. The ole email trick…

I left my last company due to a bully of a gm.

Many people were leaving over him causing problems, being sexist, racist, doing things people could easily sue them for claiming sexual harassment. List goes on. Everyone informed HR during their exit interviews, hell he even tried to make my exit interview not happen. Though they still weren’t doing anything. I had been at my new job for a couple months now and was STILL getting complaints from my old team almost daily.

So I made an email account and named Concerned company name Crew. Sent an email to EVERYONE who had an email account within the company explaining what he did/still did with events spanning from his start to the day prior.

They fired him within the week and my old crew thanked me.

14. Poachers getting punished…

One summer I volunteered to help a conservation society in East Africa. The aim of the project was to educate the local rural population about poaching and to get them to help us stop it from the ground up.

Anyway, I was staying with the lead ranger and his family and on numerous occasions he served us meat that I’m 100% sure was poached. He tried to tell me that it was pork, but it was dark and gamey with lots of small bones. I think that it was small antelope like dikdik or duiker.

When I returned to Nairobi I mentioned to my grandpa (his boss’s boss) that we’d eaten some odd meals. He investigated, and found out that my boss had a poacher friend who was selling him illegal meat. He was fired, I didn’t feel guilty. Poaching is awful.

15. And…. you’re gone!

I took a phone call on my cell when at my desk. Middle manager came up and screamed at me. Yelling about how I was not allowed to take calls for clients while at that office. I was a contractor and made it perfectly clear that I did work for multiple clients prior to doing work for this company.

The CTO’s office was 10 feet from mine. He came out and stood in his doorway listening to the rant. When the middle manager was done I just looked over at the CTO and said “it’s him or me and at the moment I don’t give a fuck which you pick.” CTO walked the middle manager out right then.

Funny thing: I didn’t hang up throughout the incident. And it was my wife on the other end. I was spending about 70 hours a week at their site digging their staff out of a hole they had dug themselves in.

16. The breaking point…

Complained for months about her breaking company policy (and thus state labor law, since the state considered a signed employee handbook to be a binding contract for both sides) — nothing. Tricked her into saying the things I’d been complaining about for months on a conference call with her boss and her boss’s boss, fired that day.

Context: My boss tried to tell me I couldn’t take breaks. The company policy handbook, which I had signed and thus became a binding contract by state law, laid out lunch and/or breaks based on length of shift scheduled for. When I pointed this out she switched to scheduling me by myself and then strolling by the store to check up on me occasionally, writing me up when she ‘caught me’ having closed the store in order to take breaks/eat lunch. Called her boss (regional director) and complained, got the write-ups removed, listened to her tell my boss to chill the fuck out and let me take my breaks, she still didn’t do it. Further (formal) complaints resulted in no changes. I knew there was a quarterly conference call coming up so I developed the habit of walking into her office and saying, ‘It’s time for my break,’ and making her say, every time, that I wasn’t allowed to go. She got in the habit of doing it kind of absent-mindedly in an increasingly aggressive tone. So then I did it again in the middle of the conference call and she blew a gasket, ranting at me about how many times she’d told me that I was not allowed to take breaks, under any circumstances, etc. The call, which she always put on speakerphone, went dead silent. It took her about 5 seconds to realize what she’d just done, and then before she could try to begin damage-control her boss politely cleared her throat and said, ‘Boss, I’ve told you before that that is incorrect.’ I grinned a big ol’ shit-eating grin and went back to work, and there was a temporary manager from another store there the next day.

Turns out she had had my formal, written complaints intercepted before they got to her boss, which I wasn’t aware was possible (apparently she had friends in high places), so I imagine that didn’t go well for her.

17. Gross!

He’d show up every day and tell us a tale of his sexual exploits. Whether true or not, none of us wanted to hear it.

If an attractive looking female comes in, he drops what he’s doing and stares at her, drooling liking a dog in a dog treat factory. After she leaves, he had to say a comment about her appearance.

After talking on the phone with a certain manager, he always comments on how nice her ass is.

He’d bully us employees and other managers. Called us bitches a lot despite us getting onto him for it.

My female coworker reported him. We all had a phone meeting with our district manager and HR. He was suspended until the investigation was over and they ruled to terminate him. Surprisingly HR worked for us that day.

18. Why can’t people be, yanoo… nice?

He was presenting a PowerPoint that I had put together to all the managers in the building. There was something he wanted to add at the last minute that he had never told me about, and when it wasn’t there, he verbally abused me for like 5 minutes straight. Yelling, name calling, telling me to prove to him that I had a college degree and wasn’t just making it up. I was a contractor so I was afraid to complain to HR because I assumed they’d just fire me, but a lot of other people in the room did.

After the meeting, I went into the share drive folder to find the presentation notes where the extra information was supposedly located. I watched the last changed time change from a day ago to the current time, then he immediately called and said it was right there in the notes file.

He was fired the next day for unprofessional behavior.

19. Everybody has encountered a “Linda”. Sorry in advance if your name is Linda…

My direct supervisor, Linda, was a cantankerous older woman with poor education and even worse people skills. About 3 months after I started, I got her so pissed off, just by doing my job, that she cursed me out, got up from her desk and quit.

I don’t even remember what I said that set her off. I probably asked her if she was done with her half of something that I needed in order to finish my half, and became exasperated when she wasn’t, because she’d been farting around all morning. It was a common occurrence.

After Linda walked out, our boss refused to hire her back when she begged (even though she’d been there something like 15 years), because “her attitude was so terrible and she’d become such a toxic, pathetic excuse for a human being.”

I got a pretty solid raise, most of Linda’s tasks (our boss was not unkind and took over some things herself, while giving me more practical things that I enjoyed doing), and even though my car was fine, she’d always have me drive her car to go make coffee runs, deposit checks, run errands, etc. It was a Toyota Solara convertible, and she’d tell me to take the top down and have fun.

I liked that job, I learned quite a bit, and if I hadn’t found something closer to home, for even more money, I probably would’ve been there quite a while.

20. Sometimes you just have to do it yourself…

I quit and his company collapsed without me. That kinda counts, right?

When I was 16, I had a stint as a small-time social media star on Twitter — not because I’m particularly interesting or anything, but for two reasons: a) I got on Twitter really early in 2007 when it was way easier to get followers and engagement due to the site being less noisy and more ‘stupid’ in terms of algorithms and b) I stood out from a lot of other minor Twitter stars because I didn’t let it get t my head; while a lot of them were egotistical and haughty, I followed everyone back, turned ‘haters’ into friends instead of retaliating, etc.

Through this fleeting fame, my former boss found me. He said he was setting up a regional media studio to help small- and medium-sized local businesses with their social media marketing, and he planned to eventually franchise the business into other cities. He hired me on the basis of my large social following (81,000 followers at the time). Obviously, having a large social following doesn’t automatically mean you know how to market businesses on social media, but I adapted and studiously researched how to do my job properly.

My boss didn’t come from a creative background or a marketing role — he came from a property background, and was just sort of winging it in finding an alternative source of income after the housing crash. Being as young as I was at the time, I didn’t really think about any of this stuff. The outcome was that I never received any training, had no real guidance in what I was doing, and was generally left to my own devices. Younger me thought it was great! I saw it as ‘freedom’, but looking back, I realize it was far too much freedom.

The side effects of this disparity between my social media skills and his inability to communicate creative ideas manifested themselves as people trying to cut past the business and come straight to me, to ask me directly as an individual whether I’d do work for them, rather than giving my boss the money. I was respectful (or naïve) enough to open up to my boss about this, and that’s when things started getting a little bit manipulative. He told me I could go my own way or remain part of a business that’d soon be growing across the country.

Fair enough, I thought. So I stayed, and one year in (I was 17/18 at this time) I realized that managing brands via social media had naturally morphed me into something of a graphic designer. A lot of my time was spent creating eye-catching visuals in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign etc. and so I suggested to my boss that we expand our media offering to include logo, graphic, and print design, and visual branding consultancy. Again, I received no training — I worked all day and studied by myself late into the night.

This pattern snowballed over the coming years. By the time I was 21, I was a social media manager, visual branding designer, copywriter, photographer, video editor, and web developer — all skills I nurtured independently with no input or guidance from my boss. The business was still operating in just one city, and my boss had started spending less and less time in the office. I still didn’t realize this wasn’t particularly normal, until clients who came to the office to meet me constantly asked where he was.

One day, a client went as far as to say: “You’re basically running the business at this point!“ It was a huge ‘glass shatter’ moment for me, and I suddenly realized that, yeah, although I wasn’t actually managing the business and its admin work etc., without me, there wouldn’t be a service or product to sell. What’s more, my wages hadn’t gone up, even though my ‘this is great, I have so much freedom!’ mindset had motivated me to continue working on stuff related to the business when I got home.

As I was nearing 22, the owner of the building where the business’ office was located asked me if I’d help him fix his computer (it was just running really slowly because he hadn’t managed his files very well). Not really thinking of it as work, I agreed, and headed into his office after work to help him out. As luck would have it, my boss walked in to hand over that month‘s rent, so he saw me there. He looked surprised, but didn’t comment — he just gave the dude the rent and left the building.

The next day, my boss wasted no time in probing me about what I was doing. He was speaking to me like a cop would speak to a suspect, asking me how long I’d been doing work for the landlord, what kind of work I was doing, why I hadn’t folded the work into the business, etc. I explained I was just fixing up his computer, and he leapt into a lecture about how we needed to keep all work inside the business, or else we would never be able to grow into other cities.

I turned 22. I’d been there for five years, my wages hadn’t gone up, I wasn’t allowed to do any work outside of the business, I hadn’t witnessed any of the growth I’d initially been promised, my boss was only in the office 25% of the time, and I saw him uploading Instagram Stories from him lunching, working out at the gym, walking his dogs, taking day trips etc. while I was at the office managing everything. A lot of the time he didn’t even warn me he’d not be in the office. It became the norm that if he didn’t turn up, I’d be running everything for the day.

Because I’d grown with the business from my youngest working age, I didn’t know any different, so all of this felt completely normal to me. And because I worked all day and all night and had no firm social life, I never got any outside perspective. Until one day, on a whim, I opened up to the landlord about it. He hadn’t even realized I was the one doing all the work — he figured it was split fairly 50/50. He said the amount of work I was producing was on the same level as an agency with three or four employees.

I started managing all of the branding, social media, and website maintenance for the landlord’s business, but didn’t broadcast that news to anyone. As I was nearing the age of 23, I met my now-fiancée, a perfectly feisty woman who, as soon as I told her about my situation, passionately advised I start my own media studio. This is where I entered the ‘long breakup’ period of my job, where I got increasingly depressed at work and physically felt my productivity slow to a near-halt.

My boss noticed, but never talked to me about it face-to-face. He started sending me irritated emails full of swear words demanding explanations for why I hadn’t delivered certain work by certain times and dates, while he was off sunning it up at the beach. It was like someone had pulled out his cork and let all the toxicity out in one torrent. My girlfriend hated him, and gently pushed me to the point where I felt like I was ready to confront him about the dead end we’d wound up in.

I asked a few of my friends about it, just to get a wider set of viewpoints on how I should go about it. They asked me things like, what does your contact say about you leaving the company and working with other businesses independently? Legal stuff, y’know. And that’s when I realized my lack of training over the past six years had also left me ignorant of the formalities of employment — I never had a contract! The real kicker was, I never had employee liability coverage either. My boss wasn’t even doing the admin stuff properly.

Obviously, that meant he also had no control over me when it came to contracts, so I literally just walked in (without my laptop — I’m now just realizing he never provided equipment either, yikes) and sat there waiting for him to arrive. Thankfully, it was one of the days he decided to turn up. He went and sat down in his chair, asked me where my laptop was and why I wasn’t working etc., and so I just straight-up told him that I was leaving the company to start my own media venture.

He laughed a patronizing laugh and simply said, “alright, good luck then.” Part of me felt like this was normal, because he was usually quite cold like that, but another part of me knew that there should have been some sort of emotion and deeper discussion in that moment. I wanted to say “so that’s it, then?” to try to flesh the talk out, but that really was it. He just turned to his computer and typing away as if I wasn‘t there. So I just turned around and left, went home, and that was it.

He did WhatsApp me a message later that day (all his caring and considerate communication came through digital means — perhaps he hired someone on a zero-hour contract to inject emotion into his texts?) asking if we could meet at the pub for a proper goodbye. And we did. It was a nice gesture, but it felt very awkward and forced, as if he’d spoken to someone about it and they’d coaxed him into doing it. He shook my hand, wished me good luck (much more genuinely this time), and we parted ways.

Three months later, I’d tripled my income as a freelancer. All of those clients who’d try to come to me directly over the years — it was like a floodgate had opened, and they all came rushing to me. I hadn’t told them I’d left, but obviously, they realized it themselves when they went to the office and I was never there. I felt bad about ‘stealing’ clients away from my former boss, but what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t just abandon the people I’d been working with just because of morals. That‘d be immoral, if anything.

I continued working with the landlord and even traveled with him a few times to build my solo filmmaking portfolio by documenting his brand’s work across the UK, including his talks at business seminars. We developed a very close working relationship, to the point where just my work for his company was earning me more than all the work I did for my former boss. He started sharing a few bits of gossip with me about how my old boss had begun paying rent later and later. I figure perhaps his cash flow had something to do with it, but the landlord also showed me an email my old boss had written in which he’d expressed his anger at the landlord for ‘colluding’ with me and pushing me to leave his company.

The further I distanced myself from the company, the more I realized how toxic he behaved towards everyone he came into contact with. I could never see it from the inside. Every time I checked the old company’s website, a new service had been removed, because it wasn’t something he could offer anyone anymore.

Back in November 2018, the landlord told me that he was kicking my old boss out of the office after he failed to pay rent for three months. A few weeks after that, the landlord proposed that we go into business together to create a separate media studio solely focused on the industry his business operates within. He said that we’d take the old company’s office once my former boss had moved out, and that I could also use that office for my own freelance venture, free of charge.

One year after leaving, I’ve taken 25% of my old boss’ clients, occupied his office, and quadrupled my income.

There’s a part of me that feels guilty about all of this — he’s a guy who didn’t quite know what to do after the housing market crashed and tried something out which didn’t go too well. But at the same time, I can’t feel too bad for someone who I believe took advantage of me for half a decade. If you treat someone with disrespect, you end up with very little. If you treat someone with respect, they give you a free office and offer to start a new business with you.

TL;DR: boss never did anything properly — no training, no contracts, no insurance, very little respect, not much guidance, empty promises about business growth, etc. Everything I learned independently resulted in me quadrupling my income and taking over his office within a year of leaving his company.

Damn! That last story was EPIC!

Good for him!

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10 Righteous Facts About ‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure’

It seems like only yesterday I saw Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure at Oak Park Mall in my hometown in Kansas. It was glorious…and I still quote the movie to this day.

The film celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2019, and in honor of this most excellent piece of cinema, we’d like to present you with 10 facts about the movie.

But first, check out the original trailer for a refresher.

1. The duo were born in an improv class

Classmates Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson formed an improv workshop at UCLA. Solomon recalled, “One day, we decided to do a couple of guys who knew nothing about history, talking about history. The initial improv was them studying history, while Ted’s father kept coming up to ask them to turn their music down.”

2. There was originally another character, Bob

Bill, Bob, & Ted? When the skit originated, the guy who played “Bob” wasn’t crazy about it, so Solomon and Matheson got rid of him and stuck with Bill and Ted.

3. Opposite auditions

Photo Credit: Orion Pictures

We all know Keanu Reeves plays Ted and Alex Winter plays Bill, but both actors originally auditioned for the opposite roles. Keanu Reeves remembered, “I got a call saying that I got the part. So I went to the wardrobe fitting… assuming I was playing Bill, and I get there and Alex Winter, who eventually played Bill, went to the wardrobe fitting thinking he was playing Ted. Then we were informed that that wasn’t the case.”

4. Pauly Shore in the mix

Shore, along with hundreds of other actors, auditioned for the role of Ted. Hey, don’t feel too bad for him, he got to be in Encino Man.

5. Not nerdy enough

Photo Credit: Orion Pictures

Reeves and Winter weren’t nerdy enough for the roles, according to co-writer Ed Solomon. He said,

“Bill and Ted were conceived in our minds as these 14-year-old skinny guys, with low-rider bellbottoms and heavy metal T-shirts. We actually had a scene that was even shot, with Bill and Ted walking past a group of popular kids who hate them. But once you cast Alex and Keanu, who look like pretty cool guys, that was hard to believe.”

6. Hard to picture this one

We all know Bill and Ted travel through time in a phone booth, but it was originally supposed to be a van: a 1969 Chevy van to be precise. Warner Bros. showed early interest in the script and folks there thought a time-traveling van sounded too close to the hit Back to the Future. Director Stephen Herek suggested a phone booth because he thought the visuals would be impressive.

Plus, Doctor Who hadn’t really made it in the States yet.

7. A happy accident

Alex Winter called the casting of the legendary George Carlin “a very happy accident.” Winter added they were originally looking for serious actors at first, “like Sean Connery. And someone had the idea, way after we started shooting, of George. That whole movie was a happy accident. No one thought it would ever see the light of day.”

8. The booth is out there

As part of a promotion when the Bill & Ted’s Excellent Video Game Adventure came out in 1991, one lucky winner received the actual phone booth from the film. Reddit tracked down the winner, Kenneth Grayson, in 2011 and he participated in an “Ask Me Anything” Q&A.

9. They’re coming back!

Rumors have been floating around for years that there will be a third film in the series (after 1991’s Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey) and now it’s official.

Excellent!

10. The script was written in four days

Photo Credit: Orion Pictures

Solomon and Matheson wrote the script in four days…by hand, during meetings at various coffee shops.

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A Survey Shows That 60% of Male Managers Are “Uncomfortable” Working with Women

Many men have stepped up to the plate in the era of #metoo and #timesup, amplifying the voices of women and believing them.

Men are also re-evaluating how they interact with women, and in many ways, that’s a good thing. But it seems some men are confused about how to interact with women in a way that’s appropriate.

Leanin.org released a survey that said 60% of managers who identify as men are uncomfortable participating in a common work activity with a woman, such as mentoring, working alone, or socializing together – a 32% jump from the previous year.

60%. More than half!

This “discomfort” hurts women in the workplace. Studies show that people who are mentored receive higher compensation and have more job satisfaction. So when bosses withdraw from women and work activities involving women, it hurts hurts women and sets them back in the workplace.

And we’re already at a disadvantage when it comes to compensation.

Is it that difficult to act appropriately toward women?  Just treat them with the same respect you would show a male colleague.

Withdrawing from women instead of evaluating your actions and committing to do better is just a sad way to approach things. If you aren’t sure how to act toward your female colleagues, you could do something really wild and ask them how they would like to be treated.

My guess is that they might want something crazy like respect and inclusion. To be trusted with important projects. To have their voices heard at meetings, and, when they are ignored, to have someone amplify their voice and credit their ideas.

Seriously. It’s not that hard to be a decent human.

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This Chart Shows How Your Lifestyle Can Affect Your Cancer Risk

We all know that the healthier our lifestyle, the more our likelihood of getting cancer goes down. But there is so much news about so many different cancer risk factors that it’s hard to block out the noise and get the facts.

How do cell phones, different foods, coffee, exercise, etc. affect our likelihood of getting cancer? The World Cancer Research Fund gathered all the latest research data and has provided all of us with an interactive chart that allows you to see how different lifestyle choices affect cancer. You can play around with the full version by clicking HERE.

Take some time to play around with the interactive chart and maybe you’ll be inspired to change some of the habits you have that could lead to a healthier lifestyle.

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German Stonehenge May Have Been the Site of Human Sacrifices

When two archaeologists excavated an ancient site known as the “German Stonehenge,” they were expecting to uncover axes, animal bones, and drinking vessels. But André Spatzier and François Bertemes stumbled upon something much different – and more sinister.

Photo Credit: iStock

The duo found the dismembered bodies of 10 women and children at the site called Pӧmmelte in northeastern Germany. One body had its hands tied behind its back, and four of them suffered from skull trauma and rib fractures before death. The position of the bodies suggests they were thrown into a burial shaft. All of this evidence has caused researchers to question whether Pӧmmelte may have been used for human sacrifice. The site was used for 300 years before it was destroyed around 2050 BCE.

Photo Credit: US Air Force

Amazingly, Pӧmmelte wasn’t discovered until 1991, when it was spotted by aerial photographers after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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A Man Found an Amazing Collection of LGBTQ Artifacts Stashed Away in a Loft

When Gavin McGregor discovered two bags stashed away in his London loft, he didn’t think much about it until he took a much closer look. When he finally searched through the bags, he found that he’d stumbled upon a treasure trove of LGBTQ artifacts from the 1980s.

Photo Credit: Twitter

McGregor quickly realized that he had a significant time capsule of the LGBTQ scene.

Photo Credit: Twitter

And the second bag contained even more impressive finds.

Photo Credit: Twitter

McGregor also found the manuscript of a novel and tried to get in touch with the writer.

Photo Credit: Twitter

Bill Albert replied that he had submitted his novel to a short-lived publishing company that was run by two people: one now lived in South Africa and the other was Paud Hegarty, who had died from AIDS nearly 20 years ago. McGregor thought that the deceased Paud Hegarty might have been the man behind the artifact collection.

Photo Credit: Twitter

Photo Credit: Twitter

Photo Credit: Twitter

McGregor decided to donate the collection to Gay’s The Word to honor Hegarty’s legacy.

Photo Credit: Twitter

McGregor said, “I’ve received fascinating, moving, personal memories and stories from a range of people already, telling stories and sharing memories.” What a great story.

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9 Cool Facts About Art

I love to paint, but I’m really, really bad at it. Still, it gives me a break from life once in a while, and that’s a good escape.

Enjoy these facts about painting, art, etc. while I try to improve my skills.

1. Very cool

Photo Credit: did you know?

2. Bob was the man

Photo Credit: did you know?

3. They should bring this back

Photo Credit: did you know?

4. Completely by hand

Photo Credit: did you know?

5. Stolen

Photo Credit: did you know?

6. Hahaha

Photo Credit: did you know?

7. Gay Street

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8. Bob again

Photo Credit: did you know?

9. Tiny portrait

Photo Credit: did you know?

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