Maybe you should put “not a murderer” on a t-shirt, to clarify the situation.

I really don’t know. He was a contractor and I suspect he was already on the way out the door for safety interactions, so maybe the host company didn’t want to rock the boat while dealing with that paperwork? He was only in the office maybe a week a month, but that week… earplugs were my friend.

He’d also repeatedly ask when I was having kids or (if he happened to remember I wasn’t married) when I was getting married. Very… hrrm… poorly socialized white boomer man? I was a 20-something new graduate at the time and thought maybe this was normal workplace stuff. It wasn’t.

Feliz Navidad. I had a coworker that would play it on his cubicle boombox and it’s just a bad song to hear while you’re trying to do something in a spreadsheet.

I knew someone who was old enough to get the shingles vaccine but couldn’t because one of the requirements for vaccination is “not having had shingles in the last X amount of time”. Poor dear just kept having shingles outbreaks. She really wanted the vaccine.

Please explain this article from 2018 .

Wales is to become the first country in the UK to ban smoking in outdoor school spaces, playgrounds and hospital grounds.

Yes, most UK hospitals do ban smoking on their grounds, but not all, and the ban is by the hospital, not at the country level.

Initial read: “mind computer numeric control‽… ooooOoOo, now I get”

No matter how much time passes, my grandmother will never have been born after 2008 [edit: and so will be allowed to buy cigarettes].

I’m not sure about banning smoking outside of hospitals. The hospital near me doesn’t allow smoking by the entrances but has a designated smoking zone.

I’m not a smoker, but I’m thinking of when my grandma was dealing with my grandpa in the intensive care unit. She was already stressed to the gills with family and husband stress. I wouldn’t want her to have to deal with nicotine withdrawal, too (or finding alternative methods of nicotine use).

On the other hand, there was an asshole smoking right at the hospital entrance last time I was there. Screw that guy.

Grandpa was in the hospital for emphysema due to a lifetime of smoking. He left the hospital and quit smoking. I don’t think Grandma ever quit, even with full-on dementia. So, mixed feelings about old folks smoking near hospitals.

Oof. I got my series of vaccinations years back at Planned Parenthood. I remember it not being covered by my insurance (I was outside the target age range) but not incredibly expensive.

Are you also a nano fan? (best command line editor ever, from the POV of tech support walking a Linux n00b through editing config files. Also can do syntax highlighting if if set it up properly.)

a half bath is a toilet+sink. A 3/4 bath is a toilet, sink, and shower (but not a tub). 3/4 bath can be fuzzy: if it’s the only bathroom in the home, it will often be called a full bath.

I’m not sure if we had to pay an estate sales tax when we bought this place. We pay town taxes every 6 months automatically through our mortgage. We also paid a recording fee for the town to record the condo sale. There were a lot of fees, tbh.

And yes, you got me, I heard about German kitchens from YouTube.

Yep. For example, search for parcel “176-194-030” in the Hartford, CT tax assessor’s search. It should bring up a McDonald’s fast food building (I chose that because it’s less creepy than singling out some random person’s home.)

There’s even a little drawing of the building. The purple is the first floor and the blue is the “canopy” or, I guess, awning outside. The “interior” tab on this site doesn’t list the kitchen quality, but does say the insulation is “typical” and 40% of the building has sprinklers. My guess is different cities and towns track different things in their tax assessments.

Oh! IIRC, Germany has the thing where the kitchen doesn’t stay with the house. In the USA, they’re firmly attached.

(USA) My flat just had its tax assessment done and that includes the floor area, heating source, and other things like how fancy your kitchen is (mine is “standard”, btw). That tax assessment is available online to everyone.

I grew up in a poor rural area of the cultural south, scored very well on the ASVAB test (armed services vocational aptitude test), which was administered during school hours to all students. The recruitment drive was heavy. Maybe you grew up somewhere young people had more options.

I had those neighbors growing up. Loud parties until 1 am on school nights, constantly revving their motorcycle. They also parked a boom lift in their driveway and I’d routinely wake up to their teen son looking in my second floor bedroom window.

Surprise, talking with them didn’t help anything. My dad helped by getting me earplugs. My mom told me to stop bothering her by having needs.

Am in America and my pup had an echo last month. It was $600USD. Your prices don’t sound out of line to me.

Last time I used Nair was over a decade ago and it was impressively, dreadfully smelly. Like burning hair, but more chemically. Just be prepared.

They might not even be pervs, maybe they’re autistic and feet are their special interest.

that’s a shame. I’ve edited the text into my comment above.

Huh, you’re right. I checked the OED online (it’s a subscription thing through my library, here’s the link the OED “cite” button gives, let’s see if it’s paywalled: Oxford English Dictionary, “jig (n.1), sense 5,” December 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1036112357.)

edit: well, I’m not a fan of that. Here’s what it says, minus the examples

A piece of sport, a joke; a jesting matter, a trifle; a sportive trick or cheat. the jig is up (or the jig is over) = ‘the game is up’, it is all over. Now dialect or slang.