my little brother came into my room last night to tell me that he was gonna sew a stack of my mom’s saltine crackers together through the little holes and then left again
i ended up distracting my parents so he could put the crackers back in the little sleeve like hed only taken one from the top. i dont know if anybodys found them yet but i talked to him about it later and it turns out that theyre sewn together TIGHTLY. like. the ENTIRE stack through ALL the holes
it has been three days and my mom has still not discovered the sewed together cracker stack in the box in the cupboard
I’m DESPERATE to see the sewn crackers
i have no idea how he accomplished this
there seems to be some confusion on how old my little brother is. my little brother is 19, one year younger than me, and is an undergrad in uni. he just likes to cause problems on purpose
it has been a month and two weeks since i made this post and i opened the cupboard today and noticed that the crackers were opened and a bunch had been carefully slid off the threads. i went over to my brother and was like ‘dude holy shit did she find them???’ and he was like ‘i dont know!!!’. cue my mom coming back down the steps wanting to know what we were saying about her. we had to tell her, and apparently this was what happened:
a week or so before, my dad, who is an EXTREMELY smart and well-read guy,found the crackers and assumed they were a manufacturing defect. like he told my mom that he thought it was interesting how the machines using thread to line up the crackers for the sleeves forgot to cut the thread before they went in the sleeve for the box. my mom was like ‘idk……i think i sense some shenanigans…..i dont know from who or how but theres some shenanigans going on in this house’ and he was like ‘no really thats so interesting how they must use thread to do stuff at the cracker factory’. he didn’t take the sleeve out before opening them up, and therefore didnt see the tape closing up the other side. when he came downstairs my brother took the sleeve out and showed him, and he was mildly surprised, like ‘huh i just assumed thats how they made the crackers lol’ and he just went on with his life. the cracker saga has been consuming me for the past month and after all that this was how it ended. idk what i expected but at the same time somehow this was a fitting end
I work retail, and have for many years now. I’m not an easily fazed person and have a Talk No Shit, Take No Shit mentality. However, I also have a pretty intense anxiety disorder on top of other mental health issues and when I started 6+ years ago there were some customers who got to me.
So, to all the workers facing Karens and Kens out in the wild, here’s my advice - cry.
If you have the type of relationships with your coworkers and managers that will support you, don’t try to hold it in. Cry like the overworked, underpaid peon you are.
Nothing terrifies an asshole Karen like the indisputable proof that their actions/words are affecting you as a real live person. They feel perfectly entitled to cuss out a cashier over a wrong order/no cash policy/ face mask mandate but when that person starts to cry and asks them why they’d say such mean things? A whole other story, my friend.
There’s no way to make that situation look good to the manager they demanded to speak with, either. My manager literally got a security guard fired for being so verbally abusive he made one of her employees cry.
This strategy has multiple benefits -
1. You’re not standing there trying to pen up your emotions, crying is a great physical release for negative emotions and you may very well feel somewhat better afterwards.
2. The person who precipitated the situation is forced to not only see you as a person with feelings, but also has to confront the fact that their abuse has consequences beyond themselves.
3. It can actually give your higher-ups leverage to address these situations. ‘They yelled at my employee’ is one thing, but 'They yelled at my employee until they were in tears’ is a waaaaay worse offense. A good manager can use that. Hell, it can get a security guard fired!
tl;dr: We live in a capitalist hell but we can work the system and cry at work to shame awful customers
