Normally 5-7 between my shirt and pants.

2 front and back pockets on my pants

The little watch pocket on jeans and such

One or two shirt pockets

Occasionally I wear cargo pants or shorts which adds 2+ more pockets

And if I’m wearing a jacket, that adds a few more. My most commonly worn jacket has 2 hip, 2 chest, and 2 inside pockets

And if I’m fishing, even I don’t know how many pockets are on my vest, pretty sure that adds a dozen or so

Wallet goes in my back left. Used to be my right but the way I sit that started to give me some sciatica issues no problem since I switched pockets. I also switched to a thinner wallet which probably helps as well but that came well after switching sides

Back right usually gets a bandana

Things move around between my front pockets a bit.

I usually carry a pocket knife and if it has a clip that gets clipped to the front right, no exceptions. If it doesn’t have a clip it could be in either front pocket, or possibly a belt pouch.

I usually have a pen on me and if my shirt doesn’t have a pocket that goes there as well.

I’ve been sporting a curly handlebar moustache for probably 15 years now, and if I’m wearing jeans or something else with a similar little watch/coin pocket, my tin of moustache wax goes there. Otherwise that tin goes into whichever pocket I find it’s rattling the least against whatever else is in that pocket.

Phone switches back and forth between my left and right front pocket, based mostly on which hand I was last using it with. If I was just aimlessly scrolling on my phone or texting someone I probably had it in my right hand so it goes in the front right. It occasionally also ends up in a jacket or shirt pocket.

If I was using it while I was doing something else, like maybe looking at a recipe while I was cooking it was probably in my left hand so it goes in that pocket.

If I have cargo pockets it sometimes ends up in one of those. One of my pairs of hiking pants has a pocket that fits it really nicely.

Keys generally get clipped to a belt loop on my right side, the case for my earbuds gets clipped on my left. Other times they end up in a jacket pocket or usually my front right pocket.

I usually carry a small notepad with me, like with the pen it preferably goes in a shirt pocket, otherwise it usually ends up in my right front, or if I have cargo pockets one of those.

I had a math professor from Nigeria

The dude spoke like 6 different languages, but when he first came to America, he barely spoke a word of English (which is how he ended up in math, numbers work the same in any language, and probably why he was really good at teaching math)

But the dude had seen some shit in his day, and we’d occasionally get some absolutely insane lore drops about armed militias and such rolling through his village, I’m pretty sure he spent some time as a child soldier, he’d occasionally get a little nervous if he heard a helicopter fly overhead, etc.

I’m glad he taught math, because like I said, he was really good at it, but man, I would have just signed up for a class to hear him talk about his life.

This Is Just To Say
By William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Besides that, I have a book of poetry that I’m not going to share, but I will share the story of why I own it.

I work in 911 dispatch. We have a frequent caller, she actually doesn’t live in our area, but her mother and father do. This is what I’ve pieced together about them.

Her father is in a nursing home. She calls frequently for police or EMS to go out for him alleging all kinds of abuse and mistreatment. This isn’t a particularly nice nursing home, but cops have been there multiple times and haven’t found any issues with her father.

She’s very uncooperative with us when she calls, refuses to answer basically any questions, and when we or the police try to call her back to tell her the outcome or to get more information she basically never answers the phone.

A few times she has actually shown up at the nursing home, caused a scene, and had to be escorted off the premises. One time her father was hospitalized for something (not sure what, but I didn’t see any calls for us that would have matched up with him, so it probably wasn’t something too serious if they took the time to arrange non emergency transport) and she showed up at the hospital, was escorted out, and spent the next day or two pretty much camped out at some nearby fast food places)

Her mother has dementia, and is a frequent caller herself, she calls to complain about her caretakers and sometimes even gets into fights with them.

I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn that the father checked himself into the nursing home to get away from his wife and daughter.

They both occasionally call for well-being checks on each other. The daughter usually because she took her mother’s insane ramblings at face value, and the mother usually because she hasn’t heard from the daughter in a while (or at least doesn’t remember hearing from her) and because of some vague concerns that she can never really explain, things like “I’m worried because of everything happening in [city where daughter lives]” but she can’t tell me what’s supposedly happening there and when I looked up the local news there I couldn’t find anything particularly noteworthy.

I’ve given the mother the direct phone number to the dispatch center that covers her daughter’s home multiple times (sometimes multiple times in the same night) so she can reach them directly, but she always calls 911 instead so I have to transfer her every time.

During one such transfer, she was rambling about her daughter, and she mentions that her daughter is a writer.

I of course had to search out what she had written.

At first, all I could find was some mentions of her contributing to some magazines and such, but couldn’t actually find any of her actual writing, but digging a little deeper I was able to find some stuff she did in college. A bunch of poetry, and it was all terrible and weird. I’d pull it up to share with my coworkers occasionally when she was blowing up our phones.

Then one day I went to do that and saw that she had written a book. I got a copy for myself and as Christmas presents for a couple of my favorite coworkers. It’s more of the same insane, rambling, nonsensical poetry.

Yes, that is clearly what I meant when I used the plural form of the word “accent”

/S (because you really seem like you might need it.)

Were the actual bigots and racists so mean to you that you can’t bring yourself to face them, and so now you’re just gonna go around digging up week-old posts to make up things to get offended about so you can pretend you’re actually standing up for something?

Go find something worth actually getting offended over.

I work in 911 dispatch, understandably once in a while I get a caller who is just absolutely losing their mind over whatever is going on that they’re calling about

And sometimes pretty much the only thing I can do to grab my callers attention and bring them back around to listening to me is to just kind of repeat sir/ma’am until I get their attention they come back around to realizing I’m trying to talk to them.

If I can get their name, I use that instead and it’s more effective, but that’s not always a given.

Just sitting there in silence until they get their shit together on their own doesn’t work, and more likely they’re going to just hang up on me.

And repeating whatever question I need answered really just kind of goes in one ear and out the other while they continue going off.

Their name or sir/ma’am is punchier, it has a way of cutting through their panic and grabbing their attention saying “you are being addressed right now and the person addressing you needs your attention”

And I really wish we had a good, gender-neutral equivalent of that. It needs to be polite and professional, and maybe a bit authoritative-sounding, so something like “dude” obviously won’t cut it.

And I need it both for trans/non-binary people, and people whose gender just isn’t clear on the phone because they’re in a panic, calling from a potato, and/or just have a somewhat ambiguous voice.

Normally I just have to pick one and go with it, and they’ll either correct me (in some cases, choosing the wrong one might actually be more effective at grabbing their attention because astonishingly (/s) people don’t enjoy being misgendered and they jump at the opportunity to correct that) or they also just roll with it.

But I’d really like to avoid that if I can, and I haven’t really found a good option for it yet.

Pretty much the whole point of a call center job is to be able to verbally communicate with your callers clearly and effectively.

And, like it or not, heavy accents can really get in the way of that, and I think that’s an accessibility issue. It makes it difficult for people to access services they need to use.

Not everyone has great hearing, some people have cognitive issues, some people are just not used to hearing different accents. I’ve had to make calls to customer service for my mom because she just could not understand the reps she was getting to be able to resolve the issues she was having.

Most accents don’t cause an issue for most people, but for some accents with some people they really do, and it’s incredibly frustrating to be in the position where you can’t understand the person who’s supposed to be helping you to fix your issue because companies don’t want to spend the money to hire customer service reps who can speak clearly for positions where that’s really the only qualification that’s needed.

And it’s not just foreign accents, I honestly have more trouble with certain American accents, I’ve gotten a few people that I’d swear were trying to do a Boomhauer impression.

I usually find some excuse to stop by my parents’ once or twice a month. Often dropping the dog off for them to watch her.

We’ll hang around the house, chit chat, maybe have dinner.

We’ll go out to get dinner or something for birthdays, do holiday dinners and such. Occasionally go help each other move furniture or what have you.

A few times a year we get together with my sister and/or her husband to do something, and usually invite each other to our parties and such.

I don’t really see or talk to my extended family much beyond getting invited to weddings and such and seeing them at family holiday gatherings. I’m fine with that.

My wife goes to visit her mom a couple times a month, often she’s helping her with chores, sometimes her mom comes to our house to hang out.

Her dad lives a little further away, we probably see him about twice a year, usually spending a night on two at his place. We usually go out to get dinner, sometimes go into the city to see a show or do something else, hang around his place and watch movies.

I almost never see her brother or his wife, we have some wonky schedules that often don’t align. When I make it to her family holiday things, it’s usually them, her mom, and her grandmother. We mostly watch stuff on tv, sometimes play uno, and eat dinner.

Personally my problem has never really been the leather wearing out, it’s almost always the soles that give out on me long before that.

And failing that it’s usually other hardware like zippers

The only pair I really remember having an issue with the leather was a pair of steel toed work boots, and they developed some holes on the toes because I tended to use them to kick things around. Not too many materials hold up too well to being banged around between steel and a rock on whatever, so I don’t exactly blame the leather there.

New pair costs $400- something, and I consider them to have been worth every penny of that. Before I got these I normally got about 2 years out of a pair of cheaper, non-recraftable boots that usually cost me north of $200.

Recrafting cost $280 (and I suspect it could have been even cheaper if I went to a local cobbler,) so assuming I get at least 3 years out of them, still cheaper than buying a new pair of the cheaper boots, and definitely cheaper than buying a new pair of these3

Yeah, unfortunately options are a little limited as far as what most people would want as an everyday shoe. Most of the recraftable shoes out there are either boots or what most people would probably consider to be sort of a dress shoe.

There’s still some options out there, Allen Edmonds has some recraftable sneaker-type shoes, though they may not be everyone’s cup of tea (they’re certainly not mine)

Yeah but the materials you have to work with are a little limited. At least around me, Walmart doesn’t carry much in the way of stuff like lumber, pipe, or other building materials, and there’s gonna be some gaps in the tools available, I don’t think most Walmarts carry welders around me, and even if they do you certainly wouldn’t be able to get the gases you need for MIG/TIG welding there, and you might want that if you, for example, need to repair those steel shutters.

And most Walmarts around me actually don’t carry guns.

And you can’t grow too much food on a parking lot, you can try to work with containers and potting soil of course, but odds are a school is gonna have more land you can easily convert to a food plot or maybe even the plumbing parts to get some kind of hydroponics system going.

“Secure” as in “fortify it against zombies and potentially other threats”

Or as in “I can get to it and lay some sort of claim to it”

Because if it’s the former, we probably need to put some restrictions on the scenario. That’s really the hard part of this and we’re just assuming we can do it, and your best bet is probably to secure as big of an area as possible. A city, a country, a whole hemisphere, or hell, the entire world or the solar system if we’re being really silly.

If we’re going with the latter, where we find a building or property of some kind and call “dibs” and the rest of it is up to us

I think a tech school is a pretty good bet, at least thinking of my local tech schools.

They have some fully stocked workshops with pretty much any tools and materials you could need- carpentry, plumbing, automotive, electrical, etc.

Maybe some kind of medical program, so probably a decent amount of meds and first aid equipment, in addition to whatever is in the nurse’s office.

A culinary program, so you have a well equipped kitchen and probably a decent amount of food on-hand.

Maybe it even has some sort of agricultural program with some farming equipment, maybe even some ready-to-go planted crops and possibly livestock.

Most schools are fairly secure with limited entrances and locking doors often they have backup generators and maybe even solar these days (odds are any school with a decent electrical program at least has a few solar panels kicking around somewhere) and you have the tools and maybe the materials there to further fortify it as needed.

And it probably has some pretty beefy fire suppression systems since you have teenagers playing with welders and industrial stoves/ovens.

Some college campuses might be as good or better for the same reasons, with the added benefits of there probably being some purpose-made living quarters, but they’re usually less compact, which has its plusses and minuses, more land to grow crops and such but harder to secure.

And if the apocalypse hits while school is in session, you have a bunch of young, hopefully reasonably-healthy people already on-hand to do some of the hard work if like me you’re not quite as spry as you used to be.

911 dispatch, yeah, kind of important.

Wish I could do it for just fire and EMS, and not police, but that’s the way the system works, and the most interesting calls I get are for police I suppose.

In a more ideal world where people don’t have to work just to survive and make ends meet, I probably would still do it, just not on a full-time schedule. It’s one of those things that needs to get done but that absolutely not everyone is cut out for, so I think it’s important for those of us who can hack it to step up to the plate to do it.

As far as whether I’m proud of what I do, well I’m proud that I get to help people, I’m proud of the skills I have that allow me to do it well, but otherwise it’s just a job, I don’t brag about what I do (although I do have a ton of interesting stories from it that I like to share)

And since it is a full time gig and I have tons of things I’d rather be doing, I’m looking forward to hopefully being able to retire someday and never having to go into the office again.