My current job has me working with children, which is kind of a weird shock after years in environments where a “young” patient is 40 years old. Here’s my impressions so far:
Birth - 1 year: Essentially a small cute animal. Handle accordingly; gently and affectionately, but relying heavily on the caregivers and with no real expectation of cooperation.
Age 1 - 2: Hates you. Hates you so much. You can smile, you can coo, you can attempt to soothe; they hate you anyway, because you’re a stranger and you’re scary and you’re touching them. There’s no winning this so just get it over with as quickly and non-traumatically as possible.
Age 3 - 5: Nervous around medical things, but possible to soothe. Easily upset, but also easily distracted from the thing that upset them. Smartphone cartoons and “who wants a sticker?!!?!?” are key management techniques.
Age 6 - 10: Really cool, actually. I did not realize kids were this cool. Around this age they tend to be fairly outgoing, and super curious and eager to learn. Absolutely do not babytalk; instead, flatter them with how grown-up they are, teach them some Fun Gross Medical Facts, and introduce potentially frightening experiences with “hey, you want to see something really cool?”
Age 11 - 14: Extremely variable. Can be very childish or very mature, or rapidly switch from one mode to the other. At this point you can almost treat them as an adult, just… a really sensitive and unpredictable adult. Do not, under any circumstances, offer stickers. (But they might grab one out of the bin anyway.)
Age 15 - 18: Basically an adult with severely limited life experience. Treat as an adult who needs a little extra education with their care. Keep parents out of the room as much as possible, unless the kid wants them there. At this point you can go ahead and offer stickers again, because they’ll probably think it’s funny. And they’ll want one. Deep down, everyone wants a sticker.
This is also a pretty excellent guide to writing kids of various ages
Right Americans, I need an explanation. What on Earth are these kids doing wrong? Surely this is normal?
You’re meant to open a tab. The bartender keeps your card, and everything you order gets added to your tab. Then, before you leave, your tab is closed, your card is charged for everything at once, and you get your card back.
That seems like a useful way for bars to take advantage of folk who are absolutely plastered.
It just seems much easier to tap your card on a machine than wait for some big tally at the end of the night.
What machine? The bartender/waitress usually has to go to a POS machine and close out manually. Plus how are they supposed to tally tips properly? Stiffing the waitstaff and causing more work is rude!
The card reader, and yeah go to the POS machine, enter the drinks and make them tap a card? Doesn’t seem totally outlandish.
People can pay with cash tips or they take a percentage of the transaction?
Or even better bars can pay their staff properly?
I’m not against tipping but it shouldn’t make up the majority of someone’s wages.
Hang on, in the US you hand your card over??? That seems like a recipe for fraud. Like, if my card was copied and used for a fraudulent transaction then my bank wouldn’t compensate me if I had handed my card over to a stranger to hold on to.
It is. The US credit industry just expects a certain level of fraud. Sometimes they will reimburse you, sometimes not. The banks built a leaky bucket and adjust their profit projections accordingly.
The way the US banking system has evolved in a totally different way than most of the rest of the world (cheques instead of money wires, credit cards instead of debit cards, all the different technology things) is a unsolved mystery to me. I’ve tried to find out an explanation googling around a bunch of times and no one seems to even talk about it.
I’ve left my card at the bar before and gone back to get it the next day and still no fraud. 🤷🏻♀️
wait wait
It’s not like that in any way. Service workers are as honest as everyone else, and by default I consider the average USian a couple of points above of your average spaniard (or any of our southern european siblings, you know what I’m talking about, portu-italo-greek-balkan-turks) in any honesty scale.
But it’s… odd. As someone else says in the notes, it’s like handling the waiter your wallet full of cash so they can take it away and take whatever money they need from there. Or telling me that in your town people don’t use keys on their house front doors and all it’s fine. I’m sure it’s ok, but when you come from a place where you lock your door every night before going to sleep, it feels crazy.
Like, some years ago there were some cases here where people installed card readers over the actual card slot of ATMs, with a small camera pointing to the numeric keyboard, so they could clone your card. Banks are always reminding you to not let anyone see your PIN number, and, generally speaking, be ultra careful with your cards.
So handling them to someone you don’t know so they take it away from you to pay without you really being in front of them and manually confirming with your secret passcode … it’s pretty mindblowing
The first time my dad was presented with a card reader at the table in Europe, he was a bit aghast. He didn’t like the idea that they could see him confirming everything and easily watch whether he tips or not. He has since gotten used to it the more my parents visited me, but it’s just a difference of understanding.
For us, it’s normal to hand off your card because unless you are actually involved in the fraud or were immensely irresponsible, you won’t be liable for the charges. And having not handed off my card for a long time, thinking about it now even makes me a bit nervous. But obviously, there is nothing a person can do about it unless you demand to follow the waitstaff to their computer and watch everything happen. It is slowly, slowly changing, but I emphasize: slow.
There is a certain level of trust you have to have in your server, and they also know that if there is theft of someone’s card or card info, they may be investigated first. But I don’t think at all it’s unreasonable to not want to hand you card to anyone you don’t know, service employee or not, because as soon as it leaves your sight, really your hand even, there’s a potential for trouble. But it’s just another weird thing about the US, and I’m sorry that there isn’t a universal standard of how these things work. Both for myself and everyone else.
ok, I’m going to take us in a little detour, but what you posted has reminded me of something on my own work-life.
Some years ago, I was working for a certain US company (ahem) that offered premium plans on a product. You could only pay on a year-by-year basis, and me and a bunch of other folks around the world considered this crazypants.
In the discussion about why we should have also monthly plans (which are less profitable for the company for both higher payment fees and early cancellation), our main argument was “but why anyone would pay FOR A YEAR of a product they haven’t used before?”, and the response from some USamerican colleagues was “well, if they don’t like it, they can cancel it within the first month and we refund them the entire fee”.
And that. There. That was the point of breakage. USamericans trusted, quite blindly, that a company would return you the entire fee, as they said, if you cancelled the plan during the first month. The rest of us? not in a million years would trust a company to do that, even if they advertise it, even if they give it to me signed on a contract, even if they are obliged by law.
I don’t know why, I don’t know how it happened, but it looks like USamericans’ level of trust (that a company or a person would do “the right thing”) is waaaaaaay above the rest of the world. Hence “giving the card to someone to hold it for you” doesn’t sound crazy to people from the US, while sounding absolutely nuts to most of everyone else.
I want to share something for those of you who are teaching and want your conservative students to be more open-minded to liberal ideas that you’re presenting.
I grew up in a conservative family and a conservative town, and like most conservative kids, had been told that colleges were hotbeds of liberalism, so I was already defensive politically when I started college. My first semester or two I was really skeptical of everything political that my professors presented me with.
And then I took a women’s studies course (required at my college). And on the first day, the professor said,
“You don’t have to be a feminist. There are days when I’m not a feminist. But we’re going to discuss feminist ideas in this class, and you might find that you agree with some of them and disagree with others, and that’s fine.”
And that took the pressure off. By telling me that I didn’t HAVE to be a feminist, that I didn’t HAVE to agree, that professor started me on the road to becoming a feminist. I particularly remember her giving us information about what a huge percentage of the housework was still done by women, even in [hetero] couples where both the man and woman worked outside the home. And after that I remember saying, “I’m not a feminist, but I can see where they’re coming from.”
Within 5 years, I was claiming the term and coming out to my mom as a feminist.
So when I taught college writing, I assigned politically liberal essays to my students, many of whom came from conservative backgrounds. And before they read the first one, I would say,
“The reading for the next class–I want you to know that you don’t have to agree with it. You don’t have to agree with anything that your professors teach you in college. But the point of a college education is to have your mind opened to other points of view. So you’re not required to agree, but you are required to approach the reading with an open mind. You might find that you agree with some things the author says and disagree with others. And that’s cool! We WANT you to use your critical thinking and decide for yourself what you think about things! But to do that, you need to give people the benefit of the doubt and be open-minded to what they have to say.”
And I have to say, it worked really well for me! I remember in particular that after I assigned the essay “Black Men and Public Space”, one of my students wrote in her reading reflection,
“I was taught in school that racism in America ended with Martin Luther King. I am appalled to discover that this is not true.”
Priming your students to be open-minded, while also encouraging them to use critical thinking, can help to break down some of the automatic defenses against new ideas that students are often taught. Approaching your students’ comments during discussion with an open-minded view yourself, validating their experiences while also making gentle counterarguments, can do a lot as well.
This is important within leftist and liberal circles as well - the idea that there can’t be good-faith disagreements between people on the same side leads to brittleness of arguments, of movements, of communities and of a person’s ability to reason.
Obviously, this doesn’t mean that you have to, or should, accept “agree to disagree” or listen to arguments that dehumanize you or others, but we need to be able to consider ideas outside what we already believe, and too often we simply don’t hold in our minds the idea that we don’t have to agree with everything on our side.
Spiderverse really said “Your grief was not necessary. It served no purpose. It did not make you better or kinder or wiser. It did not make the world better. You did not need to suffer to do good. You should never have had to suffer the way you did.
Grief is so strong and so painful that you had to justify it to yourself in order to accept it. You convinced yourself you are better because of it. That the good things you do are because of your grief, instead of in spite of it. You needed to believe it in order to move past the pain.
But the moment you believe your suffering was necessary, you begin to believe the suffering of others is necessary. And when you believe the suffering of others is necessary, you begin to be complicit in it and eventually begin actively and purposefully causing it.”
haven’t watch the atsv yet still think it would be hilarious if there was a spiderman which is the uncle ben and literally everyone else seeing him goes like 😟
