I love how all these reblogs from ableds are like “boxes of paper are 20 pounds GOTCHA” as if every single person in a 60-person workplace needs to be able to lift a box of paper.
“What’s that, James? You tore your rotator cuff? Sorry, we have to let you go. What if the printer needed to be refilled and the other 200 people in this building were home sick? It just wouldn’t be fair.”
I deserve more intellectually challenging low-effort justifications for bigotry. Please try harder next time. 1/10.
hi! i’m a secretary with a lifelong congenital back issue that i had fixed via surgery.
the first thing i want to point out is that the box of paper that @bransrath posted is not the weight of the box. the 20 lb in that description is the paper weight, which is the amount of force a piece of paper can take before tearing. i know this because it’s described as copy paper, and copy paper is by default 20 lb weight. so posting that picture as a ‘gotcha’ in response to this post is ignorant at best and intentionally ableist at worst. in reality, that box probably weighs no more than 15 lbs.
secondly, i have never had to actually pick up one of these boxes ever. and i have to deal with them a lot, given that i’m a secretary who, prior to the pandemic, was printing off 1000+ pages of booklets per week. i’ve never had to pick these up because you can literally just open them, grab a ream of paper, and take it to the printer to load it in. there’s no fucking reason why you would need the whole box. most places, like my office, also store them on or near the ground because they’re heavy, so what i do is a just drag the boxes to their designated corner until they need to be used.
so “must be able to lift 20 lbs” is a tactic of discrimination, and there’s no excuse for it in office jobs like mine. i can’t actually lift more than 15 lbs and chances are, i’ll never be able to lift more than 20 lbs. i can still do all the duties of my secretary job, though, and it’s really easy to find work arounds for things like heavy boxes of paper. even i can, and my office literally employs 3 people including me. a weight limit is not a reason to deny someone a job.
At my job these are delivered on a dolly and we open the boxes in the spot they’re dropped and unload the paper one ream at a time. No one, not even the warehouse staff who specialize in heavy lifting, lifts these boxes…
Can confirm. To move these boxes you just kick and slide them to where they bother people the least and that’s it.
1 – those boxes weigh about 50 pounds, not 15
2 – if they ask “can you lift 20lbs” say “yes, what will i be lifting?” 99.999% of the time it’s just random boilerplate put in by hr, but if it’s not? you want to know that ahead of time. if they say “oh, we don’t have a custodian so we take turns taking out the trash, and those bags get kind of heavy,” or “we sometimes have to pick up and carry boxes of rolled coins” or something, you want to know that before you accept the job.
This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said “I’m currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,” and he replied “oh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?” and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.
The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.
For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.
German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.
The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.
I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.
So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).
Holy fuck. I was raised Jewish— with female Rabbis, even!— and I did not hear about any of this. Gender studies are important.
“so you just threw gender in there for fun” ffs i hope you poured his drink down his pants
I actually studied this in one of my classes last semester. It was beyond fascinating.
There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldn’t listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.
Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didn’t want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husband’s side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.
(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasn’t supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage.
The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have.
Another interesting tidbit is that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Kristallnacht is a term that historians came up with after the fact, and was not what the event was actually called at the time. It’s likely that the event was actually called was (I’m sorry that I can’t remember the German word for it but it translates to) night of the feathers, because that, instead of broken glass, is the image that stuck in people’s minds because the soldiers also went into people’s homes and destroyed their bedding, throwing the feathers from pillows and blankets into the air. What does it say that in our history we have taken away the focus of the event from the more domestic, traditionally feminine, realms, and placed it in the business, traditionally masculine, realms?
Badass women and interesting commentary. Though I would argue that “Night of Broken Glass" includes both the personal and the private spheres. It was called Kristallnacht by the Nazis, which led to Jewish survivors referring to it as the November Pogrom until the term “Kristallnacht" was reclaimed, as such.
None of this runs directly counter to your fascinating commentary, though.
READ THIS.
If anyone has books or articles related to these accounts or ones like them, please let me know. These stories need to be told.
always make sure to start forging parents’ signatures on the first day of class. that way, your teachers won’t know that you’ve been forging signatures for the rest of the year
My poor dad is dead now, but I feel he would like the widest audience possible to know that he used to routinely hand his teachers the following note.
“In my opinion, David is not fit for Games today. Regards, David McDougall.”
My dad was not named after his father, whose name was, in fact, Victor.
My dad’s reasoning was he could never be accused of forging anything, because he hadn’t. He’d just offered his opinion, in writing.
We are forced to live in a system that steals from us daily, Kill snitch culture.
Important things to keep in mind!
- never take from ‘mom and pop’ type store. Its likely you’ll actually harm them, whereas taking from a walmart wont effect much.
- never take items that a worker is assigned to monitor (usually super expensive items), theyll be in trouble for it. and its usually a minimum wage worker and usually they lose hours or pay, or they even get fired.
- similar to the above, never take things that are usually locked up for the above reason
- if its a store you know gives their near-expiration products to workers/charity, try to avoid taking the near expiration products.
- if youre taking clothing, avoid leaving hangers. it sounds weird, but itll make it seem like it was more likely an error in the computer than a theft, since the empty hanger sitting there will seem suspicious.
- also for clothing, try not to take more than one item at once, as it will look suspicious if theres 10 medium shirts missing, and it won’t be written off as just a stocking error. and it will lead to workers being penalized
- basically just always consider ‘will this harm a worker’ and if the answer is yes then dont do it
like i was homeless for a while when i was younger and i tried to follow those guidelines to avoid doing harm to people who were probably not much better off than me while trying to get food for myself.
Holy crap, is there like an unspoken thieves code or something?!
it’s a thing. I won’t even lie. I watched someone slip a nursing exam book in their bag at the store I worked at. She made eye contact with me and the blood drained from her face. I simply gave her a sympathetic nod and walked away.
I live in a small town and I knew she was a waitress at a hotel my sister works at, and people at that hotel don’t tip well during off season. Nursing exam books are 50+ bucks. Being a med student myself, I didn’t even breathe a word, and when inventory came up later and the book was missing, I suggested it was likely a mislabel, and the manager wrote it off.
Sometimes, thievery is a necessity. Don’t send people to jail over petty things.
theft for many is survival in this system and taking away from multi-billion dollar companies that are a part of the oppressive capitalist system
I love this post so much. Like, an unbelievable amount.
And they say there’s no honour among thieves.
There’s honour among honourable thieves. A thief is still a person, with the capability for good and bad, just like everyone else. The moment someone assumes either good or bad of someone, they perpetuate that belief into reality.
Never been a big part of this myself but I approve and shall pass it on
Gonna use these cheat codes when I’m broke and on the streets @travalerray
Good luck with that
If you’re white, realize that Black people are more closely monitored than white people in stores and use that privilege.
I forgot to add this last night. Don’t steal from Target. They’ll let you get away with the theft until they have enough to charge you with a felony, they keep track with what you steal between stores, and they have the most proficient loss prevention systems.
![@FemboyPhysics tweeted: To my non-USA followers, that [sic] this is how we do volume.](https://64.media.tumblr.com/ba4100310cbd6218a8b81da1a0d43c1b/ef936e07a1e6145d-57/s500x750/330f4375761660e8628fb31b2c0b98ee8f86cd6f.jpg)
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