Tag: white people

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Everybody loses: YouTube prankster fucks with the wrong guy, gets shot; prankster in ICU, shooter in police custody

What caught my attention about this story is that it happened up in Northern Virginia, and at a mall that I’ve been to a few times before.  Dulles Town Center, at least when I was still living up there, wasn’t the bougiest mall or wasn’t a Tysons, but was still well shopped as it was way the fuck far away from the blight-spreading that had overtaken Springfield and Landmark malls and was on its way towards Tysons with the expansion of Metro.

But it was still an unfortunate story where a shithead who tries to cultivate internet popularity by performing pranks on usually unwilling participants, tries to pull a prank on the wrong guy, and ends up getting shot in the gut.  The wrong guy, who was just trying to mind his own business and pick up food for a DoorDash delivery, gets pushed into whipping out his piece, is now under arrest, and as said above, everybody loses.

I floated this story to a group chat of close friends, and the general consensus is that the shooter crossed the line by reacting with deadly force, but at the same time, I absolutely don’t think that the prankster is absolved of any fault at all.  Sure, I agree that deadly force should rarely be the answer to anything short of one’s life being threatened in the first place, but I can’t say I entirely agree that the prankster wasn’t asking for it either.

Because I don’t want to give anyone acknowledgment to the shithead prankster and his dumbass YouTube channel I won’t use names or give any links and anyone really curious about this story can probably find it easily on their own, but the guy doing the pranks is a pretty big dude, and I feel like he takes for granted that his stature and the fact that he seems to target less-threatening individuals, probably prevents a lot of people retaliating on him for trying to get a rise out of them.  So when he pressed his luck on a guy who reportedly gave him fair warning as well as tried to swat his phone away from him, I can’t say I feel any modicum of sympathy for him when he got a gun pulled on him. 

Of course the shooter didn’t have to shoot, but we live in a world where there are more unhinged people than ever out there, and the prankster got unlucky to have found one of them with an itchy trigger finger that did the deed.

What’s obnoxious about this story other than the obvious shithead prankster, is that the guy’s dad and grandfather are coming out and trying to defend him for “just trying to have some fun” and other diluted rhetoric that coddles and justifies their shithead son’s bad behavior.  Like if I were the guy’s dad, I’d probably go on record that I don’t condone my son’s behavior, but I wish he’d just got decked instead of shot.

I actually feel sympathy for the shooter, because I’d wager he didn’t wake up in the morning thinking there was any possibility that he was going to end up in jail at some point.  Much less for an altercation that he didn’t initiate.  He was just trying to mind his own business, logged into DoorDash and wanted to make some money, and some shithead bro starts fucking with him, and won’t let up.  Obviously pulling a gun and shooting the guy was extreme, but at some point, people can only get pushed before they are forced to react.

Either way, it’s an unfortunate story where everyone comes out a loser, and I post about it because these are the types of stories that draw my attention when I don’t feel like writing so much and I need to inspire myself to in order to keep up with the habit and practice continuing doing it.

I’m not perfect but I still did the right thing

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

So I’m out doing my food delivery moonlighting, and I get a ping that has me making a pickup at a Taco Mac.  I get to the Taco Mac, and as I’m walking into entrance, I’m pleased to see some bagged orders waiting at the host stand, hoping one of them is mine, so I can grab it and be on my merry way because time is money, and I might be able to eke out one more fare before it gets too late.

Unfortunately, neither of the orders are mine, and when the hostess has to go to the back to check on it, I know I’m in for a wait, which is always an annoyance because again, time is money, and when I’m waiting, I’m not earning, and I’m always concerned customers will take their frustration out at getting their food late on me, by virtue of pulling back tips.  The hostess comes back and says sorry, it’ll be like 10-15 min, is that okay, to which I roll my eyes and don’t give a real committed answer because I don’t want to cancel the fare because there’s no guarantee I’ll get another one as good immediately, but I also don’t want to wait that long.  I opt to wait, and resign myself that this is probably the last one of the night, and I go sit in an adjacent booth.

My foot hits something, and when I look down, I see that it’s a wallet.  Immediately my brain starts popping with the opportunity of finding some rich schlub’s wallet, and the prospect of an immediate payday, but at the same time, I don’t want anyone to really see that I found a wallet, lest anyone think I’m some sort of crook, even though my thoughts are immediately wondering how much cash could be in it.

I discreetly pick it up and a minute later, I pull it up onto the table like it was mine all along and I’m rooting through it, because there’s no harm in looking.  I see the driver’s license of some older white male, 6’0, white hair, lives in the same city as the restaurant.  I find a voter registration card, and based on his look and where we are, no surprise that he’s a registered Republican.  There’s no platinum or black cards anywhere to indicate that he’s particularly wealthy, but the address points to an area of some very affluent homes regardless.

And then we get to the cash, at first I find only a five a bunch of ones, but then I discover that there’s a second pocket, to where he clearly separates larger bills from the smaller ones.  Even still, there’s a few twenties, and we’re looking at $91 in cash here.

My mind is racing at this point, and I’m seeing the scales of justice in my head as I could easily hand this over to the hostess and be done with it, but at the same time having watched the lackadaisical and lackluster behavior of the host staff, I didn’t trust that they would do the right thing with this wallet, and if they were going to pilfer the cash, why shouldn’t I do it myself and benefit from it instead?

Which brings us to the other side, where I could be a complete shithead and just walk away with the wallet, keep the $91, toss the rest into the garbage and be done with it.  Brian McJoneserkowski has a bad Monday but ultimately lands on his feet after he freezes all his cards and goes to get a new license and loses not even a hundred bucks.

Because that $91 is basically a really good night of doing food delivery.  That $91 offsets the cost of breakfast for my household plus in-laws this morning.  That $91 is $91 that I didn’t have that I now have, which would be useful because I never feel comfortable financially and it would be a nice little break to get for once.

All this decision pondering was going on through my head while I was waiting for my tardy order to arrive, and I knew that I had to come to a decision soon, because once the food came out, I was on the clock to get it to the customer.

A part of me was pondering doing the real hero thing and delivering it back to the person’s home, but it was close to 10 pm, and I don’t imagine how well received it would be for some rando to show up at someone’s home at that late at night to return a wallet, and considering they were a white male and I was a minority, I’d probably get shot and/or arrested for suspicion of theft.  Because if this didn’t get resolved tonight, there’s no way I was going to give it any thought in the following days, and then I would’ve ended up keeping the cash and throwing the other effects away and have done the shithead thing in the end even if I didn’t intend to.

Ultimately, the decision I made is that in spite of the temptation to abscond with a free $91 and the fact that I admit to being tempted, and I admit to rooting through this guy’s wallet with not-quite so honorific thoughts in my head, at the end of the day, I’m no thief.  I’m not perfect, as I’ve so disclosed, but I’m not a thief.

To get around my distrust for the hosts, I went to the one worker who probably deals with left behind wallets and personal effects on a regular basis: the bartender.  I dropped it off with her, and hopefully she does the right thing and puts it into a safe or something, and isn’t sneaking off into the back to pocket the $91, but at this point it’s no longer my concern.

In the end, I know that I did the right thing, even if I took a very roundabout and questionable route.  Hopefully Charles McRepublican the III sobers up in the morning and has the wherewithal to get in touch with the Taco Mac and discover that some honorable paragon turned his wallet in without stealing any of his effects, and hopefully this earns me some positive karma that will benefit me in some positive fashion in the future.

I also think about the fact that I’m a dad with kids, and even if they weren’t with me, I’d have a hard time looking them in the eyes and trying to convince them that dada’s a good person, so even when they’re not around, I still feel like I need to be setting a good example for them, regardless of how tempted I might’ve been.

A feeling really old moment

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I went to Willy’s the other day to pick up dinner, and like most intelligent human beings who value their time, I placed an order online with the hopes of timing my drive just right to where I could arrive right at the expected time of ready to pick up, grab my food and be on my merry way home, with minimal waiting necessary for me, my kids, mythical wife and our au pair.

As if I can’t say more positive things about my de facto favorite eatery chain in Atlanta, Willy’s is usually really good about meeting their estimated times, and more often than not, whenever I place an online order, it’s ready and waiting for me whenever I do arrive, and whenever that’s the case, I’m satisfied and feeling smug at walking out with my food while there are a line of schlubs waiting to order.

Except for this one particular location, which ironically is the one closest to my home.  There was once a point where I could quite literally say that I’d been to every single Willy’s location, so I could say with conviction that this one is the worst Willy’s in their entire company network.  Now I know they’ve expanded a little bit since I was the Burrito King of Atlanta but I’d still wager that this specific location is probably still the worst of them all.

And it’s not because they’re in the hood or somewhere unsafe and sketchy, quite the contrary, they’re in one of the lily-whitest, upper-middle class parts of the Metro Atlanta area.  But the problem remains as predictably same as any poor performing restaurant, the fault of bad employees.

The thing is, the employees aren’t bad because they’ve got attitudes or are lazy, it’s just this particular Willy’s location is that they’re staffed from the pool of people in which they’re located in, which in this case is a bunch of mostly white, high school teenagers, whom mostly come from a place of privilege.  And it’s no more prevalent than how often this place is completely overwhelmed by basic orders, leading to long waits, mistakes in orders, and a whole lot of reasons why I should really stop going to this location, but I keep coming back because I like Willy’s, and I keep telling myself that things might have changed by now.

Anyway, the reason this brog post comes to fruition is because when I got to this Willy’s, I was right on time to the estimated time of readiness, and I enter the restaurant and walk straight to the shelf of online orders and lo and behold, there’s no bag with my name on it waiting for me.  In fact there’s no bags at all, but then again I’ve realized that I’m smarter than most people in my area by how much more I seem to utilize online ordering than others.

I stand around for a minute or two, hoping someone would emerge from the prep area with a bag bursting with my order, which doesn’t happen, so I put myself into the line of sight of the cashier who’s this blond, teenage-looking Chad.  At this point, I can see a couple of tickets hanging from a board.  Chad doesn’t say anything to me despite making eye contact with me, so I blink first and ask him about my order which was scheduled to be ready by now.  He has no answer to my query, and resumes making pre-made baggies of tortilla chips.  My eyebrow scrunches at this completely useless response to a simple question.

There’s a manager pacing between the grill, kitchen and the prep area, and when he sees me, he blurts out to Chad why he’s not helping me, and that I’m clearly standing in front of him because I need some help.  I explain that I’m waiting on my online order, and that I can see my ticket there, and it looks unfortunate that I’m behind what appears to be a fucking catering order and who the fuck makes a catering order at 5 pm on a Friday and why would they even take it much less try to fulfill it right before the dinner rush??

But then for the next few minutes, I watch as the poor overwhelmed manager has to basically hold Chad’s hand at instructing him to demonstrate some common sense and feel for the room, because it’s clear that Chad has absolutely no understanding of customer service work, and I’m feeling really old in thinking that the kids these days are fucked and spoiled and that the future is fucked for white America and it’s no wonder the food service industry’s reputation is in the shitter now.

  • Chad has to be told to stop bagging chips and to help customers in front of him
  • Chad has to be told to look at the growing row of completed burrito orders to locate mine.
  • Chad has to be told to use his head and not put a burrito on top of a bag of chips come on now.
  • Chad has to be told to count the number of items on the ticket and make sure it matches the number of items in the bag (he was wrong)
  • Finally, Chad has to be told how to arrange bags inside of a bigger bag to fulfill my order before handing it off

I get my order finally and leave the restaurant noticeably agitated.  What should’ve been a quick pickup took an extra 12 minutes of time that my kids could’ve been exploding in my car, and traffic could have been getting worse, seeing as how it was right at the top of the 5 pm hour.  I’m astounded by the sheer incompetence from Chad, and how this location just can’t seem to ever get any reliable help.  Seriously, no other Willy’s I’ve been to has been so poorly operated, and at this point I’m left with no other conclusion that they are as a result of the employment pools in which they operate in.

But I just felt really old because I remember my first jobs when I was still in my teens, and how I never seemed to get any heat from my employers because I had common sense and a work ethic, and beyond initial training, rarely ever needed to have my hand held as much as this fucking Chad needed to have his held.

And how I need to stop coming back to this fucking location, because they just suck.

Yeah I doubt this was an isolated incident

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Veteran maneuver: employee of the year-caliber teacher found to have alcoholic beverage on school premises during school hours

Considering mythical wife’s choice of profession, stories like this always catch my attention.  Frankly, even if she weren’t a teacher, it would probably still pique my interest because of how ironically funny and horrifically frightening it is at the same time.

The thing is, this teacher was caught very recently having booze in the classroom, but I would wager a substantial amount of money that this is far, far, faaarrr from an isolated incident.  Make no mistake, this teacher has probably been microdosing her alcoholism for years, and this was the only time in which she got caught.

It’s the classic suburban white Karen move, of carrying around an innocuous-looking reusable plastic cup with a straw that looks like it’s just water, green drink or some Karen-y shit like Crystal Ice, but it’s really one of those things plus three fingers of Dewars or Ketel One, or it’s straight up a screwdriver or a Sex on the Beach, and the lid helps obscure it.

Except that this broad was a teacher, and doing all of the above, on the clock while being in charge of at least 17+ children belonging to other people, and not smuggling her margarita out of TGI Friday’s in her kid’s sippy cup, which adds to the horrific revelation of this story.

Like I said, the scariest part about this is that there’s no question that she’s been doing this for a while.  Like a functioning addict, her justification to herself is that the booze is probably what makes her as effective of a teacher worthy to be an employee of the year, to where she feels justified to keep doing it.  But I guess she got a little too cocky, too complacent, or a little too tolerant, and she was a little heavier on the sauce than usual to the point where she slipped up and put herself in a situation where she was discovered.

Obviously, she’s gone, and no longer in charge of any other human beings, but the damage in trust has been done.  It’s bad enough there are schools in America that have metal detectors and bag searches for the students, I’m sure security protocols would be thrilled with having to add bottle sniffing onto their responsibilities, not just from the students, but the teachers as well.

Dad Brog (#105): when the Karens become real

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s no secret that many of us of a certain demographic love good Karen stories. Stories of uppity white women making outlandish entitled demands, asking to speak with managers, getting off on generally being pains in the ass to millennials, minorities, and society in general. 

We love when the internet feeds us stories of them, exposing their bullshit, low-key doxxing them and revealing them left and right, but I have to say it’s not nearly as entertaining when the Karens start targeting you, or attacking your personal world, proving themselves to be real-life insufferable c-words, and not just demons from stories on the internet.

On my daughter’s birthday, we went out to eat; a rare occurrence considering my two toddlers, but the grownups outnumbered the runts, so we braved the excursion.  My group was sequestered in a wing of the restaurant that it became quickly apparent that this was where all larger groups, parties with kids, diners needing special accommodation, and ironically, black people (this is a pretty white area), were all stashed away.

The booth seat in which I was sitting at with my daughter, had small openings in the wall behind, that can peek into the booth behind us, if she stood up.  And being a curious now-three year old, of course she stood up and took a peek at the neighboring booth.  Despite my quick admonishing her to not do such, the woman in the adjacent booth wasn’t slow to hide her displeasure at being seated near some young children.

I get it, I’ve been them before too. When I was in my teens and twenties and had no consideration of the challenges of being parents dining out with toddlers.  And she probably was too 40 years prior, the old fucking Karen hag who started making remarks about “it was so empty here” and clearly voicing her displeasure at being near my kids.

I took #1 to the bathroom and when we came back, I noticed that they were gone.  They had moved somewhere else in the restaurant, because they didn’t want to be near my kids.

Here’s the thing, had they stuck it out 10-15 minutes, I wouldn’t have blamed them one bit for wanting to move.  My girls did get noisy for some bursts, and #1 did poke her head over the partition again.  If they moved after those little annoyances, I wouldn’t have taken it as a slight.

But the fact that they did, in advance of any troubling behavior, irked the shit out of me.  It’s like they banked and hoped that my kids would do some mischief to justify their self-important moving so they could continue to have their trite white people conversations about probably how colored folks are ruining their town or some shit.

I felt insulted and unfortunately triggered by it, and it was a stinky moment in what was supposed to be an entirely great dinner with family for my daughter’s birthday. 

Continue reading “Dad Brog (#105): when the Karens become real” →

I miss Dan Uggla

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I heard about this story about how the Braves ended a spring training game in a tie, because a player got the game-ending third strike on account of not being in the batter’s box in time, because 2023 marks the start of the pitch clock era, where every single pitch now has a timer attached to it in an effort to speed up the pace of games because society’s ever-growing ADD has declared that baseball games are too long and nobody likes them anymore as a result.

No sport gets fucked with structurally as much as baseball does.  Aside from some rule changes to discourage defense because offense is sexy, basketball is by and large the same game as it now as it was back in the 1950’s.  Football’s primarily changed in order to try and reduce concussions and protect quarterbacks, but pretty much everything else goes as it did in back in 1920. 

But baseball?  Any strategy that seems too effective is neutered or outright banned (the shift), pitching mounds are raised, lowered, the physical baseballs themselves are altered, bats are regulated and banned, and there are rule changes practically every year.  One of the lasting anecdotes about baseball was that it was the game with no clock, and as a result, every single pitcher-batter matchup was potentially important, and that there was no strategic milking of the clock, and that every out had to be recorded in order for a team to be declared a victor.

Now, there is an actual clock, which effectively puts the romanticism of baseball having no clock and that every out must be earned to rest, because now baseball has embarked on a path where games really can have a finite time limit now.  With rules in place that prevent managers from spamming pitching changes in order to play matchups, and rules in place that prohibit excessive checking base runners by pitchers, MLB has basically closed the walls around old school baseball strategy and effectively put a hard time limit on every game, flexible solely by the need for extra innings or managers milking pitching changes to the most of their limited new abilities.

The Pedro Astacios who took practically an entire minute in between every pitch, and the Bruce Chens who once trolled an entire stadium by checking a runner at first like 14 times will all be phased out and rendered extinct, regardless of how capable they are throwing a baseball, and future Moneyball will probably be cultivating pitching staffs with wildly different pitch preparation speeds, with the intention of throwing off batter timing throughout games.

With all these changes to the game, I just think about the times in the past where I think about having loved baseball the most and lately, the name that pops up the most as someone I really miss, is Dan Uggla.

He was kind of like the anti-stat geek player that the rise of the stat geeks baseball culture absolutely abhorred, but teams themselves still coveted because of his sheer ability to hit home runs when he actually made contact with the ball.  His defense was below-average, he wasn’t a threat to steal bases, and being a second baseman it’s not like he had much of an arm.  But again, the guy hit home runs, and that’s a talent that every team wants, whether they wanted him as a starter, or a designated pinch-hitter, or an actual designated hitter.

There was once a season where he hit .179 on the year which is abysmal, but he still clobbered 22 home runs, which is still noteworthy.  My friend and I made the joke that all he hit were home runs, and with just 80 total hits on the year, he really did hit home runs over 25% of the time.

I take it back about not having much of an arm though, the guy had more physical arms than just about anyone else in the history of Major League Baseball, because pound-for-pound, Dan Uggla had to have been the most jacked player in history.  The guy was 5’11 which isn’t that tall as far as professional athletes go, but the guy had massive, massive arms, with most people making the comparison that his arms looked like Popeye.

Additionally, Dan Uggla also wore the tightest, most form-fitting uniforms as he could, throughout his whole career.  I’m not sure if it were deliberate, or if across the board there were some sizing issues for a man of his stature combined with his musculature, but my friends and I declared that his uniform size was “smedium” and made the comparison for any time anyone was seen wearing a tight-fitting shirt in order to attempt to make their musculature look impressive deliberately.

All in all, Dan Uggla was kind of the perfect poster boy for ironic baseball player fandom.  He was hated by nerds, but still loved by teams, and basically always had a job as long as he kept hitting home runs, all while wearing his ridiculous smedium uniforms and looking like he had professional wrestling as a post-career option.  But more importantly, he was kind of like this totem of simpler times, where there weren’t so many oppressive rules, fans bitching about game duration weren’t heard, and players had to deal with the shift.  No matter his numbers, relievers and closers in his time, still had to face Dan Uggla with the game on the line and although the numbers may have favored them most of the time any mistake they let loose was probably going to end up in the seats.

Man, I miss Dan Uggla.  Even more now, with the game itself undergoing so many dramatic changes.  It’s going to be weird when I eventually actually watch a baseball game again, and seeing shit like pitching clocks on the HUD, and I imagine they’ll feel noticeably faster in speed, which in some cases might feel pretty convenient, but at the same time, very much not like the baseball that was what I grew to love and enjoy.

I’ve never been more unafraid of an armed individual in my life

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the weekend, we sent the kids to grandma’s house so that we could get some major organization done at home.  Frankly even with the help of our au pair, there would’ve been a lot of going in and out of the girls’ rooms well into the evenings that made it optimal to just have them not be present in order to maximize productivity.  That being said, it also afforded all of us in the house, to be adults for two days, and on the second evening, we collectively decided to get out of the house.

At one point, we went into a 2nd and Charles to kill a little bit of time; at one point in my life, this place would’ve been my heaven, since I like comic books, video games, books and all sorts of the nerdy crap that they sell and buy there, but at this point in my life, I just want to look and don’t want to actually bring any more shit into my house that I feel is already full of a lot of unneeded crap.

While we were there though, I was looking through comic trade hardcovers, and not far to my left, I could hear some guy doing some serious mansplaining about the differences between the Infinity War in comics versus the MCU.  A smirk emerged on my face at hearing him blather on, because he was perpetuating all sorts of stereotypes of comic book geeks inside the bookstore.

As I passed by him, I couldn’t help but notice that beneath his vest that I have to imagine was put on completely non-ironically, was a holster equipped with what I’m pretty sure was a Glock of minimal size, I’m no expert on the granular details, especially when I could only see the handle.  The point is, the guy was carrying openly, which is completely legal in the state of Georgia.

But as the title of this post states, I don’t think I’ve ever been more unafraid of an armed individual in my life until I saw this guy.  Think about it, the guy is carrying a firearm, presumably loaded, completely in public, at a place of business that probably had upwards of 80-100 people inside of it at the time I saw him.  We live in the age where mass shootings happen at almost a weekly basis in similar conditions, and not only did I feel zero concern for my life, all I could feel were jokes formulating in my brain instead.

Like, this guy got dressed with the express intention of leaving the house, and going to 2nd and Charles of all the places in the Metro Atlanta area, and as he’s mentally inventorying all the things he needs prior to walking out the door, and oh yeah my gun is one of the things on his checklist.

“Honey, we have to get to 2nd and Charles before they close at 8, have you seen my gun?”
“Yeah baby, it’s right next to my Loungefly”

On action television and in film, there are occasionally montages of heroes getting ready to go into battle, and they’re equipping themselves with a gun before they go into the fights of their lives.  And then we have Firearm Fred over here consciously strapping on his holster to go into the nerd store, as if he might have to flex it on someone trying to get the last pack of Yu-Gi-Oh booster packs ahead of him.

Seriously, I was giggling to myself for the rest of the night at the thought of Sidepiece Samuel actually feeling like he had to be carrying a firearm inside of a fucking 2nd and Charles.  I’ve never felt so opposite of concerned or intimidated by another human being’s presence in my entire life.  I felt like even if he were a mass shooter ready to pounce, I could probably take him without there being any loss of life; I know it’s not really a laughing matter, but that’s how seriously felt looking at this guy.

Regardless, my au pair got a kick out of seeing such a sight with her own eyes.  And after we took her to a Hooters for dinner, I told her that she basically had the most American night of her life, having seen an armed individual out in public, followed by the aforementioned Hooters for dinner.  Welcome to America!