I don't disagree—I was just saying we can't always blame a parent for their child's awfulness. Some parents are wonderful and their kids still end up being assholes.

You can always tell people who've worked in any sort of service industry because they are so much nicer. They tip properly and treat people like human beings. I bartend so when people mess with me I just make their drinks weaker.

I do the same, because I understand what they put up with.

My daughter had similar experiences while working at B&N as a college student. She would regularly come home with stories of incredible rudeness. One nasty customer even asked her if she was stupid, which she is not, but she held her tongue. I give her a lot of credit, I would not have been able to. The increasing…

also he enacted the first sweeping anti-trust laws. pretty important stuff, especially with some of the corporate maneuvering going on now.

I was in a fairly upscale Philly suburb and the same thing happened all the time. People are rude.

Fattest president, AND the only president to serve as a supreme court justice (a position he FAR preferred t the presidency)!

FUCKING BORDERS. I worked there until they fired me for not demanding a customer's email address when he was buying a paper. One newspaper.

Fellow Borders alum here. One Black Friday, I had a woman call me a snot because I was helping another customer. She walked up to me in the cooking aisle WHILE I WAS SPEAKING to the other customer and called out the name of a rather unknown cookbook. No "Please help me find..." or "Do you have..." After I politely…

On the contrary, on my last Black Friday in retail, I distinctly remember approximately 427 people chirping cheerfully about how, "You must've had a rough day!" right before doing something to make it worse.

The only ones I resented more were the ones who complained about how tired they were from their 3 a.m.…

Agreed. I also worked retail for years and it really showed me how convenience for other people = sucky lives for poor people.

Christmas Eve was the one "holiday" in the year that I would volunteer to work. I worked in a bookstore and honestly, it was a great day. It was too late to order anything, and people knew it. They always took our suggestions because they were desperate. There were lots of people on the floor and my coworkers were…

When I was in Brazil, someone asked me if it was beautiful where I was from (Indiana). I hadn't really thought about it before, but I replied that it isn't dramatic—no ocean, no mountains—but it is beautiful.

While I appreciate the coverage, can we stop blaming this as a symptom of small towns?

I don't know much about this—there are, of course, rape crisis centers and sexual violence organizations that do a lot of great work (RAINN, local groups such as the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation), and I'm sure there are lots of opportunities to get involved. My personal avenue consists of pro bono…

Well, on one hand, I'm annoyed by some of the genuinely rural people around me who "tractor" and "redneck" everything to absolute death, especially when it coincides with justifications for ignorance and oppression. That's actually what I was thinking of when I wrote that line.

I'm a rural person who as a rule doesn't have a lot of patience for fetishizing rural lifestyles, and yeah, this made me cry.

We have wild hedgehogs here in France, and I delight every time I see them buffling and hustling along towards some hedgie destination. We usually end up stopping the car in the middle of the road, hazard lights flashing, at least twice per season to pull them from the road. They have a bad habit of getting flattened…

So very very cute! Glad there are people who foster sick animals. In the country where I live hedgehogs, among other non-domestic animals, are not allowed as pets as of January 2014. I thought a hedgehog would be the cutest pet ever for in my small flat, but now I will have to leave them in nature where there are…

Raspberry agrees, hedgehogs are the best!