God it’s awful. It’s like going to your friend’s improv class after months of being gently guilted about it. And then they’re just as awful and contrived as you’d feared.

Also, let’s be honest- do we really think the Hotel’s various owners did not have access to good lawyers? I’m pretty sure that if there had been a way to evict this woman that wouldn’t have dragged through the court system for years, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and have reflected terribly on the Hotel…

...Which is unfortunate for the hotel but which doesn’t get them out of fulfilling their legal obligations. And frankly, the two conditions that they’ve listed are not all that unreasonable. In NYC I believe that landlords are currently required by law to repaint their properties every three years anyway. And when you…

I agree. I don’t like people who treat service staff badly, or who bring pointless nuisance lawsuits, but she had a signed contract for these things so I don’t understand why the hotel would think she shouldn’t get them.

In my family it’s “Mam.”

A hooker, a teacher, and coworkers. Oh my.

So maybe this is something other Jezzies can fill me in on; having not been brought up in the States, I have no real idea about what/how kids learn about religion is schools. My husband told me they were not allowed to do anything related to any religion in his school, which seemed weird to me. I am absoutely behind…

Ding Fucking ding.

Oh God yeah, I’d much rather see these things handled in school instead of by the police. But mainly I just think there’s a lot missing here that potentially could shed a very different light on the situation. Maybe this school just hasn’t been doing enough, maybe this kid had been targeted by the other students.…

See, it’s stuff like this that’s actually making me think this may not have been that big of an overreaction. I watched the interview and when they were talking about this group of girls walking down the corridors and grabbing people’s butts to watch their reaction...that happened to me more than once, I had my boobs…

I kind of agree. For me it’s...odd that her parents have gone to their local TV station with this. I get being protective of your kid, but as someone else pointed out, this isn’t something that’s going to result in any permanent black mark on her record. If this had happened to me my parents would be pissed, but…

I tend to agree that there’s no “right” answer, though the Spanish system someone mentioned below sounded pretty perfect to me!

If your kids are anything like my husband, they may end up using your name anyway, even if it’s their middle name. My husband has his mother’s maiden name as his middle name, but it’s a lot easier to pronounce than his last name, so he ends up giving out the middle name a lot!

I am not that old, and I remember when being a teacher was a decent career path. Respected, solidly middle-class, stable. It still is stable, which is nice, but everything else has gone to shit. Teachers are overworked, underpaid, and have to deal with utterly unrealistic expectations. Where my mum worked (a very poor…

Oh no doubt. And like I said, incredibly nice of the people to do that. But it’s kind of a shocking indictment of the economic structure of that area.

It’s the same everywhere. My mother recently retired from the school where she’d been working for the last 20 years. She started as a cleaner, then they needed a lunchtime assistant, then they needed a reading group supervisor, and on and on...she got her certification as a learning support assistant, so she got her…

That is a very kind and generous offer. But it also rubs me the wrong way, somehow- I think because it reminds me of live-in staff. It’s kind of weird to me that teachers are being relegated to the status of Victorian servants.

Yeah, I’ve been trying to do this. I gained a fair bit of weight over the last year, and while I’m hoping to lose it again, there was no way I could avoid buying new things because otherwise I’d have nothing to wear in the meantime. The only way to avoid a massive wardrobe crash was to really ferociously edit out…

I think this service would work very well for people who have to do a lot of work events and networking...I think of the pharmacy representatives who would come into my old work on a regular basis, they would probably LOVE something like this. But for me, if I’m spending $139 on clothing a month, I’d rather buy one…

Christina looks like all the cats. That’s what that is.

Also “There is something mysterious about her..” Jesus, Erica, it’s a cat. They all look like that because they are pretty and dumb as hell, I should know I have two. Of course, it’s not outside the realms of the possible that Erica’s cat is murdering people with…