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was tracing dead copper pairs in the basement of a 1970s clinic and found a handwritten maintenance log from 1989 that solved a local rumor

I work as a telecom field engineer and often do physical-layer line audits. So half of my week is spent in dull basements that haven’t seen daylight since the fall of the Berlin Wall. What to do there? I tone cables, sometimes trying to figure out which unlabelled jumper wire is keeping an oldass elevator intercom alive. Last Thursday had a task to survey a wing of a municipal clinic built in 1976. The building is scheduled for gut renovation next spring, but the admin block next door kept experiencing intermittent ground hum on their PBX trunk. Down behind the main 100-pair distribution frame in that narrow deadspace between the asbestos paneling and the galvanized cable riser, I felt something stiff. I pulled out a cloth-bound A4 ledger with marbled covers. The spine was held together with dried electrical friction tape. It was an unofficial station log kept between October 1987 and November 1991 by an on-duty technician named V. H. I know staff in this district had a half-joking le...
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a condom fell off me infront of my grandma

my girlfriend was over and we were doing some things that definitely shouldn’t involve grandma. suddenly, grandma calls down to us from upstairs saying that she has food. panicked, and without taking the condom off, i put on pants and run upstairs while my girlfriend gets her bearings. i meet my grandma at the top of the stairs and take the food and as im walking away she calls to me and tells me to come back after i put the food down. so i put the food down and come back only to be met with a condom laying on the top step. she asks me what it is and i play dumb saying something along the lines of “i must have tracked it in from outside” and my grandma then proceeds to tell me a story all the while a condom lays between the two of us. later, my girlfriend got into an argument with her parents and they went through her phone and found out that me and her were having sex. my girlfriend’s mom said she was going to talk to my grandma so i decided to talk to my grandma first. my girlfriend...

My husband was recently hired to renovate a dead mall. He’s missing now.

I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to figure out a good way to approach this, so I’ve decided that I should just start typing. Just get a bunch of words onto the page and maybe when I read them back, something will finally click and I’ll be able to begin making sense of things. Might be wishful thinking but it’s still worth trying. I’m not sure what else I can do. So my husband, Oliver, went missing last week. Of course, it’s been a really difficult thing to try and process. Especially given how bizarre the details are. Details that seem to get more bizarre the more I think about them. On some level, it doesn’t even feel real. Best way I can describe it is like I’ve become trapped inside some fucked up television show and I’m just desperately waiting for everybody around me to drop the act so that I can snap back to reality. Waiting for Oliver to appear at our front door again and tell me that he’s fine and that everything’s alright. That this had all just been some elaborate prank. But...

I’m a freelance animator. A client paid me $500 a day to never let my laptop screen go to sleep.

Everything started three weeks ago when I received an email from a man named Thomas. I had a portfolio website set up with my contact information, so getting cold emails was not entirely unusual. The subject line simply read "Private Animation Commission." I opened the email while I was drinking my morning coffee. Thomas wrote that he needed a very specific, photorealistic walking loop of a human character. He did not want a stylized cartoon, and clearly demanded absolute realism. He wanted the skin textures, the clothing folds, and the walking gait to look exactly like a real human being. The email stated that he would provide extensive reference photos. I replied and asked for his budget. My jaw dropped when his response came through a few minutes later. Thomas offered an upfront payment of five thousand dollars to build the character model and the animation rig. After the animation was completed, he offered to pay me a daily retainer of five hundred dollars. There was a v...

AITA / Should my husband step in and whoop my 18F sister’s 18M boyfriend’s ass?

My little sister (18F) is dating this 18M boy and they are toxic as hell together. They’re constantly fighting and arguing, and apparently they’ve both left bruises on each other. The boyfriend takes my sister’s phone from her all the time and refuses to give it back until she does whatever he wants. He’s also been told multiple times by both my mom and me to stop leaving hickeys on her and sucking/licking her neck in front of everyone. He doesn’t listen. Since they started dating about 6 months ago, I’ve probably hung out with my sister maybe 20 times because she’s constantly with him. My mom has repeatedly told him to go home and has told him he isn’t allowed to stay over, but he just ignores her and stays because my sister says it’s okay. Recently, they got into an argument and he tried taking a computer monitor away from her. She ended up calling my husband and asking him to make the boyfriend give it back. My husband went over there, told him to leave, and basically made it clear...

DAY HUNDRED AND SIX

A Village Sensation When your humble servant returned from Russia and arrived in the village by taxi, I was greeted by some extraordinary news. Our eighty-year-old neighbor, after being a widower for a year, had married a seventy-year-old woman. “Is that really a sensation?” You may criticize me. I will answer: “You are one hundred percent right. That is not a sensation.” But when a seventy-year-old woman becomes pregnant by an eighty-year-old man with a walking stick and false teeth—that is a sensation! Science tells us that most women give birth before the age of thirty. And here was a seventy-year-old woman who, against all expectations, was about to become a mother. Nobody could digest the news. The old man’s grown-up children thought that their father and his elderly wife would soon leave this world one after the other. But then something drove them crazy. A new heir had appeared on the horizon. The matter concerned a property consisting of sixteen sotkas of land, seven houses, t...

How I almost died from the polio vaccine.

How the polio vaccine almost killed me. So background is that I am in nurse practitioner school and about to start my clinicals, of note I work as an ER nurse in a relatively small town area. While uploading my vaccine record to the portal thing, I realized I can’t prove that I had the whole polio series as a kid, even though I probably did have them. And because I was waiting until the last minute the only option I had was to get the adult dose like that week. Important note for the story is while I was in nursing school I worked full time as an EMT on an ambulance in the same city. That’s a detail we will revisit later lol. So I made an appointment at the health department, took my dog to go get his vaccines at the vet, ran into the health department to get my vaccine real quick and I was going to be on my way. Get the dose, walk out, right past the sign (that I remember actually looking at) that says wait 15 minutes to make sure you don’t have a reaction. If that isn’t foreshado...