I’m not going to get too into the politics of the troubles, but I think it’s kind of worth remembering that this did happen in the context of an armed conflict, morality gets fuzzy.

Thinking about it in the context of modern conflicts, let’s say a Palestinian or Lebanese group assassinated an influential Israeli businessman who was vocally advocating for Israel continuing their operations, or perhaps a Ukrainian group assassinated a Russian oligarch.

Or hell, the guys who shot the United healthcare CEO or Charlie Kirk.

In some theoretical future where there’s some kind of peace treaty between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine/Lebanon, or the US has gone through some kind of civil war to overthrow MAGA types, would it seem so unreasonable to want those people to be freed as part of the negotiations?

Or looking further back, let’s say members of the French or Polish or whatever resistance in WWII had assassinated a German businessman who helped fund the Nazi war machine, wouldn’t we have expected them to be freed after the war?

And I think likely that’s a similar kind of light at that least some Irish people would view these guys in.

And of course, depending on what side of the conflict you were on, you may not see things that way. If you were a Nazi, or if you support Israel or Russia or Trump, you’d probably think of those assassins as nothing but criminals or terrorists, but as the saying goes, one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom-fighter

Honestly, your required specs are basically any monitor on the market at this point, you can rotate the display orientation of any monitor with settings baked into any OS you’re likely to be using

You probably won’t even need to spend $100 for a 60hz 1080p monitor

If you can’t find one with an adjustable stand that’s to your liking, just look for one that can use a VESA mount and get another stand for it, probably less than $50

You can probably get 3 monitors and stands for your budget and still have enough left over to grab lunch.

Unless you have some gaming, graphic design, etc. needs you haven’t disclosed, I don’t think it’s worth getting too hung up on this, even cheap monitors tend to last a pretty long time

Policies and what resources are available are going to vary a bit from one agency to another, but assuming it came in to us on a 911 line

From landlines, we get an address for the phone number. There’s a couple exceptions to that with certain kinds of business and VoIP lines where the address we get may not actually be the actual address where the person is, or there’s always the chance that the phone company has wrong info, but generally speaking if you call from a landline we know where you are.

From cell phones, things get a bit fuzzier. For the most part we’re relying on triangulation from cell towers to locate you (we call it “Phase II”) which means the quality of that location can vary from pretty good to basically useless based on how many towers your phone can reach, signal strength, geography, etc.

What that location looks like is we get a set of coordinates

An “uncertainty radius” or “confidence factor” which is a distance in meters from that point that the caller is probably within

A “confidence percentage” which is how confident the system is in that location (I’ve literally never seen this be anything other than 90%)

So what it ends up looking like is something like “90% confident that the caller is with 200m of 40.12345°N,-90.12345°W” (random-ish coordinates, not sure where that location actually is, but it’s definitely not where I work)

I’ve seen the confidence factor be in the single digits, and I’ve seen it in the thousands. Sometimes it takes a minute before we get a good fix, sometimes it comes in right away, sometimes we never get a good location from it.

My agency’s policy is that if we have a confidence factor of 300 or less, we can enter the call as normal with just that phase II if we’re unable to verify that location any further

And if they’re in somewhere like a wide open field or parking lot or something, 300m is pretty good, they’ll probably see you when they get out there. If you’re in a denser neighborhood with apartment complexes and a bunch of houses, wooded areas, etc. that’s really not much to go on. Usually we can get at least that 300m, but again not always.

That phase II location also takes a while to update, if we’re lucky we can only get an updated location every 20 seconds or so, so if, hypothetically, you’re in a car flying along the highway at 70mph, you could be about a half mile away from where you were by the time we got a new ping.

So we always try to verify the location, and we can’t, as my callers like to put it “just GPS your phone”

New technology is rolling out, we can sometimes get actual GPS locations from your phone which is usually more accurate and updates faster, but it depends on what settings you have enabled, what your carrier supports, etc. I think my center currently can only get it from iPhones. Same for your emergency information like contacts, medical info, etc if you’ve filled that out.

Once you hang up with us, that’s usually pretty much it, we’re not getting any further updates on your location even if we call you back and you answer.

We also don’t get any of that if you call on a 10-digit non-emergency line, usually we get your phone number and maybe a name on the caller ID, but depending on how the call got routed to us, like if you were forwarded from a station, we may not even get that much.

If we get a call with no other usable location info, if it came from a landline we can look up the phone number to get the address.

We can also look up the phone number to see if we had any prior calls from that number that we might be able to get an address from. We only store those records for about a year, sometimes our police departments have records that go further back they can look up, but we need something to go on to pass it along to the correct department that would have those records.

Pretty much anything beyond that is usually something that needs to be initiated from the police. There are only very narrow circumstances where we’re able to request for a phone company to try to ping your phone, and even if we can do it, the location may not be any better. They can also try to get subscriber info from the company to get your home address (although that’s not always super useful, people move and don’t update their address, are on someone else’s plan, etc) if they get a name and date of birth they can try to look up your info from your drivers license info (again assuming it’s up to date) property records, etc.

So if we get a call that’s just an open line with heavy breathing or something else suspicious, we’re using those tools to try to get someone out to at least the general area to try to locate the, and police are hopefully using whatever other resources they have on top of what we do to try to narrow it down if needed.

We’re probably going to enter it as a hang-up call or a suspicious activity which just gets a police response unless we heard something that makes us specifically think fire or EMS are needed.

If we heard yelling, gunshots, alarms going off, etc. then we might enter it as something else as appropriate to make sure we’re sending the right resources.

If they stop talking to us while we’re on the call, hopefully the first thing we got from them was a location, it’s the first thing we ask, otherwise all the same thing applies.

If it’s just an open line, we’ll stay on for about 30 seconds or so to see if we hear anything. If we don’t we enter it as a hang up, try to call it back, and if they don’t pick up we just kind of move on and it’s in the hands of the police to do something about it.

If I have to pick only one, I’m going to go with modern crumple zones

But man, I do wish we had some kind of magical smart metal that could be as rigid as an old car for low speed collisions, but still crumple for more serious impacts.

Because when you drive an old shitbox like I do, pretty much any damage is enough to total it, and having to get a new car really sucks when the accident was minor enough that no one was going to get hurt anyway.

It hasn’t become a pattern yet, at least not in my area, but I’m sure it’s not gonna be the last call I handle where bad AI info is gonna be a problem somehow

I did mention it to my supervisor, and did my best to politely and professionally chew the cop out for blindly trusting the AI search results.

We’ve already had plenty of experience sorting out issues where addresses and such that people got from Google maps or whatever don’t match up with reality, but we’re pretty good at catching that kind of stuff and figuring it out.

As far as getting calls passed along to us in weird ways, unfortunately I think the only solution for that is for people to just suck it up and call 911 on their own instead of calling their mom. With a few exceptions for VoIP phones and such, if you call 911, it’s going to your local dispatch center wherever you’re located, and we hopefully have some kind of approximate location for you. The amount of times I’ve had to play 20 questions with a 3rd party caller who has no clue about what’s going on for something I could have cleared up in about 30 seconds if someone had just called themselves is pretty insane.

And even if you do have to be that 3rd party making a call for someone somewhere else, calling 911 is probably going to be your fastest way to get there. It can be weirdly hard to find a good number for local police sometimes, but most 911 centers have access to some database or service to find the right contact info faster than you probably would googling it (I’ve gotten calls come into me for towns in other states or even other countries, because they had the same or similar names to ones in our area, and the caller didn’t double check that they were calling for the right Townsville)

Although, I will say, some 911 centers are pretty terrible. One that borders my county has a bad habit of transferring any calls for something that isn’t in their area to us, either because they didn’t bother to verify the location, or because they just can’t be bothered to look up the information themselves and they know we’ll do it for them. Occasionally they even transfer us calls that they should have kept themselves and I have to transfer a really frustrated caller back to them.

That’s another thing my higher-ups are aware of and working on.

Philly-area millennial.

Among friends and family around my age, I have probably around a dozen or so people or couples who own their homes, one of whom inherited it, and one who bought it from family for cheap

And many more than that who rent, live with their parents (who often but not always own their home) and a couple whose housing situations aren’t quite what you’d call secure but aren’t quite homeless either.

As for myself, I’m kind of caught in paperwork limbo living in a house that’s owned by my mother in law, that she’s agreed to sell to us and we’ve been given carte Blanche to do whatever we want with it, are responsible for repairs and maintenance, but actually getting shit together for a mortgage is being way more of a pain in the ass than it should for reasons I don’t really want to go into.

In my parent’s social circles, the vast majority own homes or have in some way secured some kind of long-term housing for themselves, like one who basically gets their apartment rent free by being some kind of property manager.

The pain really isn’t that bad

And at least for me, the worst parts of it are more on my sort of FUPA area, not so much on my dick and balls themselves, so for the service I get, it’s only like 3 patches around the edges that actually hurt. Might suck more if you’re planning to get more than that done, but I can’t really comment on that myself.

And again. It’s only for an instant with each rip and then it’s over, by the time you’ve flinched it’s already stopped hurting.

Get waxed, I’ve been doing it for a couple years now, worth it.

Hurts a bit when they pull it off, but not nearly as bad as you imagine, and it only hurts for an instant, not like it’s a pain that’s gonna linger around with you.

Smoother and longer-lasting than you could ever hope to manage with a razor, and no risk of cutting yourself

Depending on your skin, maybe you could have some issues with ingrown hairs, but I’m pretty sure if you’re prone to that you’re probably gonna have those issues shaving too.

My only complaint is the price, the place I’ve been going charges about $75 (+tip) for their “basic” service, which is just shaft and sack. I’m personally a really hairy dude and I feel like it would look weird for me to go beyond that and have bald patches on my crotch and ass crack, and I’m certainly not gonna spend the time and money for a full body waxing.

The full, most premium package to get all of you junk and butt waxed with all the extra goes up to something like $150 (+tip), and there’s a few options in-between so that you have a sense of the price range.

Which I do think is a pretty fair price for the service, but it’s also certainly not cheap. Personally I kind of justify it because I’ve known people who spend that much or more or haircuts about as often as I get it done, and i shave my head myself with a safety razor, so my haircut expenses are basically 0, so just kind of trading one grooming expense for another.

I usually go about a month and a half between waxings, first week or two there’s no noticeable hair regrowth, and by the 6th week I usually have about the required ¼ inch or so for waxing. Takes about a half hour for what I get done.

In some places it can be hard to find places that do it for dudes, and not all employees are trained or willing to do male waxing, so don’t ruin it for the rest of us, wash your ass and junk and don’t be a creep.

I work in a 911 dispatch center, one time I had someone from the police in one town, let’s call it Townsville, trying to get ahold of an officer from another town in our county, Citysburg.

I go to put a phone call request in for them, and ask what it’s regarding, and they say it’s about an incident that happened at the Mega Lo Mart in Citysburg.

There is no Mega Lo Mart in Citysburg, but there are a couple in nearby towns, some of them have Citysburg mailing addresses, or people might casually say that they’re in Citysburg because they don’t really know where the borders are, this is pretty common and we deal with it a lot, so I ask if they have the address to make sure that I’m getting them in contact with the police department that actually covers that store.

They spit out an address like 123 Main St in East Jabip

East Jabip isn’t in our county, I’d never even heard of that town before. I punch it into Google maps, it’s like 2 or 3 hours away from us and sure enough there is a Walmart at that address there.

So to make sure I wasn’t missing something, I asked why they wanted to speak with Citysburg police if the incident happened in East Jabip.

And they reply “yeah, I’d never heard of east Jabip either, so I punched the address into Google and the AI told me that it was in Citysburg”

Just blatantly false, AI-hallucinated bullshit.

And our cops (or their office staff, can’t remember who exactly it came from) just blindly believed it and didn’t bother to verify it at all.

And Citysburg isn’t some nowhere town, we’re a fairly dense suburban county, these two towns are maybe about a 20 minute drive from each other if traffic cooperates, and Citysburg is our county seat, cops from all over the county are there all the time for court and such and the surrounding areas, they should know that area at least well enough to know that East Jabip isn’t there

And they even admitted that it didn’t sound right to them, but they still went ahead with it and didn’t question the AI.

And luckily this wasn’t for anything too urgent, it was for credit card fraud or something along those lines. But actual emergencies get called into us all kinds of bass-ackwards ways like someone in another state calls their mom who lives here who calls her local police who transfer her to us so that we can transfer her to the police where the person who’s actually having an emergency is.

That kind of stuff happens pretty frequently by the way, that’s not some bullshit scenario I’m making up, I get that probably on a weekly basis.

And so it burns me up thinking that if there had been an actual emergency, having to sort out this bullshit could have caused delays in getting help to someone who needed it because someone outsourced their thinking to a shitty AI

Normally 5-7 between my shirt and pants.

2 front and back pockets on my pants

The little watch pocket on jeans and such

One or two shirt pockets

Occasionally I wear cargo pants or shorts which adds 2+ more pockets

And if I’m wearing a jacket, that adds a few more. My most commonly worn jacket has 2 hip, 2 chest, and 2 inside pockets

And if I’m fishing, even I don’t know how many pockets are on my vest, pretty sure that adds a dozen or so

Wallet goes in my back left. Used to be my right but the way I sit that started to give me some sciatica issues no problem since I switched pockets. I also switched to a thinner wallet which probably helps as well but that came well after switching sides

Back right usually gets a bandana

Things move around between my front pockets a bit.

I usually carry a pocket knife and if it has a clip that gets clipped to the front right, no exceptions. If it doesn’t have a clip it could be in either front pocket, or possibly a belt pouch.

I usually have a pen on me and if my shirt doesn’t have a pocket that goes there as well.

I’ve been sporting a curly handlebar moustache for probably 15 years now, and if I’m wearing jeans or something else with a similar little watch/coin pocket, my tin of moustache wax goes there. Otherwise that tin goes into whichever pocket I find it’s rattling the least against whatever else is in that pocket.

Phone switches back and forth between my left and right front pocket, based mostly on which hand I was last using it with. If I was just aimlessly scrolling on my phone or texting someone I probably had it in my right hand so it goes in the front right. It occasionally also ends up in a jacket or shirt pocket.

If I was using it while I was doing something else, like maybe looking at a recipe while I was cooking it was probably in my left hand so it goes in that pocket.

If I have cargo pockets it sometimes ends up in one of those. One of my pairs of hiking pants has a pocket that fits it really nicely.

Keys generally get clipped to a belt loop on my right side, the case for my earbuds gets clipped on my left. Other times they end up in a jacket pocket or usually my front right pocket.

I usually carry a small notepad with me, like with the pen it preferably goes in a shirt pocket, otherwise it usually ends up in my right front, or if I have cargo pockets one of those.

If you’re talking about apprenticeship, it’s still very much a thing in the trades. I don’t work in the trades, so I don’t really know what the process is like these days, and it likely varies a lot place-to-place, but if you’re thinking it works by just finding an electrician and saying “hey, can teach me to do stuff with wires?” Then following them around learning and doing grunt-work for them for a while, I’m pretty sure that’s just not how it works and there’s going to be at least some classroom training involved these days.

In theory, internships are supposed to fill a similar role, though of course a whole lot of internships are kind of bullshit.

To me, a “job-shadow” is just kind of a “come in and watch for maybe a day or two to see what the job is like” kind of situation, not really a way to actually teach you to do the job.

That’s something that actually happens a lot in my job (911 dispatch) at least at the agency I work for.

Part of the hiring process is for potential new hires to come in to sit with us for a couple hours, listen to us answering and dispatching calls, ask us some questions, and just kind of get a feel for what the job is like. For us this happens after an initial interview and aptitude test, and potentially before a second round of interviews depending on how many applicants we get.

We also get some other people coming in to sit with us from other public safety type jobs so that they can see how things work on our end. EMT students, firefighters, police academy students, I had someone from I think our Department of Health & Human Services sit with me one time, etc.

And trainees from our current class sometimes sit with us to see how what they’re learning in the classroom applies to actually doing the job.

And then once they’re out of the classroom, for a while they’re out on the floor doing the job with a trainer sitting with them, listening to them handling calls and helping them as needed.

And a lot of jobs have something kind of similar to that last part where with varying degrees of formality, where you have someone assigned to train you and get you up to speed. I used to work in a warehouse, and for the first few weeks I was basically following around another warehouse employee as he taught me how to do everything.

This Is Just To Say
By William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Besides that, I have a book of poetry that I’m not going to share, but I will share the story of why I own it.

I work in 911 dispatch. We have a frequent caller, she actually doesn’t live in our area, but her mother and father do. This is what I’ve pieced together about them.

Her father is in a nursing home. She calls frequently for police or EMS to go out for him alleging all kinds of abuse and mistreatment. This isn’t a particularly nice nursing home, but cops have been there multiple times and haven’t found any issues with her father.

She’s very uncooperative with us when she calls, refuses to answer basically any questions, and when we or the police try to call her back to tell her the outcome or to get more information she basically never answers the phone.

A few times she has actually shown up at the nursing home, caused a scene, and had to be escorted off the premises. One time her father was hospitalized for something (not sure what, but I didn’t see any calls for us that would have matched up with him, so it probably wasn’t something too serious if they took the time to arrange non emergency transport) and she showed up at the hospital, was escorted out, and spent the next day or two pretty much camped out at some nearby fast food places)

Her mother has dementia, and is a frequent caller herself, she calls to complain about her caretakers and sometimes even gets into fights with them.

I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn that the father checked himself into the nursing home to get away from his wife and daughter.

They both occasionally call for well-being checks on each other. The daughter usually because she took her mother’s insane ramblings at face value, and the mother usually because she hasn’t heard from the daughter in a while (or at least doesn’t remember hearing from her) and because of some vague concerns that she can never really explain, things like “I’m worried because of everything happening in [city where daughter lives]” but she can’t tell me what’s supposedly happening there and when I looked up the local news there I couldn’t find anything particularly noteworthy.

I’ve given the mother the direct phone number to the dispatch center that covers her daughter’s home multiple times (sometimes multiple times in the same night) so she can reach them directly, but she always calls 911 instead so I have to transfer her every time.

During one such transfer, she was rambling about her daughter, and she mentions that her daughter is a writer.

I of course had to search out what she had written.

At first, all I could find was some mentions of her contributing to some magazines and such, but couldn’t actually find any of her actual writing, but digging a little deeper I was able to find some stuff she did in college. A bunch of poetry, and it was all terrible and weird. I’d pull it up to share with my coworkers occasionally when she was blowing up our phones.

Then one day I went to do that and saw that she had written a book. I got a copy for myself and as Christmas presents for a couple of my favorite coworkers. It’s more of the same insane, rambling, nonsensical poetry.

For the record, I don’t think the government is in contact or aware of alien life, at least not any technologically advanced civilization (I’m open to the possibility of maybe them being aware of microbial life on Mars or Europa or something and keeping it under wraps)

But, if they were, and assuming we’re talking about a civilization based in another star system (as opposed to somewhere in our solar system or maybe in interstellar space somewhere) I think it’s a pretty safe bet that that’s being handled by people in the military and the president, etc. are all kept out of the loop.

Because it would take too damn long to get a message back and forth to them assuming they don’t immediately give us the key to FTL travel or communications.

Let’s assume that first contact was made in January 1993, and one of Clinton’s first acts as president is to acknowledge that we received their message, introduce himself, and signals that he’s willing to open a dialogue with them.

He fires off that message, let’s say it’s to proxima Centauri, the closest star to us, it takes a little over 4 years to get there, arriving around early to mid 1997.

They reply and we get their next message probably mid to late 2001 (I really don’t feel like crunching the exact numbers of how long these messages are taking to travel or speculating how long it’s taking to draft our messages.)

Bubba is out of office, and Dubya needs to be brought up to speed on the alien situation right around the same time 9/11 is going down. He fires off a reply, and gets back to starting a war in the middle east.

Aliens get that reply around late 2005, and send another reply. We get that around early 2010. Obama’s been in office for about a year, things have kind of settled down a bit. He fires on another reply, it arrives around 2014, aliens are starting to get the picture that they’re probably not going to have a real back and forth conversation with the same president. They send a reply.

Their reply reaches Trump in 2018 sometime. He rambles at them a bit, they get it in about 2022, the aliens aren’t at all sure what to make of that, they think maybe the transmission got corrupted somehow. What they do make out sounds like insane raving bullshit, but at least this guy will be gone soon and they can get back to talking to a real grown up with the next message.

They don’t learn about COVID, or Jan 6, or any of the other stuff going on. Biden get skipped over, Donny is about to receive that reply in a few months, he’s gonna be the first president to have an actual back and forth with the aliens, and he’s probably gonna be pissed that they’re asking if we can put Obama back on the phone.

So yeah, not a great way to be having a conversation. It probably makes a lot more sense to give that responsibility to maybe some career military types, or maybe some unelected pencil-pushers whose government careers can last decades and have more of an opportunity to select and train their successors to ensure smoother communications, and to keep the president and politicians as far out of the loop as possible, because there’s a good chance they could be out of office before they can actually get anything done.

The dynamic changes a bit if we’re talking to someone closer, if maybe we’re dealing with a fleet that’s parked somewhere in or near our solar system that’s authorized to act autonomously from their home planet. Maybe then we could loop the president in a little more, but if they do ever need to phone home for something we’d still have the same problem.

Or if they’re further away than the closest star to us, the problem gets even worse. Let’s say instead of proxima Centauri at about 4¼ light-years away, they’re instead based around Altair at about 16.7 light-years away. They would have gotten Clinton’s message in around late 2009 or 2010, and we’re probably just about due to finally hear back from them in the next couple of months.

True, but fathers have been threatening their daughters’ suitors since time immemorial.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that it’s been used in a similar way for nearly as long as we’ve been using “the birds and the bees” as a euphemism.

It’s probably not the origin of the phrase, but I remember seeing some sitcom where a father sat his daughter’s boyfriend down to give him the “the birds and the bees” talk

The boyfriend said something like “no thanks, I already heard it from my parents”

And the father replied along the lines of “not my version you haven’t, you see, when the bee stings the bird, the bee dies”

Not-so-subtly threatening the boyfriend.

In my head it’s Red Foreman giving that talk, but I’m not 100% on that.

I’ve encountered what I think of as the Gen z stare once or twice.

It skews more towards the younger end of Gen z, and honestly might even be more of an older gen alpha thing.

What I’m talking about isn’t the blank look given after being asked a stupid question, although they are absolutely masters of that as well (and I love that look and use it as myself)

It feels like more of a lack of understanding that someone is asking you a question and expecting an answer, or perhaps an inability to process that question and come up with an appropriate answer.

My friend who works at a bank has what I think is kind of the quintessential story that shows this version of the stare looks like, a younger person walked up to the counter, he asked some variation of “How can help you today?” And just got a stare back, like it never crossed their mind that they’d have to answer a question and say “I need to make a deposit/withdrawal,/etc.”

And I don’t think it’s necessarily a feature of the generation as a whole, not that gens z and alpha don’t have their quirks, but I have plenty of Gen z friends and coworkers and I don’t think they’re much worse off in any particular way than my fellow millennials. I have somewhat less exposure to gez alpha, but overall my opinion of them is largely the same so far.

I think it’s a very specific subset of the generation with a perfect storm of social isolation/anxiety issues, maybe some neurodivergence, probably some overbearing helicopter parents, and COVID kind of hitting at exactly the wrong point in their lives so that they missed out on some kind of social development milestones.

Like others have said, the degree of technology permitted and a lot of other things vary a lot from one amish community to another.

But in general, most Amish aren’t going to school beyond about 8th grade. Some of them might be getting some sort of vocational training in addition to that but you’re probably going to have a hard time finding any kind of opportunities for Amish higher education.

In general, they tend to get more leeway for using technology as part of their business than for personal use, they might have a computer to help track business expenses, maybe even a business email or have a website for selling their goods online. It’s possible they might even be allowed to have a car or use a tractor for certain purposes.

But as far as just pursuing a math education, that’s probably gonna be a no-go. And if they somehow do permit it, you’re probably gonna need to get by with a pencil, paper, slide rules, etc.

I work in 911 dispatch, and we have some really rich towns in the county I work for

And I have one story that makes me think it’s at least something that’s on their minds

I got a call from one of those neighborhoods for a breaking and entering. The caller had been out of the house and came home to find that someone had broken in while they were gone.

I’m gathering all of the information, and without me prompting he starts giving me his description - 6ft-whatever black man, wearing blah blah blah, and that he’ll be waiting by the front door etc.

And it just felt very clear to me that he knows unless he is very upfront about that, that when the cops get there, there’s a really damn good chance that they’re immediately going to assume he’s a suspect and not the homeowner.

Googled him later, former NBA player, I don’t follow sports but apparently he was kind of a big deal when he was playing. Not sure what his net worth is, but houses in that neighborhood tend to sell for several million.

Probably the nicest caller I’ve ever gotten from that neighborhood, and with the best reason to call. Another guy nearby once got into a fight with an Amazon driver because he had the audacity to pull into his driveway.

As an aside, that is how B&Es happen. Unless it’s your crazy ex or something looking to start shit with you, they’re not breaking into your home while you’re home, they want to take your shit and get the fuck out they don’t want a confrontation with you. I admittedly work in an overall pretty safe area, but we do have some pretty shitty towns as well as the mega rich, but after 7 years on the job I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a call for an in-progress B&E while someone was home where they didn’t know the person trying to break in (and usually there was a very specific, though usually not particularly good, reason they were trying to break in- they wanted to take back something they gave the person, were trying to retrieve their own belongings, they just wanted to fight or trash the place because they were mad at them, etc.)

And it’s almost always in the super rich neighborhoods where houses are spaced far apart, the residents can afford to take long vacations far from home, and there’s lots of valuable stuff to steal left unattended while they’re gone. To a lesser extent it happens in the really shitty neighborhoods. It’s almost unheard of in the rest of suburbia.