billdotd retweeted
Sorry, but I need to vent!!!!
I experienced the WORST customer service today at a local store. I don't want to mention the name of the store because I'm not sure how I'm going to proceed. Yesterday I bought something from this store. I paid cash for it. I took it home and found out it didn't work. So today, less than 24 hours later I took it back to the store and asked if I could get a refund. The girl working at the store told me “NO” even though I still had the receipt. I asked if I could get a replacement instead then. Again this person told me "NO." I asked to talk to a manager now as I'm really not happy and I explained that I had just bought the item, had got it home and it didn't work. The manager just smiled and told me to my face that I was "OUT OF LUCK."No refund. No FREE replacement.
I'll tell you what...I am NEVER buying another Lottery Ticket from there again.
billdotd retweeted
I think it's very important to realize that there is a small but quickly growing faction of the political spectrum that will cheer when
-- your family Tesla gets firebombed
-- a CEO gets executed in the street
-- a podcaster is murdered at a college debate event
-- a candidate for POTUS is shot in the head
-- the world's greatest entrepreneur is publicly threatened with execution at a fairly mainstream event
billdotd retweeted
My wife has taught high school in Tokyo for twenty years.
Every year, a few of her students spend a year living with a family in America. When they come home, she asks each of them one question.
"What do you miss?"
She expects hamburgers.
She almost never gets hamburgers.
And these aren't old stories. Most of these kids came home in the last two years.
"Every time I left the house, my host mom said, 'Text me when you get there.' In Japan, nobody needs to know where I am. In Ohio, somebody always did." (Mina, 17, Ohio)
"If you walk toward a door, an American will hold it open. Even if you are very far away. So you have to run. I ran to so many doors." (Itsuki, 16, Georgia)
"My host brother screamed on the floor of a grocery store. A stranger walked by and said to my host mom, 'You're doing great, Mama.' She almost cried. I didn't know strangers were allowed to say that." (Aoi, 17, Texas)
"We went away for the weekend and left our trash can at the curb. When we got back, it was by the garage. Nobody said who. My host dad said if it had been there one more day, the neighbor would have knocked." (Haruto, 16, Minnesota)
"A car got stuck in the snow in front of our house. Four men came out of four houses. Nobody called them. They pushed, the car drove away, and they went back inside without saying their names." (Ren, 17, Michigan)
"Every American has jumper cables. Maybe half of them know which clip goes where. The other half help anyway." (Shin, 16, Montana)
"In July, my host family put a cooler on the porch. Cold water, snacks, and a sign: 'For our delivery drivers. Thank you!' I asked if they knew the drivers. They said no." (Nanami, 16, Arizona)
"Downtown, there are banners on the lampposts. Photos of soldiers from the town. Some old, some very young. My host grandpa walked me down the street and told me every name." (Yuna, 16, Iowa)
"I got a C-plus on my first test. My host dad said, 'I'm proud of you,' and put it on the fridge. In Japan, nobody is proud of a C-plus." (Takeru, 17, Pennsylvania)
Then the quietest girl in the class raised her hand.
Sora. Seventeen. Missouri.
"Nobody asks me 'home safe?' anymore," she said.
She was wrong.
In September, there was a typhoon warning for Tokyo. At 2 a.m., Sora's phone lit up.
It was her host mom. In Missouri. Watching the weather in a country she had never been to.
"Saw the storm. You home safe?"
Sora told my wife she cried for a long time. Then she typed the answer she had typed a hundred times, from football games and friends' driveways.
"Home safe."
Her host mom wrote back one line.
"Good. That's all I needed."
My wife has asked that question for twenty years. Not one kid has ever said they missed how big America is.
They miss how America says goodbye. And how it checks that you got home.
So, America. You think you've lost something.
You haven't. It's on a porch in Arizona. It's pushing a car in Michigan. It's awake at 2 a.m. in Missouri, watching our weather.
You don't remember doing any of it.
A kid in Tokyo will never forget.
billdotd retweeted
5 things you must never stare at for too long:
1. Someone else's happiness.
2. Your past failures.
3. A bond that has already ended.
4. The memory of being disliked.
5. Worries that have not arrived yet.
Look away, and protect your peace.
billdotd retweeted
I failed 21 SAS selection.
One hundred and twenty men started. Four finished. I was not one of them.
I do not tell that story to be humble. I tell it because of what happened next, which nobody ever asks about.
I went home. I was 19 years old and I had failed at the one thing I had told everyone I was going to do. There is a particular silence that follows that. Friends are kind. Family are careful. And you sit in your childhood bedroom and understand that the failure is now a fact about you.
Six months later I went back and did the whole thing again.
Passed the second time.
Here is what I actually learned, and it is not what people expect. It was not about grit. It was not about wanting it more. It was that the first attempt was not wasted, it was the reconnaissance. I knew where the ground broke you. I knew what the third day felt like. I was not braver the second time, I was better informed.
Most people treat a failure as a verdict.
It is data.
The only real failure is the one you refuse to go back and look at.
billdotd retweeted
If you are ever feeling overwhelmed, go on a prayer walk.
Step outside, walk, and listen.
The person talking on her phone about marital problems? Pray. The elderly person with a walker. Pray. The angry man in a hurry? Pray.
If you pass a house, pray for the family. A church? Pray for its congregation. Business? Pray for the workers.
You may be the only person who cared enough to lift up a stranger’s concerns. And when you do, your own seem smaller in hindsight.
billdotd retweeted
So, basically, 500 million Europeans expect 300 million Americans to protect them from 120 million Russians who can’t even defeat 40 million Ukrainians while those 500 million Europeans don’t even realize they are being conquered by 2 billion Muslims who claim they are being persecuted by 8 million Israelis. Is that about right?
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billdotd retweeted
Costume Party
Host: What are you?
Me: A harp.
Host: Your costume's too small to be a harp.
Me: Are you calling me a lyre?
billdotd retweeted
Experts say you should wait 60-90 minutes after waking up before drinking coffee.
But here’s the thing.
No.
Love this
Driving home from Nashville a few days ago, the wife wanted to stop in Franklin to do a bit of Christmas shopping. Obedient to her wishes as I am, I make the detour and park. As we strolled along the square, I see an older man sitting alone on a bench. Being the sort who initiates conversation with strangers, I say jokingly:
“You look like a man who is waiting for his wife while she spends his money.”
He gives me a wan smile and replies: “I wish I was.” His voice cracks. “She passed away last November.”
We stop. I extend a sympathetic hand. He shakes it and rises to greet us. Lauri asks him about his wife, and he tells us what a wonderful woman she was and of their 50 years of marriage. His eyes welling with tears, he says he comes to the square and sits on that bench daily to reminisce about her because it was their spot for decades. He seems glad to have someone, even strangers, with whom he can talk.
We chat a bit longer, exchange numbers, and I ask him if we can pray for him. A believer, he readily accepts the offer. So, right there on the square in Franklin we pray for the Lord’s comforting presence and peace in his loss. We open our eyes and, at that very moment, a woman walks by hurriedly and reaches for the bench behind this fellow. Only I see it, and I think she might be stealing his phone which he had left on the bench when he rose to speak with us.
I walk to the bench to investigate and see that she’s left a card, a little plastic dove glued on it, proclaiming the hope of John 3:16. I look up to see her far down the sidewalk, her brisk pace undiminished, placing them everywhere in her own evangelistic endeavor. God bless her for it.
Lauri and I wished our new friend well and proceeded to shop. I bought a new vest at her encouragement — “It looks good on you” — and she bought some aromatic candles — “cinnamon vanilla.” But all the while we were thinking of this man and the seemingly coincidental nature of our meeting. The Lord had used us to visibly encourage him.
I cannot tell you the number of times I have had such encounters simply because I spoke to a stranger: a taxi driver who told me someone had murdered his daughter; a waitress who cried when I told her she was doing a good job; a contractor who, just last week, revealed to me how the Lord had delivered him from meth addiction when I was sharing the Gospel with him; and a young woman who looked unsettled and I simply asked her what troubled her so.
There are people all around you who carry secret burdens, and the Lord puts you in their path for a reason. Do you notice them? Or do you press on to “more important” things? Pray that the Lord gives you eyes to see them and the heart to minister to them. It will do you as much good as you do them.
billdotd retweeted
We acknowledge that no one has the bandwidth for this, but if it helps:
-It’s ‘sleight of hand’
-It’s ‘bated breath’
-It’s ‘lo and behold’
-It's 'buck naked'
-It’s ‘brass tacks’
-It’s ‘free rein’
-It’s ‘toe the line'
billdotd retweeted
They still don't understand Gen X in the workplace.
We don't want free pizza parties.
We don't want mandatory team-building retreats.
We don't want motivational speeches about being a family.
And we definitely don't want another company-branded coffee mug.
You know what we want?
💰 Pay us what we're worth.
🏖️ Let us take our vacation days without guilt.
🏡 Respect our time outside of work.
🤝 Trust us to do the job we were hired to do.
📵 Stop expecting us to be available 24/7.
We're not looking for an office to become our second home. We have lives, families, responsibilities, and better things to do than pretend a pizza party makes up for being underpaid and overworked.
Pay us fairly, respect our boundaries, and let us get on with our lives.
That's the perk. That's the culture. That's it. 😂
billdotd retweeted
A man was running behind a bicycle in an empty parking lot, bent over, one hand on the seat.
The boy on the bicycle was crying and saying he could not do it.
I timed this, because I could not look away. Forty minutes. The man ran for forty minutes.
Between attempts he did not say "you're fine" and he did not say "it's easy." He said, "That was better than the last one." Every single time. Even the times it was not better.
I offered my assistance. I proposed that I hold the rear of the bicycle so that he could rest, and I explained, at some length, that in my tradition the instruction of the young is a duty that outranks the instruction of the self.
He said, "Sure, man, thanks," and handed me a bicycle seat and sat down on the curb and put his head between his knees, because he was fifty years old and he had been running for forty minutes.
I ran with the boy. Twice. It is harder than it appears and I would like that noted.
On the third attempt the man stood up and said, "Let him go."
I did not want to let him go.
He said it again, quietly. "Let him go."
I let him go.
The boy rode forty feet, alone, wobbling, screaming, and did not fall.
The man did not cheer. He put both hands on top of his head and turned in a full circle, the way men do when a thing is too large to hold still for.
The boy is not his son.
The boy lives two doors down and his father works nights.
billdotd retweeted
Eighty-one years ago today, Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb.
The bomb, dropped by the United States, devastated the city and took countless lives.
And yet, Japan rose from the ashes.
The United States and Japan, once enemies at war, are now close allies.
We can never forget what happened.
But we do not hate the Americans living today.
We remember history.
But we do not inherit its hatred.
That is how I feel.
billdotd retweeted
I was added to a group chat.
Nobody asked. My phone made a sound and I was in a room with nine Americans and a name at the top that said "THE BOYS 🏈🔥."
I did not know four of them.
Inside I said: I HAVE BEEN CONSCRIPTED INTO A COUNCIL WHOSE PURPOSE AND MEMBERSHIP HAVE NOT BEEN DISCLOSED TO ME.
The first message I received was a photograph of a lawnmower with no caption.
Eleven replies. Nobody asked what the lawnmower was. Everyone understood immediately. One man replied "LMAOOO" with four O's, and another replied "no way he did it again."
He did it again. Somebody had done something again. With a lawnmower. Previously.
I have never learned what happened. There is no way to ask. To ask would reveal that I am new, and I have been in this chat for fourteen months.
Then I learned the rules.
You do not say hello. There is no greeting. You simply begin, mid-thought, as though continuing a conversation that has been running since 2019, because it has.
You do not answer questions directed at the group. Someone else will. If nobody does, the question dies, and nobody mourns it, and the man who asked it will bring it up again in six weeks with no reference to the first attempt.
You do not leave. Leaving generates a system message. The system message is visible to all. There is no discreet exit. The only way out is death, and even then someone will post in it.
Inside I said: THERE IS NO GATE OUT. THE WALLS FACE INWARD.
I said nothing for four months.
Then one night at 11 PM, a man posted "anybody up."
Two words. No question mark.
Three people replied within a minute. Then a fourth. Then they talked for two hours about nothing.
I understood then what the chat is for.
It is not for information. It has never carried information. It is a light left on in a window so that a man who cannot sleep can see that the house is still there.
Last month my father was ill.
I did not say so. I would not say so.
At 1 AM I typed "anybody up."
Four replies in ninety seconds. Nobody asked why. Nobody asked if I was alright. They simply began talking about a football game from 2011 and an argument they have been having about it for a decade.
They talked until 3 AM.
Then one of them wrote, "night, brother."
Just that. To me. Singular.
He knew.
They all knew.
Nobody said a word about it and nobody ever will and I have never in my life been held so carefully by people who refused to admit they were doing it.
This is how my entire business is run 😂
I mentioned that my garage door was making a sound.
An American immediately said, "I got a guy."
He did not ask what the sound was. He did not ask what kind of door. He produced a guy on the basis of the word garage.
I asked who the guy was.
He said, "Just a guy."
He did not have a company name. He had a first name and a phone number in his phone saved as "Mike Garage."
That is the contact name. Mike Garage. As though Garage is his surname. As though there is a family.
I asked how he found this guy.
"My brother-in-law used him."
I asked if the brother-in-law was satisfied.
He thought about it. Then he said, "He's still standing."
The house is still standing. That is the entire review.
Inside I said: THEY DO NOT KEEP RECORDS. THEY KEEP LOYALTIES.
I called Mike Garage. He answered from inside a vehicle. There was wind. He said he could come Tuesday between eleven and four.
Between eleven and four. A window of five hours. In my country this would be a scandal. Here it is generous. He gave me a window at all. Some guys do not give you a window. Some guys say "Tuesday" and that is the whole appointment.
He came at 1:40.
He fixed it in twenty minutes. He charged me less than I expected and he did not take a card, only cash or an app I had never heard of.
Before leaving he looked at my water heater, which I had not mentioned, and said, "That's gonna go."
I asked when.
"Couple years."
I asked what I should do.
He said, "I'll give you a guy."
He gave me a guy. Mike Garage has a guy. The guy has a guy. There is a network beneath this country made entirely of men named after their function, and none of them advertise, and all of them are busy.
Inside I said: THERE IS A SECOND NATION HERE. IT HAS NO SIGNS. IT IS ENTERED ONLY BY INTRODUCTION.
I have been given four guys since.
I have a guy for trees.
I did not know I needed a guy for trees.
I have trees now, apparently. They are my responsibility. A man named Rick told me so and then left.