things you once thought socially acceptable which now horrify you to remember

(Bull was French-owned)

I think a large chunk of the work to get chip-and-pin rolled out in Ireland was managed by an ex-ILXor!

^^ Things you were shockingly old when you learned o_O

Card declined you poxy fule

definitely had some financial mishap in american bars by giving my credit card, and starting a tab, drinking till steaming as fuck, signing the bastarding receipt with a 20% gratuity, waking up the next day unsure of just how much i spent

can happen with any form of payment

shur manys the day after a mart day id to send in another fifth of a pig back into town to cover the tip

tell a yank that nowadays and theyd tell ya shouldve been a quarter pig ffs

Going back to the "following guest" weirdness, in Aus Ive noticed a lot of places they now bleat "next waiting!" which also makes not a lot of sense.

xp they’re lucky you sent more than the squeal

Brought up the “following guest” thing with somebody today and he told me that at DSW the cashiers are required to say “ next shoelover!”

VULTURE: Was it hard to adjust to civilian life?

LETTERMAN: It’s still hard. I have trouble operating the phone. That’s the God’s truth. I needed a pair of shoelaces. And I thought, Hell, where do you get shoelaces? And my friend said, there’s a place over off I-84, it’s the Designer Shoe Warehouse. So I go over there, and it’s a building the size of the Pentagon. It’s enormous. If you took somebody from — I don’t know, pick a country where they don’t have Designer Shoe Warehouses — blindfolded them and turned them loose in this place, they would just think, You people are insane. Who needs this many shoes? It’s sinful. It’s one of these places where there’s no employees and every now and then there’s just a scrum of shoe boxes. I’m not finding the damn shoelaces, and finally I think, Maybe it’s one of those items they’ve got at the counter. I go up there and I’m nosing around the counter and, by God, there’s shoelaces. This is after about an hour. So now I’m waiting in line and the woman checking people out says in a big loud voice, “May I help our next shoe lover, please?” I just started to tremble. Nobody else seems to have a problem with going to a store! You don’t want to have painted yourself into some elite position where it’s “Bob, go out and get me some shoelaces.” It makes you feel stupid. Here’s where I’m comfortable: There’s a bait-and-tackle store near my house. They’ve got guys in there, and you can buy live bait, you can buy artificial bait, they’ll put new line on your reel. You can talk to them about rods. They’ll tell you where to go for a largemouth bass. That’s exactly where I want to be.

https://www.vulture.com/2017/03/david-letterman-in-conversation.html

ronswanson.jpg

Paying a guy to paddle my canoe. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.

david otm

I stop in DSW pretty regularly. It's definitely insane. But I've never had anyone call me a "shoe lover".

thought we were beyond that as a society

Don't kinkshame

We were in the Whole Foods off Columbus Circle yesterday and I was listening out for "Following Guest" but didn't hear it - but I also didn't understand a single thing about what the queuing system was, there seemed to be three lanes feeding into the same set of checkout machines, and when we haltingly took one we overheard something that we're paranoid was people complaining about us skipping the line in some way.

(Things you fear are socially acceptable but still horrify you)

Nothing about waiting in line at WF is socially acceptable, everyone is horrified

xp do they have self-checkouts or were they regular staffed ones? this sounds odd and like I might screw it up. normal in my area is each staffed checkout has a line, self checkouts are relatively new but typically have one line for the whole area and first in line takes whichever frees up next

I’ve never heard anyone call for a customer at a grocery checkout unless it’s a register that just opened and no one’s noticed

These are staffed express checkouts, multiple lines, with screens telling each group which checkout stall to go to. They just got them here too.

well, that’s new

Sounds like the DMV, except the express part

omg lol yes now that WF has been bought by Amazon they can adopt disruptive innovations from the DMV and the passport office

willing to bet "twitter" is gonna be all over this list in ten years or less

"Twitter"?

I have anxiety about the WF line too. All the ny stores are set up crazy. I hate going there.

I look forward to more of this "following guest" reconnaissance.

My wife has pointed out that she got Following Guested at a Duane Reade before that - we are in Boston now and going to another DR - will report back about whether this infection has been retained.

excellent reportage

We went to CVS instead and it was 11.00 on a Tuesday so it was just us and some ghosts, reportage ends.

there’s a duane reade in boston?????

t/s: following guest vs following ghost

following Geist

https://i.imgur.com/4mQqZct.png

No, no Duane Reade, I looked for pharmacy and assumed one of them would be.

Watched 1st half of Eddie Murphy's 'Delirious' recently and immediately thought of this thread. The combo of his homophobic "jokes" and the audience guffawing seriously made me nauseous.

I was just thinking of how all of us enlightened 40+ year-olds could probably still do the whole Honeymooners routine from memory.

US pop culture had already hammered the existence of The Honeymooners into me, but I saw three minutes of it on a family trip to America when I was 11, and that’s still all. Didn’t it run for a few decades, on and off? Is it the “bang zoom to the moon” domestic violence thing that’s a “routine” that never changed?

i don't really want to go on record as defending the honeymooners, but there is *never* any doubt that alice is utterly in charge

otm

it still runs here and there on local late night, and they never stopped doing the New Year's Eve marathons in NY

speaking of something that aged poorly, i just caught the ending of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective on cable and hollllly shit that comes super hateful now

it did at the time. Naked Gun 33.3 too.

The freshman hazing scenes in Dazed and Confused wouldn’t stand a chance today

Really? Even when it was a new movie, the whole point of those scenes and much of the rest of the film was that this was how people acted in the distant past, and it was clearly no longer acceptable.

I was talking about the Eddie Murphy "Norton? I've been lookin' at you... lookin'' at me..." routine.

the "homina homina homina" bit is still funny

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TuhSV-PCtyQ

*someone does or says something slightly unusual*

"are you on crack"

wait thats out now?

speaking of something that aged poorly, i just caught the ending of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective on cable and hollllly shit that comes super hateful now

yeah I recently rewatched it and it goes from "this is actually still really funny" to "wow that comes off poorly" really quickly. I would guess there's a whole host of 80's/90's films that in retrospect were super homo/transphobic

Revenge of the Nerds is also a pretty egregious example...no gay panic but there's a scene that's basically straight up rape which ultimately becomes the hero's triumph. its gross.