I-am-iela - Laugh Hard At The Absurdity Of Evil

just passing through

the postcard for september in the postcard club!

My new favorite hobby is weaponizing my Mom Friend status against my male coworkers, of which there are a surplus because I am A Woman in The Trades. It's hilarious to me. I have been the Mom Friend my entire life and working construction means I've expanded my territory from Mom Friend to Site Mom by virtue of always knowing where things are and also having pain meds and general life advice if you need any. Do you know what happens when you are so aggressively mom-shaped despite not even being 30? All the young guys I work with have subconsciously put me in the mom category of their brains. Do you know what that means? I live and work in the American South. These guys have been raised both socially and culturally to Respect All Mom Figures and I've snuck myself into that classification like a cuckoo in the nest. Like, listen, I can take it and dish it out with the best of them and I'm "one of the guys" 97% of the time, but I have my limits. If they're being dicks to each other and I'm tired of it all I gotta do is look really disapproving and scold them with some classic Mom-isms and it will stop them dead in their tracks. It's a total short circuit of their brains. Not one of these guys has withstood my telling them "manners are free and it costs nothing to be kind." Sometimes I just give them a look and say "Really?" in that tone of voice all moms use when they're completely fed up with you and it makes them straighten up in 10 seconds flat, guaranteed. It's psychological warfare of the highest order. One time I jokingly pulled out a "I'm so disappointed in you" after hearing this barely 18 year old tell some story about being obnoxious in an online game voice chat and it was very obviously a joke but somehow it rattled him so much AT WORK that he later told me he stopped doing it. It's a perfect storm of factors and literally all of them are in my favor. Should I care more about not enforcing gender stereotypes, especially in such a male-dominated field? Probably, but let's be real, the power has completely gone to my head.

Ferocity

stating to think there’s an inverse correlation between how good media is and how easily fandomizable it is 😁