It's gotten so bad, we had a discussion today about it at work. Our boss told us to "be careful, and be kind." I mean, it's a Saturday, but he cared for us anyway and said that we needed to be wary because there are some pretty mean people out there.

It's a good way to disseminate information that can't be made official, though. Gossip will spread faster than memos. Sadly, it's prone to alterations depending on the tellers narrative. Plus, people make up stuff all the time. There's a general "group think" that's hard to manage, and secrets just get broken by some deductive reasoning PLUS the unreliable narrative. So you could be close lipped and just get shit found out because now you're a puzzle they want to solve and then spin for their own agendas.

One of my friends is a woman who is socially awkward. She is kind, and wants to do a good job. But frequently gets fucked over by catty office workers. Often by pretending to be her friend and then just using her (to get secrets, for example) until she's all spent up, and then she becomes the scapegoat until she quits. It's weird because I have worked with her and I know she's amazingly talented with a modicum of support, but women just fuck her over again and again, because being a mildly autistic woman just irritates the fuck out of neurotypical women.

A friend of mine lives in Baltimore, and this is what he does: too many things stolen from his porch, including porch furniture, potted plants, and even his trash cans.

My neighbor was pissed, since she had just planted it that past summer, and it was only 2-3' high.

I had a huge old pine tree in my front yard that was naturally split into two straight trunks from a single trunk. During a huge ice storm, one half of the tree fell over and pounded my neighbor's tiny Japanese maple into the ground like a tent peg, and the other half, no longer counter-balanced, gently leaned against my house. When they started cutting it up with chain saws, sparks started shooting, so they had to finish it up with an axe. They assumed lots of nails were in the tree.

Turned out some time in the ancient past, someone put up Christmas lights in it and never took them down, so now all the wires had grown *into* the tree. Like you could cut disks of it from the trunk, and see the old wires and bulb sockets among the rings.