The Last Thing We Want To Hear Is About Accidents In Work Place Which Had A Fatal Or: Fill & Download for Free

I'm from the UK, so totally non partisan in this debate, and hopefully, from my perspective outside of the maelstrom within the US at the moment, objective.By the way, I'm white, middle aged (55 this year) a small business owner, and not affiliated to any political party.I used to laugh at Donald, I used to look forward to his various temper tantrums, and odd speech patterns, and see which international treaty he was going to unilaterally renege, or head of state he was going to offend this month.He never disappoints… whether it was asking if he could use tactical nuclear weapons to blow up hurricanes, or if that failed, use a Sharpie pen to redraw a storm warning, or even take offence, cancel a State Visit and sling insults at the Premiere of Denmark when she refused to sell him Greenland… it was all highly amusing.Then things took a weirder turn. In the UK there was a wife of a US intelligence officer, Ann Sacoolas. Now, her husband, Jonathan, worked at RAF Croughton, and due to a preexisting treaty, did not have Diplomatic Immunity.This is important, a reciprocal agreement between the UK, and the US, meant that intelligence operatives waived their right to diplomatic status.Unfortunately, in August of last year, when Mrs Sacoolas was leaving the base, she forgot that she had to drive on the left in the UK, and caused a collision with a 19 year old boy called Harry Dunn. Harry died as a result of her carelessness, and Mrs Sacoolas was the subject of a UK police investigation, as you would expect, and she cooperated fully.But not for long.About 10 days after the fatal accident, the US state Department got involved and Mike Pompeo insisted that Mrs Sacoolas, as the wife of a US intelligence officer who was not a diplomat, had diplomatic immunity, and the couple were extracted from the UK.This caused something of a dilemma, because Mrs Sacoolas was in no immediate danger, we recognised that it was a tragic accident, and the bereaved family were fully expecting an inquest, prosecution, and some, necessarily inadequate justice… they didn't want compensation, and nothing could bring Harry back, but they expected a process to play out. So what the hell was going on?Well the first consequence was that as soon as Mrs Sacoolas was on US soil, the dodgy last minute “Immunity” she had been granted that did not tally with the Vienna Convention… dissolved. You don't have diplomatic immunity in your country! A Red Notice is now in place which means she can be arrested if she leaves the US.The other thing was the intervention of the President of the United States. Donald got to hear about the accident which had been turned into a full blown international incident by Mike Pompeo, and invited the parents of Harry to The White House. They went, honoured, and expecting that maybe, as a father himself, he might show empathy to their plight.No. Donald… I'm struggling for words here… he was completely oblivious to the pain, and the common human desire that when you see something is patently wrong, that you do your best to put it right, heal the pain, or at least try to ensure that nobody else has to go through the same turmoil and living nightmare of losing a loved one the same way.Donald offered them money to go away.The parents refused.Donald outright refused to return Ann Sacoolas to the UK for trial.The parents were disappointed.Donald then tried to offer them a consolation prize. They could have their pictures taken with him in the White House, and as a special treat (I'm not making this up) he offered them the chance to meet the killer of their 19 year old son, who was waiting in another room to come through, and be photographed with her too.The parents politely refused, and in a press conference later were very careful to thank the President for his time, but admitted, in typical British understatement, that the whole affair had been confusing, and overwhelming.Donald, in a press conference later explained that he had offered them compensation, which they had refused, “I don't know why, they had their reasons,” and in almost as many words said that Mrs Sacoolas was not going to face justice, and they should just learn to live with it.This was a Damascus moment for me.I realise that Donald should not be vilified, we shouldn't call him names, mock, or insult him.He is ill, I would say he is suffering from cognitive degeneration. He is utterly incapable of thinking about anything except his own world view. Friday, he did the same to George Floyd and his bereaved family.Here is the quote:Trump said during his Rose Garden event this morning, “Equal justice under the law must mean every American receives equal treatment in every encounter with law enforcement regardless of race, color, gender or creed. They have to receive fair treatment from law enforcement.”The president then appeared to veer from his prepared remarks, saying, “We all saw what happened last week. We can’t let that happen. Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying, ‘This is a great thing that’s happening for our country.’ This is a great day for him. It’s a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody. This a great, great day in terms of equality.”Let me just say, simply, objectively, and you notice without a single derogatory comment, or hyped up anger… this is not normal.If you can't see it, show this comment to a friend, and ask them if the behaviour I have described is:i) Untrueii) NormalBecause, please believe me, as someone who does not have anything to gain by saying this, to the rest of the world, this is disturbing. Somebody help him.

I was moved by the love story of Richard Feynman and Arlene Feynman. Probably because I admire him too much.TL;DR versionFeynman had a crush on the most popular girl in the community who already had a boyfriend. After she stops seeing him, she and Feynman get together and fall in love deeply. She contracts tuberculosis and is about to die. Richard and Arlene marry happily and then she dies.It is moving only if you read this.The really loooong version:The following is from the book, What Do You Care What Other People Think?The Early CrushOne time I was invited to a party at Arlene's house. Everybody was there because Arlene was the most popular girl around: she was number one, the nicest girl, and everybody liked her. Well, I'm sitting in a big armchair with nothing to do, when Arlene comes over and sits on the arm of the chair to talk to me. That was the beginning of the feeling, “Oh, boy! The world is just wonderful now! Somebody I like has paid attention to me!”In those days, in Far Rockaway, there was a youth center for Jewish kids at the temple. It was a big club that had many activities. There was a writers group that wrote stories and would read them to each other; there was a drama group that put on plays; there was a science group, and an art group. I had no interest in any subject except science, but Arlene was in the art group, so I joined it too. I struggled with the art business — learning how to make plaster casts of the face and so on (which I used much later in life, it turned out) — just so I could be in the same group with Arlene.But Arlene had a boyfriend named Jerome in the group, so there was no chance for me. I just hovered around in the background....One day Arlene told me Jerome isn't her boyfriend anymore. She's not tied up with him. That was a big excitement for me, the beginning of hope! She invited me over to her house, at 154 Westminster Avenue in nearby Cedarhurst.When I went to her house that time, it was dark and the porch wasn't lit. I couldn't see the numbers. Not wanting to disturb anyone by asking if it was the right house, I crawled up, quietly, and felt the numbers on the door(Contrary to what people might expect in this situation in a movie, they discuss philosophy, Descartes and RPF leaves)Falling in LoveArlene was a wonderful girl. She was the editor of the newspaper at Nassau County Lawrence High School; she played the piano beautifully, and was very artistic. She made some decorations for our house, like the parrot on the inside of our closet. As time went on, and our family got to know her better, she would go to the woods to paint with my father, who had taken up painting in later life, as many people do.Arlene and I began to mold each other's personality. She lived in a family that was very polite, and was very sensitive to other people's feelings. She taught me to be more sensitive to those kinds of things, too. On the other hand, her family felt that “white lies” were okay.I thought one should have the attitude of “What do you care what other people think!” I said, “We should listen to other people's opinions and take them into account. Then, if they don't make sense and we think they're wrong, then that's that!”Arlene caught on to the idea right away. It was easy to talk her into thinkingthat in our relationship, we must be very honest with each other and say everything straight, with absolute frankness. It worked very well, and we became very much in love — a love like no other love that I know of.Arlene found a summer job in Scituate, about twenty miles away, taking care of children. But my father was concerned that I would become too involved with Arlene and get off the track of my studies, so he talked her out of it — or talked me out of it (I can't remember). Those days were very, very different from now. In those days, you had to go all the way up in your career before marrying.I was able to see Arlene only a few times that summer, but we promised each other we would marry after I finished school. I had known her for six years by that time. I'm a little tongue-tied trying to describe to you how much our love for each other developed, but we were sure we were right for each other.The TragedyAfter I graduated from MIT I went to Princeton, and I would go home on vacations to see Arlene. One time when I went to see her, Arlene had developed a bump on one side of her neck. She was a very beautiful girl, so it worried her a little bit, but it didn't hurt, so she figured it wasn't too serious. She went to her uncle, who was a doctor. He told her to rub it with omega oil.Then, sometime later, the bump began to change. It got bigger — or maybe it was smaller — and she got a fever. The fever got worse, so the family doctor decided Arlene should go to the hospital. She was told she had typhoid fever. Right away, as I still do today, I looked up the disease in medical books and read all about it.When I went to see Arlene in the hospital, she was in quarantine — we had to put on special gowns when we entered her room, and so on. The doctor was there, so I asked him how the Wydell test came out — it was an absolute test for typhoid fever that involved checking for bacteria in the feces. He said, “It was negative.”“What? How can that be!” I said. “Why all these gowns, {21} when you can't even find the bacteria in an experiment? Maybe she doesn't have typhoid fever!”The result of that was that the doctor talked to Arlene's parents, who told me not to interfere. “After all, he's the doctor. You're only her fiancé.”I've found out since that such people don't know what they're doing, and get insulted when you make some suggestion or criticism. I realize that now, but I wish I had been much stronger then and told her parents that the doctor was an idiot — which he was — and didn't know what he was doing. But as it was, her parents were in charge of it.Anyway, after a little while, Arlene got better, apparently: the swelling went down and the fever went away. But after some weeks the swelling started again, and this time she went to another doctor. This guy feels under her armpits and in her groin, and so on, and notices there's swelling in those places, too. He says the problem is in her lymphatic glands, but he doesn't yet know what the specific disease is. He will consult with other doctors.As soon as I hear about it I go down to the library at Princeton and look up lymphatic diseases, and find “Swelling of the Lymphatic Glands.Tuberculosis of the lymphatic glands. This is very easy to diagnose...” — so I figure this isn't what Arlene has, because the doctors are having trouble trying to figure it out.I start reading about some other diseases: lymphodenema, lymphodenorna, Hodgkin's disease, all kinds of other things; they're all cancers of one crazy form or another. The only difference between lymphodenema and lymphodenoma was, as far as I could make out by reading it very carefully, that if the patient dies, it's lymphodenoma; if the patient survives — at least for a while — then it's lymphodenema.At any rate, I read through all the lymphatic diseases, and decided that the most likely possibility was that Arlene had an incurable disease. Then I half smiled to myself, thinking, “I bet everybody who reads through a medical book thinks they have a fatal disease.” And yet, after reading everything very carefully, I couldn't find any other possibility. It was serious.Then I went to the weekly tea at Palmer Hall, and found myself talking to the mathematicians just as I always did, even though I had just found out that Arlene probably had a fatal disease. It was very strange — like having two minds.When I went to visit her, I told Arlene the joke about the people who don't know any medicine reading the medical book and always assuming they have a fatal disease. But I also told her I thought we were in great difficulty, and that the best I could figure out was that she had an incurable disease. We discussed the various diseases, and I told her what each one was like.One of the diseases I told Arlene about was Hodgkin's disease. When she next saw her doctor, she asked him about it: “Could it be Hodgkin's disease?”He said, “Well, yes, that's a possibility.”When she went to the county hospital, the doctor wrote the following diagnosis: “Hodgkin's disease — ?” So I realized that the doctor didn't know any more than I did about this problem.The county hospital gave Arlene all sorts of tests and X-ray treatments for this “Hodgkin's disease — ?” and there were special meetings to discuss this peculiar case. I remember waiting for her outside, in the hall. When the meeting was over, the nurse wheeled her out in a wheelchair. All of a sudden a little guy comes running out of the meeting room and catches up with us. “Tell me,” he says, out of breath, “do you spit up blood? Have you ever coughed up blood?”The nurse says, “Go away! Go away! What kind of thing is that to ask of a patient!” — and brushes him away. Then she turned to us and said, “That man is a doctor from the neighborhood who comes to the meetings and is always making trouble. That's not the kind of thing to ask of a patient!”I didn't catch on. The doctor was checking a certain possibility, and if I had been smart, I would have asked him what it was.Finally, after a lot of discussion, a doctor at the hospital tells me they figure the most likely possibility is Hodgkin's disease. He says, “There will be some periods of improvement, and some periods in the hospital. It will be on and off, getting gradually worse. There's no way to reverse it entirely. It's fatal after a few years.”“I'm sorry to hear that,” I say. “I'll tell her what you said.”“No, no!” says the doctor. “We don't want to upset the patient. “We're going to tell her it's glandular fever.”“No, no!” I reply. “We've already discussed the possibility of Hodgkin's disease. I know she can adjust to it.”“Her parents don't want her to know. You had better talk to them first.”At home, everybody worked on me: my parents, my two {23} aunts, our family doctor; they were all on me, saying I'm a very foolish young man who doesn't realize what pain he's going to bring to this wonderful girl by telling her she has a fatal disease. “How can you do such a terrible thing?” they asked, in horror.“Because we have made a pact that we must speak honestly with each other and look at everything directly. There's no use fooling around. She's gonna ask me what she's got, and I cannot lie to her!”“Oh, that's childish!” they said — blah, blah, blah. Everybody kept working on me, and said I was wrong. I thought I was definitely right, because I had already talked to Arlene about the disease and knew she could face it — that telling her the truth was the right way to handle it.But finally, my little sister comes up to me — she was eleven or twelve then — with tears running down her face. She beats me on the chest, telling me that Arlene is such a wonderful girl, and that I'm such a foolish, stubborn brother. I couldn't take it any more. That broke me down.So I wrote Arlene a goodbye love letter, figuring that if she ever found out the truth after I had told her it was glandular fever, we would be through. I carried the letter with me all the time.The gods never make it easy; they always make it harder. I go to the hospital to see Arlene — having made this decision — and there she is, sitting up in bed, surrounded by her parents, somewhat distraught. When she sees me, her face lights up and she says, “Now I know how valuable it is that we tell each other the truth!” Nodding at her parents, she continues, “They're telling me I have glandular fever, and I'm not sure whether I believe them or not. Tell me, Richard, do I have Hodgkin's disease or glandular fever?”“You have glandular fever,” I said, and I died inside. It was terrible — just terrible!Her reaction was completely simple: “Oh! Fine! Then I believe them.” Because we had built up so much trust in each other, she was completely relieved. Everything was solved, and all was very nice.She got a little bit better, and went home for a while. About a week later, I get a telephone call. “Richard,” she says, “I want to talk to you. Come on over.”“Okay.” I made sure I still had the letter with me. I could tell something was the matter.I go upstairs to her room, and she says, “Sit down!” I sit down on the end of her bed. “All right, now tell me,” she says, “do I have glandular fever or Hodgkin's disease?”“You have Hodgkin's disease.” And I reached for the letter.“God!” she says. “They must have put you through hell!”I had just told her she has a fatal disease, and was admitting that I had lied to her as well, and what does she think of? She's worried about me! I was terribly ashamed of myself. I gave Arlene the letter.“You should have stuck by it. We know what we're doing; we are right!”“I'm sorry. I feel awful.”“I understand, Richard. Just don't do it again.”You see, she was in bed upstairs, and did something she used to do when she was little: she tiptoed out of bed and crawled down the stairs a little bit to listen to what people were doing downstairs. She heard her mother crying a lot, and went back to bed thinking, “If I have glandular fever, why is Mother crying so much? But Richard said I had glandular fever, so it must be right!”Later she thought, “Could Richard have lied to me?” and began to wonder how that might be possible. She concluded that, incredible as it sounded, somebody might have put me through a wringer of some sort.She was so good at facing difficult situations that she went on to the next problem. “Okay,” she says, “I have Hodgkin's disease. What are we going to do now?”I had a scholarship at Princeton, and they wouldn't let me keep it if I got married. We knew what the disease was like: sometimes it would get better for some months, and Arlene could be at home, and then she would have to be in the hospital for some months — back and forth for two years, perhaps.So I figure, although I'm in the middle of trying to get my Ph.D., I could get a job at the Bell Telephone Laboratories doing research — it was a very good place to work — and we could get a little apartment in Queens that wasn't too far from the hospital or Bell Labs. We could get married in a few months, in New York. We worked everything out that afternoon.For some months now Arlene's doctors had wanted to take a biopsy of the swelling on her neck, but her parents didn't want it done — they didn't want to “bother the poor sick girl.” But with new resolve, I kept working on them, explaining that it's {25} important to get as much information as possible. With Arlene's help, I finally convinced her parents.A few days later, Arlene telephones me and says, “They got a report from the biopsy.”“Yeah? Is it good or bad?”“I don't know. Come over and let's talk about it.”When I got to her house, she showed me the report. It said, “Biopsy shows tuberculosis of the lymphatic gland.”That really got me. I mean, that was the first goddamn thing on the list! I passed it by, because the book said it was easy to diagnose, and because the doctors were having so much trouble trying to figure out what it was. I assumed they had checked the obvious case. And it was the obvious case: the man who had come running out of the meeting room asking “Do you spit up blood?” had the right idea. He knew what it probably was!I felt like a jerk, because I had passed over the obvious possibility by using circumstantial evidence — which isn't any good — and by assuming the doctors were more intelligent than they were. Otherwise, I would have suggested it right off, and perhaps the doctors would have diagnosed Arlene's disease way back then as “tuberculosis of the lymphatic gland — ?” I was a dope. I've learned, since then.Anyway, Arlene says, “So I might live as long as seven years. I may even get better.”“So what do you mean, you don't know if it's good or bad?”“Well, now we won't be able to get married until later.”Knowing that she only had two more years to live, we had solved things so perfectly, from her point of view, that she was disturbed to discover she'd live longer! But it didn't take me long to convince her it was a better circumstance.So we knew we could face things together, from then on. After going through that, we had no difficulty facing any other problem.Married LifeMy whole family was worried about that — aunts, uncles, everyone. They brought the family doctor over to our house. He tried to explain to me that tuberculosis is a dangerous disease, and that I'm bound to get it.I said, “Just tell me how it's transmitted, and we'll figure it out.” We were already very, very careful: we knew we must not kiss, because there's a lot of bacteria in the mouth.Then they very carefully explained to me that when I had promised to marry Arlene, I didn't know the situation. Everybody would understand that I didn't know the situation then, and that it didn't represent a real promise.I never had that feeling, that crazy idea that they had, that I was getting married because I had promised it. I hadn't even thought of that. It wasn't a question of having promised anything; we had stalled around, not getting a piece of paper and not being formally married, but we were in love, and were already married, emotionally.I said, “Would it be sensible for a husband who learns that his wife has tuberculosis to leave her?”Only my aunt who ran the hotel thought maybe it would be all right for us to get married. Everybody else was still against it. But this time, since my family had given me this kind of advice before and it had been so wrong, I was in a much stronger position. It was very easy to resist and to just proceed. So there was no problem, really. Although it was similar circumstance, they weren't going to convince me of anything any more. Arlene and I knew we were right in what we were doing.Arlene and I worked everything out. There was a hospital in New Jersey just south of Fort Dix where she could stay while I was at Princeton. It was a charity hospital — Deborah was the name of it — supported by the Women's Garment Workers Union of New York. Arlene wasn't a garment worker, but it didn't make any difference. And I was just a young fella working on this project for the government, and the pay was very low. But this way I could take care of her, at last.We decided to get married on the way to Deborah Hospital. I {27} went to Princeton to pick up a car — Bill Woodward, one of the graduate students there, lent me his station wagon. I fixed it up like a little ambulance, with a mattress and sheets in the back, so Arlene could lie down in case she got tired. Although this was one of the periods when the disease was apparently not so bad and she was at home, Arlene had been in the county hospital a lot, and she was a little weak.I drove up to Cedarhurst and picked up my bride. Arlene's family waved goodbye, and off we went. We crossed Queens and Brooklyn, then went to Staten Island on the ferry — that was our romantic boat ride — and drove to the city hall for the borough of Richmond to get married.We went up the stairs, slowly, into the office. The guy there was very nice. He did everything right away. He said, “You don't have any witnesses,” so he called the bookkeeper and an accountant from another room, and we were married according to the laws of the state of New York. Then we were very happy, and we smiled at each other, holding hands.The bookkeeper says to me, “You're married now. You should kiss the bride!”So the bashful character kissed his bride lightly on the cheek.I gave everyone a tip and we thanked them very much. We got back in the car, and drove to Deborah Hospital.Every weekend I'd go down from Princeton to visit Arlene. One time the bus was late, and I couldn't get into the hospital. There weren't any hotels nearby, but I had my old sheepskin coat on (so I was warm enough), and I looked for an empty lot to sleep in. I was a little worried what it might look like in the morning when people looked out of their windows, so I found a place that was far enough away from houses.She DiesWhen Arlene's condition became much weaker, her father came out from New York to visit her. It was difficult and expensive to travel that far during the war, but he knew the end was near. One day he telephoned me at Los Alamos. “You'd better come down here right away,” he said.I had arranged ahead of time with a friend of mine at Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs, to borrow his car in case of an emergency, so I could get to Albuquerque quickly. I picked up a couple of hitchhikers to help me in case something happened on the way.Sure enough, as we were driving into Santa Fe, we got a flat tire. The hitchhikers helped me change the tire. Then on the other side of Santa Fe, the spare tire went flat, but there was a gas station nearby. I remember waiting patiently for the gas station man to take care of some other car, when the two hitchhikers, knowing the situation, went over and explained to the man what it was. He fixed the flat right away. We decided not to get the spare tire fixed, because repairing it would have taken even more time.We started out again towards Albuquerque, and I felt foolish that I hadn't thought to say anything to the gas station man when time was so precious. About thirty miles from Albuquerque, we got another flat! We had to abandon the car, and we hitchhiked the rest of the way. I called up a towing company and told them the situation.I met Arlene's father at the hospital. He had been there for a few days. “I can't take it any more,” he said. “I have to go home.” He was so unhappy, he just left.When I finally saw Arlene, she was very weak, and a bit fogged out. She didn't seem to know what was happening. She stared straight ahead most of the time, looking around a little bit from time to time, and was trying to breathe. Every once in a while her breathing would stop — and she would sort of swallow — and then it would start again. It kept going like this for a few hours.I took a little walk outside for a while. I was surprised that I wasn't feeling what I thought people were supposed to feel under the circumstances. Maybe I was fooling myself. I wasn't delighted, but I didn't feel terribly upset, perhaps because we had known for a long time that it was going to happen.It's hard to explain. If a Martian (who, we'll imagine, never dies except by accident) came to Earth and saw this peculiar race of creatures — these humans who live about seventy or eighty years, knowing that death is going to come — it would look to him like a terrible problem of psychology to live under those circumstances, knowing that life is only temporary. Well, we humans somehow figure out how to live despite this problem: we laugh, we joke, we live.The only difference for me and Arlene was, instead of fifty years, it was five years. It was only a quantitative difference — the psychological problem was just the same. The only way it would have become any different is if we had said to ourselves, “But those other people have it better, because they might live fifty years.” But that's crazy. Why make yourself miserable saying things like, “Why do we have such bad luck? What has God done to us? What have we done to deserve this?” — all of which, if you understand reality and take it completely into your heart, are irrelevant and unsolvable. They are just things that nobody can know. Your situation is just an accident of life.We had a hell of a good time together.I came back into her room. I kept imagining all the things that were going on physiologically: the lungs aren't getting enough air into the blood, which makes the brain fogged out and the heart weaker, which makes the breathing even more difficult. I kept expecting some sort of avalanching effect, with everything caving in together in a dramatic collapse. But it didn't appear that way at all: she just slowly got more foggy, and her breathing gradually became less and less, until there was no more breath — but just before that, there was a very small one.The nurse on her rounds came in and confirmed that Arlene was dead, and went out — I wanted to be alone for a moment. I sat there for a while, and then went over to kiss her one last time.I was very surprised to discover that her hair smelled exactly the same. Of course, after I stopped and thought about it, there was no reason why hair should smell different in such a short time. But to me it was a kind of a shock, because in my mind, something enormous had just happened — and yet nothing had happened.The next day, I went to the mortuary. The guy hands me some rings he's taken from her body. “Would you like to see your wife one last time?” he asks.“What kind of a — no, I don't want to see her, no!” I said. “I just saw her!”“Yes, but she's been all fixed up,” he says.This mortuary stuff was completely foreign to me. Fixing up {35} a body when there's nothing there? I didn't want to look at Arlene again; that would have made me more upset.I called the towing company and got the car, and packed Arlene's stuff in the back. I picked up a hitchhiker, and started out of Albuquerque.It wasn't more than five miles before... BANG! Another flat tire. I started to curse.The hitchhiker looked at me like I was mentally unbalanced. “It's just a tire, isn't it?” he says.“Yeah, it's just a tire — and another tire, and again another tire, and another tire!”We put the spare tire on, and went very slowly, all the way back to Los Alamos, without getting the other tire repaired.I didn't know how I was going to face all my friends at Los Alamos. I didn't want people with long faces talking to me about the death of Arlene. Somebody asked me what happened.“She's dead. And how's the program going?” I said.They caught on right away that I didn't want to moon over it. Only one guy expressed his sympathy, and it turned out he had been out of town when I came back to Los Alamos.One night I had a dream, and Arlene came into it. Right away, I said to her, “No, no, you can't be in this dream. You're not alive!”Then later, I had another dream with Arlene in it. I started in again, saying, “You can't be in this dream!”“No, no,” she says. “I fooled you. I was tired of you, so I cooked up this ruse so I could go my own way. But now I like you again, so I've come back.” My mind was really working against itself. It had to be explained, even in a goddamn dream, why it was possible that she was still there!I must have done something to myself, psychologically. I didn't cry until about a month later, when I was walking past a department store in Oak Ridge and noticed a pretty dress in the window. I thought, “Arlene would like that,” and then it hit me.Looks like the entire book is available at scilib.narod.ru/Physics/Feynman/WDYC/en/index.html

I worked in the call center of one of the top-rated security companies in the United States: Vector Security. Specifically, I worked in the corporate headquarters.To their credit, Vector warns you what you’re getting into. They tell you during the first interview; they tell you during the testing phase of the first and second interview; they tell you during the two separate one-on-one interviews you have with shift supervisors; they tell you when you get hired; and they tell you repeatedly during the full month worth of 4-day a week, 12 hour shift training.“This job is not for everyone. You need to be able to speak clearly and calmly under pressure. You will be yelled at, screamed at, called incompetent, cursed at, insulted and berated; not occasionally, not every once in awhile, but regularly and with real venom. You are going to respond to, on average, 150–200 alarms / inbound phone calls every night, and that is often going to mean as many as 20 phone calls for a single alarm (depending on situation,) and that a large number of people aren’t going to be happy to hear from you. There will be alarms blaring in the background, you won’t be able to turn them off, you will have to sometimes yell to be heard over them, and if they can’t communicate clearly with you, you have to adhere to the rules. You don’t have any discretion.”You still think, “I’ve worked retail. I’ve been a manager in a restaurant. I’ve dealt with venom… I can do this.”No.If somebody’s alarm goes off at 3 a.m., that’s your fault. If they can’t remember their passcode to turn it off that’s your fault. If you don’t know what is setting it off, that’s your fault. If their house was broken into, that’s your fault. The police showed up because they didn’t answer their phone and provide a verbal passcode? They did answer the phone, but they don’t know the passcode? Those are your fault.We had customers who were being fined by local law enforcement or fire departments because of the massive number of false alarms they’d experienced. I’m not allowed to discuss specifics about policies, but generally speaking, there’s a period during the sale phase where you establish exactly how you want Vector to react to certain alarms. Customers will get angry that, when you’ve followed the policies they themselves set forth and they did not respond or intervene, you’ve dispatched the relevant authority to make sure everything is safe. They’ll try to sue the company to pay the fines they incur, because they believe we should be able to decide arbitrarily that a given alarm is “probably” false.I had no idea how loud, how stressful, how emotionally demanding this job was going to be. Working as many as 80 hours a week, I was physically exhausted, mentally drained, emotionally taxed, and always on the verge of a total meltdown, all before factoring in the customer interaction. There are alarms going off in the background of the call center, people yelling, people trying to talk to you, other people talking, crosstalk, music in the background.But it’s the customers that made the job degrading. I’ve never in my life been more tempted to say, “Fuck it, I hope your house really is on fire,” than I was at this job. Customers would shout at me, curse at me, insult me, harass me. You’re not allowed, as the responder, to hang up on the customer except under very specific circumstances, so you’ve gotta sit there and take it. Your only option for hanging up on them is to mute them (so they can’t hear you) and try to get a supervisor’s attention so they can listen into your line, and with their approval, you can route the customer to the supervisor. Supervisors are always swamped and there are a number of alarms that only they are allowed to handle; you can be waiting on the line for a long time to get one to help you.Some customers aren’t just content to rant and yell; they need to hear confirmation that you’re being insulted. If you don’t respond in some fashion after a period of time, they’ll get angry that you’ve been too quiet. They’ll accuse you of ignoring them or hanging up on them (protip: I did stop listening probably about 10 minutes ago. It was that or scream back, wordlessly, in the throes of a total meltdown.) Of course, if you’re trying to give them the confirmation they seek, they’ll interrupt you; you’re not actually supposed to speak. Just pretend, for their sake.They’d have spoken to a previous alarm responder, whom they’d hung up on in anger before their issue was fully resolved, and their alarm would activate again. The alarm would come back across my station, because we’ve not had a chance to address the issue, and I don’t have the option not to begin the response protocol again. So inevitably, I’ll either get an incredibly angry customer on the phone… or else I’ll have to send emergency responders despite knowing there’s a 99.999% chance this is a false alarm.Police, fire, medical responders understand all this, though, right? They’ve been through it, it’s their job, they understand it! Except they don’t. Most days they’re incredibly resistant, they don’t want to cooperate. They’re busy people, they also know that the preponderance of alarm company calls are false alarms, and they don’t want to waste a valuable resource checking what is in all likelihood a false alarm when their units could be doing something else.So the alarm company gets routed through a secondary line. It’s a private line, typically, one that goes straight to a dispatcher or an officer at the respective station, but which is treated as low priority. I’ve sat on hold for 20 minutes waiting for contact with someone who can dispatch a uniformed officer. I need supervisor approval to disconnect with emergency responders. I have to verify they are who they say they are, get their dispatcher information and a reference ID for the call; most of them are busy, and will hang up on me before I’ve gotten that. So I’ve gotta insist they give it to me in advance, and a surprising number don’t want to.But beyond that, they’ll ask you if it’s a false alarm. Demand that you verify the alarm’s authenticity before they’ll send a responder. They speak to you as if you don’t understand what the procedure is, or insist that you follow a protocol that isn’t in the account instructions. Essentially, they demand that they exercise an authority you do not have and will become exceedingly snide and combative until you’ve complied.Of course, that’s provided they’ll speak to you in English. Vector has a number of locations that it monitors in both Puerto Rico and Canada, and a number of police and fire responders are in areas that speak primarily Spanish or French. You’re obligated to go through the entire process of contact, including the emergency response script with the dispatcher before you’re allowed to disconnect and re-route the call through a translator.If they answer the phone in perfect English, converse with you in perfect English, and then insist they will not dispatch unless you make the request in their language, you have to assent. You’ve gotta jump through those extra hoops. It costs times, that time costs money (both the company’s and the customer’s) and even with the translator on the phone, these agencies love to be obtuse. These are some of the longest, most frustrating, most insulting calls I’ve ever taken, because these dispatchers genuinely are enjoying fucking with the American on the other line.And then there is the review process. You’re not allowed to make mistakes. I don’t mean, “there’s an acceptable number of mistakes,” but literally you are not allowed to make a mistake. The company is liable for every alarm activation that was actually an emergency that an agent failed to process according to the exact instructions for that account. The company can be held financially liable for failing to adhere to those instructions even if no emergency took place. If someone calls to try to access an account and they use an incorrect passcode and it gets accepted, someone’s probably getting fired, and they might face fines or legal action if anyone got hurt.The reviews are brutal. Your first year, there’s a level of forgiveness, but it isn’t much. You’re constantly scrutinized, criticized, and monitored. Don’t get me wrong; this is totally understandable. In fact, I would have it no other way; if I’m paying this kind of money for a security system and monitoring service, anything short of exactly what I’m paying for is unacceptable.But as an autistic man with some severe stress issues, this was more than I could handle, especially with the non-stop assault I faced on the telephones. Each call I had to make, each time my phone rang, I had to stare into the face of my some of my most severe anxiety attacks and say, “Oh well, I gotta do it.”For a short while, I was allowed to keep a pencil and a tablet at my desk for the purpose of drawing. Having a sketchpad allowed me the opportunity to occupy myself just enough that I could cope somewhat with the stress and anxiety of the situations and get through a shift. Eventually, though, I was told I couldn’t have them (again, understandably, from a security perspective) and I had to try to cope with the shifts with nothing but my headset and my keyboard.After the third on-shift meltdown, and one that happened while driving (nearly causing a fatal accident,) I took a medical leave, and eventually decided I couldn’t bear to return.I do not regret tendering my resignation.I would like to note, however:Despite interactions with customers being a thoroughly repugnant endeavor, Vector Security is an amazing company to work for. They take an amazing amount of care and responsibility for their employees, they’ve got incredible standards in their work, their training is intensive, exhaustive, and incredibly thorough, and it’s populated with genuinely wonderful, strong human beings. Some of the best people I’ve ever met, I met in that call center.Their trainer is perhaps one of the coolest, most strong-willed and intelligent people I’ve ever met (Kim, if you’re reading this, thank you for everything you did during my training,) their executives and management team are all protective and personable and not at all afraid to roll up their sleeves and help out, the environment feels almost like family, and they treat each other as such.If you’re ever looking for a security company, or you’re a strong-willed individual with a drive to help people, it’s a fantastic company.But please, for the love of whatever you hold sacred, be kind to the alarm response agents. They’ve had a hard day, your anger isn’t even the nastiest thing they’ve heard in the last hour, and they genuinely don’t deserve to be spoken to so caustically.