I used to work at McDonalds (I know). Opening usually involved me at the front counter with a headset on so I could do drive-through orders and handle making coffee / putting orders together / taking money at the front from the little old people that came in at the crack of dawn every morning. We would also have a manager who was there to be important and one person in the kitchen. We’re a small rural town so usually this is fine but we were on kind of a major highway so sometimes it would get busy out of nowhere.
Depending on the manager the amount of help we had would vary wildly. One morning we got super busy and I started cracking under the pressure. I’m a fantastic multi-tasker but my drive-through line was backing up since I was trying to juggle them and all the walk-in folks from my front registers and when it gets packed…well, it’s fun. I glance around trying to find my manager for help. I see him on one of our cameras – he’s outside smoking a cigarette around the side of the building. Mind you, this is like his third trip out to smoke this morning. I’m absolutely dying trying to get caught up. Customers are being passive aggressive saying they will come behind the counter and get their own coffee and stuff. I have people yelling at me in my headset from the drive through. I end up having to remove the headset just to try to get the frontline sorted. I start making progress with the front but I basically had to sacrifice the drive-through customers for two minutes.
Apparently the cars outside start yelling at my manager and interrupt his smoke break so he comes in, sees me with my headset off and goes berserk. He’s like “WHOS TAKING THE DRIVE-THRU ORDERS?” I’m in the middle of trying to get a fresh pot of coffee going so I sort of auto-respond “No one. Hang on.” as I continue to dash around behind our counter to grab a fruit & yogurt parfait for an order. He basically gets in my way and starts giving me shit. Loudly, talking to me like I’m a dog. I point to the camera and yell, loudly enough to disrupt the entire inside of the restaurant. “I’m these two registers, first window, second window, and I’m bagging. I’m like FOUR PEOPLE and you’re out behind the building not doing SHIT!”
His eyes go wide. I can tell he knows I’m holding on by my last thread. He’s sighs. And he’s like “You’re in a ton of trouble but we can talk about this later.” No. Fuck him. I’m done. I’m all riled up from random customers yelling at me. I toss him the headset. “You want to give me shit for not being able to run like four stations with no support? Run five. I’ll watch.” I remove my name badge.
He went to say something to me. I turn away, facing the one girl working in the kitchen who is watching this all play out. I remember telling her “I’m so sorry.” and then I dropped my name badge, toss my hat on the counter, grab a water cup, put on (and zip) my jacket so my uniform is covered up. I go to the drink fountain, fill my water cup, and then I go sit on the far side of the seating area and watch him go down in flames. He ends up ALSO taking off the headset and picking up the phone so he can spam call the whole workforce one by one trying to call for help. It’s like 5AM so no one is going to accept a call from their work number. About ten minutes into his struggle he ends up very loudly pleading with me to come back from behind the counter. I can’t even see him on the other side of the sea of people swarming the counter at this point.
I call back “I need a smoke first!” and I go outside.
So after the many many posts mourning the passing of Stan Lee earlier today I’ve started seeing an inevitable wave of backlash about how he actually wasn’t a good person and we shouldn’t be mourning them. And these posts are par for the course when a celebrity dies because no one is all good or all bad, and that’s fine. And Stan Lee was human, he was a person with a complicated life and a complicated legacy, and I’m not here to whitewash any of that. However, I’d like to refute a couple of the points I’ve seen people making.
And while your mileage may vary on how much you agree with him there, it’s a far cry from him cruelly declaring Peter Parker having a boyfriend would be an affront before God and man and an insult to his authorial intent or whatever. Also, I think the original post that started this story was about Andrew Garfield saying something while doing press for Amazing Spiderman 2 and Stan Lee writing the contract as a result, but the contract is from 2011 and the first Amazing Spiderman came out in 2012, so the timeline doesn’t work. I could be misremembering the post though. There’s also this implied narrative that Andrew Garfield got axed for saying his Peter Parker was bi, but uh, no. No, they cancelled the franchise because Amazing Spiderman 2 bombed at the box office.
Now, to wrap it up, was Stan Lee a good and perfect man? No. His legacy is very much a mixed bag, especially when it comes to his relationship with his long-time co-creator Jack Kirby (although that’s a whole other suitcase to unpack some other time). I would like to point out, however, that the posts praising him aren’t all just blindly hero-worshipping him and being willfully ignorant. When someone you admire dies it’s natural to forget about the bad parts of them for a bit and get a little misty eyed, and not everyone’s gonna be totally objective about this man that they never met but who represents something important to them. I think that speaks more to the way we interact with celebrity as a culture than it does about the way Marvel fans see Stan Lee frankly. And hey, we gain nothing by pretending that Stan Lee wasn’t an important figure in comic book history, one who co-created the first black character in mainstream comics just two years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, who fought the Comic Code Authority censors to use comics to tackle heavy subject matter, who helped bring legitimacy to the art form and humanity to its characters. So as long as I’ve got you here I’m gonna leave you with his thoughts on racism in 1968, words that feel just as relevant today:
Soot tags gather after fires in areas with low circulation. They are not, as commonly believed, ash covered spider webs.
oh, well then what the FUCK are they???
They’re made of sticky particles from a polymer or petroleum based fire, like burning carpet, drapes, upholstery, and clothes. Due to a static charge, they chain together and naturally gather near ceiling corners because the rising hot air pushes them into the cool spots by convection.
Because they’re formed by static electricity, they can only be removed with professional chemicals and equipment. Attempting to remove them improperly will only break the chain before all the soot can be captured, leaving the remaining soot to spontaneously reform the webs later. Even worse, trying to wipe or wash them away can firmly adhere the soot to your wall or ceiling, which will permanently stain it.
A natural phenomena that only coincidentally resembles the damned webs of transdimensional ghost spiders.
so that’s why they crumble when touched and don’t stretch like spiderwebs… you learn something new every day 😀
I was waiting for the night bus at 1am the other night, eating fries, when a dude, high as fuck, tried to harass me. It took several “I don’t want to talk to you, please go away” for him to finally move, but I think it helped that another man was giving him the death stare and clicking his tongue at him. He then checked I was okay and whether I knew the guy or not. Good dude.
Shout out also the man who silently switched places with me on another night bus to be a buffer between me and a guy who had threatened me. Thank you
Men: this here? This here is what you need to be doing as allies. The men who harass and insult women are not likely to take our complaints about it seriously. But you, another man, they will listen to.
I was pumping gas at like 10 PM one night, and these bunch of drunk guys came walking up to the gas station, and one of them yelled over to me if I wanted to see his dick. His friend says to him, “You don’t have anything she wants to see.” and apologized. It was pretty awesome.
this is all we want from men. to recognize the wrongs done by other men, and acknowledge it. not give us shitass defense like, “not all men do that”
Don’t say“not all men”, PROVE “not all men” by getting up and actually doing something when y’all see women getting harassed.
It’s amazing how there is a generation of people who hate Stan Lee for ???
The man, even in his early years denounced racism as a special type of evil that can’t be defeated with a bullet.
Marvel was the first mainstream comic to show a gay marriage.
And the accusations of him sexually harassing a nurse were false. and proven to be false.
The man has denounced racism and promoted tolerance and diversity for years, much more than what most people who age would have ever dared consider. Hell, he created Black Panther, the first black comic hero.
But all because the man didn’t want to make Peter Parker black and bisexual he obviously is a racist and homophobe… Despite…
Luke Cage
Falcon
Storm
Spider Girl (Corazon)
Miles Morales
Moonstar
Karma
Black Panther
Shuri
Kimura
Lady Deathstrike
Echo
Jubilee
Monet St. Croix
Hulkling
America Chavez
Northstar and hosting the first gay marriage depicted in mainstream comics IN 1992 WAY BEFORE GAY MARRIAGE WAS EVEN LEGALIZED
Valkyrie
Wiccian and many others…
But y’all asses over here fucking ignoring the shit out of them like the only thing Stan Lee and Marvel ever made was Spiderman and Peter Parker all because the man doesn’t think that you should redefine established or preexisting characters. Why?
Because he believed in creating NEW characters, new characters who had their OWN personalities, who had their OWN stories, who had their OWN fans
He wanted to make new things, not redefine what already exists. He wanted to make NEW characters and stories that people could connect to. NEW characters who could stand on their own as opposed to just being “This character but now xyz.”
He wanted characters who had their own life and vibrancy to them.
Yet y’all asses fucking mad he didn’t make Peter Parker black while you ignoring the fuck out of Miles Morales. Yet y’all asses are mad he didn’t make Peter Parker bi or gay while ignoring the fact that the Marvel comic version of Deadpool and Loki are both bisexual.
Y’all fucking ignoring the POC and LGBT+ characters that exist in the Marvel universe all because you wanna be like ~~uwu 20gayteen~~
Until y’all asses start recognizing POC and LGBT+ characters THAT ALREADY EXIST you don’t get to say shit about anything else being gay.
DON’T SIT THERE AND IGNORE CANON LGBT AND POC CHARACTERS AND THEN ACT LIKE STAN LEE WAS A RACIST OR HOMOPHOBIC BIGOT
I think I got tagged in that post about a million times this morning from people wanting me to signal boost it, and honestly this will sound awful, but this is why as a general rule I do not signal boost missing person posts unless they are coming from individuals I know, because honestly you just don’t know what is going on sometimes.
I had friends growing up who ran from their abusive parents and it was framed as a “missing troubled teen” narrative to get them back. More recently I had a friend who tried to leave her husband and her husband tried to tell everyone she’d lost her mind and didn’t know what she was doing and if anyone saw her they needed to send her back to him. He was bold enough to get the police involved too. Some abusers are just brazen in their confidence to not get caught.
And honestly, do I know what is happening in the above post? No, but with so many conflicting accounts and different voices, I’m hesitant to help a possible abuser splash their victims face all over the internet.
i will note that after that callout the initial poster doubled down on her blog, stating this:
My husband I believe is schizophrentic and not thinking in his right
mind. If you see him, IMMEDIATELY contact the Mason Ohio Police
Department. DO NOT let him know you have spotted him and have called
someone. He may run in the mental state he’s in. (513)299-8560
in this situation, if a family member is supporting him but the relationship partner suggests they have personally diagnosed him as schizophrenic (without understanding the appropriate spelling, context, etc)… to the point that they declare you should not interact with him or he might just run, i cannot at all suggest going along with the original poster’s intentions.
it is important to remember that when you reblog these things that motives for these posts can always be much more sour than you realize. if a person on tumblr you do not personally know is asking you to send them information on anyone’s whereabouts, situation, or otherwise something that could give them power over that person, you should do personal research on the matter at the very least before reblogging. if you cannot find the information you need, do not reblog it – there are positive channels that people can use for these things, and those channels will have rules in place to try and keep victims protected and safe from abusers.
a random post on tumblr like this?more often than not, it does nothing to protect these people. a pleading tumblr post has no checks and balances to protect from abusers… beyond people looking critically at the shit they’re saying.
be careful.
The obvious response to that nonsense is “so why didn’t you mention his mental issues in the first place?”
I'm Still Kicking 