Have luddite grandparents who would refuse to pay their taxes with anything but a handwritten check on general principle, and who wouldn’t have been able to work a Bitcoin ATM even if you were right there with them literally pointing at things and telling them what to do.

It also helps that they’re dead.

My parents are getting up in their years though. My mom’s still sharp as a tack and decently good with tech. She doesn’t exactly fully understand AI, but she’s aware of it and has a general ideas of what it can do, so I’m pretty confident her bullshit detectors can fill in the gaps from there.

And my dad… well he has my mom around. Probably about 20 years ago he was just about ready to give information to some scammer claiming to be from Apple tech support

Despite the fact that we owned no apple products.

There is a whole deep rabbit hole to go down about sexual orientations, gender identities vs biological gender, genital preferences, etc.

And within that rabbit hole, there is a wide range of things you can be (or not be) attracted to for any number of reasons that are perfectly acceptable

That said

I see trans men as technically still women

That’s something that you need to work on.

That’s not saying that you necessarily need to be attracted to or trans men in any way. I think being trans is a perfectly valid reason to not be interested in someone.

But that doesn’t mean you should see them as anything other than the gender they identify as.

I’d generally identify myself as a straight, cis man, and I’d generally say that I’m not attracted to trans women. But there’s a great many cis women I’m also not attracted to for a great many reasons, and some of those reasons are a lot more shallow than what equipment they were born with between their legs or what combination of genes and hormones are at work in their bodies.

That doesn’t mean I see those cis women as any less of a woman because I’m not attracted to them and the same goes for trans women. They all go into the same mental folder as my mother, sister, other female relatives, and platonic female friends, coworkers, acquaintances, etc. that I have no intention of dating.

I’m not perfect, I still have my biases, and various notions about gender identity and such that I’m working on, and I’d be lying if I said I never incorrectly assumed someone’s gender or accidentally deadnamed them or used the wrong pronouns, etc. I’m still learning, I’m a flawed human, and I need to unlearn a couple decades of things that I learned growing up.

But that’s the sort of ideal I’m working towards.

I can understand the thought process behind your statement that “I see trans men as technically still women.” I really get that, and that’s the sort of thing that’s wired into your brain at a pretty deep level and is hard to unlearn.

But it’s wrong, and you shouldn’t leave it at that and think that it’s ok and that’s just the way you are. That sort of thought should always be followed up with some sort of “but that’s wrong I’m trying to be better” sort of thought.

Again, you don’t have to be attracted to trans men, but you do have to learn to see them as actually men.

My PC is hooked up to my main TV as a gaming/home theater thing.

I think my setup is pretty cool, it’s synced up to my Philips hue lights, surround sound, the whole shebang.

For whatever reason, I assume some sort of DRM nonsense, the light sync doesn’t work through the hue sync box and I have to use the PC app

The Hue app doesn’t support Linux, and from what I can find the app doesn’t work right through proton/WINE/etc. there’s a handful of people trying to cobble together their own Linux hue sync apps but none of them seem like they’re quite there yet.

I’m pretty sure that with the advancements made in the last few years I can probably run just about any game or program I want (most of what I use aside from games is FOSS anyway) but I do still have a bit of a bad taste lingering in my mouth from trying to get games and stuff running on Linux over a decade ago.

For some it kind of is, the leather subculture is a thing, and needless to say leather is a pretty important part of it.

I am not at all qualified to really go into it too much beyond just pointing out that it exists.

I do have a little anecdote about it though. I know someone who is an all-around very kinky person, into all kinds of fairly extreme bondage stuff. She entered and won some sort of “Ms Leather [city we live in]” competition/pageant thing a few years back but there was a bit of controversy about it because she wasn’t part of the leather subculture, even though there was a pretty decent amount of overlap between her own kinky interests and the leather community, and so she decided to resign her title and apologize over it.

I started typing a few of them out, it became a very long long post, and then I set my phone down for a minute and it got deleted somehow and I’m not gonna retype it all right now, because I probably should have gone to sleep about 2 or 3 hours ago after getting off work.

But if you remind me later today, I’ll try to type some of them up again.

Also gonna get my disclaimer out of the way for it now

The problem with talking about the craziest calls is because they are crazy and often pretty unique incidents that sometimes make the news, someone could probably Google the details and figure out exactly where I work and I don’t particularly want to put that out there. And if I strip out the more identifiable details, that often kind of gets rid of the parts that made them so crazy so they just don’t make for as good of a story.

That said, before it got deleted I feel like I had a pretty entertaining and still properly anonymized post going, but it did only scratch the tip of the iceberg for some of the crazy shit I’ve handled.

I’ll leave you with one more story that fit the OP’s request for dumb calls though

I had to send police out to basically tell two grown-ass adults to say please and thank you to each other.

I got a call from a lady who was absolutely furious.

The problem was she wanted to park in a particular parking space, but there was some guy already parked there and sitting in his vehicle.

Now this was just public street parking in a busy downtown area. Not some private lot, or permit only area, or even the space right in front of her house I don’t think it was even metered or time-restricted. Just a first-came, first-serve space on the side of the street that anyone can park in.

So she asked him to move, and based on how she was talking to me, I suspect that she didn’t ask nicely.

To which he responded “say please”

Which pissed her the fuck off enough to call 911 about it.

I also get the impression that she did not, in fact, try saying “please”

I work in a pretty diverse county. We have some of the richest communities in the country here, and we have areas that are pretty economically depressed with high crime rates, we have semi-rural areas with hundreds of acres of woods and farms and we have areas that seem more urban than some parts of the major city that we border. We got a bit of everything here.

This particular story took place in a little microcosm of urban blight. It’s a rough, pretty urban little town, full of drugs, crime, homeless encampments, graffiti, decaying homes with boarded up windows, etc.

And the police in this town really are… something.

Overall, as far as cops go (which is a big qualifier,) the cops in my county are pretty good. I’ll go into that a bit more in my other stories if/when I get around to them.

The ones in this town are cut from a different sort of cloth though. Not that they’re necessarily bad, when shit is hitting the fan and there’s been a shooting or some other major incident, they’re exactly the cops you want running the show, they are organized and they get shit done

And they are actually very familiar with their community, it sometimes almost feels like they all personally know each and every person who lives in their town

However, for anything short of a major incident, it feels like they want nothing to do with it and calls end up sitting in pending for ridiculously long times even when they don’t seem to have anything else going on.

So how or why the police actually went out to this petty squabble in a timely manner is a mystery for the ages.

But go they did, and, per the notes they entered into the call, they “explained the concept of street parking to the complainant”

Now, my first instinct here is to say that my caller was an entitled asshole. And she absolutely was. But the other party wasn’t actually that much better. He chose to engage with and antagonize her, and while he did have every right to be there, he could have deescalated the situation at any time by just leaving. Was a parking space really worth wasting the police and my time over? What if she had escalated further and gotten violent?

Playing devil’s advocate, if I somehow didn’t know robotaxis and other autonomous vehicles were a thing, I might think it was a car used for Google Street view or some sort of GIS mapping

Or if I were a paranoid cop I might think they have a bomb strapped to their roof, or cell phone jammers or some other crazy conspiracy bullshit.

I’m no expert on animal color vision, but different animals absolutely see color differently, some have markedly worse color vision than humans, others are even better

And of course we can’t really know for certain how different animals perceive color since we can’t actually see the world through their eyes as it gets processed through their brain, though we can make some pretty educated guesses.

AFAIK, most mammals except for some primates (like humans) and a few other exceptions, have dichromatic vision (have only 2 kinds of cone cells in their eyes instead of 3 like we do) so there’s gonna be some “gaps” in their color vision, and one of the common configurations is similar to red-green colorblindness in humans and would make orange look very similar or indistinguishable from green but the specifics do vary from one species to another.

Other types of animals like many fish, birds, and reptiles actually have 4 types of cones and so can see parts of the spectrum we can’t (though it doesn’t necessarily mean they can or can’t see the same colors we do and then some, where we have receptors for red, blue, and green light, they might have for example, red, blue, blue-green, and green, giving them essentially the same range of color vision we do but with extra sensitivity to the blue/green part of the spectrum)

And then of course you have animals like mantis shrimp with 12 or 16 types of receptors.

When I took my state’s required hunter safety course, one of the instructors was an older dude with grey hair and a ponytail who wouldn’t look out of place at a Dead & Company concert.

To point out the importance of wearing an orange hat during small game seasons, and also to “be sure of your target and what lies beyond it” he pointed out how much that grey hair and ponytail would look a lot like a squirrel if you only caught a glimpse of it through some brush.

Not saying that’s exactly what happened here, the kid doesn’t look like he was the grey ponytail type, but the article shook loose that memory in my head.

EDIT: not that I’m ungrateful, but somehow this is now my highest rated comment on Lemmy, and I’m just curious why this one in particular resonated to well.

Yeah I’ve been at it for about 7 years now, as a very rough ballpark I’ve probably answered well over 100k calls at this point, so plenty of opportunities to pick up some funny calls. This is just kind of a best-of list of funny calls that aren’t too traumatic or personally identifiable. I’ve handled some pretty crazy shit in my time here and I’d generally consider the area I work in to be a pretty boring and safe place, I can’t even imagine some of the stuff some other places deal with.

Ok, actual 911 dispatcher here, I have a few.

First one has actually happened twice, I’ve also heard a couple 911 recordings of this happening elsewhere

Caller is upstairs in their bedroom, and they hear some noises from downstairs. They start freaking out thinking someone is in their house.

I enter the call, stay on the line with them, and after a couple minutes a lightbulb goes off in their head, they crack open the door to hear a little better and say “nevermind, it was my Roomba”

The first time I think the caller’s boyfriend changed the schedule on her, and the second time the robot got caught on something and was making a lot of racket.

–

Next one, I have a child caller, he’s freaking out because he got Kool aid powder in his eye and it stung. Now, that would be understandable if he was by himself, kids don’t know better, but I can hear his dad talking to him in the background. Now I’m sure this kid was freaking out and this was the only way he could get him to calm down but c’mon man, rinse the kids eyes out and tell him to suck it up, don’t make me go through all the motions of asking this kid if he wants an ambulance and getting him connected to poison control and shit, be a parent.

–

Another call with poison control, it’s late at night, and this dude had just went to get himself a midnight snack. His wife had made 2 trays of cabbage rolls (ground beef wrapped in cabbage) she’d cooked one and left the other one raw intending to cook them the next day or freeze them or something. My caller chose poorly, and apparently ate more than one raw cabbage roll before realizing it.

He’s not having any symptoms, except for sort of a general disgust of having eaten raw meat. He’s not sure if he wants an ambulance, I eventually get him over to poison control because I was basically out of other options, and they basically tell him “look dude, you’re either gonna get food poisoning and spend a couple days throwing up and feeling like shit or you’re noto not really anything you can do about it”

Then he starts asking them about if he can go to the doctor to get prophylactic antibiotics or something. Just way blowing this whole thing out of proportion

–

Another one was actually a legitimate call, but took a turn for the stupid somewhere in there. We had a domestic going on, one party was inside the house, the other party was outside, they’re standing at the front door yelling at each other.

We got calls from both halves, I had the people inside someone else had the person outside. I tell my caller to just close the door and wait for the police. They do. All should have been right with the world, parties are separated, I get all the information I needed and disconnect.

Except like 2 minutes later I see we now have EMS going to that address.

Because my idiot opened the door to continue arguing and got pepper sprayed.

–

Caller sees a light flickering outside at a house several doors down from him. Thinks this is very suspicious. Officers go out there and close out the call with this disposition in the notes “Suspicious flickering light located, no criminal activity afoot”

–

We have a homeless person who calls fairly frequently, probably has some mental health issues. She’s pretty harmless, mostly just wants the police to give her rides to different places she’s trying to get to. Sometimes they even do it for her, but of course taking someone to a bank at 2AM isn’t exactly a top priority for police, so sometimes her calls end up sitting in pending for a while. And no matter how many times we tell her that we still have her call and police will be out there when they can, she keeps calling in to ask for an ETA and to make sure they haven’t forgotten about her.

One night she’s getting really impatient, standing around in a parking lot for a couple hours in the middle of the night. At some point she sees someone in a red jacket standing around in the parking lot way at the other end of the shopping center, probably a good 100 yards+ away from her.

He’s not approaching her, waving at her, doing anything at all to acknowledge her presence, but she thinks he’s suspicious and it’s making her nervous.

Lady, you’re also standing around in a parking lot in the middle of the night. Pot, kettle.

Anyway, after a while one of our officers calls her up to tell her to chill with the 911 calls because they’re busy with other shit, and then drops this on us- she apparently mistook a stop sign for a person in a red jacket.

–

We have a disturbance at a fast food restaurant. The usual, customer freaking out and trashing the place and yelling because they fucked up her order or something. Unfortunately, nothing too unusual there.

Except that in addition to the restaurant calling, the customer also called herself, basically to say “I’m trashing the place and causing a scene because they messed up my order.”

So… you’re basically calling to rat on yourself? Do you expect me to give you permission to carry on wrecking the place or something?

–

Got a call one night, this lady is freaking out because there was an animal on her lawn. She was terrified of it, talked all the way around her house to go in the back door because she didn’t want to walk past it.

What kind of animal? She didn’t know. She was too freaked out to even give me a vague description. Was it big or small? What color was it? Did it have fur, feathers, or scales? She couldn’t tell me.

Officers go out, it was a bunny.

–

Getting more into general stuff people frequently call about than specific stories.

We have a few major highways that run through our area. Once in a while for roadwork to clean debris off the highway, etc. they need to create a traffic break- basically get a couple work trucks or state police vehicles out on the highway in a line across all lanes with flashing lights and such to slow down traffic so someone up ahead can do whatever they need to do in the roadway without getting pancaked.

Again, these vehicles are clearly marked with highway maintenance or police logos, flashing lights, reflectors, the whole shebang.

And without fail, someone calls to complain about this.

–

So many calls about deer, raccoons, snakes, foxes. Opossums, coyotes, and all of the other local wildlife just kind of…existing.

–

Fireworks calls on new Year’s, 4th of July, etc. like not even just some jackass shooting off fireworks in their backyard, but the city or a country club or whatever putting on their own display with all of the permits and Safety regulations and all of that. People call and complain about the official municipal fireworks.

Not to mention the people who think they’re gunshots. Protip- gunshots don’t whistle and sizzle. I get calls about “gunshots” all the time where I can hear them in the background making very un-gunshot like noises.

–

No, I don’t know when your power is gonna be back on after the bad storm we just had. The utility companies have already been notified, it’s on them. Do you think the cops can just arrest or shoot the downed wires to get your power back on?

–

Confused old people who just want to know what time it is.

I think Adam Savage has actually gone into this a bit on his YouTube channel, dude really likes space suits and have a lot of videos about them so I’m not even going to try to find which specific video it was

Back well before I was born, my mother and her family made a few trips to visit relatives in Poland.

Frankly, she probably has enough material about those trips that she could write a book, or at very least a couple of solid blog posts about those trips, with the cold war in full swing and being able to compare and contrast their life in America with that behind the iron curtain.

But among the things that affected her most deeply from those trips was visiting Auschwitz.

She never exactly sat me and my sister down to give us a Holocaust talk or anything like that, but we got little bits and pieces of information dropped on us from time to time.

I don’t think this was fully intentional on her part but whenever she talked about it, she was always a little light on context. The “where” was obviously Poland, at least for the camp she visited. Never really went into when it all happened, again it was obviously somewhere in the past, but no mention of WWII, it could have been in the recent past just before so visited, it could have been 200 years ago.

And most importantly, no mention of the who or why. No mention of Germans, Nazis, Jews, or any of the other people involved. It was just people who did horrible things to other people. As far as I know it could’ve been ethnic Poles like myself who did it to other poles just because they could.

So without outright saying it, it very much sold the “it could happen here” idea and the kinds of terrible things people are capable of doing to other people.

That is a sidetrak swivel metal plate for attaching a secondary monitor

I know nothing more than that, I just ran it through Google lens and it came right up (it can be hit or miss but it’s usually pretty good at recognizing anything with a logo on it.) I’d imagine it’s probably just stuck on with some heavy duty double stick tape or similar and could be safely scraped off or maybe loosened up with some rubbing alcohol or something, also pretty sure it’s just literally a metal plate that a magnet can stick to.

That’s not even remotely what the article is

This sub is for real headlines that sound like something out of the onion, not your made up fiction

No because I’m married and my wife wouldn’t like that.

More seriously, It’s not a hard no, but I lean towards probably not, it would probably depend the specifics of their identity and the state of any medical transition.

In general, I’d tend to call myself a straight cis man. If I think long and hard about it, I could make an argument that I’m perhaps something along the lines of a non-binary person with a penis, who just happens to present in a traditionally “masculine” fashion in basically every way, and who is attracted to people with vaginas who present in at least a somewhat feminine way.

That’s a fucking mouthful though, and I’m just not gonna get into the weeds about that in casual conversation.

The fact that I’m a man isn’t really something that’s particularly important to me, I just kind of think of myself as a person. If somehow someone misgendered me it wouldn’t bother me in the slightest (though it may get a chuckle because I’m a bald, hairy dude with a big busty beard and fairly deep voice, not exactly the picture of femininity)

And while I quite enjoy having a penis, I don’t feel as though I’d be particularly bothered by having a vagina instead (although you can miss me with that period nonsense, but I think most vagina-havers would agree on that point) and I’d otherwise live my life the same way.

And how “feminine” a theoretical partner would need to be actually gets a lot of leeway. I can find people pretty far into the tomboy/androgynous/butch/etc end of the spectrum attractive, maybe even preferably to the extreme “girly” end of the spectrum. There’s a line there where they’d be too “masculine” for my tastes, but it’s a fuzzy one.

And for me, a certain amount of physical attraction in a partner is important. It’s a pretty wide spectrum that I’m able to find attractive, but there are limits, and I have preferences and dislikes to varying degrees.

And one of those strongest preferences is that my partner have a vagina. I am just not attracted to people with a penis.

If we want to count it under the trans umbrella, I don’t think that me dating a non-binary person with a vagina would be out of the question.

Maybe even a FTM femboy type who hasn’t had or want bottom surgery.

MTF, which I think is more in the spirit of this question, is a bit murkier though. If they don’t intend to get bottom surgery I think that’s a pretty hard no. And even if they have or intend to I can’t say that I’ve ever seen, let alone touched, a surgically-created vagina, so I don’t know if they’d do it for me the same way as a natural one.

The best comparison I do have is that I generally consider myself to be a boob-guy, and while it’s not an outright disqualifier, fake boobs don’t usually do it for me in quite the same way as real ones, but some are better than others, and while I tend to like big boobs, I have nothing against small ones, and a mastectomy isn’t a deal-breaker for me either.

So I suspect that with bottom surgery, it’s a firm “maybe”

As for a trans partner who has not yet but intends to get that surgery, I guess it kind of depends on the timeline. I don’t really want to have sex with someone with a penis and a sexless relationship for me would have a limited lifespan.

All of that said, regardless of whether I’d date them or not doesn’t change how I’d view their identity. There’s plenty of women out there I wouldn’t date for any number of reasons, but that doesn’t mean I see them as any less of a woman.

Again, it varies, but a lot of places have moved to a central dispatch model where basically everything, emergency and non-emergency, is going through the same dispatch center in one way or another.

In the area I work in, especially after hours and over the weekend, a lot of stations aren’t staffed and everything redirects to us anyway, and even if you do reach someone at the station, often they’re either going to transfer you to us at central dispatch, or take down the information and call us themselves after they hang up with you. They’re not able or not supposed to dispatch much of anything from the station directly.

Technically those calls go behind 911 calls in our queue than calls on actual 911 lines, but luckily in my area our staffing and call volume are at a level where that’s almost never a factor and pretty much all calls are answered immediately.

So most of us here are of the opinion that people are better off just calling 911 for anything except for basic administrative things that need to be handled by the office at the local station, basically everything else needs to go through us so you might as well cut out the middle-man and go to us directly. And worst-case scenario we can’t help you and we’ll tell you who to call instead (you really need to be a major nuisance before anyone even begins to think about trying to get you in trouble for misusing 911 for a non-emergency, none of us want the paperwork or to have to go to court or anything else that would have to go with that.

Again, the situation varies a lot from place-to-place, non-emergency lines may be more useful in other areas, call volumes and staffing levels may be worse and you may not want to tie up the 911 lines, etc. so it pays to be aware of the situation in your local area.

Again, this all varies, but that’s pretty much how things seem to work everywhere within a couple hours of where I work.

It’s going to vary a bit by jurisdiction, everywhere handles things a little differently

The coroner’s office should have an office number and you can certainly try calling that. It may or may not be staffed overnight or over the weekend and they’ll have some sort of on-call procedures in place (in my county, when they don’t have anyone in the office, their phones actually come through to us at the dispatch center to have the on-call coroner paged. Generally speaking we don’t do that for the general public, just for police, hospitals, etc.)

Whatever funeral home you intend to use may also be able to handle it.

But in general, just call 911. I won’t lie, a lot of what happens after that kind of happens in a black box from my perspective, I take the call, hang up and police/fire/EMS go out and do their thing and I get very little follow-up from there. But they have the experience with this kind of thing, they know what steps to take from there.

I also get a decent amount of calls where my callers are kind of clueless about what’s going on, it’s happened that they tell me the patient is conscious and alert only for the field units to report that they are in fact stiff and cold to the touch and an obvious class 5, and the opposite way around where they’re sure someone is dead and when they get out there the person is in fact up and talking and seems to be in perfect health, and of course everything and anything in-between. So it never hurts to have someone go out there to make sure things are actually as they seem. And of course we want to double check to make sure there wasn’t anything suspicious about the death as well.

I remember I had a caller one time who had been transferred to us from a nearby county where she was located. She told me her father had just died and she was having trouble getting ahold of her relatives in our county to let them know so she wanted us to go try to make contact with them for her (this would be about a priority 4 BTW, emergency and non-emergency calls all get handled through our central dispatch here)

Of course she didn’t have her relatives addresses, good phone numbers or much of anything for us to actually help us make contact with her relatives. But I was trying my best trying to help her, asking a lot of questions trying to figure things out trying to get her to describe where they live etc.

But the more I’m talking to her, things just seem kind of off, so I ask her when exactly her dad died

It was like literally right before the call, she was still sitting around in the home with the body and the first thing she thought to do about it was call her relatives that she apparently barely spoke to anyway.

Which, fine, I get wanting to let your relatives know about a death in the family, and different families and cultures have their own funeral practices and such, but you probably want to do something about the corpse in your living room first.

So I got her back over with the dispatch for her county, both so they can do whatever they need to about notifying the coroner and whatever other policies they have in place and because her local police would probably be better able to run the information through their system to find contact info for the relatives than I would be over the phone with her.

I work in 911 dispatch, at my agency our calls are assigned a priority from 1-5, 1 being the most severe, 5 the least

1 and 2 are considered high priority, you’re getting all the lights and sirens and everything, 3-5 are low, on the police end of thing a priority 5 is pretty much just us giving information to them, not something they actually need to do anything about, maybe they need to drive by and check on something, and maybe make a call afterwards to to public works or something to have them deal with an exceptionally bad pothole.

On the EMS side of things what that looks like is

1- pretty much what you expect, cardiac arrest, shootings, choking, traumatic amputations, etc.

2- honestly most of the EMS calls we get are a class 2. Things people need to go to the hospital with some urgency, but aren’t in immediate danger of expiring on the way there.

3- these are sort of the “you really called 911 about this?” calls. Like, sure, you should probably get this checked out, but you probably could have driven yourself or gotten a friend to take you to an urgent care, it probably could have waited a few hours, and the doctors probably just gonna tell you to take some Tylenol and take it easy for a few days.

4- this is basically psych patients. Physically there’s nothing wrong with them, they’re just mentally unwell

Which brings us to the point of this rant: class 5- obviously dead people. They can’t get any deader, so no real rush. They basically just need someone with some medical training to go out there and go “yep, that’s a corpse” and maybe check up on the family member who’s having a panic attack over it. Doesn’t get much more stable than that.

As a result of this “Class 5” has also entered our jargon as shorthanded for a dead person. So much so that some of our local news stations have picked up on it, if it’s a slow news day and they’re listening to the scanner fishing for a story and they hear “class 5” they might get a little nosey about it (I have a friend who worked for one who told me that after I started working here)

Totally anecdotal, but I work in 911 dispatch, so I have a bit of insight on people involving themselves in emergencies

It’s really hit or miss.

Fires, gunshots, medical emergencies, fights, things blowing up, car accidents, noise complaints, aircraft crashes, I’ve probably taken a call about it, and those calls have come in from the person involved, a neighbor , a random passerby, their grandmother who lives in another state, or some random follower on tiktok.

And sometimes we get a hundred calls about the same thing. There are times I can just about answer the phone with “911, if you’re calling about the [thing] in [place] we’re already aware, help is on the way.” And be right about 90% of the time while that thing is going on. (To be clear I don’t do that, because almost every time I crack a joke about my job or vent about stupid shit our callers do, some self-righteous dipshit comes at me with a whole “if that’s how you talk to your callers maybe you’re not cut out for this job” spiel as if no one ever vents about the idiots they have to deal with at work.)

And there are other times where we get exactly one call about something serious happening in a very public place and we’re left wondering if it was a prank call until our police/fire/EMS get out there and confirm that yes, everything is exactly as described or even worse, it’s a total shit-show and all hell’s breaking loose.

Sometimes it seems like a whole town is turning out to help people with a minor fender-bender, and sometimes hundreds of people are driving right by an overturned vehicle.

Usually, of course, it’s somewhere in-between. We got a handful of calls about something but our phones aren’t ringing off the hook about it.

Moral of my rant is, a lot of times people will step in to help or at least call 911 in an emergency, but you can’t always count on that. The idea of the bystander effect is exaggerated and misinterpreted, but the core takeaway about it is solid. You can’t always take it for granted that someone else is going to do something to help, so if you find yourself in a position where you can be the one who helps, you should do so.

I think this is going to depend a lot on the sort of environment you’re hiking in

For me, one of the big issues with jeans is that they don’t dry out easily, if there’s any chance you’re going to get wet or sweat a lot, they’re a very bad choice. In some cases I’d even consider it to be a valid safety issue if for example the temperatures are going to drop and damp clothes are going to put you at risk of hypothermia

Or in hotter, humid climates, they won’t breathe well, meaning your sweat won’t be able to evaporate which is how your body keeps cool (already enough of an issue when the humidity is high) on top of jeans already being kind of hot on their own

Also chafing, potentially fungal issues, etc.

And if you’re doing sort of a more technical hike where you really need your full range of movement to climb over things, jeans may be a little stiff for that (although arguably a worthwhile tradeoff for them being more abrasion-resistant)

And if you’re doing overnight backpacking, they’re absolutely too heavy to be worth it in my opinion.

But I can think of plenty of hikes I’ve done where jeans would have been an adequate, maybe even preferred sort of pants, like if it’s a day hike, the weather is cooler, dry, and maybe somewhere with a lot of rocks and thorns.

This kind of feels like a rule that was instituted because too many inexperienced hikers showed up in jeans when they were a very bad choice for the conditions and had a bad time because of it, so instead of trying to judge it on a case-by-case basis weighing experience levels, everyone’s personal comfort, the weather and trail conditions, etc. for each hike, it was a lot easier to just say “no jeans” so that everyone could just show up and hike instead of having to play wardrobe police every time they met up (and maybe to hedge their bets against getting sued if someone ended up with hypothermia or heat stroke or whatever from wearing jeans when “no one warned them not to”)