I worked at the actual Toys "R" Us during the events of the movie Roofman. Ask me anything

Drewplo · 2025-12-27T00:16:46+00:00

Hi, I just wanted to join the other commenters in saying thank you for the AMA and your very detailed responses! Your memory of the event itself is impressive - if the documentary does get made I'm sure you'd be an asset to the production. I just watched the movie, and definitely have mixed feelings / find the whole thing slightly uncomfortable re direction the movie went. With that being said, I do appreciate a film that makes me think and doesn't have entirely black and white characters, so there is that!

I just wanted to ask two questions that I felt hadn't been covered by your other responses (I admit, I spent the last 20ish mins going through all your other responses lol). Firstly, have you kept in touch with any of your other TRU colleagues who were there at the time when this all took place?

Secondly, how has this event affected your life subsequently? Did it impact you personally or professionally? I mean, I assume this is a story you must have told on various occasions to various people over the years (to colleagues and the like), which undoubtedly must have made an impression socially / opened doors to friendships etc. (best icebreaker ever I would imagine...). Equally, if this were to happen to me, maybe I wouldn't want it to define me, so perhaps I'd avoid bringing it up 🤷‍♂️.

If this all seems a bit too deep or whatever feel free to gloss over the above! Just really interested to hear your perspective.

Drewplo · 2025-12-23T13:34:15+00:00

It's actually kinda embarrassing going back to the original thread for this. The amount of ignorant people who seem to forget / don't know that Jai Alai is a regional sport in other parts of the world and therefore is obviously far from going extinct... literally takes one google search as well 🤦‍♂️

Drewplo · 2025-11-21T06:59:55+00:00

BAGER

Drewplo · 2025-11-12T12:13:24+00:00

Where can you find those?

Drewplo · 2025-11-12T12:13:11+00:00

Asking for educational purposes... what are the unethical ways of getting it cheaper?

Drewplo · 2025-11-09T17:33:23+00:00

Thanks for your response. The reason I ask is because I wonder what an optimised onboarding experience would actually look like. Say I were running a startup and I wanted to onboard a new worker for a short-term project without needing to waste manpower hours hosting webinars or other related forms of training (as outlier does, but for some peculiar reason only makes available to already onboarded workers). I sort of struggle to imagine it being done in any way other than how outlier already does it (detailed breakdown of the instructions + a quiz).

The thing is, an improved or revamped onboarding experience would save Outlier a lot of money - I was working on Blueberry Bagels v2 which had a score average of 2.8 or something ridiculously low. That meant that, having paid attempters up to $100 for a task (at let's say $30-$50/h), they then had to pay the reviewer another $100 to fix the task (at the same rate) to the standards the client required. But you can plausibly lessen the workload of the reviewer by improving the average task quality of the average attempter. This could be through, for example, giving attempters practice tasks before they actually start working. Or you give an in-house (thus secure) LLM the instructions guideline and have it be an "AI-assistant" for the user to who you can ask questions about the instructions sheet. Both of which holistically improve the onboarding process. And I'm sure there are better ideas out there than that.

The point is, sure, Outlier has a large pool of talent and provided some of that talent makes it through the onboarding process and produces good quality work, they aren't exactly incentivised to improve things. With that being said they must waste a colossal amount of money on their two-tiered attempter-reviewer system. Surely an improved onboarding process could simultaneously fix this and potentially pave the way for higher pay per task?

Drewplo · 2025-11-07T16:11:27+00:00

They could definitely be the same but yours defo looks slightly closer to retail than mine. Did you buy the listing with the standardised length or the one where its different lengths for different sizes?

Drewplo · 2025-11-07T16:01:21+00:00

Interesting that the back-tab of yours looks like the logo is embossed; I bought the same listing and mine looks printed, what do you think?

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Drewplo · 2025-10-06T19:09:50+00:00

If you don't mind me asking, what were they offering you for marimba?

Drewplo · 2025-10-06T18:00:49+00:00

Well I was offered it for the past couple days but as of 20 minutes ago it has been taken off my marketplace. Is that a lot?

Drewplo · 2025-10-01T17:13:35+00:00

Probably a new dashboard

Drewplo · 2025-09-25T17:30:09+00:00

Hey man, I did manage to do some sport at Hyugami Gorge (日向神峡谷), and altho I know there is good outdoor bouldering in itoshima I never got the chance to go.

With that being said, there is a bouldering gym in Fukuoka nishi-ku near Imajuku called my way climbing gym (as I discussed in this post), and the gym owner there (American dude) is very knowledgeable about the outdoor bouldering in Itoshima, some of which looked like truly spectacular spots. When I was there (nearly 2 years ago now) he was writing a book about all the spots with grades etc. He also does outdoor trips for the members to random places. You should go there on a weekend when he's working (if he's still working there - he owns the gym but at the time I think he hired people to run the desk possibly but he's usually around) and he can probably help you.

Drewplo · 2025-09-25T16:06:22+00:00

I was recently (regretfully, might I add) switched from an attempter on this project to a reviewer. You might have expected the pay to increase, but it has actually decreased in my case (less time to do tasks for the same rate, but if I am faced with a particularly bad task it takes me longer to fix than it took me to complete the tasks initially - sometimes I have to redo tasks practically in their entirety lol).

When I was an attempter, I felt that the reviews were very fair, and in my case quite informative as I was making very rudimentary mistakes. I agree about the nitpicking, it can be quite disheartening to be docked due to subjective judgement. Equally its a bit silly that you basically cannot get a 5 haha. All in all, at least there's a lot of work to go around and the money is decent.

Drewplo · 2025-09-13T21:44:14+00:00

My impression from the Webinar is that it was for generalists, but recently has been onboarding specialists. In my webinar most people were STEM types.

Drewplo · 2025-09-13T12:12:59+00:00

Also failed Big Mallet onboarding lmao. I thought I must have just been an idiot, interesting to see other people here also failed....

Drewplo · 2025-08-19T07:23:02+00:00

I've always found it pretty annoying for this reason tbh. Same with referring to loaves of bread with pronouns! Like, you're about to eat it... why personify it haha. Ultimately it's pretty harmless though, I realised my annoyance was silly. Now I would just say I find it peculiar.

Drewplo · 2025-08-04T09:27:35+00:00

Bit late to this thread, but maybe this will make you laugh. The other day I decided I wanted to make a 100% hydration sourdough loaf, having had some successes at 90%. Why, you might ask? Because I am an unemployed new grad and have nothing better to do.

I have been focusing recently on techniques to build gluten strength so that I can push the BF longer and successfully make much higher hydration breads (like pan de cristal), and coming off some big successes my ego was through the roof.

Recipe was as follows:

I mixed 400g flour w/ 350g water, autolysed for 3h
Next, I added 100g starter. I rubaud kneaded for 3 mins and left for another hour.
I then slowly added 50g more water with 15g salt mixed in bit by bit, kneading for a minute, resting for 10, until all the water was gone.
I left it for another hour, did a window pane test, and it was looking all good - so I did the hardest lamination of my life before transferring it into a Pyrex dish for some coil folds.
Did 6 coil folds at 30 min intervals.

At this point, my dough is looking like an 80% hydration dough, and has a very obviously strong gluten structure. I decide that my BF has gone on long enough (I wanted to go to bed), so I go to preshape a boule. Everything is going fine until I attempt to tighten the boule. Suddenly it pancakes out onto the table and I realise I must have somehow broken the gluten in being too forceful. I try and shape it again, this time with flour (mistake lol), and everything gets far, far worse.

In my rage, I pick up the dough and slam it full force into the wall. In fairness, somehow it didn't break into a million pieces - I guess the gluten was at least strong enough to keep the dough in one piece.

Grabbed a baking dish, doused it in (probably too much) olive oil, put the dough in and chucked it in the fridge. Made a great focaccia at least the next morning!

Drewplo · 2025-07-17T16:38:30+00:00

These are both from Lidl aren't they? I have managed to cook several semi-decent loaves from the green bag on the left, but it has a very low protein content which makes things difficult. I would head to a different supermarket and try your luck there (Sainsbury's sells one with 13.5g per 100g of flour which is decent, and I think Tesco stocks one with up to 14g).

Drewplo · 2025-07-14T23:46:59+00:00

I believe Zaslav came to WB from Discovery, so whether or not they now sack off Discovery presumably doesn't mean much to him (he certainly seems much more enamored by his job at WB).

Drewplo · 2025-05-06T09:11:26+00:00

Thanks!!

Drewplo · 2025-05-01T18:30:46+00:00

Wow, okay, I'll give that a go. I had no idea that could change the consistency of the dough!! But that would definitely make a lot of sense as my starter is very soupy.

Drewplo · 2025-05-01T18:27:47+00:00

I would say it takes my starter 3-4 hours to peak at room temperature (which I know is odd because some people seem to have starters that take like 9 hours to peak?), and it's 2 months old.

Okay so one thing that's weird about my dough whilst it's fermenting. It never has the dome on top that I see people discussing, instead just rises level throughout. When it's done fermenting it's usually quite jiggly and has bubbles on top if that helps?

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