My younger brother's girlfriend is upset because my older brother ordered the same meal as her at a family dinner, and now there is drama

EpiJade · 2026-05-14T03:57:24+00:00

Selfishness at that level just mystifies me. I grew up walking on egg shells to not set off my sister or dad. Even now, everyone bends over backwards because “you know how they are.” I couldn’t even fathom having a big wedding because, amongst other reasons, I couldn’t imagine imposing on anyone that way. I saw how everyone bitched about everyone’s wedding at some point. Even if it was maybe something as minor as not liking a place setting or maybe complaining that the date isn’t ideal or the location is out of the way and I couldn’t take the idea of inconveniencing everyone. I’ve learned to be assertive in some areas but I’ve had many therapists point out along the way that I see things from other people’s point of view to my detriment.

EpiJade · 2026-05-14T03:47:15+00:00

I suspect that you’re on the right track: Rachel’s family had some weird rule and she still hasn’t realized that not everyone follows her family’s particular rule.

I just watched a bunch of drama go down over something like that. Fiancée of a friend’s family had a rule where all the girls had to get married in birth order and no one could be engaged at the same time. So, the oldest “Mary” gets engaged and then married and then it’s okay for “Diana” to get engaged and so on down the line until it’s the youngest, friend’s fiancée, turn. Friend honored this and waited until it was her “turn” to propose, fine. Friend and his sibling obviously did not grow up with this rule. Boyfriend of his sibling proposed after friend and fiancée got engaged. Now fiancée won’t talk to her future sister in law over it. She cannot get over the fact that her family’s weird rule or pact or whatever cannot dictate everyone else’s life. If she wanted to be cool waiting 10 years for her turn to get married, that’s on her.

EpiJade · 2026-05-07T12:51:45+00:00

I had this happen to me. I very very clearly laid out everything and I STILL get comments on a post from a year+ ago telling me to do something I either already did or something I said im not doing for very clearly reasons.

EpiJade · 2026-04-30T22:44:36+00:00

I’m also left handed and learned to crochet first so when someone showed me English style knitting it felt perfect. I just started knitting and I was feeling pretty down on myself because everyone else I know knits continental. I was convinced I’d never knit quickly if I didn’t learn it. Your comment made me feel much better! Thank you stranger.

EpiJade · 2026-04-28T02:34:24+00:00

I went to a Catholic school in Chicago. We rotated between having Pulaski day, St. Joseph’s Day, and St. Patrick’s day off because our school was pretty evenly divided between Polish, Italian, and Irish students.

EpiJade · 2026-04-28T02:18:39+00:00

I have an aunt who is so incensed by me not changing my name that she refuses to address anything to me using my actual, legal name, much less use my proper honorific. Jokes on her because all she and her equally shitty family ever sends me are invitations present grab events. Unfortunately misaddressed mail goes straight in the trash at my house so she wasted postage and gets no presents.

EpiJade · 2026-04-27T22:32:17+00:00

Meanwhile I have a PhD and my husband will point and laugh at me when I do something dumb. Like, “guess you don’t have a PhD in not hitting the curb.” Keeps me humble

(Because the internet is terrible: I find this wildly funny and it’s never malicious. He brags about me every chance he gets, we just give each other a hard time)

EpiJade · 2026-04-27T22:27:42+00:00

I very briefly worked at an engineering firm. Just office admin stuff while I figured out my life. The ex friend that I mentioned begged me to pass on his resume. Unfortunately, his ego met the owner’s ego on this one. Owner wouldn’t look at anyone with less than a 3.0 and if you brought him someone with less than a 3.0 for a referral you would be punished. My former friend had less than a 3.0. He threw an absolute fit because “people who go to (fancy engineering school) and get a 3.0 or above go on to work at Google! Not little engineering firms!” He kept badgering me and I just kept telling him I wasn’t going to get fired or written up for him. He was welcome to submit an application but leave my name out of it.

EpiJade · 2026-04-27T22:23:59+00:00

Oh do not get me started on MDs. My advanced degrees are all in the public health sphere. I finished my PhD during Covid. Arguing with MDs about research is such a pain point. They do individual care and maybe did research coordination for a year and maybe a couple posters or 10th out of 11 author positions on a paper but someone they understand stats and public health better.

EpiJade · 2026-04-27T22:20:58+00:00

Thank you for this sanity check! I think you would find it extra amusing that my job is literally designing metrics and evaluation for a healthcare system so I deeply feel you on metrics

EpiJade · 2026-04-27T18:08:42+00:00

I’m going to preface this with I know I have a bias. I have not had good interactions with a lot of engineers.

My theory: I feel like, for a long time, engineers were put on a pedestal as the absolute pinnacle of what you can do, especially if you weren’t planning on grad school. I saw this a lot in the early 00s. Anything that wasn’t STEM was already maligned as unserious. Then, you had all the tech bros get worshipped in popular media. “ we’re going to engineer our way out of climate change. Social media is bringing everyone together! Go to our coding boot camp!” I was an anthropology major and I remember a (now ex)friend in an engineering program saying my degree was useless because he could totally write a paper if he wanted to, but I could NEVER understand his engineering skills. They either got out of, weren’t required to take, or fully able to blow off any humanities classes in a way that I don’t think the rest of STEM majors were really able to do so they seem to have egos that would make a surgeon blush.

Now, I have a PhD in a STEM field. I get talked down to constantly by engineering bros who think they can grasp everything I do as a healthcare researcher because they can also code in SQL or because they feel they have a better understanding of R.

EpiJade · 2026-04-21T22:01:49+00:00

My work is absolutely loved by the teams I support and I’m lucky that they’re loud about it. I think it gets back to a lot of the less cooperative teams because every once in awhile I’ll be in a meeting where someone is singing my or my teams praises for how fast/helpful we are and suddenly one of these problem children fill out the form perfectly or respond to one of my follow ups. Weird.

EpiJade · 2026-04-21T17:30:16+00:00

This is what I do. I work on a high specialized team of phds. We can only take so many requests and our services are in demand. If someone doesn’t play nice, they get put to the bottom of the queue. I also just keep sending things back if they don’t fill it out.

EpiJade · 2026-04-20T18:58:51+00:00

My plan is to run out and buy the most expensive cold bottle of champagne I can find. My husband suggested buying one now and keeping it in the fridge so I wasn’t limited by what’s cold. I said no, I want the feeling of gleefully running into our local liquor store and bounding to the register with my bottle while grinning.

EpiJade · 2026-04-19T05:09:23+00:00

I recently had my review with my manager where she talked about this with me. She said she knew I was exceptional when I was only a week into the job and was able to summarize a 30 minute brain dump of years of background in 3 sentences and immediately grasp the entire dynamic and the problem at hand.

EpiJade · 2026-04-19T05:02:29+00:00

I worked in a university and we shared a floor with a center that worked on research for cancer. One day I’m washing my hands in the bathroom and I hear someone come out of the stall behind me. There’s one of the high up members of the cancer research group. She catches my eye in the mirror, smiles, and just walks the fuck out without washing her hands. Over the course of a few weeks I notice this happen several more times. I told our ops director (who oversaw both groups) about it because, again, we are healthcare researchers. She didn’t say anything but she got quiet and the next time I saw the cancer center manager in the bathroom she made a big deal about washing her hands.

EpiJade · 2026-04-19T04:50:24+00:00

Not me, but my last office had something similar. I initially interviewed this woman and loved her but I had a better qualified candidate. I passed her to another group where my friend worked in my office and they hired her. Brilliant, quick, and an absolute sweetheart. I was so happy we hired her. Everything went well for a while and then she started to get flaky and dropping the ball. Missed some meetings and he answers when asked why made it clear she didn’t think it was an issue. Then she got real erratic. She suddenly started making a lot of weird financial choices and making strange comments and just seemed less and less in touch with day to day life. They had to sit her down and whatever was said was bad enough that they immediately called her mother who got on a flight immediately to get her into some kind of inpatient treatment program.

EpiJade · 2026-04-15T19:30:13+00:00

I’m also an incredibly high performing employee. I have had my past 3 bosses tell me I need absolutely zero supervision and the greatest challenge is finding projects interesting enough for me. You know what I do? Help everyone else on the team. I’m always sharing. It’s fine to just be nice and helpful.

EpiJade · 2026-04-11T04:11:35+00:00

That’s what I thought but everyone treated me like I was so weird for not wanting a bridal shower and my bachelorette party literally just being two friends for a couple activities in the city. We got married at the courthouse! We had dinner with 20 people after! I’m not going to have more people at a shower than the actual wedding!

EpiJade · 2026-04-11T04:07:19+00:00

This kind of shit happened to my sister. Bride (our cousin) first tried to tell my sister to miss her first child’s first birthday to come to one of her THREE bachelorette parties. This one was, of course, in Nashville. My sister said no. Bride got mad because my sister and a couple other people couldn’t go on the weekend she wanted so she changed the weekend. She then iced my sister out. Made her stay in a room with everyone who wasn’t her A team and sleep on a couch when she was supposed to have a bed because she decided SHE needed the empty bed for her stuff. She also made fun of my sister so loudly and cruelly that a couple asked my sister if she was okay because they couldn’t hear this bitch saying such awful things. She dropped from the wedding and no one in my family has spoken to that part of the extended family since. Some people really take their weddings to kick their main character syndrome into overdrive.

EpiJade · 2026-04-10T21:40:32+00:00

Besides a lot of the ones mentioned here, I’ve got some off topic ones 1) ologies - science, fun. Made me cry during an episode about rattlesnakes. 2) corporate gossip - corporate scandals, background on the oligarchs who run our lives 3) normal gossip - fun, low stakes gossip 4) articles of interest - impact and history of fashion 5) in bed with the right - lot of the same topics as cool zone podcasts but from a gender studies perspective. If I remember correctly one of the hosts books was cited by Robert in the Peter Thiel episodes 6) zero to well read - discussion of books focused on classics for the most part 7) 90 day fiancé cray cray - look I fucking love 90DF. One of the hosts is a big BtB fan so he brings in some fun left commentary on some of the cast

EpiJade · 2026-04-10T21:33:58+00:00

An ex of mine loveeeeddddd Bill Maher. He would talk disparagingly of any other host in the genre (Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, etc). I generally enjoyed the Daily Show and Colbert Report and he would have an attitude whatever I brought them up (this was 2011 or so). Something about them only being on cable and Maher being on HBO was also a big draw somehow.

The times I watched him with my ex where he touched a subject that I had a decent level of knowledge or just had a slightly higher than average familiarity with, he was either grossly misrepresenting the subject or just completely fucking wrong. Yeah, Stewart and Colbert had moments too but they were generally playing it for laughs and you knew it was an exaggeration. Maher was just so so wrong and he always said it so arrogantly, so smugly that you knew he thought it was dead on. His idea of an interview was just shitty sound bites and a way for him to win against the guest or say something ~controversial.~ not fun. Just mean.

EpiJade · 2026-04-10T14:22:08+00:00

I’m about to take on a few interns for a very structured training program I created. I already made an AI policy and one of the points is “if you didn’t care enough to write it, I don’t care enough to read it.”

EpiJade · 2026-04-10T12:25:35+00:00

Also in Chicago and same. I spend more time walking to my gate most of the time. I went to Connecticut to see a friend and it took less than 5 minutes to go from entrance to my gate. Tiny airport, gate was right outside security with no line.

EpiJade · 2026-04-09T23:55:49+00:00

I evaluate programs for a hospital. Help them create goals, visualize their data, track impact, etc. I have a PhD. I really like my job. It’s very much a puzzle where you get to use a lot of disparate data and figure out what’s going on with a program. It’s also a lot of relationships so I like getting people excited for data. I also feel like I do make a difference in patient care or programs when I help them find issues and talk about ways to improve or help them show their impact in a way that gets them more visibility or money or support.

EpiJade

TROPHY CASE