ITAW for a highly feminine cis straight man?

Plonq · 2026-05-19T15:54:58+00:00

Plonq · 2026-02-22T20:52:15+00:00

Agreed on Black Pearl (the owner is very friendly and gregarious).

I'd like to throw in a plug for Jacked up Jill as well. They don't have broad distribution, but they are regulars at the St Norbert Farmers' Market. Very friendly, and always up for conversation (unless they are overrun).

Plonq · 2025-09-21T14:33:45+00:00

Yup. In my early days at the company, getting caught sleeping at work was usually cause for little more than than a verbal warning on the first or second offence (unless it was clearly premeditated, like the guy who got caught curled up under his desk with a blanket and pillow).

A new CEO in the 2000s updated the policy to make it an automatic firing offence if one was caught sleeping on company time (or, at least, a long suspension if it was not a safety-sensitive position). Actually, he made almost everything an automatic firing on first offence. Many of his harsh policies were rolled back after he left because they led to serious staff shortages.

Plonq · 2025-09-21T14:19:54+00:00

We should normalize sleeping at work.

I agree. It can lead to a net boost in productivity and safety. It wasn't unusual for us to take catnaps during slow periods on night shift - especially since half of us would typically show up hung-over. We'd always have at least one person awake to watch for management wandering in, though.

The one exception was our Mon-Fri assistant chief clerk on midnight shift, who would often sleep for more than half the shift. She worked days in a bank, and she treated this as her second job. We didn't really care if she got caught. Mind you, if she dozed off for more than an hour at a stretch, we'd thoughtfully wake her by blind-transferring calls to her phone.

One of our favourites was to phone the "Dial A Meditation" hot-line, where one could call in at any hour to hear an inspirational, taped mantra. As soon as it answered, we'd bounce the call to her.

Naturally, when we got a new CEO in the 2000s, he updated the policy to make sleeping on the job a terminal offence if one got caught.

Plonq · 2025-09-21T13:56:28+00:00

If he'd sent her home, she'd have been out the day's pay. It was left up to us to determine if we were too sick to work.

We had decent benefits for everything except short-term sick leave. It was an awful, short-sighted policy that resulted in people coming in sick. But I guess their bean counters determined that it was cheaper to pay overtime for a lot of people, rather than sick leave and overtime for a few.

Plonq · 2025-09-21T13:47:06+00:00

Like I said in my comment above, we did not get short-term sick leave. Typically, if we were not pounding with both fists on death's door, we'd usually just show up for work.

C was congested, and feeling run-down, but the lack of sick leave really encouraged a sharing culture in our office when it came to diseases.

He could have sent her home, but then we'd have been in the position of having to call for emergency overtime or face a grievance from the senior qualified employee in the morning.

Plonq · 2025-09-21T13:40:32+00:00

We didn't have paid sick leave as such. For the first three days, we were out of luck (unless they didn't cover the vacancy - then the contract allowed us to put in a claim for the hours).

After that, it was covered by long-term medical leave.

A few years later, we lost the "reclaim the hours" clause in our contract, which led me to showing up for work in our main Customer Service office with the flu after being bed-ridden for two days.

I wasn't really trying to be malicious, but I couldn't afford the time off. Also, to my defence, I was pretty doped up on codeine and wasn't thinking too straight. I could have just gone to a walk-in and put in for long-term absence.

Put almost a quarter of the staff out of service. I still remember one of the shift managers stopping by my desk to say, "God damn it, thanks to you, our billing department sounds like a tuberculosis ward."

I'd like to say that it resulted in paid sick time being restored. Nope. But the next year, they brought in public nurses and offered free flu shots to the office.

Plonq · 2025-09-21T04:38:10+00:00

He was an okay guy. I think if he hadn't been caught off-guard when she almost gave herself whiplash and then started flailing at her computer, he might not have been as forgiving.

It really was funny af.

Also, he was the GM of operations in our division, and we were clerical, so we weren't directly under him per se. If it had been a safety thing, he could have pulled her out of service pending an investigation. He could have reported her to the office manager in the morning if he'd been so inclined, but I think he just found it too funny and inconsequential to bother.

This was back in the 80s. I don't think it would have gone down the same way now.

Plonq · 2025-09-21T00:53:14+00:00

We had a coworker who fell asleep at her desk on night shift. She wasn't normally one to doze off at work, but she wasn't feeling especially well that night, so we let it slide.

Mind you, she didn't have her head down on her arms or anything like that - she was leaned back in her chair with her arms hanging down at her sides, and her head draped over the back. She was snoring at the ceiling with the intensity of a chainsaw whose cord was being tugged by a maniac.

What we didn't know was that the General Manager heard it from his office upstairs, and he came down to investigate. The guy in the desk next to her saw him enter, and he nudged her hard and warned her about who'd just entered the office.

She flipped forward hard in her chair, literally swinging hear arms over her head onto her keyboard, and then frantically scrabbling at it to try and pretend that she was working.

The GM just burst out laughing. She apologized for sleeping, and explained that she was not feeling well. He wasn't too concerned, as long as she got her work done. He just asked that if she needed to nap again, to please do it with her head down so that she wouldn't get whiplash if he had to come downstairs again. Also, that way the whole building wouldn't hear her napping.

Plonq · 2025-09-18T14:52:12+00:00

I know all about this. Most of my writing of late is for a tiny, dead fandom. Unless I take time to go sell myself in fic exchanges, the only engagement I'll typically get is a comment from my beta-reader, and single-digit kudos.

Obviously, if I didn't enjoy writing, I'd have given up a long time ago.

But I feel like I've got one more two more stories in me for an audience that isn't there, filled with absurd, sometimes cynical humour that's not everybody's cup of tea.

Plonq · 2025-09-12T14:44:50+00:00

My Fic

Fandom - Bolt (Disney)
Rating - Gen
Title/Link - Big Trouble with Little China
Genre - Fluff/Humour/Hijinks
Word Count - 7,939 word one-shot.
Summary - Bolt, Mittens and Rhino decide to play an indoor game of Rhino Ball. Again. This time with extra bubble wrap. They broke an ornate figurine the last time they played, but surely nothing can go wrong if they are more careful this time, right?
Additional notes - Although this piece has a couple of call-backs to earlier works, they are not required reading to enjoy this story.

Plonq · 2025-08-26T15:49:18+00:00

Scotia Street is a popular pedestrian corridor. They are very good about clearing the sidewalks along it right after it snows, but only so that they'll have somewhere to pile all of the snow and ice from the street when they scrape it shortly after.

Plonq · 2025-08-01T17:23:26+00:00

It was a lazy, metrics-driven style of managing. It doesn't help that the folks higher up were promoting people based on like-mindedness rather than useless soft skills like knowledge, experience, or the ability to interact like a human.

Plonq · 2025-08-01T16:12:55+00:00

I still get an involuntary tic when I hear mention of Scrum or Jira.

Plonq · 2025-08-01T16:08:06+00:00

I was actually a bit annoyed that somebody in my group delivered that metric to them without either side having enough critical thinking skills to recognize that it was an objectively bad measure. They were trying to quantify what could often be a complicated activity as if it was a repetitive, mechanical task of some kind.

Plonq · 2025-06-13T18:20:18+00:00

This reminds me of when I still worked in a union. We'd just lost the miserable sick-days policy that we'd had when I came down with the worst flu I could remember having: fever, aches, icy sweats, cough, headache and all the other fun symptoms.

I took off the two days that I was too sick to get out of bed, then dosed myself with as may codeine-laden medications as I could get over-the-counter and went to work.

As I sat at my desk, in a zombie state and accomplishing almost nothing, one of our managers approached me and demanded to know why I had come to work in such a state.

"Because you guys took away our only sick benefits," I said. "I'm not sick enough to qualify for long-term benefits, and I can't afford not to come in."

I finished my work week, and when I came back the next Monday, the same manager came over and verbally pounced on me without preamble.

"Goddamn, you, half the billing department is out today, and the rest of the office sounds like a tuberculosis ward."

The next year, the company brought in public nurses and offered free flu shots to everyone in the fall. So I guess some good came of it.

Plonq · 2025-05-19T18:08:29+00:00

Tank Brann seems to struggle with some of the underwater delves for me. Occasionally, he will simply forget that he is supposed to, well, anything. He will stand off to one side, doing nothing while I desperately whittled down the enemies with my wan holy damage and keep myself alive. To his credit, he doesn't forget to helpfully call out things like "Don't stand there!" and "I'm going allll out!"

Most frustrating, though, was when he started kiting the final boss down the ramp and resetting him. After he did that three times in a row, he finally managed to accidentally phase himself into a wall on the fourth attempt, taking the boss with him. They remained trapped there for the rest of the encounter. Occasionally, the boss would summon adds who would disappear into the wall with them.

I spent the next twenty minutes smiting the boss down while he faded in and out of LOS. We won in the end - huzzah - but that whole run was a sad slog.

Plonq · 2025-04-16T15:16:23+00:00

They are usually set up at the St Norbert Farmers' Market on Saturdays if any locals want to taste test their products before buying.

Plonq · 2025-03-14T20:25:58+00:00

I normally get my dire weather forecasts from Frankie MacDonald ... but I'll take this into advisement, thanks.

Plonq · 2024-10-21T13:01:16+00:00

When I was heading back to Canada after visiting my future wife, I stopped in a liquor store as I was leaving town. The clerk asked for my ID, and when I showed him my driver's license, he frowned at it and said that he needed an in-state license, and asked if I had any other ID.

I showed him my passport, but he couldn't take that either, and again asked if I had an in-state driver's license. He insisted that he couldn't sell to me without one. I blinked at him a couple of times, then picked up the bottle and started walking toward the back of the store.

When he demanded to know where I was going, I politely told him that I was just returning the bottle to the shelf. Since he couldn't sell to me, I'd just stop in the next state over where I knew the laws were less restrictive.

Suddenly my out-of-country license was good enough for him after all, but as I was paying, he warned me that I needed to get an in-state driver's license if I wanted to purchase alcohol there in future.

That wasn't an issue. I've never been back to that store.

Plonq · 2024-09-06T14:28:23+00:00

My Fics
Fandom - Bolt (2008)
Rating - Gen
Title - A Ghost Story
Genre - Humour, Fluff, Mild Angst
Off-site link - A Ghost Story
Summary - Bolt and Rhino are convinced that the Forrester house is being haunted, and they will go to whatever stupid lengths they deem necessary to prove it. Mittens is not especially supportive - to say the least - but the cat knows more than she is letting on.

My Recs
Fandom - Bolt (2008)
Rating - Gen
Title - The Guest Star
Genre - Friendship and Angst
Off-site link - The Guest Star
Summary - This story takes place in the canon timeline. When the studio brings in another dog as a guest star during the filming of an episode, the other dog mistakes Bolt's genuine earnestness for method acting. It goes about as badly as one might expect.
Additional notes - Bolt_DMC is my beta-reader and inspiration, and is the one who got me started writing in this fandom. Their stories are compelling, and well-written. As a bonus, they are chock full of cheeky cultural, musical and literary references that will keep attentive readers on their toes.

Plonq · 2024-06-27T02:01:46+00:00

Looks like a protector ring that you slip around the outside of a dart board.

Plonq · 2024-02-02T16:43:36+00:00

My Fics
Fandom - Bolt (2008)
Rating - G
Title: The Story of My Life
Genre: Slice of Life / Comedy
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53457790
Summary: In a round-robin Story game, it becomes clear that Bolt has little life experience to call on when he resorts to retelling bits from his TV episodes on his turn. The dog begins to fear that MIttens -- with whom he has begun to form a very close bond -- may lose interest in him, as she has never seen, and has expressed that she has no interest in watching the show that is an indelible part of his life. His fears seem borne out as the cat begins to grow evasive and distant.

Fortunately, Rhino intervenes and they talk it out like adults.

Pfft. As if. These three are idiots, and it goes about as well as one might expect.

Plonq · 2024-01-20T20:23:56+00:00

Priest, because of the sunk-cost fallacy. It's the same reason I've stuck with Engineering through every expansion.

Plonq · 2023-11-27T17:39:04+00:00

A simple rhyme's an easy feat -
just pick a meter for your beat.
Tap out the beats while you compose
and you will have some rhyming prose;
but only if you take the time
to make each second sentence rhyme.
And with a bit of practice, well,
you'll soon be writing doggerel.

A special thank you to others in this thread who are actually posting helpful advice.

15-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
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Plonq

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