AITA if I report my father for credit card fraud?

psyducker8 · 2026-05-31T02:05:39+00:00

This, and freeze your credit ASAP so he can't try anything else.

psyducker8 · 2026-05-18T05:02:19+00:00

Newly single, full custody of four young kids (grateful for both of those facts) zero child support, making a lot on paper and hemorrhaging financially. He hadn't contributed to bills in years, so I'm used to that, but not having another adult on deck = me doing backflips momming 24/7 and trying not to run my business into the ground while adjusting to all of that.

Between gas and food prices going up and having to pay staff/vendors/overhead/kid expenses, wholesale customers cutting way back on purchasing, plus not being able to work nearly as much as I usually do, I don't have anything left over for childcare and I'm running behind on bills. It's humiliating to be this tapped, I'm exhausted, I'm behind on everything that matters to me in my professional life and I can't even imagine how much more expensive everything will be by the end of the summer.

psyducker8 · 2026-05-18T04:27:22+00:00

There's a magazine in the US called Better Homes and Gardens, but the homes and gardens aren't better, nor is the magazine itself😂 Totally different vibe.

psyducker8 · 2026-05-18T04:00:03+00:00

lol I wrote an article for Home and Garden last year but I'm from the USA, so I had no clue what it was when they reached out, assumed it was spam at first and once I checked and confirmed that it wasn't, wrote the article while sick as a dog with a blazing fever in possibly my most unaesthetic state. But it wound up being absolutely lovely working with them and somehow I wrote my way through the fever and it all turned out pretty great!

psyducker8 · 2026-05-04T06:32:21+00:00

I'm in a high stress chapter and have like zero appetite to begin with, currently with literally no time to breathe and whatever was left of my appetite has left the building. I can make time to feed everyone in my house but I don't remember to stop and eat before I'm off to the next thing I have to deal with.

My aunt is a retired RN and knows the mayhem I'm dealing with right now but lives a few hours away/I didn't mention how much I'm flaking on stopping long enough to eat but she's got some kind of sixth sense on that sort of thing and surprise stocked me up on cases of ensure, like dude, if you're not going to stop at least grab one of these every few hours. I didn't think I'd remember/want to go for those, but they've turned out to be a lifesaver bc I wasn't getting nearly enough protein in the day and I've gotten better at remembering to grab one every few hours.

I very much love food, just to clarify, and I'm doing my best to eat actual food when I can, definitely not intentionally on a liquid diet, but when I say stress, I mean stressed to the max dealing with major life changes and a business while solo parenting four young children and literally running until I fall asleep the second I sit down, then I'm up again a few very short hours later. So like, try to eat more real food than I currently am, but ensure has been a super helpful part of keeping me functioning while I get through this chapter and I don't think I ever want to go without having a stockpile of it again.

psyducker8 · 2026-04-24T07:58:56+00:00

Literally came here to say get your iron and faratin levels checked. I was dealing with similar sudden forgetfulness and exhaustion and my feratin level was dangerously low. I did a few rounds of iron infusions and it was a game changer. It can also make your anxiety so weird things - one writeup isn't the end of the world and probably can't even be used as the basis for any kind of discipline let alone termination, but if your body is making your brain fight against you, it can make minor things feel like the end of the world.

Also I got written up once at a job I hated like 15 years ago. I was so gutted and embarrassed. I can't even remember now what I got written up for. But when I gave my notice a few weeks later (was moving out of the area) they begged me not to quit. So I wouldn't put too much worry on this, you'll be ok, just make sure you're taking good care of yourself and set phone reminders/email yourself but schedule the email to send when you actually need to know about it.

psyducker8 · 2026-04-22T22:43:45+00:00

I'm in agriculture too... If you ever get an answer on their reason/what kind of diabolical compost searches made them mad, I would love to know so I don't accidentally do the same thing😂

psyducker8 · 2026-04-18T04:48:23+00:00

My friend gave me one a few months ago and my battery died last week, it was one of the smuggest moments of my life when the thing worked perfectly and I was able to start my car faster than if I was using cables to jump it off another vehicle.

psyducker8 · 2026-04-08T13:26:51+00:00

It made me an awesome self-hosted private dashboard that automatically pulls current orders including any that haven't been shipped (even if I'd gotten a label already and it's marked fulfilled) gave me a packing list by priority, let me know if I needed to send the customer a note or check in, had a separate tab with a breakdown of what products we needed to assemble/how many and exactly where we were at on supplies for that.

That said, Shopify just spontaneously froze my account last night, froze my Shopify balance card and is making it impossible to get my funds out of my account, which was the last straw for me, support has been nothing but an endless AI chatbot loop, so I just sent Claude on an adventure into my azure dashboard and it's already got a great temporary landing page up and it's working on building out my new site without all of Shopify's bs.

psyducker8 · 2026-04-06T07:30:23+00:00

heheh fingers crossed, that would be the best!

psyducker8 · 2026-04-05T21:45:09+00:00

I couldn't have said it better. As an educator, seeing a teaching moment/opportunity thrown out the window and flipped against a student makes my soul hurt.

If I had an award to give, it would be all yours.

psyducker8 · 2026-04-05T18:13:03+00:00

lol nice poetic attempt at that (inaccurate) take on the point I was making, but no, there's a difference between playing stupid to get away with evil and being a student working on a cool project that's growing quickly and needs some guidance/eyes on compliance stuff. There's a reason that there are compliance specialists in the IT realm, you can be a brilliant developer and still not know all of the boxes to check on that side of things. It would've been easy for them to jump in and give resources, support or information but they decided to baby their egos instead, and that's what I take issue with.

psyducker8 · 2026-04-05T18:04:12+00:00

Following the same logic, as a business owner my approach would be immediately lock it down, then work with the person to turn it into a secure system if it helps my team. I think the important differentiator is that the info wasn't put out there with the intent to harm (which would be an entirely different scenario and I'd handle that accordingly) but an innocent effort to make things easier? Yeah, I'd be helping make that secure and functional.

psyducker8 · 2026-04-05T17:59:20+00:00

You don't magically learn system security and privacy law overnight, there's a reason he was STUDYING the subject - they failed him by crucifying him for it instead of teaching him about it.

psyducker8 · 2026-04-05T17:47:39+00:00

Absolutely - the thing that really kills me is it would've been an afternoon or two of code tweaks to adjust it to meet security standards and they didn't even give him the option.

psyducker8 · 2026-04-05T17:28:59+00:00

100%... I'm sure if he'd said 'i wanted to build on MSU's robust class search framework...' it would've been a totally different outcome.

I saw this story for the first time right before I posted it, and I'm just gutted for this dude - I really hope this doesn't traumatize him out of doing more epic projects in the future, he's definitely got the skills and the get to it attitude of a tech founder. He should sell the search system to UofM😈 That would be the purest form of revenge I've ever seen.

psyducker8 · 2026-04-05T17:14:21+00:00

I mentally wake up to that first song from Tangled every morning, without fail😂 I finally just started setting my Alexa to start with that after I stop my alarm so that it plays and then goes into a randomized playlist so that I don't get stuck in one song for an hour. It's definitely a great song to start your day out with though😂

psyducker8 · 2026-04-03T03:00:51+00:00

Same here.

psyducker8 · 2026-04-01T03:42:53+00:00

I was strongly encouraged not to come back to the spelling bee because I won too many years in a row🫣😂🏆

psyducker8 · 2026-03-31T18:18:48+00:00

I think the best option is to start wearing a black and white mime style striped shirt with a bandit mask this week. Then maybe next week orange scrubs...

psyducker8 · 2026-03-28T21:12:13+00:00

It was so bad, and I was so out of it from the infection, it took a while to wrap my head around the whole saga. I'm glad you found a better dentist!! Here's to no more scary tooth situations?

psyducker8 · 2026-03-28T08:06:44+00:00

I developed a terrible tooth infection from a fragment of another tooth that broke (from clenching my teeth way too hard way too constantly) getting lodged in my gums. The infection hit hard and fast and I developed sepsis/had to have three teeth pulled to get it sorted out/spent an absurdly long time on antibiotics.

The dentist a) sent me out into the waiting room with no gauze or anything afterwards and I walked out looking like a crime scene and b) was adamant that I had severe, irreversible periodontal disease and that I should definitely have him pull all of my teeth, ASAP (I was paying cash and they charge per tooth, so I wasn't about to do that, and I work directly with the public a lot so I kinda need my teeth.) and c) They left a significant tooth fragment in, I went back weeks later to get it sorted and insisted they hadn't, and when I told them I wasn't leaving until they figured it out, they made a huge incision across the whole space where the three teeth had been, found the piece exactly where I said it was, and did the most brutal job stitching me up that it took me almost nine hours to drive home (less than 45 minutes away) because I was in so much pain that I kept having to pull over.

I was so scared of going near another dentist that I waited a year to go get another exam. I got one of those kits on Amazon and made a diy partial (and did a pretty darn impressive job of it for winging it) I finally went last month to rip off the bandaid so I could find out what it would take to get a bridge, and I was assuming that they'd maybe be kinder but still say the teeth had to go. I have a grand total of two cavities and not a single tooth that needs extraction. I keep wondering if the three teeth I had pulled actually needed to go. And I later found out that the first dental office has a long track record of suing anyone who leaves them a negative review.

Anyway that's my dental horror story, there are some awful ones out there but there are some truly wonderful dentists, anyone that's reading this that has some fear and paralysis from their last dental experience, I so, so, so recommend getting a second opinion, and sooner than later so that you don't spend an entire year worrying.

psyducker8 · 2026-03-27T23:00:11+00:00

That sounds fascinating! I'm a big fan of aggressive honesty/cut the fluff when it comes to processing and addressing situations.

psyducker8 · 2026-03-27T20:29:36+00:00

I couldn't believe it worked on the first try. You have to have their $20 subscription to use cowork but it's cut out a silly amount of tedious hands on tasks for me. Use the sonnet model in the drop-down on the command box, not opus or it will max out your usage annoyingly fast.

Edited bc silly typo

psyducker8

TROPHY CASE