Successfully sued a previous employer for unpaid wages after I noticed they were shorting me and everyone I worked with by over $100 every check.

Probably a real stupid one.

The CEO plays golf with a bunch of dept leads. I’m one of the few dept leads who works remotely, and I don’t play golf. So I’m frequently not on his radar (which includes things like budget and promotions too).

He had a “brilliant” idea to make a internal project that should have gone to my department. We are literally the subject matter experts. But he gave it to another department. The dept lead tried to play both sides. He wanted the project because it’ll earn him brownie points with the CEO. But he tried to appease my dept by saying it’s a experiment.

I didn’t care. I was a bit annoyed the CEO ignored us. But my dept was in no position to take more work.

Well, by taking the project on, their department was under a lot of scrutiny. The internal tool touched everybody. They don’t have UX experience. They don’t know how to work collaboratively. They over engineered the hell of out it. You can’t make changes without being a senior developer (which means even juniors can’t contribute wtf) And worse, the CEO got pissed off that this expensive internal tool barely works. That dept lead went from “Oh we got this” to now fuming over the status of the project.

Finally, a C-level person demanded the other dept hand it over to my dept.

We took the project and rebuilt it in our technology. It took them three months, and we had it fully working in a week. Even better, my dept builds tools for non-technicals. So it was coded in a way where new features can be added by anybody, and managed by a non-engineer. My team still didn’t get credit/attention from the CEO. But whatever.

We won a 6 dollar per hour kicker towards our healthcare, which if you declined the company healthcare that money ended up in your pocket so you can buy healthcare elsewhere.

Left that job for other reasons but we raised everyone salaries by about 30% in that time too. Huge wins for the workforce.

Mine didn’t really have “bad guys” but I was driving to lunch and someone’s car stalled out in the middle on an intersection. I pulled into a parking lot and got out to help push. In probably a minute or so I had 3 other strangers all helping me push this other stranger’s car.

When we finished one of them asked me my car was going to be OK and I told them it wasn’t my car, then we both laughed and the owner said they’d be fine. We all dispersed after that. I just thought it was pretty cool how a bunch of random strangers saw someone who needed help and everyone pitched in on their own accord.

Kinda reaffirmed my faith in humanity I guess.

Change.org petitions to not deport people from Canada, who either would be killed by their own government or hurt by other people due to endemic homophobia and transphobia in their culture after being deported to their home country, or, in one case, because he turned 18 just before his parents and younger siblings were granted citizenship.

Worst part is why; I’m half-European (my family were farmers and possibly feudal landowners at the wealthiest, political upheavals forced them to expatriate themselves a half-dozen times in the early 20th century so my dad’s nationality is vague) and half-Colombian (and my mom’s family tree is itself very mixed race), so I know how important immigration is for both the immigrants and the recieving nation. I’ve never held anything against anyone that they were born with since around 2007 and I have never tried to justify that dislike of severely mentally handicapped people from back then at any point, then or now.

Finally, I live in Western Canada and have a lot of empathy. It seems that, while I’m not going to hold it against all French Quebec residents, there are some Québécois who are fucking cruel when it comes to deportation. I’ve talked to a guy, Caucasian as paste, who has been illegally reported to Immigration twice because he’s from Ontario and lives in Quebec, and that’s just how Immigration - which is HQ’d in Quebec for no good reason - treats people who look similar to themselves, let alone the dozen different times an upstanding potential skilled worker migrant from a “person of color” background has been nearly deported despite a clear-cut case of being in life-threatening danger if they are deported.

Fortunately, most of the petitions succeeded in putting pressure on Immigration Canada to hand out exceptions to rules because of the circumstances and because most of the country is all too aware of how much bigotry has taken hold in Quebec.

I mean, I don’t want to generalize and I’ve never known much about Francophone history, but I somehow can’t help but wonder if French aristocracy both on the other side of my country and over in Europe have always tended to be sociopathicly narcissistic. Hearing about some of the things the French government has just tried to enact has me feeling like we’re in some sort of home stretch of the end of the world, or at least a historical turning point that will go down in the history books of the 23rd and 24th century the way Napoleon’s reign or the American Revolutionary War is portrayed in modern media.

Also, before anyone says it, I know every country has had corrupt leaders throughout history. It just seems to take a special kind of arrogance among leadership for “The rich bitch thinks we weren’t allowed to eat cake without permission, when we can’t afford the bread?!” to be a plausible accusation at multiple points in time and space with the only common thread being the language spoken, but since that could be said about English easily I apologize if that feels accusatory. You’re not the language you speak or the flag you fly, just please don’t let power go to your heads everyone.

Thirty or so years ago Gorbachev’s decision to allow elections with a multi-party system and create a presidency for the Soviet Union began a process of democratization that eventually destabilized Communist control and contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The remnants of the old Communist party can be found today on lemmygrad.