Dude vs Life

I was four days into an approved week off, sitting on a rock at the top of a mountain trail, when my manager texted. "Mandatory all-hands in twenty minutes. No exceptions." I reminded her I was on approved leave. She sent a screenshot of a policy and wrote, "Skipping will be marked as a no-show on your record." The only place with signal was a flat boulder at the summit, the one spot where my phone showed a single bar. I had paid $40 for the trail permit and hiked three hours to get there. Fine. I sat down, opened my laptop, and joined the call with my camera off and my mic muted. Technically present. Five minutes in, my manager's voice cut through the meeting. "Jordan, I can't verify you're here. Cameras need to be on for attendance." I looked at the valley below me. Then I looked at my sandwich. "Sure," I typed in the chat. "Verification it is." I clicked the camera button. There I was on a boulder at 9,000 feet, sweaty, sunburned, hat on backwards, holding half a turkey sandwich. Behind me, the whole mountain range rolled out in the morning light, and about ten feet to my left, a mountain goat was calmly eating my backpack strap. Nobody on the call said a word. Then the goat let out a long, loud bleat right into the microphone I had just unmuted. Someone on the team coughed, and I'm fairly sure somebody else was crying with laughter. "Is that a goat?" a coworker whispered. "His name is Gary," I said. "He's very supportive of the quarterly goals." My manager started stammering about "making an exception just this once." I said, "No, no, you were right. Cameras on for verification. And here I am. Verified." The director of HR was also on the call. She cleared her throat gently. "Jordan, you're excused from the meeting," she said. "Please enjoy the rest of your time off. We'll sort out the attendance record." She muted my manager for the rest of the call. My private messages exploded. One coworker wrote, "Best thing I have ever seen on a company call." Another just sent forty goat emojis. I finished my sandwich, packed up, and hiked down at my own pace. Back at work the next week, nobody scheduled me for anything on my days off ever again. Two months later, my manager moved to a different team, and a new one started who said, on her first day, "If you're on leave, you're on leave." I framed a screenshot of the call. It sits on my desk, with Gary in the corner of the frame, still chewing.

JD Vance: "Today, the Dept of Agriculture is announcing millions of dollars in new grants toward 10 meatpacking facilities right here in the state of Kansas"

Thanks to President Trump, we are accelerating the Arsenal of Freedom and putting American industry back on top. AMERICAN WORKERS. AMERICAN JOBS. AMERICAN MANUFACTURING.

Dear @POTUS, Please stop all visa applications from Brasil effective immediately. A country that openly supports communism should never have the privilege of enjoying capitalism. I also have a list of Brasilian Americans who lied on their naturalization forms and should be denaturalized and banned! We need to remove the rot of this mind virus out of our nation because it’s like a metastatic cancer it digs roots and spreads like wild fire.