What perfectly normal thing can't you be around anymore due to something you experienced?

Mine is a pretty tame example: I never minded the smell of garlic was fine around it… but I took a job for DHL and they had these large tubs of garlic for horses that had to go out to people. There were about 10 of them coming down the belt.

Now I can’t stand it. I’m just reminded of how strong that smell was I was actually gagging. The tubs were heavy, the handles were feedble. Some of the tubs were damaged so I got a bit on me.

I stunk of it for the rest of the shift. It wasn’t even a normal garlic smell it was just so powerful and nauseating.

Chifilly,

For me, anything “bubblegum” flavoured or smelling. When I was a teen, I had to have 4 teeth taken out, but it was done in 2 sessions so I didn’t have my entire mouth out of action (it was my back teeth on both sides, top and bottom), and both times the mouthwash, and the numbing gel they used before the injected one was bubblegum flavoured, and I can’t stand it anymore because of dealing with my teeth being pulled out my face

Black_Gulaman,
@Black_Gulaman@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Known locally as “Gin Bilog”. It is the cheapest gin in the stores. Back when i was a student, we used to dink copious amounts of this, mixed with soda or juice, water or even pure.

but one time i had a fever but did not want to miss a party so I still attended it. Even though i had a fever then, i still drank the alcohol as though i was not sick.

after recovering from the fever, i noticed that i am repulsed by the gin and cannot even stand the smell of it. up to now i haven’t drank a single sip of that drink.

cntzr0,

Smirnoff Double Blacks for me. Was the poison of choice for many as it was one of the first alchopops with 1.8+ standard drinks in a bottle. The mere sight of them makes me shudder.

Transcendant,

Red Bull. For several years when I was late teen / early 20s, I’d go clubbing all weekend… always drinking red bull, then inevitably overdo it with the disco biscuits and have to puke.

~4 years of that, and I’ve anti-Pavlov’d myself so that even the smell of red bull sets me heaving.

thepianistfroggollum,

For years I couldn’t smell or drink sprite without smelling or tasting vodka since in high school I had a coworker who would buy me handles of vodka because she liked contributing to the delinquency of a minor (she was also a substitute teacher and is the reason I know what Salvia is)

I would mix it 50/50 with sprite.

Nepenthe,
@Nepenthe@kbin.social avatar

Christmas carols. Being forced to come back to a retail job over the Christmas rush a little over a week after my brother was found dead on the floor outside my bedroom :)

The boss there had a very personal bone to pick with me, made it clear she didn't even have to give me any bereavement leave since I was part time, and when a customer went on a Mach 4 tirade because I wasn't smiling hard enough (not kidding), she backed them up and threatened to fire me in front of everyone.

12hrs+ of this every day. I preferred working by myself in back because people would leave me the fuck alone to do my job, but it turns out it was also useful for intermittent off-camera crying!

To this day, 13 years later, I can still tell you the exact playlist that was on the radio. That was when The Fray's How to Save a Life was still big and I used to really like that song, but I can avoid it now a lot easier than I can avoid "I'll Be Home for Christmas."

It got me forcibly stopped by the police once, when I couldn't take it anymore, ran out of the store, and the owner assumed I stole something. I really just don't leave the house after October.

xuxebiko,

Fuck! that's rough.

May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your ex-boss's armpits.

Imhotep,

12hrs+ of this every day

And this is legal where you live?

Nepenthe,
@Nepenthe@kbin.social avatar

Yes? Although I should back up and say that for retail, those are holiday hours. My normal hours were like....16 per week, tops, and that's all that was available in the area. Because as long as my total hours per week are kept just barely under 40, I don't get to have healthcare!

....So we just played russian roulette with the bills and I had to quit when the stress combined with simply not eating began to impact my health at work. Being unemployed did not improve the situation.

I don't know if you're aware that full-time often goes to 60-80hrs+ per week, but that works out to about the same. I've only very recently persuaded a roommate to stop pulling all-nighters on a salary. They were literally going all last week surviving on naps, but eventually admitted that they almost never actually hit the cash bonuses they were aiming for having dangled in front of them anyway. So hopefully I can keep them to that.

These are extremely common tactics, as is any job from a temp service having an employment policy that resembles a revolving door, wherein no matter how hard you go, they are going to fire you just shy of a month or two, after which they would have legally had to hire you and give you super gross things like benefits.

By the time the French revolted, their peasants were eating grass to survive. Most of us are still at least eating food for humans. We're probably going to ride this to collapse.

DharmaCurious,

My last job before my current one, I would routinely work 20 hour shifts, with 4 hours off, followed by a 20 hour shift. Normally would do that 4 days, followed by 4-5 normal 12 hour shifts with a 12 hour turn around.

Security jobs can really suck.

Smathy,

Childbirth.

I can't watch scenes in movies, tv, mentions in books/papers, friends talking about it etc. I can't do it.

My daughter's birth in 2020 was all kinds of traumatic and I avoid the topic at all costs.

maegul,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

It’s not necessarily a “normal” thing … but academia and university. I’ve been a university/academic rat for a bit and become so disillusioned with the place and its culture that I think I’ve got to the point of finding all of it, including those who subscribe to and participate in its value systems, completely off putting.

GreenPlasticSushiGrass,
@GreenPlasticSushiGrass@kbin.social avatar

Good God, yes! It would be such an enjoyable job if the whole culture around it weren't so toxic.

Nepenthe,
@Nepenthe@kbin.social avatar

Could you explain? Is it just the kinds of people who are attracted to those jobs generally making it insufferable?

maegul,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

It’s hard to explain if you haven’t seen it, because academic topics and education have so much that’s good about them, and I’m probably not well placed to explain as it’s kinda raw for me still. But I’ll theow some ranting dot points out there.

  1. The emphasis on assessment and running undergraduate programs like factories evidently detracts from the educational quality. Even the way topics are broken up into chunks and prerequisites to maximise efficiency can be quite artificial and hamper the ability to emphasise important fundamentals of a topic. In the end there’s a lot of focus from students and academics on winning or administering the gamified assessment system to memorise things forgotten in a few weeks and the deep insights and skills that can be learnt get pushed aside. In short, undergrad education has become an industrial complex.
  2. The whole place is run by a pyramid scheme prestige cabal, albeit politely so, where everyone is or is supposed to feel very privileged to just be working in the building, because of the amazing things there and to have passed the great assessment game well enough to be allowed in. Culture problems or systemic problems just can’t be addressed. Problematic people can get away with a lot because they are senior. Whole groups or departments can have a quiet toxicity that no one does anything about, including warning or helping younger students naive to such problems, because, going through the game of and pain of the process is how you earn your position and so academics are literally personally incentivised to not make things too easy for students.
  3. As a graduate research student, you are often chasing prestige and are young and eager to prove yourself. Truth is you’re likely canon fodder for the system. No one really cares about your education. Some ahead of you a few years will see you as competition. And as it’s a pyramid scheme, the vast majority don’t make it into the castle, so they’re right you are competition. But not in who’s smarter or more creative, but who stands out more or gets to work on the right project or gets lucky with the right discovery. The whole assessment mentality of finding the right people gets noxious when you start using fuzzy things like success in research as a young researcher. But the thing is a lot of research work, at least in science, depends on graduate students as a labour force to get things done. An unpaid young and eager to prove themselves labour force that will most likely never make it into academia (sound familiar?)
  4. All of the above extends into the practice of research and academia itself. Academic compete for grants in a system often called “the lottery”. They’re on a treadmill to publish more and more papers instead of actually making sure their research is correct and they’re finding the truth. Ask any researcher how much they trust any paper they’ve looked deeply into. Truth is a lot research is done problematically. And then the publication system is it’s own gamified assessment system, where other researchers judge whether a paper is worthy of publication, which sounds good, except academics are overworked with research needing to publish their own papers and reviewing others papers is unpaid, and so they often make passing superficial judgments sometimes based on prejudices or impressions. What’s more, papers get published in journals which have grades in terms of “quality” which is based on the impression that the papers in those journals are impactful without really waiting to see if they turn out to be true over time.

I’ll stop ranting there and just say that much of the above may not be at all unique outside academia. But in combination with the use of students eager to prove themselves and the ideals of truth of science etc, it can all look pretty vile once you see it from the inside.

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