“You don’t come here for the hunting, do you?”

I will say a proud (if dismayed) moment for me as a parent was being forced to see the text’s between my daughter and the boy she was interested in.

Context: they were both 15, and the boy’s parents were religious wack-jobs. The father specifically said that 15 was too young to have a relationship. I had to respectfully disagree, since my wife was 15 when we started dating (I was 16).

Of course, the parents monitored all the boys communications, and would send me crap i didn’t want to see.

In the texts the boy suggested that he and my daughter should lie to the parents. My daughter pointed out that there’s no way we wouldn’t know.

She knew that we considered lying to be the one unforgivable sin. So she wouldn’t waste it ;-)

Thankfully, that relationship died. It would have been a whole lot easier to let it alone, but his parents couldn’t.

I’ve heard that when the boy went to college he couldn’t handle the freedom and ended up dropping out and returning home.

That depends on the situation. If you don’t know them, then yeah, you’d need to confirm you’re taking to the right person.

I ended up meeting all the parents of my kids’ friends, so it would have been beyond difficult to fake that.

Said this in a reply to another comment, but I wanted to make a top level reply as well.

I’ve been in this situation.

My recommendation is to tell your son he has to have Tiffany ask one of her parents to give you a call.

You don’t want to initiate the call in case they don’t know and are nut jobs.

However, you want to hear them say they are ok (and what they are ok with) in case they don’t know and are nut jobs.

Establishing a relationship with her parents will help when it comes time to decide which grandparents are going to cover which babysitting shifts ;-)

Just kidding about that last part. Kind of.

I’ve been in this situation.

I wouldn’t initiate a conversation with her parents, but I would insist that they give me a call.

I would want to hear it from them. If they did give permission, I would want to find out what their expectations are.

Asking to hear from Tiffany’s parents also gets around the possibility that they think Tiffany is actually spending the night at Amber’s house.

Nuke it from orbit.

It’s the only way to be sure.

Well, Americans are nothing if not terribly uneducated.

I guess I’d recommend watching Banshee.

In the years before the US existed, when the land was colonized by European powers, Europe had a lot of really annoying, prudish types who were a major downer.

Someone had the bright idea to encourage them to move to the colonies where they could live their prudish existence free from the naked bodies of Europe.

We ended up with all of Europe’s biggest prudes. Europe’s prudes have been trying to reestablish themselves, but they are at a serious disadvantage. Meanwhile, we in America have to deal with an overwhelming population of prudes that we’ve struggled for centuries to extinguish​.

While we’re on the subject, Europe also found it convenient to dump their criminals here. So we end up with a culture in which full frontal nudity is unacceptable, but gun violence is just fun entertainment.

I say that as someone who loves some good violence. Nothing quite so enjoyable as living vicariously through some bad ass beating the snot out of the bad guys in a movie.

I never would have thought of myself as a prude, but recently stopped watching the series Banshee because the amount of gratuitous sex in the show was exceeding the amount of gratuitous violence to such a degree that I began to feel uncomfortable.

I work at a hospital.

In IT.

For Radiology.

You don’t have to convince me to hate Siemens.

Like watching two high school bullies fight each other.

Also you need to love licorice and sauna, that’s a rule

TIL I’m Finnish.

Your concern seems strange to me.

Looking at “British” for example, you’re taking about four culturally diverse groups (English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish). “Ethnically British” doesn’t really make sense.

That doesn’t even consider the multitude of people from everywhere around the world who are British and perfectly comfortable identifying as such.

Why would anyone bother with sanctions? Nothing a foreign government could do would be worse than what our own is doing.

Just wait it out and hope you manage to find a way to secure our nukes after everything disintegrates.

Play the lottery. I don’t know anything about the people who won big lotteries. Maybe it was me.

My parents chose each other. My mother chose my father to get away from her mother.

My father is an only child who isn’t used to not getting his own way. If you had asked me 30 years ago, I would have said she’d eventually divorce him or murder him.

For a long time, he’d leave her alone so he could go out and ride his motorcycle, and she was miserable because she was stuck at home alone.

Now he’s too old to ride so he’s home all the time. He’s definitely crossed into “elderly”, and he’s having serious health issues. He’s depressed because he thought he’d be young forever, and he can’t accept the reality. He won’t do anything to improve his situation. He just sits around saying he’d rather be dead. So now my mom is miserable because she’s stuck at home with him.

Despite all that and the hostility they’ve expressed to each other over the years, I’d say they are perfect for each other.

Well, the context I was thinking was routine travel.

If I had plans with a friend, and they had something big to tell me, I’d be ok with them saying we needed to talk when I got there.

I’m thinking more along the lines of:

It’s Wednesday, I’m at work, and my wife calls me in the middle of the day to tell me we have to talk when I get home.

Or conversely, I’m at home, and my boss calls me to say I should come to his office so we can talk when I get in.

“Promise me you won’t be upset.”

I am not promising shit until you tell me what we’re talking about. In fact, you just got me upset.

However, “don’t panic” wouldn’t get a better reaction from me. If you want me to not panic, tell me you’ve already dealt with it and there’s nothing for me to do, or at the very least describe your plan. I’ll decide whether panic is warranted after I hear your solution.

Another bad one:

“We need to talk when you get here.”

If we’re not going to talk about it now, why not wait to bring it up until I’m there?

“I was lucky and my brain chemistry corrected itself, so all you need to do is stop being unlucky and be lucky like me!”

While we’re at it, if you can’t reach the top shelf, just grow taller. That’s what I did.

I’m aware of an effort to get LLM AI to summarize medical reports for doctors.

Very disturbing.

The people driving it where I work tend to be the people who know the least about how computers work.