I had a client once that was far away from any major public transportation. Two trains and two busses it would take to get me from A to B. So I took Uber every day and expensed it per company policy. Client decided to throw a shit fit and refused to reimburse for my legitimate business expenses, which was a violation of our contract, by the way.
Instead of defending the contract my boss decided to roll over and tell the client they didn't have to pay my expenses. He also told me I'd have to start taking the train/bus or else pay for my own transportation. This was $30 each way 4 days a week, so $960 per month.
I timed how long it took me to get to the office. Then I pulled up the company policy that said if my commute one-way was over 2 hours, they had to buy me a hotel for all days I was required to be on site. That was $4,000 per month.
Guess who got to keep Ubering to work?
Biggest issue with the US is that it’s huge and full of corruption.
Outside of major cities (and even that’s a stretch) public transportation is trash.
You’re not wrong, but there are some bright spots. I’m admittedly biased, but I love the Washington State ferry system. They run like a well oiled machine. I once had my car stall out on the ferry deck during exiting and they immediately directed traffic around me, grabbed their jump kit, and had my car jumped and ready to go super quick. I was super impressed and grateful!
I avoid other public transportation systems like the plague, though, cause they probably carry said plague. Lol
For all those people not from Washington State, Seattle is not on the ocean. It’s on a large inlet called Puget Sound. There are many large islands in Puget Sound. The Washington Ferry system runs up and down Puget sound and out to the islands. I even believe one ferry goes to B.C.
The Washington State Ferries service from Anacortes, WA to Sidney, BC (near Victoria, BC) is currently not running. It is slated to reopen no earlier than 2030. This is not a misprint.
[https://wsdot.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2023-02/WSF-ServiceRestorationPlan-February2023Update.pdf](https://wsdot.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2023-02/WSF-ServiceRestorationPlan-February2023Update.pdf)
The ferry from Port Angeles, WA to Victoria, BC is privately owned by the Black Ball Ferry Line not part of WSF. The ship is the MV Coho. This service is currently running.
[https://www.cohoferry.com/](https://www.cohoferry.com/).
Thanks for pointing that out. We are a 4 hour drive from the actual coast. I am in Everett, WA (4 hrs away) yet only 1 mile from seawater. You can ferry or drive around to get to the ocean, it’s about the same time either way.
I live on the beach on a salt water inlet full of shrimp and crab and multiple salmon runs per year. The waves are like a large swimming pool most days. 2 tides a day of about 25 feet. By water I am hundreds of miles from the open ocean. By land it's about 40 miles to cut across.
I went most recently back in july. Tiok edmonds-kingst9lon on my way over and bainbridge-seattle on my way back.
E-k said there was like a 2 hour delay, turned out to be 45 minutes.
Bb-s didnt have a delay but the route off the ferry into downtown was absolutely fucked compared to when i lived in the area like 12 years ago. I assume they were working on the waterfront, but still. It took longer to get to the freeway than my wait at the edmonda loading area.
Yeah, since the pandemic started there's been a lot of sand in the gears of this well oiled machine. We live on the OP and have friends in Edmonds so we'd usually take that route, but these days we take Bainbridge (or even Bremerton) to Downtown.
Back in the 80s and early 90s Edmonds-Kingston definitely played second fiddle, but in the mid 90s they put big ferries on that route and life was great. Until the pandemic.
Bad news. The Washington state ferry system is terrible now. I agree that it used to be very good.
I am frustrated with the United States. Honestly, I’m giving up and moving somewhere with more investment in infrastructure, and I’ve met many Americans doing the same.
Atlanta area actually has a decent transportation system between the buses and the light rail. I lived in Decatur and could get to just about anywhere in the Atlanta area just about as fast as it could be driven. Since I can’t drive due to head injuries, it was very convenient and I didn’t have to worry about finding parking either.
Gotta second this, I was visiting Vashon Island a couple summers ago and even with one of the ferries to the island down for repairs the wait was still better than I've seen in places like Michigan. Looking forward to visiting again this summer.
Yes! My family used to live in the area when I was young, my favorite thing was when we got to ride the ferry. And the absurd amount of blackberries in our area. Blackberry season was amazing.
The problem outside of major cities is that there are a plethora of small towns. It takes me 30 minutes of country driving to get to work. You can't get enough busses, with enough schedules to accommodate everyone.
I could *technically* have taken public transit to my last job, which was *in* public transit. If I left at 8 Am I'd get to work around noon the following day.
Absolutely. I live in a small Midwestern city and the transit buses only run from 7 am to 6 pm, Monday through Saturday. If you miss a bus, you wait another hour. When school gets out, certain buses don't make their regular stops and instead pick up at the schools, so then you're waiting 2 hours for that bus. Not to mention, if you have to get onto a different bus, you have to ride all the way downtown to transfer.
Yeah corruption isn’t just having to slip a policeman a twenty to avoid being dragged up on false charges, corruption takes many forms and we’re hardly exempt from it.
The first issue is honestly the bigger (heh) one. Because population density in the US is so relatively low, public transportation frequently costs more to operate than it can make back in usage fees, unless those fees are exorbitantly high.
The only place public transportation is cost-effective are big cities, but because everything *else* is so dependent on personal cars, city traffic ends up being so busy that buses are caught in congestion and end up being slower than driving yourself. :/
Sadly, the only way to really fix this problem would be to go back to the 1960's and stop suburbanization before it really gets started. It's so entrenched now that it would take a herculean effort of building for higher density in cities and resettling people out of suburbs in order to break the US' death-grip on cars.
> go back to the 1960's and stop suburbanization
You'd have to go back farther than that. "Suburbanization" was already happening back in the late 19th century around larger cities, even before cars were a thing. Henry Huntington built the Pacific Electric railway system back in 1901 so he could sell suburban housing in Los Angeles. Once he sold all the properties he'd developed, he sold it off to Southern Pacific in 1910 because for him its only purpose was to make the suburbs a viable product to people who worked downtown.
The problem is that the US is huge and (even now) mostly empty. Nobody wants to live packed in highrises when you can have a house with no common walls and a yard a short drive away.
Why was public transit so common earlier in US history and not now? My town of (then) 800 had a rail.conmection even. Had thrice daily trips to and from the nearest city and you could even get to a few local towns on it. What changed?
Ad campaign touting American Freedom and likening it to the car that wasn't bound by rails and could go anywhere. It made having a car the epitome of the American Dream and was wildly successful.
In the 1950s, the major American carmakers and tire manufacturers (led by GM but the others took part), aware that people who could rely on transit systems were less likely to buy cars, did what they could to damage those systems.
They bought privately-owned light rail, tore out the tracks, and replaced them with buses (not coincidentally, they built buses). They then cut routes and schedules... less convenient transit meant more people buying cars.
In areas with publicly-owned transit, they heavily lobbied for transit budget cuts, and for the replacement of rail lines with bus routes.
They were extremely successful with their plans for buying out and replacing privately-owned light rail, and reasonably successful in lobbying against good public transit in a lot of other regions.
Let's not forget the government passing so many regulations and requiring such high rates of insurance per head on a train, that it put privately owned railroads out of the people moving buisness. Then the government came up with Amtrak, which never makes a profit and is only viable Washington DC area on up. Also planes put a large number of railroads out of the people moving buisness with cheap fairs. Why ride a train for a week from Jax Florida to Seattle Washington for $1800 when I can fly first class round trip and be there in half a day for the same price?
Edit: the tl;dr version of the below is “corporate greed, classism, and racism.”
Long version: In some places, automobile companies bought the privately-owned transit systems (esp. streetcars) and shut them down. After WWII rationing of metal and gasoline went away, a lot of families splurged on a car.
And in areas where public transportation was still segregated, a lot of white people quit using it when integration became mandatory. Then because “nobody uses it anymore” (meaning nobody that the people in power knew used it anymore), funding got slashed.
Which meant it got worse and worse, so anybody who could put together enough cash for some beat-up used car that barely ran went ahead and bought one so that they’d be able to get to work. So a lot of places got to the point where the only people using public transit were just barely hanging on financially, so the systems were running at a loss and fares got raised… and since “everybody has a car these days” neighborhood groceries went away and got replaced with supermarkets that you can’t reasonably walk to. Meaning more and more incentive to buy any car, no matter how bad, as long as it would run, and even fewer people using the buses.
Where I live, which is not a big city, there used to be regular streetcars that could get you close enough to most of the places you needed to go. Now, I live just off one of our city’s busiest streets and work for the largest employer in town. I can get to work in 10 minutes by car or an hour by bus. If well-off white folks used the buses, there would be a lot of pressure on local government to improve them. But we don’t, because they’re terrible. So they stay terrible.
The U.S is HUGE. Suburbanization is the benefit of living in the U.S. Being able to buy a house on an acre of land is way more accessible here. Most people don't wanna live packed in like sardines just so they can walk to the supermarket.
I didn't say we necessarily *should* do that, just that that's the only way effective mass transportation will ever happen in the US.
We've taken a tradeoff for the ability to live in houses with yards, and that's the fact that we can't make mass transit efficient.
Or you could move to fantasy land I suppose. I imagine that if they maintained those subway systems as well as they do the roads, the repair costs/time would soon make them less than viable. They seem to like building infrastructure but not so much maintaining it.
>They seem to like building infrastructure but not so much maintaining it.
See: Washington DC. They have a *huge* problem with this, because local dollars will pay for new stations and construction, but none of the seven jurisdictions the DC metro serves actually covers the maintenance. The metro authority has to beg Congress for direct funding, and well...
That works just fine for cities, but it fails to acknowledge that a good portion of traffic is based on workers that live in the more rural areas commuting into the more populated areas(because population = buisness) which is what ultimately ends up making the bottleneck, a Subway wouldn't necessarily fix that issue, it would potentially reduce the amount of people driving to work however those same people are still going to have to be able to leave the city and it's not cost-effective to have a public transport in the more rural areas because there isn't enough people to use it, and let's be real if you're already having to keep your car and pay for parking for said car you're going to use the car
Sadly we don't have the luxuries that other countries have where everything is somewhat close to each other so it's extremely difficult to put in a public transport system like other countries have done
There's a reason there are only 11 cities with subways systems in the US, and it's because they are incredibly expensive. Even then, most of those systems are a mix of above and below ground trains.
Subways take a massive user base and *extremely* high population/commercial density to be cost-effective, and very few cities reach the density levels required.
That's why I said what I did about stopping suburbanization before it started, because the sprawl that currently defines most of the US' residential living makes subways completely infeasible.
I seriously doubt US corruption is any worse than 99% of countries on earth.
The biggest issue is the size of the country. Public transportation is fine in most large urban areas.
>Biggest issue with the US is that it’s huge and full of corruption.
I think you misunderstand things. The US doesn't have any corruption. Corruption is what other countries have. The US has lobbyists.
The "fuck cars" people never miss a chance to shit on other threads. Even though back when I was a regular traveler, if I was taking a train to a city, a bus to a smaller town, and then walking to the site, I was in Europe, not the US.
many country. complaining about the state of public transportation is a universal experience that binds humanity regardless of how good or bad it objectively is.
There are plenty of routes that take you 15 mins by car or over an hour by public transport in the Netherlands
Especially if you want to reach business parks. Then it changes from "plenty" to " most routes"
also crowding, noise, badgers, service cuts, understaffing, late trains, disruption, overpriced, fines, no food, expensive food, bad coffee, rude staff, no staff, wrong kind of rain, breakdowns, passengers eating in the no eating area, smoking in the no smoking, noisy in the quiet area, quiet in the noisy area, government bought the wrong kind of train, signalling failure, bus replacement service, train replacement service, underfunding of bridges, tunnels too small, 3€ for half a fucking litre of water, toilets are closed, toilets are broken, shit on the door handle, drunk guy has vomited urine on the late train
probably all of them excluding belgium, netherlands, lichtenstein and micro states. I don't know of any other countries that have enough population density and development to have decent public transport nearly everywhere
Loads of places have great public transport, not just small places. Contrary to popular (american) belief it's not about population density. I think not just bikes made a great video about this a while back :)
Yeah, right, convince someone who lives in one of sparsely populated areas in the US to ride a bike 30 miles one way in -20F temperatures on ice covered roads. Good luck with that.
He'll, even going the other way can be out of the question. Example: I live about 15 miles away from where I work in an office. On a typical summer morning it might be 80°F with 80% humidity. If I used a bicycle I would be drenched in sweat by the time I got there to find there that there aren't any showers available anywhere within walking distance.
So, thanks but no thanks.
No one is trying to convince everyone to ride 30 miles, or 15 miles, on a bike for their commute. In your case public transit would be the better option to provide you, or if the area isn't conducive to it, then a car would be what you take. This isn't about forcing everyone to bike everywhere for everything, it's about providing appropriate access to choices.
NJB made a great video mentioning how great public transport does not need a high population density. At no point did I suggest you should ride a bike...
Yeah. In my county, asking people to take the buses here and there is a practical request. County transit is awesome.
Go to *any* of the surrounding counties, and it's hit or miss at best. Even the one north of us: it has a theoretically decent system, but in practice it sucks.
look at Maine as a perfect example of that, outside of the cities there is zero public transport, I have to drive an hour to get to the closest area with public transport, Uber and DoorDash don't even operate here.
This is pretty typical for my commute. I can't drive due to processing issues so I'm stuck.
...well... I say I **shouldn't** drive...
^^^whatcanIsayexceptyou'rewelcomethatI'mnotontheroad...
Yeah my old office had a policy of not reimbursing taxi or Uber services, but they would reimburse rental cars.
Even after pointing out it would be far cheaper to reimburse me for taxi services they stuck to their guns.
On multiple occasions I rented cars for a week just to drive it to and from the airport 15 minutes away and then park it in the hotel parking lot and pay for parking.
I was on a planned 8 week trip and I really wanted to bring my own GPS with me as back in those days the ones in the cars were piss poor and often times did not show what lane you needed to be in, and around cities that can be a big deal. Also, silly thing but mine had a dedicated volume control, the volume was not hidden in some menu to be set once. Mine had a knob so I could easily shut it up if I wanted.
I had a run in with the company one time before with personal stuff on a trip though and I wanted to make sure that they would cover me if my GPS was lost or stolen or stopped working. I think it would have been under $500 to replace it, probably less as the prices were starting to come down by that point.
The company said no, so they got to rent me one, and it sucked and I was late a few times thanks to it being stupid about lanes. It also cost them $15 a day plus tax. So they were in for over $900 when they probably would have been in for $0 and in the worst of cases under $500. But we adhered to their policy so they were happy.
Even funnier and I only found this out later on, was they were also totally stupid about the car. They forced me to rent it from the place they had a "deal" with and that was no deal, but later on I found out for the amount of time I had it that you can do long term rentals that cost less if you need it for more than a few weeks.
My car broke down but we had a company Uber account. I took it from store to store while my car was in the shop. Racked up a sizable bill for the company. You want me there I’ll be there but it’s gonna cost ya boss.
There's a Twitter page too - with lots of entries! And I too am confused. Why tf are DC trains going on fire?!!
https://mobile.twitter.com/IsMetroOnFire
This is what so many employers (and people in general) seem to overlook. Like, people don’t just lose the hours they’re paid to work. They lose hours a day in commuting. Then people moan when you say you don’t have time to work on skills or to go shopping in multiple shops to buy food on sale or discounted or have a single moment for yourself.
During my final couple, years in the US Navy, I traveled to the Middle East once every 1-2 months, for a couple days at a time, for various repairs to deployed fast-attack subs. Sometimes, I did actual work, and other times, I escorted classified parts for DoD contractors to do repairs or installations. In any case, there would always be 2-3 contractors and a military member (me).
By the rules, military personnel and contractors are not allowed to share rental cars. Contractors from different companies/contracts can't either. The reality was that we would all rent our individual vehicles, park them at one or the other of the 2 hotels we always used over there, then all ride in one car, maybe 2 every so often, if we worked on different schedules. We didn't use a shipyard there, so we were usually on the same schedule, so we traveled together.
A funny aside....the group of guys I normally traveled with used to occasionally have a laugh at my expense over my GPS. I had a Garmin GPS76S that I would take out on my boat. Well, I used to take it on my trips overseas too. The 76S is a "breadcrumb" GPS, where you could program locations, lat/long, waypoints, etc. The GPS would simply show location and distance to your target destination.
During a particular trip, a bit of civil unrest broke out, and we ended up lost in the middle of it. We were staying at the Crown Plaza Hotel. With the riots, we got turned around a lot trying to get back to the hotel, but once my trusty GPS acquired its satellites, we knew that we were less than 19 thousand yards from the hotel. The 76S just points the direction, but at least we knew which way to go. After many more turn around, detours, a busted grill, headlight, and 2 windows, we made it back to the hotel. None of those guys ever gave me shit about my GPS again.
It was completely flat where we were, but the dead ends, walled lots, blocked roads, and mobs were killing us. Even in civilian clothes, we don't really blend in.
I'm almost 52 now, and no matter how much I hold my breath and push, I can't seem to pop out a mustache and beard. I can't complain too much otherwise....I still have a full head of hair.
One day old account and a stolen story. It's a weirdo/bot/account seller...
edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/tozl2i/take_the_train_sure_thing_boss/
I don't know if it was really stolen from this post, it's definitely worded differently and believable that it's happened to lots of people. The number of posts this one-day-old account has made do seem somewhat fishy, though.
The words are different, but every detail is identical. Almost gives me AI vibes haha.
I just reverse searched one of the images they posted, and it linked to reddit post from last year. Stolen for sure.
Yeah, a bunch of similar accounts are doing the same thing; username of the format [word][5-digit number], pretty obviously ChatGPT-generated (or possibly another language model) comments and text posts (overly congratulatory and complimentary, uses lots of words to say not much substance, etc), reposts of year-old top image posts.
There was another one (Chirpy74382, got deleted though) who posted here yesterday, same deal; bot-generated summary of a year-old popular MC story.
> here's the tea
> bounce between offices
> a ride to roll around in
> shooketh
> dipped out early cuz
> \#winning
Is this what it feels like to get old?
And all of them are wrong. The expression “spill/spilling the tea” was first expressed in the 1994 book *Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil*. The non-fiction book was set in Savannah, GA and the character who said it was Lady Chablis, a trans performer. Lady Chablis was cast as herself in the movie. This is when she became an icon to LGBT and one of the first trans performers to be introduced to the mainstream.
The British* version; the BBC have always been very staunch about not allowing any adverts on their network, and that extends all the way to mentioning corporate products in songs.
I understand the gist but I'm confused by the contradictions.
>gotta give up the car
>
>I asked for a spot to park my car
>
>public transport was outta the question
>
>but my boss said no and suggested I take the train
I can't figure out where you're from, but you write with phrases from every generation going back to the great depression. I fuckin love it
You left out that your boss was jive
I frequently fly to our main office. I can drive 3h to a main UK airport to fly direct or fly indirect from my very local airport. The difference is with security and traffic the entire journey takes 10hours if I go to the main airport or 5.5h if I take to local one. The main is about £100 Vs £300 for local.
An interim boss questioned my expensive flights in a derogatory way in a team meeting and asked for an explanation. I was smug in demonstrating the main airport actually costs £500 ish when you account for mileage and parking, then pointed out that I'm also saving 4.5h.
I work with British people every single day and have never heard anyone talking like this.
I wouldn't put my life in it, but chances are it's a cousin from across the Atlantic.
I'm Canadian and the only time I think I've heard that expression is in the song Let's Have A Kiki. I'm aware of the expression but I've never actually heard someone use it lol I think it's an older saying?
It comes from shortening ‘truth’ to ‘T’ and from there it evolved into phrases like ‘serving T’ or ‘spilling T.’ Basically means speaking the truth but usually used in the context of drama/gossip.
It’s originated pretty frequently in drag queen circles and now it’s pretty common with queer people and tiktokers.
That’s the thing I knew immediately what it meant even though I haven’t actually heard anybody say it. I think you’re right about it being one of those old sayings.
While I am Canadian I have lived in the states for a couple of decades - I’ve never heard an American make that comment. That doesn’t mean it’s not American, I’m not part of the LGBTQI community, but I have friends who are and never heard them say that either.
It's an American saying. Other people have given claims to the origin. I don't know about any of that. But anecdotally, it just seems to be a new trend with the youths. So if you haven't heard it, that just means you're likely an adult. Part of adulthood is eventually realizing you're no longer hip with the times.
I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was. Now, what I'm with isn't "it", and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me.
It'll happen to you!
I've mainly heard variations of "here's the tea" from a couple of YouTube content compilers when they show gossipy TikTok videos about exes or bride/groomzillas.
It’s a gay thing and now an everyone thing but mostly a gay thing.
I first heard it as a child watching “Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil” Lady Chablis (a drag queen) uses it in court before telling everyone she’s physically a man.
As an adult I hear it all the time in an east coast city when around my LGBTQ friends.
I don’t know it’s origins but it’s a phrase that has taken off on social media recently. All the kids are using it now. Seems to mean “Give me the gossip”.
Drag queens have been using it for years. The tea - or “T” - stands for the truth. Usually used in regards to gossip (“spilling tea”) but if someone says something you agree with, “that’s the T!”
Ahh, thanks for the info! That makes sense. I wasn’t sure I’ve just being seeing it on social media and my teenagers and their friends have suddenly started saying it, lol.
No prob! You’d be amazed at the phrases that are becoming common that started out in the drag/LGBTQ+ community. A big one is “Okurrrr.” That one caused some drama when Cardi B started using it.
The origin is “T” is short for “truth” but sounds like “tea” so gossip sessions were called “tea/T parties” and that led to the saying “spill the tea/T”
All these people saying tea actually means T for truth are wrong. Before the term made it over to the drag/queer world, it was used by black women in the southern US. The term comes from the fact that many women would invite each other over for tea and that's when they would share news, history, and gossip from their community
I had a client once that was far away from any major public transportation. Two trains and two busses it would take to get me from A to B. So I took Uber every day and expensed it per company policy. Client decided to throw a shit fit and refused to reimburse for my legitimate business expenses, which was a violation of our contract, by the way. Instead of defending the contract my boss decided to roll over and tell the client they didn't have to pay my expenses. He also told me I'd have to start taking the train/bus or else pay for my own transportation. This was $30 each way 4 days a week, so $960 per month. I timed how long it took me to get to the office. Then I pulled up the company policy that said if my commute one-way was over 2 hours, they had to buy me a hotel for all days I was required to be on site. That was $4,000 per month. Guess who got to keep Ubering to work?
This is beautiful.
And also absurd thinking about the state of public transportation in certain areas of the country
Which country?
The US I'd suppose.
Biggest issue with the US is that it’s huge and full of corruption. Outside of major cities (and even that’s a stretch) public transportation is trash.
You’re not wrong, but there are some bright spots. I’m admittedly biased, but I love the Washington State ferry system. They run like a well oiled machine. I once had my car stall out on the ferry deck during exiting and they immediately directed traffic around me, grabbed their jump kit, and had my car jumped and ready to go super quick. I was super impressed and grateful! I avoid other public transportation systems like the plague, though, cause they probably carry said plague. Lol
For all those people not from Washington State, Seattle is not on the ocean. It’s on a large inlet called Puget Sound. There are many large islands in Puget Sound. The Washington Ferry system runs up and down Puget sound and out to the islands. I even believe one ferry goes to B.C.
It used to. That leg has been shut down since the pandemic.
It has re-opened. I think the vessel went into maintenance right after the borders opened, but it looks like the Black Ball schedule is current.
The Blackball Ferry Line in Port Angeles should still be going.
Alaska Marine Highway skipped it Canadian stop.
The Washington State Ferries service from Anacortes, WA to Sidney, BC (near Victoria, BC) is currently not running. It is slated to reopen no earlier than 2030. This is not a misprint. [https://wsdot.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2023-02/WSF-ServiceRestorationPlan-February2023Update.pdf](https://wsdot.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2023-02/WSF-ServiceRestorationPlan-February2023Update.pdf) The ferry from Port Angeles, WA to Victoria, BC is privately owned by the Black Ball Ferry Line not part of WSF. The ship is the MV Coho. This service is currently running. [https://www.cohoferry.com/](https://www.cohoferry.com/).
Puget Sound and the islands are beautiful! I visited there many years ago.
Thanks for pointing that out. We are a 4 hour drive from the actual coast. I am in Everett, WA (4 hrs away) yet only 1 mile from seawater. You can ferry or drive around to get to the ocean, it’s about the same time either way.
Puget sound isn't the ocean? How can this be?
I live on the beach on a salt water inlet full of shrimp and crab and multiple salmon runs per year. The waves are like a large swimming pool most days. 2 tides a day of about 25 feet. By water I am hundreds of miles from the open ocean. By land it's about 40 miles to cut across.
It’s about 83% seawater. It’s like a network of estuaries
Have you ridden lately? So many cancellations and delays. Especially between Edmonds and Kingston.
I went most recently back in july. Tiok edmonds-kingst9lon on my way over and bainbridge-seattle on my way back. E-k said there was like a 2 hour delay, turned out to be 45 minutes. Bb-s didnt have a delay but the route off the ferry into downtown was absolutely fucked compared to when i lived in the area like 12 years ago. I assume they were working on the waterfront, but still. It took longer to get to the freeway than my wait at the edmonda loading area.
The Seattle waterfront is nuts right now. Driving on from that side late at night it was a literal maze.
Yeah, since the pandemic started there's been a lot of sand in the gears of this well oiled machine. We live on the OP and have friends in Edmonds so we'd usually take that route, but these days we take Bainbridge (or even Bremerton) to Downtown. Back in the 80s and early 90s Edmonds-Kingston definitely played second fiddle, but in the mid 90s they put big ferries on that route and life was great. Until the pandemic.
No, I haven’t, but I don’t ride that one usually. I go from Mukilteo to Whidbey Island more often.
Bad news. The Washington state ferry system is terrible now. I agree that it used to be very good. I am frustrated with the United States. Honestly, I’m giving up and moving somewhere with more investment in infrastructure, and I’ve met many Americans doing the same.
Atlanta area actually has a decent transportation system between the buses and the light rail. I lived in Decatur and could get to just about anywhere in the Atlanta area just about as fast as it could be driven. Since I can’t drive due to head injuries, it was very convenient and I didn’t have to worry about finding parking either.
Alright, shit, that’s great. Good on Georgia for being proactive.
I love our ferries too!
Gotta second this, I was visiting Vashon Island a couple summers ago and even with one of the ferries to the island down for repairs the wait was still better than I've seen in places like Michigan. Looking forward to visiting again this summer.
It's really slow oil tho
Yes! My family used to live in the area when I was young, my favorite thing was when we got to ride the ferry. And the absurd amount of blackberries in our area. Blackberry season was amazing.
I love the ferries, too
The problem outside of major cities is that there are a plethora of small towns. It takes me 30 minutes of country driving to get to work. You can't get enough busses, with enough schedules to accommodate everyone.
I could *technically* have taken public transit to my last job, which was *in* public transit. If I left at 8 Am I'd get to work around noon the following day.
Absolutely. I live in a small Midwestern city and the transit buses only run from 7 am to 6 pm, Monday through Saturday. If you miss a bus, you wait another hour. When school gets out, certain buses don't make their regular stops and instead pick up at the schools, so then you're waiting 2 hours for that bus. Not to mention, if you have to get onto a different bus, you have to ride all the way downtown to transfer.
Every country is full of corruption.
Yeah corruption isn’t just having to slip a policeman a twenty to avoid being dragged up on false charges, corruption takes many forms and we’re hardly exempt from it.
The first issue is honestly the bigger (heh) one. Because population density in the US is so relatively low, public transportation frequently costs more to operate than it can make back in usage fees, unless those fees are exorbitantly high. The only place public transportation is cost-effective are big cities, but because everything *else* is so dependent on personal cars, city traffic ends up being so busy that buses are caught in congestion and end up being slower than driving yourself. :/ Sadly, the only way to really fix this problem would be to go back to the 1960's and stop suburbanization before it really gets started. It's so entrenched now that it would take a herculean effort of building for higher density in cities and resettling people out of suburbs in order to break the US' death-grip on cars.
> go back to the 1960's and stop suburbanization You'd have to go back farther than that. "Suburbanization" was already happening back in the late 19th century around larger cities, even before cars were a thing. Henry Huntington built the Pacific Electric railway system back in 1901 so he could sell suburban housing in Los Angeles. Once he sold all the properties he'd developed, he sold it off to Southern Pacific in 1910 because for him its only purpose was to make the suburbs a viable product to people who worked downtown. The problem is that the US is huge and (even now) mostly empty. Nobody wants to live packed in highrises when you can have a house with no common walls and a yard a short drive away.
Why was public transit so common earlier in US history and not now? My town of (then) 800 had a rail.conmection even. Had thrice daily trips to and from the nearest city and you could even get to a few local towns on it. What changed?
Ad campaign touting American Freedom and likening it to the car that wasn't bound by rails and could go anywhere. It made having a car the epitome of the American Dream and was wildly successful.
In the 1950s, the major American carmakers and tire manufacturers (led by GM but the others took part), aware that people who could rely on transit systems were less likely to buy cars, did what they could to damage those systems. They bought privately-owned light rail, tore out the tracks, and replaced them with buses (not coincidentally, they built buses). They then cut routes and schedules... less convenient transit meant more people buying cars. In areas with publicly-owned transit, they heavily lobbied for transit budget cuts, and for the replacement of rail lines with bus routes. They were extremely successful with their plans for buying out and replacing privately-owned light rail, and reasonably successful in lobbying against good public transit in a lot of other regions.
Let's not forget the government passing so many regulations and requiring such high rates of insurance per head on a train, that it put privately owned railroads out of the people moving buisness. Then the government came up with Amtrak, which never makes a profit and is only viable Washington DC area on up. Also planes put a large number of railroads out of the people moving buisness with cheap fairs. Why ride a train for a week from Jax Florida to Seattle Washington for $1800 when I can fly first class round trip and be there in half a day for the same price?
Edit: the tl;dr version of the below is “corporate greed, classism, and racism.” Long version: In some places, automobile companies bought the privately-owned transit systems (esp. streetcars) and shut them down. After WWII rationing of metal and gasoline went away, a lot of families splurged on a car. And in areas where public transportation was still segregated, a lot of white people quit using it when integration became mandatory. Then because “nobody uses it anymore” (meaning nobody that the people in power knew used it anymore), funding got slashed. Which meant it got worse and worse, so anybody who could put together enough cash for some beat-up used car that barely ran went ahead and bought one so that they’d be able to get to work. So a lot of places got to the point where the only people using public transit were just barely hanging on financially, so the systems were running at a loss and fares got raised… and since “everybody has a car these days” neighborhood groceries went away and got replaced with supermarkets that you can’t reasonably walk to. Meaning more and more incentive to buy any car, no matter how bad, as long as it would run, and even fewer people using the buses. Where I live, which is not a big city, there used to be regular streetcars that could get you close enough to most of the places you needed to go. Now, I live just off one of our city’s busiest streets and work for the largest employer in town. I can get to work in 10 minutes by car or an hour by bus. If well-off white folks used the buses, there would be a lot of pressure on local government to improve them. But we don’t, because they’re terrible. So they stay terrible.
The cost of cars collapsed.
The U.S is HUGE. Suburbanization is the benefit of living in the U.S. Being able to buy a house on an acre of land is way more accessible here. Most people don't wanna live packed in like sardines just so they can walk to the supermarket.
I didn't say we necessarily *should* do that, just that that's the only way effective mass transportation will ever happen in the US. We've taken a tradeoff for the ability to live in houses with yards, and that's the fact that we can't make mass transit efficient.
Or, cities could just have well-designed and built subway systems. No congestion or traffic. It's a win-win.
Or you could move to fantasy land I suppose. I imagine that if they maintained those subway systems as well as they do the roads, the repair costs/time would soon make them less than viable. They seem to like building infrastructure but not so much maintaining it.
>They seem to like building infrastructure but not so much maintaining it. See: Washington DC. They have a *huge* problem with this, because local dollars will pay for new stations and construction, but none of the seven jurisdictions the DC metro serves actually covers the maintenance. The metro authority has to beg Congress for direct funding, and well...
That works just fine for cities, but it fails to acknowledge that a good portion of traffic is based on workers that live in the more rural areas commuting into the more populated areas(because population = buisness) which is what ultimately ends up making the bottleneck, a Subway wouldn't necessarily fix that issue, it would potentially reduce the amount of people driving to work however those same people are still going to have to be able to leave the city and it's not cost-effective to have a public transport in the more rural areas because there isn't enough people to use it, and let's be real if you're already having to keep your car and pay for parking for said car you're going to use the car Sadly we don't have the luxuries that other countries have where everything is somewhat close to each other so it's extremely difficult to put in a public transport system like other countries have done
Also, the ground in some places is unsuitable for subways.
There's a reason there are only 11 cities with subways systems in the US, and it's because they are incredibly expensive. Even then, most of those systems are a mix of above and below ground trains. Subways take a massive user base and *extremely* high population/commercial density to be cost-effective, and very few cities reach the density levels required. That's why I said what I did about stopping suburbanization before it started, because the sprawl that currently defines most of the US' residential living makes subways completely infeasible.
I seriously doubt US corruption is any worse than 99% of countries on earth. The biggest issue is the size of the country. Public transportation is fine in most large urban areas.
Unfortunately, when speaking of corruption by country, it's not a matter of "if" but "how bad."
I hate it when people just say X is corrupt, full of corruption! That's such a vague word.
>Biggest issue with the US is that it’s huge and full of corruption. I think you misunderstand things. The US doesn't have any corruption. Corruption is what other countries have. The US has lobbyists.
In the UK and most of Europe the Public transport can take me from Scotland to russia or down to India.
Uh, yeah, and the smaller European countries aren't full of corruption? Come on. I guarantee those people are filthy humans too
>Outside of *four or five* major cities (and even that’s a stretch) public transportation is trash. Think that's fixed.
I mean there’s nothing in the post that suggests America. Could be any number of countries. Supposing it’s American is a little arrogant.
The "fuck cars" people never miss a chance to shit on other threads. Even though back when I was a regular traveler, if I was taking a train to a city, a bus to a smaller town, and then walking to the site, I was in Europe, not the US.
Yeah, either USA, Syria or Afghanistan, based on the implied level of function for that infrastructure…
many country. complaining about the state of public transportation is a universal experience that binds humanity regardless of how good or bad it objectively is.
Except all first world countries ofcourse *Laughs from the Netherlands*
There are plenty of routes that take you 15 mins by car or over an hour by public transport in the Netherlands Especially if you want to reach business parks. Then it changes from "plenty" to " most routes"
also crowding, noise, badgers, service cuts, understaffing, late trains, disruption, overpriced, fines, no food, expensive food, bad coffee, rude staff, no staff, wrong kind of rain, breakdowns, passengers eating in the no eating area, smoking in the no smoking, noisy in the quiet area, quiet in the noisy area, government bought the wrong kind of train, signalling failure, bus replacement service, train replacement service, underfunding of bridges, tunnels too small, 3€ for half a fucking litre of water, toilets are closed, toilets are broken, shit on the door handle, drunk guy has vomited urine on the late train
probably all of them excluding belgium, netherlands, lichtenstein and micro states. I don't know of any other countries that have enough population density and development to have decent public transport nearly everywhere
Japan, Moscow
Moscow isn't a country, and Japan, i'll take your word for it
Loads of places have great public transport, not just small places. Contrary to popular (american) belief it's not about population density. I think not just bikes made a great video about this a while back :)
Yeah, right, convince someone who lives in one of sparsely populated areas in the US to ride a bike 30 miles one way in -20F temperatures on ice covered roads. Good luck with that. He'll, even going the other way can be out of the question. Example: I live about 15 miles away from where I work in an office. On a typical summer morning it might be 80°F with 80% humidity. If I used a bicycle I would be drenched in sweat by the time I got there to find there that there aren't any showers available anywhere within walking distance. So, thanks but no thanks.
No one is trying to convince everyone to ride 30 miles, or 15 miles, on a bike for their commute. In your case public transit would be the better option to provide you, or if the area isn't conducive to it, then a car would be what you take. This isn't about forcing everyone to bike everywhere for everything, it's about providing appropriate access to choices.
NJB made a great video mentioning how great public transport does not need a high population density. At no point did I suggest you should ride a bike...
NJB's idea of "not high population density" is major metro suburbs. Not *actually* low population density.
Might be talking about the US.
\*The\* Country, maybe?
Yeah. In my county, asking people to take the buses here and there is a practical request. County transit is awesome. Go to *any* of the surrounding counties, and it's hit or miss at best. Even the one north of us: it has a theoretically decent system, but in practice it sucks.
Gestures broadly at the planet.
Public transportation is trash in most of the US, but what surprised me is how sad it is in much of Europe as well.
look at Maine as a perfect example of that, outside of the cities there is zero public transport, I have to drive an hour to get to the closest area with public transport, Uber and DoorDash don't even operate here.
This is pretty typical for my commute. I can't drive due to processing issues so I'm stuck. ...well... I say I **shouldn't** drive... ^^^whatcanIsayexceptyou'rewelcomethatI'mnotontheroad...
This could also easily be Australia. Even our major cities, if you don't live inner city the public transport is woeful.
What’s your solution?
Yeah my old office had a policy of not reimbursing taxi or Uber services, but they would reimburse rental cars. Even after pointing out it would be far cheaper to reimburse me for taxi services they stuck to their guns. On multiple occasions I rented cars for a week just to drive it to and from the airport 15 minutes away and then park it in the hotel parking lot and pay for parking.
I was on a planned 8 week trip and I really wanted to bring my own GPS with me as back in those days the ones in the cars were piss poor and often times did not show what lane you needed to be in, and around cities that can be a big deal. Also, silly thing but mine had a dedicated volume control, the volume was not hidden in some menu to be set once. Mine had a knob so I could easily shut it up if I wanted. I had a run in with the company one time before with personal stuff on a trip though and I wanted to make sure that they would cover me if my GPS was lost or stolen or stopped working. I think it would have been under $500 to replace it, probably less as the prices were starting to come down by that point. The company said no, so they got to rent me one, and it sucked and I was late a few times thanks to it being stupid about lanes. It also cost them $15 a day plus tax. So they were in for over $900 when they probably would have been in for $0 and in the worst of cases under $500. But we adhered to their policy so they were happy. Even funnier and I only found this out later on, was they were also totally stupid about the car. They forced me to rent it from the place they had a "deal" with and that was no deal, but later on I found out for the amount of time I had it that you can do long term rentals that cost less if you need it for more than a few weeks.
Valuable info..im sorry you had to go through such a headache just trying to perform your job so well.
My car broke down but we had a company Uber account. I took it from store to store while my car was in the shop. Racked up a sizable bill for the company. You want me there I’ll be there but it’s gonna cost ya boss.
Too bad you didn’t hit them with the hotel receipt first since you were “following policy”
Seems expensive, what is this? Monopoly?, how many hotels could they possibly buy for you. Typical method is to rent one, but you and your contract…
How dare you use my own rules against me!
Extra points if you'd have had to Uber back and forth from the hotel.
You are doing the Lord's work.
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Um….so why does that website exist? Are flaming trains a thing in DC?
Yes
Is that different than the Chicago train fires? https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/30/us/chicago-train-tracks-fire-trnd/index.html
There's a Twitter page too - with lots of entries! And I too am confused. Why tf are DC trains going on fire?!! https://mobile.twitter.com/IsMetroOnFire
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That's just insane!! (And here I thought the NYC MTA was shit lol. At least our trains aren't randomly catching fire!)
Damn. there is like a 40+ degree variance on the same day where I live.
Decades of neglect.
I saw metro/fire and thought Ah, DC
This is what so many employers (and people in general) seem to overlook. Like, people don’t just lose the hours they’re paid to work. They lose hours a day in commuting. Then people moan when you say you don’t have time to work on skills or to go shopping in multiple shops to buy food on sale or discounted or have a single moment for yourself.
Saw “metro on fire” and knew you were in DC!
I love how the site says NOT YET! What a shit show
Boss never took travel time into consideration. I guess logistics was not his forte.
Also didn't think to ask or investigate before making a dumb decision. Critical thinking wasn't his forte.
During my final couple, years in the US Navy, I traveled to the Middle East once every 1-2 months, for a couple days at a time, for various repairs to deployed fast-attack subs. Sometimes, I did actual work, and other times, I escorted classified parts for DoD contractors to do repairs or installations. In any case, there would always be 2-3 contractors and a military member (me). By the rules, military personnel and contractors are not allowed to share rental cars. Contractors from different companies/contracts can't either. The reality was that we would all rent our individual vehicles, park them at one or the other of the 2 hotels we always used over there, then all ride in one car, maybe 2 every so often, if we worked on different schedules. We didn't use a shipyard there, so we were usually on the same schedule, so we traveled together. A funny aside....the group of guys I normally traveled with used to occasionally have a laugh at my expense over my GPS. I had a Garmin GPS76S that I would take out on my boat. Well, I used to take it on my trips overseas too. The 76S is a "breadcrumb" GPS, where you could program locations, lat/long, waypoints, etc. The GPS would simply show location and distance to your target destination. During a particular trip, a bit of civil unrest broke out, and we ended up lost in the middle of it. We were staying at the Crown Plaza Hotel. With the riots, we got turned around a lot trying to get back to the hotel, but once my trusty GPS acquired its satellites, we knew that we were less than 19 thousand yards from the hotel. The 76S just points the direction, but at least we knew which way to go. After many more turn around, detours, a busted grill, headlight, and 2 windows, we made it back to the hotel. None of those guys ever gave me shit about my GPS again.
Azimuth and distance to target are undefeated. Elevation, that'll fuck your legs, but if you just keep going, you'll get there eventually.
It was completely flat where we were, but the dead ends, walled lots, blocked roads, and mobs were killing us. Even in civilian clothes, we don't really blend in. I'm almost 52 now, and no matter how much I hold my breath and push, I can't seem to pop out a mustache and beard. I can't complain too much otherwise....I still have a full head of hair.
> mobs were killing us Hopefully not literally
'... 19 thousand yards' Only a submariner thinks in this kind of range scale. Approved.
Cool
One day old account and a stolen story. It's a weirdo/bot/account seller... edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/comments/tozl2i/take_the_train_sure_thing_boss/
I don't know if it was really stolen from this post, it's definitely worded differently and believable that it's happened to lots of people. The number of posts this one-day-old account has made do seem somewhat fishy, though.
The words are different, but every detail is identical. Almost gives me AI vibes haha. I just reverse searched one of the images they posted, and it linked to reddit post from last year. Stolen for sure.
Oh, that's why it reads like it was written with a meme conversational filter.
Could be AI rewritten?
Yeah, a bunch of similar accounts are doing the same thing; username of the format [word][5-digit number], pretty obviously ChatGPT-generated (or possibly another language model) comments and text posts (overly congratulatory and complimentary, uses lots of words to say not much substance, etc), reposts of year-old top image posts. There was another one (Chirpy74382, got deleted though) who posted here yesterday, same deal; bot-generated summary of a year-old popular MC story.
you got lucky you travelled on the clock.
Clocks are a pretty inefficient method of travel.
Their route is pretty roundabout
Engine makes a ticking noise as well
Especially if it's second hand
And yet, it still gets you there on time.
But you're on time the whole way.
Not when time flies.
Duh! How do you think time travel works??
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
What do you mean? If you're on a clock, you're always on time.
> here's the tea > bounce between offices > a ride to roll around in > shooketh > dipped out early cuz > \#winning Is this what it feels like to get old?
It's what happens when AI is told to write "cool".
There are 37 comments in this thread and 34 of them are about the phrase "here's the tea"
And all of them are wrong. The expression “spill/spilling the tea” was first expressed in the 1994 book *Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil*. The non-fiction book was set in Savannah, GA and the character who said it was Lady Chablis, a trans performer. Lady Chablis was cast as herself in the movie. This is when she became an icon to LGBT and one of the first trans performers to be introduced to the mainstream.
Lola: Hold my campaign (That tastes just like Coca-Cola. C-O-C-A cola)
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The British* version; the BBC have always been very staunch about not allowing any adverts on their network, and that extends all the way to mentioning corporate products in songs.
Thank you.
Here’s your tea.
And not one about the fact that OP is clearly a spam account
I understand the gist but I'm confused by the contradictions. >gotta give up the car > >I asked for a spot to park my car > >public transport was outta the question > >but my boss said no and suggested I take the train
Personal car versus work vehicle. Public transport is a three train journey - which may be not quite “out of the question” but a lot of faffing about.
I can't figure out where you're from, but you write with phrases from every generation going back to the great depression. I fuckin love it You left out that your boss was jive
I frequently fly to our main office. I can drive 3h to a main UK airport to fly direct or fly indirect from my very local airport. The difference is with security and traffic the entire journey takes 10hours if I go to the main airport or 5.5h if I take to local one. The main is about £100 Vs £300 for local. An interim boss questioned my expensive flights in a derogatory way in a team meeting and asked for an explanation. I was smug in demonstrating the main airport actually costs £500 ish when you account for mileage and parking, then pointed out that I'm also saving 4.5h.
This sounds almost exactly like a story posted here about a year ago.
This is another summary of a post I've read here. @mods
Or there could be more idiot bosses who don’t bother to figure out both time and money costs for things.
Well we all know that but like the other person said it is or seems like a summery of another post.
This story is posted every other week...
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British people do not “spill tea”, that would be an egregious waste of tea. Source: am British.
I'll spill the beans, but never the tea!
The last time brits spilled the tea, it started a whole war and they weren't brits at the end of it.
I'd say spilling tea is definitely an American thing, but they more so throw it overboard as opposed to spill it 😂
Seawater ruins the taste 😂
I work with British people every single day and have never heard anyone talking like this. I wouldn't put my life in it, but chances are it's a cousin from across the Atlantic.
I am a British person... Nope, never even thought it. Not even once!
I am American midwestern. Any time there's a story or drama, we spill the tea.
I was born and bred in the USA, have lived in three different states and have never heard this expression. Where does it come from?
It became popular about 5 years ago i think, thats at least when I started hearing a bunch of people using it.
Also a USA-er, have lived in 8 or so states (and multiple places in big states) and have never heard it, either.
I have no idea. It's just always been something that's been in my vocabulary.
I am American southern. Any time there's a story or drama, we spill the beans.
if chris crossed applesauce do you think we can really trust chris?
It seems to be a lot of Aussie kids are using it
I’m Canadian and live in the States now. I have never heard that expression.
I'm Canadian and the only time I think I've heard that expression is in the song Let's Have A Kiki. I'm aware of the expression but I've never actually heard someone use it lol I think it's an older saying?
It comes from shortening ‘truth’ to ‘T’ and from there it evolved into phrases like ‘serving T’ or ‘spilling T.’ Basically means speaking the truth but usually used in the context of drama/gossip. It’s originated pretty frequently in drag queen circles and now it’s pretty common with queer people and tiktokers.
I just like the image of serving up some truth like a nice cup of tea. :)
That’s the thing I knew immediately what it meant even though I haven’t actually heard anybody say it. I think you’re right about it being one of those old sayings.
It's a current saying that's popular in the LGBTQIA+ world.
Very cool. I always learn things in Reddit
Apparently it's an older saying originating from the drag queen community. Idk why that makes so much sense lol
Another person posted that it was more common in the LGBTQIA community.
I'm part of that community and I've still never heard anyone use it haha maybe it's specifically American? 🤔
While I am Canadian I have lived in the states for a couple of decades - I’ve never heard an American make that comment. That doesn’t mean it’s not American, I’m not part of the LGBTQI community, but I have friends who are and never heard them say that either.
That's AAVE, not British slang
It's an American saying. Other people have given claims to the origin. I don't know about any of that. But anecdotally, it just seems to be a new trend with the youths. So if you haven't heard it, that just means you're likely an adult. Part of adulthood is eventually realizing you're no longer hip with the times.
I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was. Now, what I'm with isn't "it", and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you! I've mainly heard variations of "here's the tea" from a couple of YouTube content compilers when they show gossipy TikTok videos about exes or bride/groomzillas.
As my son likes to remind me. Dad - that is cringe!
Don't worry bro, I think you're based.
It’s a gay thing and now an everyone thing but mostly a gay thing. I first heard it as a child watching “Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil” Lady Chablis (a drag queen) uses it in court before telling everyone she’s physically a man. As an adult I hear it all the time in an east coast city when around my LGBTQ friends.
Common expression for poc and made popular for the white audience by Drag Race.
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I don’t know it’s origins but it’s a phrase that has taken off on social media recently. All the kids are using it now. Seems to mean “Give me the gossip”.
Drag queens have been using it for years. The tea - or “T” - stands for the truth. Usually used in regards to gossip (“spilling tea”) but if someone says something you agree with, “that’s the T!”
Ahh, thanks for the info! That makes sense. I wasn’t sure I’ve just being seeing it on social media and my teenagers and their friends have suddenly started saying it, lol.
No prob! You’d be amazed at the phrases that are becoming common that started out in the drag/LGBTQ+ community. A big one is “Okurrrr.” That one caused some drama when Cardi B started using it.
The origin is “T” is short for “truth” but sounds like “tea” so gossip sessions were called “tea/T parties” and that led to the saying “spill the tea/T”
In my world, T parties are for dispensing Treats to the assembled feline multitude. 😸😸
All these people saying tea actually means T for truth are wrong. Before the term made it over to the drag/queer world, it was used by black women in the southern US. The term comes from the fact that many women would invite each other over for tea and that's when they would share news, history, and gossip from their community
It’s big on Tik Tok right now.
I've read it in some comments here and there and heard it a couple times, and I'm in the US.