Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Meech17" data-source="post: 9830123" data-attributes="member: 7044459">This talk about being shamed, or ashamed of gaming reminds me of a story from my teen years.I was 17 or so, in High School, and working my first job at Taco Bell. Every now and then, they would introduce several new menu items at the same time, and whenever they did they'd have an all-hands meeting where we'd go in, and all learn to make the new food items, or learn the processes behind them, whatever. It was a rare occurrence.. I did it maybe three times working there in as many years.I was also in the school marching band. That summer I had taken a week off work to attend band camp. This meeting was right off the end of that, and I had requested being off a couple days after to rest and relax a little bit before going back to work, and my manager agreed on the condition I attended the meeting. Since I wasn't working that day, I wore street clothes into the restaurant. We had band camp at a small college a few hours away, and this college had a t-shirt shop. They would sell shirts, and iron on a bunch of stuff however you wanted. Our school (and many others) had been using them for bandcamp for quite a while, so they really leaned into it, and would always make us custom band camp graphics with our school names, band names, the year, etc.So I'm proudly wearing my new, tie-dye marching band shirt into this work event and my coworkers start roasting me for it. American Pie was still less than a decade old at this point so "One Time, at Band Camp" jokes were still very much in the zeitgeist.One of my shift managers.. And this was a guy who grew up in a rough area. He had done some time in jail, been involved in gangs, and even while working at Taco Bell, still ran a side-hustle as an independent pharmacist... He says:"Hol' up now. You guys are clowning on him.. But I would bet money that band camp is sick as hell. If I know anything.. You get a group of people who are all similar together, and it don't matter if you're the dorkiest geeks in the world. If you're away from home, surrounded by a hundred other super dorky geeks just like you.. It's impossible to have a bad time."And that's really stuck with me through life.</blockquote>

Verification