Oh, yeah, that could be called precipitous.

I was skinny as fuck in high school (6' 3", 125#) so my nickname was "Slim Goodbody." I hated it, but that doesn't seem as bad as Kathy and Teppy's nicknames....

There was one bully who would grab my wrist to show how skinny it was....

I was bullied pretty significantly in middle and high school.

In middle school it was the typical middle school girl evil mental warfare because I broke up with the darling of the preppy girl crowd. And also because the girls I went to elementary school stopped hanging out with me. They called me "Fly" - short for "McFly" since my lat name was "McVay". Pretty innocuous. There was also a guy that was in 7th grade when I was in 8th that was pretty ... I don't know - out there. Big time into heavy metal and wore these upside down pentagrams and stuff. I told one of my "friends" that he kind of scared me. He came up behind me at lunch one day and tapped me on my shoulder and asked me why I was scared of him. I was still pretty shy and couldn't answer him. That was when he started slapping me on either side of the back of my head. No one stopped him, including me. He didn't quit, even after I sat there crying.

It's sometimes amazing to me, when I think back about middle school and how horrible it was for me, that I'm not more fucked up. Having almost no friends and even having teachers humiliate you on a daily basis is pretty awful.

t is suddenly quite thinky

High school was a daily name-calling thing, but nothing really physical and the couple of times that it was, I got physical too and that put an end to that.

The two memories I have of a kid named Brian Jones from elementary school are him teasing me by calling me "Skinny legs" and him getting his penis stuck in his zipper and running out of the bathroom crying for the teacher.

Ah practically instant karma!

ION, Man in hot tub calls 911 seeking cocoa

A homeless man having a hot tub soak at a suburban Portland home allegedly called 911 requesting "a hug and a warm cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows in it." Police arrested him for criminal trespassing and unnecessarily calling 911. I really hope they brought him the cocoa though. From AP News:

Beaverton police say Mark Eskelsen called 911 from his cell phone, identified himself as "the sheriff of Washington County," and asked for medical help. He later admitted he wasn't the sheriff but informed the dispatcher he'd been "yelling for about an hour and a half."

The man said in his Sunday morning call that he'd been in the water about 10 hours and his towels had gotten wet.

We got the best all-staff email about a new vacation policy -- they are cutting down the amount of time you can carry over (to a reasonable amount, I think). The email opens with all this bs about work-life balance, and how that's so important to all of us, and people should have time off...and then transitions into the real fact that having all that leave time on the books is a financial liability.

We had a firm no-teasing rule in place in prep school. And it was hard core. And I was a tattle tale. So you could start in on my name, but I would get you sent to the principal in a heartbeat, so think twice.

In fact, if a teacher thought someone might be teased, she sat everyone down and told them not to even think about it. We got the speech when Susan got orthopedic shoes, I remember. And she got left alone.

At high school in Jamaica there was more peer pressure teasing, which I was on the receiving end of because I was a foreign-accented upper middle class girl. The girl I remember being the worst later recognised my mother in the supermarket and told her how much she'd liked me. At the time, she was just a stank bitch operating off her pop charts fame. I have no idea where she thought there was affection in our exchanges. It was all about me not being Jamaican enough.

In English high school no one really gave me shit. They did restrain me physically once from going after another girl, but that was about it. I'm not sure what she did to piss me off, but it was something they thought was playful, and I thought I'd get to beat her up about. But I thought all matters of honour were to be settled by the sword at that age.

I don't remember being physically bullied in elementary school as well, but there was a lot of emotional bulling. I was the Intelligent Weird Kid who did weird stuff, and classmates didn't know how to handle something so different than them. In a way, it was as if I was borderline in the spectrum then - couldn't care less what about I wore, didn't have a hunch of peer pressure or knew the right way to react to things. But I felt very well that I didn't fit. I did make connection with some people, but every connection, by the general context of things, was Fucking Weird (to me. And I'm sure that to them as well). By junior high I learned to keep everything to myself, but classmates still sucked. I thought that the entire world was like this, and preferred my own mind's company. It was a good day if people noticed my existence and said "hello" to me in the morning.

It was high school which restored my faith in the human kind. We were a bunch of outsiders, together, in a boarding school, with an intoxicating feeling of freedom, creativity and a strong feeling of belonging and brotherhood. With all of teenage angst, I think I never felt more happy and free as I was there. To this day, I regard to it as the best decision I've ever made.

We got the best all-staff email about a new vacation policy -- they are cutting down the amount of time you can carry over (to a reasonable amount, I think). The email opens with all this bs about work-life balance, and how that's so important to all of us, and people should have time off...and then transitions into the real fact that having all that leave time on the books is a financial liability.

Ours doesn't carry over at all. It's a huge pain, but otoh it makes it harder for managers to discourage people from taking any time in the first place. As someone who struggles to remember or coordinate time off in the first place, it does give you an incentive to actively make sure you do take the time.

These days, schools are better at combating bullying, right?

We try really really hard, but stuff happens away from school, via texting, and online. Also, there's a lot more of them than there are teachers, so they can do stuff that we miss. We spend time teaching about bullying (inc. cyberbullying), what it is, what you should do if it's happening, etc. I come down hard on namecalling in my room, but I'm sure I miss things.