The hardest part of the Water Temple is that one of the keys is hidden way better than the others, and if you start opening doors in the wrong direction you will run out of keys without it. Combine that with the clunkiness of swapping to/from the Iron Boots and raising/lowering the water level, and the place quickly grew tedious and frustrating.

The 3DS remake added an extra camera sweep and some decor highlighting the hidden passage where that key is found.

I only ever got one ad in RIF, repeated in every spot. I think it was an app for organizing decks in TGCs, but as I don’t play any TGCs, I never bothered to investigate. As with every other ad on the internet, I only interacted with it by accident.

Briefly: I didn’t.

More substantively: I never owned a cell phone growing up, even though I was at the right age when they became a common thing for teenagers to have. It wasn’t a money thing, nor household rule, as my sisters got phones when they were in high school. The biggest reason was probably just how I communicate. I wasn’t big into IM services either, and I preferred email or face-to-face, or a (landline) phone call if it was an urgent matter.

Then there was also my adolescent brain thinking I was making a bold counter-culture statement by steadfastly resisting the march of technology. In reality, I was probably just being a pain in the neck for my friends and family, and I probably unnecessarily endangered myself at least once.

I did finally, begrudgingly, get an old hand-me-down flip-phone in my final year of university, but that was out of necessity, and I used it to make maybe only a dozen calls the 2.5 years I had it before getting a smart device.

To bring it full circle: I did try sending a text message with that flip-phone exactly once, at the insistence of my family. That message was predictably a garbled mess, and to this day my sisters still wonder how I managed to get a number to appear in the middle of the “word”.

I have a number of other somewhat amusing stories about people’s reactions to my lack of a cellphone, but this post is long enough already.

Am I the only person in my generation who never learned to type on a number pad? It wasn’t the only thing I didn’t recognize from the “test”, but it stuck out to me.

At least last time I donated blood in my country (Canada), you could discretely indicate “do not use” by applying a different sticker to the bag. This was done in case someone got peer pressured into donating but didn’t want to reveal something private that would have disqualified them otherwise.

My version of this story happened in the gymnasium. My class, along with the students from three other classes, were all formed up as a choir and had just wrapped up practicing a song for the school’s Christmas play. One kid let loose, and the whole assembly made a very hasty (and disorderly) retreat, leaving the poor guy standing in a puddle of his own vomit.

Bit of an obscure one, but Fire Emblem Gaiden.

There is a miniscule (0.014%) chance for the very first enemies in the game to drop an extremely powerful item that normally isn’t available until much later. Getting it early is absolutely wild because one of its effects is doubling stat gains when leveling up, which can quickly snowball your characters into godhood.

My personal pet peeve is when they play an ad before giving you the menu options.

First, wait thirty seconds for them to tell me how great their mobile app is. Then listen to the options, pick one, find out I picked the wrong one, and have to go back up one level. Now I have to listen to the ad again before I can hear the options.

I don’t care how proud you are of your app, I wouldn’t be calling you if I could solve my problem with it.

teenage_wasteland_the_who.mp3

Different problem, same vibe.

There is definitely a spot early in Ages where it is very easy to get stuck and not know how to progress, right after the second dungeon. Every time I’ve played the game I’ve ended up spending a least an hour wandering the map trying to figure out/remember how to get the Rope and the Flippers.

There’s also the fact that the dungeon puzzles are some of the more difficult ones in the series. It’s actually expected to get temporally stumped from time to time.

I believe it’s 8000 in the manga.

This happens all the time in the military, where NCOs tend to be older and more experienced than the officers they report to, especially at lower levels of the organization. This sometimes causes issues, but when it works, it’s because of two things:

1. These situations are completely normal for the organization, so everyone knows what to expect and how to maintain decorum.
2. The officer and NCO have different roles and acknowledge each others’ strengths and weaknesses.

My practical advice, then, is this: don’t worry so much at first. Your older coworkers may be completely fine with the situation - for example, they may be just fine being line cooks and have no ambitions to move up. If you start getting feelings of resentment from your coworkers, you should address them then.

You can also defer to their greater experience in situations where appropriate. Make sure they understand that while you are acting on their advice, the responsibility still lies with you. If the decision results in an unfavourable outcome, you are the one who will take the blame. However, if the decision results in a favourable outcome instead, be sure to give credit to the advice and experience of your team.

You’d think so, but every couple of months there’s another post making the rounds on the internet because some oblivious person completely missed the message of their favourite band.