u/KingBowser24

Here's my story for that.

When I was in middle school back in 2011-2012, there was an old still-running Pepsi vending machine in my (very small) town that was owned by a local business. It sold pretty much all of the major soda varieties at 50 cents per can. They were ice cold, too. I happily used it like I was supposed to for quite some time, often stopping by it while walking home from school. But of course being a broke young teen who wasn't old enough for a job and whose parents weren't terribly well off themselves, I didn't always have change on me for the machine, so getting my 50 cent soda was still more a privilege than a daily thing.

Well, eventually, one of my more streetwise friends found that the machine could be easily opened up, and you could reach through the outside cage and take the sodas for free. And well, us being the roaming group of bored poor kids we were, once he told us, we all got in on nabbing sodas from that machine. Most of the time 1 or 2 of us would just swoop by and nab 1 or 2 sodas, but there were a handful of times where we came over as a group and made a whole organized heist out of it, with 1 or 2 kids working the machine and filling a backpack with sodas, and the rest of us posted up all over the area keeping watch in all directions, even using hand signals to warn each other if a car or person was coming nearby. There were no cameras nearby that we knew of, and we generally did this at night, but there were a couple more bold operations carried out in broad daylight.

This happened off and on for... I wanna say around 6 months before we realized hey, maybe some of us don't want to get in trouble. The business owner almost certainly knew what was up as well, as he installed a motion light over the machine and eventually fixed the lock that we kept prying open. But, he never confronted us, we were never caught, so, after growing out of it we sorta just forgot about it.

Until a few years later in High School, when the business owner came to the school to be one of those motivational guest speakers. Me and much of the old squad happened to be sitting together attending his speech, and towards the end of it while talking about how your actions can affect others and whatnot, he brought up how some years ago some kids were stealing sodas from his vending machine, forcing him to fix and secure it better which was very difficult for him. He was a disabled Veteran (ofc we didn't know this at the time of the soda stealing), and he kept repeatedly looking right at me and my buddies during that specific part of his speech.

We all agreed that the old man more than likely knew it was us, but for one reason or another, chose not to confront us, call the police, or say anything about it until that day years later. If his goal was simply to make us regret our past stupidity, well, it worked. We all felt terrible for the rest of the day.

TL;DR: Stupid Middle School Me and his equally stupid Middle Schooler friends stole cans of soda from an old vending machine repeatedly, came to deeply regret it years later when we found out the owner was an old disabled veteran who struggled to restock and repair it- something he seemed to directly tell us during a school speech.

Just a couple years ago I was always complaining on here about how it felt like I was always being patronized and infantilized and how annoying it was. Older adults treated me like a kid and called me one, my parents occasionally still ordered me around, and even younger Zers would laugh if I tried making an old joke or tried pulling the seniority card.

But then it all seemed to flip right around the time I turned 27 (early 2025). It felt like most peoples' attitude just flipped on a dime- suddenly I was "unc" to the younger people and "basically 30" to the older adults and that's how it's been ever since. Like bro not even 2 years ago y'all were treating me like a baby, why can't y'all just treat me like a damn 20-something lmao

I suppose its not all bad, people seem more respectful and actually listen to me more often now, and I can show up to a family gathering and not be expected to do all the chores because I'm not "one of the kids" anymore. This is all more just mild annoyance that people seemed to jump from one extreme to the other overnight

Hey all. So I have a friend who was my best friend growing up and we remained pretty close well into adulthood- until a couple years ago when he... kinda just fell off the face of the planet. It seemed kind of abrupt too, like usually he'd be happy to hang whenever I'd ask but since about 2 years ago I haven't gotten a single response or call back from him.

I've spoken to his sister a couple times since, I asked her if he was upset with me for any reason but according to her it has nothing to do with me. She even said "I don't think he could be mad at you if he wanted to", but also said that he's just been hermiting super hard. From what I've heard he never really talks to anyone and rarely even leaves his parents' house. Which is so weird to me because when we were growing up, he was always the more active and social one compared to me. However, years back he was with an abusive partner that isolated him from pretty much his entire circle, friends and family alike. She quite literally derailed his entire life, and I honestly don't think he ever truly recovered from that. I strongly suspect he might be severely depressed from what I know about his circumstances.

I have half a mind to just cruise down to his house one of these days and knock on the door, however, its a farm house in the middle of the country about 40 miles away and his parents are pretty much impossible to reach (they've more or less always been that way). Supposedly, he and his Dad are sharing a phone which I did get the number to from his sister but I haven't gotten a response from either.

So... how can I go about this? It's weird to me that I'm basically unable to contact him, but, I still care about the guy and want to be there for him. Especially since I was told it wasn't my fault and he's more just generally kept himself isolated. Should I keep trying to call or message them here and there? Should I talk to the sister more? Should I just take the risk and go to their house? I'm kind of at a loss.

I'm 28m and there's a girl I know that I seem to get along with fairly well, at least in the occasional passing interactions we have. I considered asking her if she wants to go out sometime, but I recently learned she's only 20.

I feel very on the fence about it personally- normally I'd strongly prefer someone 25+. My friends/family members are split on it, with some saying "absolutely not" and others saying some variation of "eh you're both in your 20s, go for it". I should also probably add that I don't have a ton of dating experience myself, and one of the people in favor of it cited that as a reason. I haven't been with anyone since I was 23 and even before that didn't date a whole lot.

We both live in the same tiny rural town and work regular jobs, so I guess the only real reason I'm even thinking about this is because there isn't exactly alot of dating prospects to begin with, and our general lifestyle seems similar enough on the surface. But what are your thoughts?

EDIT: Wow there's alot of mixed answers here too. I can see both sides of the argument, but I'm leaning towards not doing it overall. She seems like someone I wouldn't mind hanging out with (and I definitely don't say that about everybody) but, I also I think about how insufferable I was at 20 lmao. I wouldn't say I'm a whole different person now, but there's definitely been at least a few mental/emotional changes since then.

Older Zoomer born in Prehistoric Times here. I'm not personally offended by being called old (i make unc jokes all the time and find some of them pretty funny), but over the last 2-3 years I've seen alot of more serious things like, whole ass 20 year olds being like "lmao why this grown ass man/woman talking to us" to a 24yo, or someone getting legitimately uncomfortable just because they found out the person talking to them was a few years older or younger than them, or people spazzing out over a minor age gap in a relationship or even a friendship, or a group making fun of someone just because they were born before or graduated high school before x year. Alot of these things I've seen in person or learned about through my younger siblings.

I guess the reason its weird to me is because I personally grew up in a small town environment where everyone just kinda chilled with everyone and noone cared about age as long as noone was being creepy. I had several whole ass adult friends even as a younger teen. Even at University it didn't seem to be an issue, one of my best friends there was 27 while I was 18, and other than me sometimes jokingly calling him old, noone seriously cared. This all seems very recent to me- half this stuff noone would've cared about 5 years ago, at least from my experience.

TL;DR: Unc is wondering why Gen Z has become so ageist in recent years and what might've caused it

I even posted it here after getting it (original post). But anyways it's a 2018 1500 Express 4x4, has the 5.7L Hemi. Had absolutely no issues with it in the ~500 miles I've already put on it, until I stopped at a store yesterday, and when I went to leave, found it won't start. Won't even turn over, it'll just make a single click when you try. Had an ex-mechanic friend peek at it, he said the starter gave up the ghost. Confirmed it by crawling under and seeing that the click is coming from the starter assembly. So I had it towed to a local shop, but they may not be able to get to it for a few days.

In the meantime, how much money might I be looking at here? Anyone here ever gotten this job done on this generation of Ram?

Also, painfully funny side note: This happened the day one of my best friends came in from out of state and I was showing him the truck. Murphy's Law I suppose lmfao

So I was talking to a woman for a couple days, and for most of that, chemistry felt strong and we seemed to be getting along very well. We eventually planned a date and spoke about other plans if we continue to get along too. She herself was very flirty with me, showering me with compliments and such, which is something I wasn't very accustomed to, being an average looking autistic nerdy guy lol

Well eventually, she asked me about my last relationship and how it ended. I just told her that nothing bad happened, our lifestyles just didn't line up, and we parted on good terms. We're still friends today. And for some reason this made her completely flip the script. She initially accused me of still having feelings for my ex- I responded with "I respect her but I'm not hung up on her, we broke up years ago." Then she started going off about how it's "trashy" to still be friends with your ex, and insisted that I needed to just cut her out of my life. My next response was along the lines of "You know not all relationships end badly, right? Some people just work better as friends". Atp she totally flipped and started hurling some personal, and honestly quite hurtful, insults at me that were completely unrelated to the discussion. After that I basically just said "well if thats how you feel, alright." and stopped talking to her. For some reason she was all like "Oh but we can still be friends!" but I ignored her after that, and she eventually unfriended me on social media. I was dumbfounded for a while, I thought if anything she might've taken that as a good sign that I don't hate on or hold grudges against my exes but I guess not.

Honestly my only hangup on that now is that she was recently divorced from a (supposedly) abusive ex, so I'm wondering if something about the ex conversation just set her off. I dunno. Like I mentioned I'm autistic and I'm not always good at judging these things and tend to speak very directly so maybe I just came off as insensitive towards her situation or something.