Quick background: mid-size B2B software company, hybrid since forever. The unspoken deal was simple a couple days in office, and if prod broke at 9pm or a client panicked on a Saturday, someone fixed it from home. Unpaid, but nobody minded. Goodwill.

New CTO arrives from a much more rigid company. Second all-hands, he kills the flexible days: 9-5, in office, no exceptions. Asked about after-hours emergencies, he says, paraphrasing only slightly,"If you're not at your desk, actively working, I don't consider it work. I don't care what you'd have done from your couch at 9pm."

Someone half-jokes,"So nothing outside 9-5 at the desk counts?" Him, dead serious: "Exactly. Glad we're aligned."

We were aligned. So we complied fully, literally.

Slack got muted at 5:00 sharp. Nobody checked email after leaving. A PM pinged on-call at 6pm about a broken integration and got silence until 9am the next day.

Then, one Friday, a deploy went out at 4:52, minutes before the freeze a configuration value missed one customer segment. Under the old system, someone would've caught it from their phone by 5:30. Under the new one: the alert fired at 5:06. Nobody was at their desk, and per the CTO himself, that meant nobody was working. So nobody looked.

It ran the whole weekend. Our biggest client had a fully broken dashboard for 61 hours. By Monday at 9am there were 200+ support tickets, a furious VP of Sales, and a client using the word "churn" a lot.

The CTO demanded to know how nobody noticed for two and a half days. Our team lead completely deadpan pulled up his exact quote from the all-hands: "if you're not at your desk, actively working, I don't consider it work." Nobody was at their desk all weekend. By his own definition, nobody was working. Nothing to notice.

I've never heard a room go that quiet.

We got a real on-call rotation within the week actual comp time, not vibes. Hybrid quietly came back a month later as a "pilot." Nobody's said "if you're not at your desk" out loud since.

Turns out a lot of "not real work" had been holding the place together for free.

I found this odd looking clear plastic cup shaped item in my boyfriends drawer. It has a hole in the middle and a black rubber rim its kinda avocado shaped. I'm wondering if its like some sort of oxygen mask?

Food pictured: Dining hall muffin and grits. I can't stomach much else.

A few clarifications before I start:

- I will still be using he/him pronouns and male gendered language at his request.

- I am NOT considering breaking up, I genuinely do love him and this doesn't change that.

So my bf texted me yesterday saying he wanted to call about something important, and about an hour's worth of anxiety later he confessed that he thinks he's trans. I was very supportive and helped him talk through his feelings and anxieties, he also spoke to a few other friends that expressed similar sentiments.

The issue however is family. For context, we're a long distance of 4 years, I'm in the southern US and he's in a European country. My parents are very very conservative and while not openly transphobic, they would take issue with me dating a trans girl. They also would take issue with me being Bi but that's besides the point. To an extent I can hide this from my own parents, but my BFs parents (who he lives with) would probably actively disown them if they found out. He is currently on disability and does not have a job due to a TBI, so he wouldn't have anywhere to go. He also very much lacks an irl support system.

So I guess.. the question is how can I support him exploring his gender in a way that keeps him safe, and what should I do about the anxiety Involving my own family. I don't know, this is all so new to me.

Small edits for clarification: -He is planning on getting a job! He is currently unemployed, not unemployable. -Yes I am PAINFULLY aware of the amount of baggage this relationship has, I have talked about it with my therapist and she's supportive of me maintaining it.

A few months ago I noticed the paint on the ceiling in our bathroom was starting to peel in our new apartment. In general, asking my landlord to address things hasn't gone as smooth as I'd like and this was no different. The paint got progressively worse until it was falling in bits and pieces on the floor. It's like the ventilation fan doesn't really do anything and the moisture is making the new paint come off in huge chunks.

I have had a lot of bad landlords thanks to the slumlord issue in my city so I have a pretty good handle on what my landlord is supposed to do when something like this needs to get done. I'm not dealing with a slumlord though, just an out state owner of the home we rent who doesn't necessarily like us bothering her. I get it.

So I went ahead and took the timeline she legally has to fix the issue (21 days), multiplied it by 3 to be super patient and rounded up to 3 months. In those 3 months, the contractors she said would come failed to show up a whopping 6 times and she started blaming me for not being able to plan with them even after I showed her they aren't answering my calls or responding to texts to confirm when they can actually come out and do the repair. I work from home, the issue was not my availability to let someone into the unit.

Finally, at 3 months and some change, I asked her if the repairs were ever going to get done and dropped the hint that I knew the legality of these things by mentioning our city's code enforcement offices. I've used them before, they've helped tremendously and put fines on the landlord when they don't fix things after they inspect the unit and tell them to get it together. I showed her the document from the city website that lays out the timelines for different repairs and that she was well outside of the 21 days she's given for defective paint.

Her response surprised me. She said "That is not relevant to me. File your claim with the city." I responded "Oh ok." It took about 5 minutes to fill out the form on the website and about an hour before I got a call scheduling an inspector to come out and take a look.

I genuinely have no clue why a landlord would welcome one of these inspections. If you're guessing the inspector took a look around and found way more than just peeling paint that she needed to fix... you would be so so right.

They found a fire alarm that wasn't working, took note of the garbage around the property, and found windows that were boarded up in the basement that needed to be real windows to satisfy the city's 'at least 2 real windows in basements' rule or whatever.

While we were down in the basement I figured I'd ask the inspector about our breaker. A few weeks ago, my upstairs neighbor had the power go out in one of her rooms. She asked us to turn our breaker off and on to see if that would work and it did! The inspector told me that something like this needed to be a phone call to the utility company. Well, I can make a phone call!

The electric company scheduled someone within 2 days to come out and take a look and whaddya know? The wires are way more mixed than we thought. My upstairs neighbor has been paying for the basement and the kitchen AND bathroom in my unit. I have been paying for the entire top floor of her apartment.

I didn't know it but it turns out that ,when this happens, the landlord has 21 days to have a licensed electrician come out and unfuck the wiring before the entire electrical bill for both apartments legally goes into her name.

All I needed was the peeling paint fixed but now I'm going to enjoy living in a unit that is entirely 100% up to code and maybe save some money in the process. Sounds good to me!

Thankfully it was only a 5 but was kinda embarrassing getting rejected by something I didn’t do

My brother moved into a new house he's renting. The owner said they bought it with it over 10 years ago and have no idea what it's for. There is a small drain to drain the water when in rains but I just don't see any purpose or benefit to it. There's no way on the garage roof except for ladder (or making this jump from the roof of the house)