(Thread IKs:
OwlFancier, crispix)
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justcola posted:old goons: what was working in an office like before the internet/computers? Was it just rooms of people typing and smoking cigarettes? I imagine it would be such a clatter that it'd make me spring from my desk to see what was the matter. Download and play “Control”
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# ? Mar 8, 2024 22:04 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 02:07 |
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Floating redheads shooting the place to bits and throwing desks at people were a common feature of mid 20th century offices.
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# ? Mar 8, 2024 22:08 |
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Angrymog posted:Random quote Got a text today from a passing dude. Offering me 4k£ for my 70k miles 20 years old smart car. It looks like poo poo too. Not tarted up.
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# ? Mar 8, 2024 22:35 |
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justcola posted:old goons: what was working in an office like before the internet/computers? Was it just rooms of people typing and smoking cigarettes? I imagine it would be such a clatter that it'd make me spring from my desk to see what was the matter. My dad did an office job in the 70s and was proper old school vibes "defer to the boss" kind of thing. It was a financial company still in its old victorian offices, brass nameplates on the door, metal filing cabinets, green glass desk lamps, furniture that looked like it had had the building built around it. All the customer records lived on these weird square cards and came home with him in a metal box about a foot cubed that hinged open like a packet of fags. He was issued a mechanical typewriter for doing work on and a mechanical adding machine - we were still finding stashes of the rolls of paper for that when we cleared their house. Mum was still working at the deaf school in those days and I have memories of being told to sit in this massive draughty office and wait for him to finish and that it was very important I was quiet because of the boss, you see. Didn't want to get Dad in trouble. Part of me thinks that was just a thing they said to keep me quiet but it really did feel like there was this strict hierarchy there, seeped into the walls of the building. Don't remember smoke except EVERYTHING look like it had had smoke in it for 100 years. They cleared out and moved into "modern" 80s offices not long after which had Computers and he was given a ruggedized thing that looked like a ZX spectrum with a LCD screen that he had to connect up to a modem to talk to the mainframe. (Till he died, he pronounced it "modum"). Dad didn't get on with it, hated the electronic typewriter, hated the company's sans serif rebrand, hated the surreal adverts on TV but especially hated having to call his new boss by his first name. Man was analogue as gently caress.
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# ? Mar 8, 2024 22:41 |
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Hard pressed to find many goons who worked in an office before computers, I have worked with people who worked in offices before computers. Mostly filing systems, index cards, telephones, typists, a lot more people doing the search for information, storage of information than what you would have now. That and smoking at your desk. My earliest was doing work experience for Airbus where I worked on improving a procurement system (form in outlook / excel lookup / someone putting the data in SAP) right around the A380 public launch. Even then there was internet and stuff.
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# ? Mar 8, 2024 22:44 |
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The entry level office job was 'filing clerk'. I didn't work in an office before computers, but I did work in a library. I spent many hours putting little slips of paper in alphabetical order.
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# ? Mar 8, 2024 22:49 |
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just remembered working in a boots opticians 10 years ago, which had taken over another chain some years before that and was running parallel computer systems, with the old one on some terminal commandline poo poo. also filing cabinets full of uncomputerised records
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# ? Mar 8, 2024 23:23 |
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I do have a fondness for all the specialized crap that was developed before everything got streamlined into universal computers that could store and do anything. Even down to stuff like those archive shelves with the cranks on the end that have one aisle shared between dozens of shelving units and you have to move the shelves to get the aisle where you want it. Absolutely stupid to use but there's something about that kind of design that I like. Of course now I work somewhere where the archive is "a room full of plastic totes full of papers and hope nobody ever needs to look anything up"
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# ? Mar 8, 2024 23:24 |
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One area where pre computer Britain sorely lacked was installing Paternosters
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# ? Mar 8, 2024 23:32 |
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I'm grateful that at work, we're only a couple of years away from having had electronic records for 10 years, because that means we can free up half a storage room. I work for the NHS, and space is at a premium, so presumably some poor sod will have their exciting new office in half a storage room that can only be accessed from a toilet. Welcome to the team!
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# ? Mar 8, 2024 23:34 |
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smellmycheese posted:One area where pre computer Britain sorely lacked was installing Paternosters I am not confident that the public would be able to use those without getting mulched. E: though I suppose it is appropriate that the UK should have the same access technology as blighttown. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Mar 8, 2024 |
# ? Mar 8, 2024 23:43 |
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my favourite kind of study is the one which gets commissioned by rightwing dickheads to find a specific conclusion and ends up finding the opposite. hope it does get properly released. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/08/low-traffic-neighbourhoods-generally-popular-report-ordered-by-sunak-finds quote:An official study of low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) ordered by Rishi Sunak amid efforts to stop them being built has instead concluded they are generally popular and effective and the report was initially buried, the Guardian has learned.
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# ? Mar 8, 2024 23:49 |
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OwlFancier posted:I'm trying to think of a musical instrument that didn't get invented outside of western europe and I'm struggling. I think it would have to be some sort of modern electronic thing because I feel like the rest of the world already invented all the ways to get noise out of bits of tree and animals and rocks. Apart from very single orchestral instrument you mean?
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# ? Mar 8, 2024 23:53 |
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escapegoat posted:Apart from very single orchestral instrument you mean? I'm drawing a somewhat arbitrary line where I'm looking for things I think are actually significantly different. The concept of a bowed string instrument for example is a lot older so I'm just saying everything like that are variations on the same thing. Or at least conceivably developed from earlier things through sufficient iteration that the particular species are themselves arbitrary. So I guess I'm looking for some original primary method of getting sound out of an original arrangement of components. So like, drums are a thing. Plucked strings are a thing. Bowed strings are a thing because I would consider the use of the bow to be an addition of a new original component and method of getting sound out compared to plucking. I'd probably say that keyboard controls do count, as possibly does the concept of hammered strings, so I might accept the piano-type instrument if that's a euro thing.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 00:03 |
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Nuclear Spoon posted:my favourite kind of study is the one which gets commissioned by rightwing dickheads to find a specific conclusion and ends up finding the opposite. hope it does get properly released. I like “there are tensions between evidence and perceptions” as a euphemism for "these people believe some absurd nonsense".
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 00:09 |
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Anecdotally, I'm in an LTN and the main effect I've noticed is that none of the assholes who drive around in really loud cars advertising their tiny dicks get to go down the road where the local councillor lives. My hairdresser has told me footfall to her business has cratered since the scheme went through, and a local sports shop that had been there for 80 years upped sticks and moved to the Jewellery Quarter. And also one of the main roads feeding into the high street is even more jammed up with traffic at busy hours than it used to be, and all the residents along there have signs in their windows saying NO TO LTN, WE DESERVE CLEAN AIR TOO. And it's not related, but while I'm griping about traffic management, another local street has jams three times daily, because nobody parking there bothers to get their loving wheels on the pavement, so it's effectively a one lane road with traffic trying to go both ways. Doesn't affect me much though, I was already walking and taking buses.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 00:20 |
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You are not, strictly, supposed to have your wheels on the pavement.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 00:22 |
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That's only true in London.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 00:28 |
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OwlFancier posted:I'm drawing a somewhat arbitrary line where I'm looking for things I think are actually significantly different. The concept of a bowed string instrument for example is a lot older so I'm just saying everything like that are variations on the same thing. Or at least conceivably developed from earlier things through sufficient iteration that the particular species are themselves arbitrary. quote:The Piano Has the Same Mechanism as the Dulcimer source: https://www.yamaha.com/en/musical_instrument_guide/piano/structure/
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 00:32 |
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Dabir posted:Anecdotally, I'm in an LTN and the main effect I've noticed is that none of the assholes who drive around in really loud cars advertising their tiny dicks get to go down the road where the local councillor lives. My hairdresser has told me footfall to her business has cratered since the scheme went through, and a local sports shop that had been there for 80 years upped sticks and moved to the Jewellery Quarter. And also one of the main roads feeding into the high street is even more jammed up with traffic at busy hours than it used to be, and all the residents along there have signs in their windows saying NO TO LTN, WE DESERVE CLEAN AIR TOO. And it's not related, but while I'm griping about traffic management, another local street has jams three times daily, because nobody parking there bothers to get their loving wheels on the pavement, so it's effectively a one lane road with traffic trying to go both ways. You should see the complaints and photos of cars with their wheels on the pavements in our local FB group! Especially people using wheelchairs, mobility scooters or with prams / strollers being forced into the rather narrow roads taking their lives into their hands because loads of people round here - especially youngsters with new licences - drive like lunatics, despite the 20mph speed limit in built-up areas.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 00:35 |
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There's someone in our office who started in 1970. I should ask her about her memories of office life while she's still around.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 01:06 |
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About ten years ago (christ...) when I first worked in an office I kept wondering what that weird old-computer-looking thing was in one corner that nobody ever seemed to use. Turned out it was an old microfilm reader - I had never seen one of them before in my life. I wonder if it ever got used since then.Dabir posted:That's only true in London. Scotland too, now!
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 01:11 |
OwlFancier posted:I do have a fondness for all the specialized crap that was developed before everything got streamlined into universal computers that could store and do anything. I work in an actual archive and we have rolling stacks, they're great. They even have clicky brakes so nobody can move the shelves and crush you to death. There are still lots of departments that tell us their records are too important to be sent to the archive, where we will label and box them and put them on their own little rolling shelf. They are such important documents that they must stay higgledy piggeldy in a room with a leaking roof. We can't even bear to start taking to them about archiving their electronic records. Edit: we have a microfilm reader too!
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 01:18 |
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I think one of the worst things about the digitisation of archives is that there aren't so many physical archives, and I can no longer apply to be the Portrait Goblin that lives under the office.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 01:28 |
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Angepain posted:About ten years ago (christ...) when I first worked in an office I kept wondering what that weird old-computer-looking thing was in one corner that nobody ever seemed to use. Turned out it was an old microfilm reader - I had never seen one of them before in my life. I wonder if it ever got used since then. Oh gosh, the microfiche reader, I'd forgotten all about that! All our invoices where photographed on to that plus all sorts of contracts etc & every month we would get a new pack of the blue postcard sized film circulated from HQ. I figured out how to have a secret few minutes shut eye using the microfiche reader at the back of the office with my pen suspended over a pad where I had some old notes already scrawled in case of prying eyes, prop my head up with one hand and just shut my eyes for 5 minutes. (Afternoon/early evening naps are the joy of my life and have been since childhood). I think lots of newspaper archives are still on those if you want to go more than 20-30 years back. Digitizing everything is a slow & costly process.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 02:03 |
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:
I went to university in 1983 and they had the whole Times archive on microfiche, and it was pretty amazing to just be able to read contemporary reporting of victorian stuff. Jack the Ripper murders as they happened, that sort of thing. Can you even get that on the internet now? Libraries are great.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 02:56 |
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Unkempt posted:I went to university in 1983 and they had the whole Times archive on microfiche, and it was pretty amazing to just be able to read contemporary reporting of victorian stuff. Jack the Ripper murders as they happened, that sort of thing. Can you even get that on the internet now? Libraries are great. Some is. https://www.digitisednewspapers.net/histories/tda/#:~:text=The%20Times%20Digital%20Archive%20can,or%20a%20specific%20digitised%20collection. https://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ has other more local newspapers - not complete sets but big chunks. I've used this quite a bit looking into issues in the 1940s regarding Palestine (Belfast Telegraph in particular has a lot). You have to pay to read more than just the headlines though. References to Palestine in their archives go right back to 1727 (which IMHO puts to bed the nonsense argument I see from some sections of the pro-Israel zionist camp that 'There's never been any such place as Palestine'.) One of the things that strikes me is how much more "literate" for want of a better word all these various local newspapers seem to have been than they are now. Also intrigued there is a newspaper that lasted just over a year 1800-1801 that was part taken over by another one called True Briton that existed. Was Fromage around then? Anyway, here's a search I did from 1/1/1935 to 31/12/1953 on Palestine: https://britishnewspaperarchive.co....dayearly&page=0 Jaeluni Asjil fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Mar 9, 2024 |
# ? Mar 9, 2024 03:31 |
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Dabir posted:Anecdotally, I'm in an LTN and the main effect I've noticed is that none of the assholes who drive around in really loud cars advertising their tiny dicks get to go down the road where the local councillor lives. My hairdresser has told me footfall to her business has cratered since the scheme went through, and a local sports shop that had been there for 80 years upped sticks and moved to the Jewellery Quarter. And also one of the main roads feeding into the high street is even more jammed up with traffic at busy hours than it used to be, and all the residents along there have signs in their windows saying NO TO LTN, WE DESERVE CLEAN AIR TOO. And it's not related, but while I'm griping about traffic management, another local street has jams three times daily, because nobody parking there bothers to get their loving wheels on the pavement, so it's effectively a one lane road with traffic trying to go both ways. LTNs get blamed for these things whether it's true or not. Your hairdressers business has cratered but then so has most service industry in the last few months. Traffic is busy, but it always has been. You just notice it now. This is literally what the study has found.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 04:18 |
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NotJustANumber99 posted:Got a text today from a passing dude. Offering me 4k£ for my 70k miles 20 years old smart car. It looks like poo poo too. Not tarted up. You have a roadster though don't you? They're a bit rarer than the fortwos. Office chat: my first real job we had computers and wyse terminals to connect to our mainframe with. (most depts just had the terminals, but IT had both) We had an internet connection, but it wasn't always on - it got connected in the morning, at lunch time, and in the afternoon, for email collection. As it was all set up in our office we'd sometimes run it for longer or at ad-hoc times if we wanted to do a little bit of browsing.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 08:14 |
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up until the pandemic there were still railway signalling master records on linen and negatives that needed changed by hand on a drawing board all finally got digitised (badly) in 2020
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 09:16 |
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Bozza posted:digitised (badly) in 2020
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 09:45 |
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Has Britain ever had a fantastic year?
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 09:53 |
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ThomasPaine posted:There is literally no obviously misleading propaganda from the Palestinian side though. Oct 7th happened, and Hamas + its allies are very open about claiming responsibility. Obviously we can argue back and forth about the long term context it happened within and the various rights and wrongs of that kind of anti-colonial resistance, but it's pretty straightforward and makes sense if terrorism, in the very strict sense of the word, is part of your overall strategy (and really, given Israeli policy, what other options do Palestinians have?) I appreciate this post. Thankfully here is a much better place to lurk and get info on the situation than the other isreal/palestine thread in DnD. I guess im not as informed on Hamas as I thought.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 10:18 |
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Azza Bamboo posted:Has Britain ever had a fantastic year? 1966 and 2012
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 10:20 |
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Azza Bamboo posted:Has Britain ever had a fantastic year? 1842, when we invented the dinosaur
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 10:25 |
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The Saviour posted:I appreciate this post. Thankfully here is a much better place to lurk and get info on the situation than the other isreal/palestine thread in DnD. I guess im not as informed on Hamas as I thought. Definitely a good post that. If you want more regular updates in Something Awful Posts format, the C-SPAM thread is actually pretty good.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 10:28 |
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My office only digitised during COVID. Oh sure people had computers and emailed, but files were printed out, work was written on a board and then ticked off by people when it was picked up, filing cabinets for old work, giant calendar for people to write their appointments in, etc. I tried to get them to do more stuff digitally, but the youngest person in the office was in their 50s and none of them were having it. I once had to explain to someone the difference between a single and a double click with their computer mouse. The job manual I got when I joined was a big binder that detailed helpful things such as how to mail merge and then instructing you to print out the merged file and file it away in the proper filing cabinet. Saving it on the computer just Wasn't Done. The staff were all also very uninterested in learning. I set up systems to make everything quicker and less analog, but nobody could be bothered to learn how to log in to their outlook365 account until they absolutely had to. Theres a shared digital calendar that most people refuse to use. They're also still working on digitising out actual, physical archives full of box of paper but I suspect that's just to save on storage costs. All the boxes just sit in a disused office instead now. We're now mostly digital, but the systems in place for it are mostly hodge podge nonsense I put together and our new filing cabinet is just me saving files on my computer and emailing them out to people when requested. Still better than paper. I'm glad we don't have any of the specialised machines, though there is a letter stuffer machine and a dusty fax somewhere in the mail room.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 10:36 |
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frytechnician posted:Afternoon everyone. Thanks for this, assuming it was you posting a couple of weeks ago too. I probably wouldn’t have been aware of it otherwise. On my way there now
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 11:33 |
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OwlFancier posted:Acoustic modems are hilarious. As a last ditch attempt to see if it was worth keeping our FAX number at work I tried getting some life into a 90s era US robotics modem with the idea of using that to receive faxes, but it just didn't want to work properly. So we got rid of the fax entirely and honestly never needed it in over a decade. I used to have an office room full of 90s and even late 80s stuff and old computers and poo poo. Until a few years ago when 99% of things got cleaned out. Too bad I really liked the old computers for components. Built a powersupply from one of the PSUs. I did save a t on of stuff like Corel Draw boxes, Win 95 UPGRADE box, Netware 3.x something boxes, a Nokia 1610 phone with charger and extra battery. Keep them on the shelves as display pieces.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 11:45 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 02:07 |
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Miftan posted:My office Christ alive, I couldn't work in a place like that. I would murder everyone
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 12:35 |