Welcome to Gaia! ::

Not even daring to quote dronze or lace right now I am going to say, dronze is one hundred percent right. I will admity I do watch maury (only because my mom put's it on at times when there's nothing better to watch) and I have seen many of there shows that speek about this issue. It is extremly sick to hear how young children are getting into these sexual situations.

I will admit my younger brother is five, he can be a really big hassel at times, my mom has given him a few taps on the mouth when he talked back and it smartened him up but there is a point in which you have gone to far, you can't beat your kids yet you can't just leave them without A. supervision and B. discipline. My mom always took my little bro with her on her trips and left me home...it was only for one or two hours most. Now she leaves him with me because I am allowed..and I always keep a close eye on him even when he's outside I keep an eye on him.

I understand the comercial point to an exstent, I admit, I have seen allot of beer adds on channels like YTV and teletoon and that alone can be a huge influence to kids. Yes television does have some channels that can have it called an idiot box but there are some very good channels aswell, This now takes me to the internet fact. With young kids this is a big problem...more and more they see the internet and learn how to use it by watching, what happens one day when they search up something like teletoon or transformers on google and there on a file where the serch setting aren't set to there level, who knows what they could find.

I do let my brother on the computer and if it's not my mom watching what he's doing it's me. kids can get into some really dangerous things if we don't monitor what they do. I meen when you have the search filter on it's lowest setting p**n sites for teletoon and transformers come up.

Now onto the trouble with teens and people who come on gaia young and ignorant. With teens or even pre-teens there's the problem of private chat rooms and the iternets two hells myspace and facebook, along with MSN. If you guys have never heard the story of the girl who had a cop randomly add her on MSN, then the girl giving enoguh information to the cop tofind her and where she lived,you should. I mean you never know what sick b*****d is online and on those sites just waiting to take another girl or boy even. Children who are unmonitored on these sites can throw themselves into a living nightmare if there not taught about the dangers. It scares me when some random person adds me on MSN so I always ask who adds me and I never give away personal info I don't even use my real name on MSN, it's always a nickname I came up with or something. I'm not a hundred percent sure about this but if I am correct almost 30 kids are reported missing every day or something...and what do you think happened to those kids..I bet you ninety-nine percent of them went on a private chat room and met with some random guy who said to meet them somewhere or they gave away too much info to some random guy and he fond the child and BANG there gone. It's not only a nightmare for the parent's but the child too, and many who aren't warned never even think this will happen, many think they're invicible and that's where thier trouble begins. If we want the next generation of children to become what we all know there capable of me must act now...and it's not only kids that need a smack upside the head the parent's do to...ifthere kids seem deprssed ask them what's wrong and don't be afraid to push it out of them. My mom knows when I'm in a bad mood and even if it takes her three hours she get's th truth out of me so any parent reading this should no it's wrong ot neglect you shild and if you've loved them and taken care of them well enough you'll know that when they say nothing os wrong but they look sad or angry or any of the sort they are not and if you hav to force it out of them by sitting them down on the furniture and talking to them till they burst then do so! Negotiation does work and it helps!

Face it, the world is throwing stuff at kids like me (I'm only 14) and my brother way too fast for us to react and so many children want to be cool they do whatever it takes...you probabily ask yourslef what happened when kids would just be themselves and everytime you walked outside your door you either had a ball fly a you or your son/ daughter come to you with a new friend and ask for a drink of water or something, well here's your anwser (sorry if I spelt it wrong) it is G O N E. Video games TV and the internet have taken over...but we must rebel and get back into those outdoor habits or else we are going to see a world of grey. Sorry if I seem like a I ranted it's just I've never had time to exspress how I felt abotu this topic and finally someone brings it up in a way i can respond to without feeling like a total jerk or smart a** about it.

I don't remember the exact source. But a survey of child abductions actually said. A child is more likely to be kidnapped by someone they know. This also implies that the person would have to be living in the same neighborhood in most cases of child abduction. Overall monitoring really needs to be a priority. The one monitoring doesn't always have to be a parent. It can be an older brother/sister as well. But they MUST be intelligent enough to know what to do in the case of an emergency. This means not putting kids in early grade school in charge of young preschoolers/kindergartners. I used that as an example cause there. Is a family next door to me that used to do that. I would catch the kid on occasion playing in the road or dangerously close to it. And all of the younger children would follow suit. Granted it is a road that is usually clear near a school. That doesn't change the fact that is kind of supervision doesn't cut it.

And now for something a bit less grand in the social scheme of things, but equally applicable, and any of my fellow food service workers can probably agree with these....
I've spent the past week or so up to my neck in rude customers, and I just have to get this one out here, so here we go.

Dronze's Rules for diners at various casual-dining and fast food places.

1. Know what you want.
I understand that with the plethora of options and bible-sized menus of today's not-so-serious places to eat, why customers might want to take a minute to review the menu. I have no issue with this, however, there are ways to do this properly, and ways to do this that make the common, near-minimum-wage-slave like me realize that jobs like these are a dime a dozen, and that the value we place you at in the course of the day is less than zero. If you have to wait in a line to get your food, utilize this time wisely, and decide what it is that you want, so that when you get to me, the lowly burrito slinger, you're not wasting my time, or, depending on who you are while reading this, your own.

Sitting there at the ordering station, drooling on yourself is all well and good when it's not busy and there's no wait to get served, but if you had to wait in line for 15 minutes behind 30 people, and you suddenly have to take 10 minutes deciding what you want to eat, then you deserve to get slapped with a hot tortilla, plain and simple. Just take 5 minutes while you're in line, shut your never-stopping, self-important gob, and look at the menu... that way everything runs smoothly and you can get your food.

2. Where you parked is not my fault or problem.
I swear, the next customer that asks me if we can hurry this up because they're parked in a "no parking" zone, or because they didn't feel like feeding the meter is going to be getting security radioed to their car and me taking a little LONGER than usual. These zones are marked for a reason, and if I can assist the authorities in ending the fact that you're a douschebag, or at least make my day that much better, because I know at the end of the day you're going to be a REALLY bitter or a REALLY P.O.ed douschebag. Either way, I get my vindication, and got my revenge, and those are the moments that make my slave wage ever so worthwhile.

Remember, those of us working in food service are either sadistic, sociopathic, cruel, masochistic, annoyed, uncaring, or some large amalgamation of the above, and best of all, we handle your food. Besides, think about this before you decide to say something stupid, I could care less how you leave the store, but if i'm bored, or you're a jackass, your pain and misery will put a smile on my face for at least a few minutes, and I couldn't give 2 shits if your porsche is being toed by an inept hillbilly named "Jethro Earl"... in fact, ol' Jethro's probably gettin' a free burrito for that one.

3. If you want to complain about something, know who to complain to.Grunts don't decide portion sizes, we just decide if that 4th scoop of salsa counts as extra, and if you're a p***k, it always does. If you have an issue with portions or prices, take it up with corporate, because there is very little we, in the trenches, are willing or able to do to resolve an issue like that. If there's something that needs stocked in the dining room, bring it up to an employee, and if there's an issue with an employee, take it up with a manager. The last thing we feel like hearing for the billionth time is how expensive stuff is at our place of employment. we know the cost of things, as well as the cost to make the stuff. most places aren't trying to gouge you, really. Repeat business ensures our survival as a company. The next time someone wants so complain about $1.50 guacamole I'm gonna beat them with our avocado masher, since they don't seem to get the fact that that 4 ounces of guacamole costs anywhere between $1.25 and $2.50 to actually produce.

4. Hang up your cell phone.
If the call is really that important, then what, precisely, are you doing ordering food? The next self-important p***k without the decency to, at the very least, take their phone away from their ear for the 15 to 30 seconds it takes to order their food is going to need a good proctologist to remove their phone from where I've lodged it. Your call can wait, and if it can't, you can. You're not only being a thorn in our sides, you're holding up the line. Just wait until we start ignoring you the way you do us when you step up with that damn device attached to your head... some places are doing it already, so take the hint.

5. The tip jar isn't just there to look good.
We do our work in obscenely uncomfortable conditions for 7 to 8 hours a day. While I appreciate the fact that tipping is optional and the economy is bad, the economy hits us, too. would it really kill you to drop a buck in the damn jar every so often? At my job, in a severely upscale shopping center, we will regularly serve anywhere between 50-120 transactions per hour. If half of these customers tipped $1 each, in the 3 hours of rush time we're doing traffic that heavily, we'd have anywhere between $75-$180 in tips, split between 5 or 6 people... that's much better than the $3 i get on average, ya know?

Ah... children.... They're only cute till either a) You have to change the diapers or b) They figure out you have no real power over them due to infanticide being illegal. Stupid commies. JK JK xd But seriously. People seem to have an increasingly selfish and uncaring attitude towards the "common" work force. Not saying that we're common, but that we're the ones that have to do the dirty work, the grunts of society. When kids behave badly, it's generally the parents' faults for either being too much of a pansy to give their kids a good smack when they're bad or for putting of getting their kids their proper "medication." Adults that act badly really can't be considered adults. Just because they've got the body of an adult doesn't mean their brains are any more developed than that of an ostrich. They probably should have been smacked more in their heads as children. Or perhaps dropped on their heads. Yeah. I like that last one.

at a sit-down place, that's perfectly acceptable, but when you walk up to a counter, the game is a bit different...

the fast food deal is like going up to the bank teller and saying "i dunno what i want to do, so gimmie a second...."

print out a receipt first, without paying the cash, take care of the other customers, and scan that one item when he comes back (on a new receipt). then charge on the machine once more on both receipts. or if the computer is smart enough to do a hold, do that instead

XD well who cares? Ive been in lines like that, and ive hated it, but i dont piss and moan, i just wait XDDD lol Yes, you should be as polite as possible when working with the public, but sometimes you really do have to tell people off (in a POLITE WAY, of course) that they dont run things so be patient.