I had every one of these items including a transparent teal pager. i didn’t have many friends nobody ever paged me but if you were trying to fit in you thought it might help. My clear swatch was blue, had the little rubber face guard on it!

I did like the conair phones though I took the one pictured in the op image and turned it into a lineman’s handset (thanks 2600!). They were doing new home construction across the street from my home and I snuck over there in the night, hooked my handset up to the service drop and called 1-900 sex lines to troll the gals. Only they were getting paid and did not give a fuck they were happy to keep 13yo me on the line. I screwed something up and caused a huge spark and small boom and never went back because i was worried i had damaged something and they would be looking for me.

i do like the trains! The Coast Starlight is amazing and the view from the observation car is just heaven.

The Empire Builder is another good train although the scenery on that route can’t compare with the west coast.

If you are young and occasionally get sharp stabbing pains in your chest while breathing in that go away and have no other symptoms you should tell your doctor of course but also learn about Precordial Catch Syndrome

Precordial catch syndrome (PCS) is a non-serious condition in which there are sharp stabbing pains in the chest. These typically get worse with inhaling and occur within a small area. Spells of pain usually last less than a few minutes. Typically it begins at rest and other symptoms are absent.

Learning about this greatly reduced random anxiety for me. And it stops when you get old yay!

my personal conspiracy theory is that Amtrak exists solely to make train travel look bad, driving up private car sales.

I had a long career in ecommerce and the amtrak website has been annoying to book train rides on for the entirety of its existence. It would be trivial to improve it in any number of ways but it’s got (and maintains) the design patterns of a captive audience portal like ssa.gov instead of doing anything that removes barriers to purchase.

While it’s possible they have just had the same not very good at their job person for the entirety of the sites history (decades now) i very much doubt it. The company’s site today gives the same feel as when it started; they really don’t care if you buy a ticket or not and they aren’t really going to do much to help you do it.

you don’t have to go in my wife orders in the app and they text when it’s ready and bring it out to the car. usually the order is ready within a few minutes.

we are both autistic and do much of our shopping this way it’s soooo much easier I dunno why anyone would go in.

shoot one portal in my bathroom. Carry the emergency bathroom gun everywhere just in case. No emergency will ever actually be important enough to use it but the peace of mind is always there…