!dev
!!personal
!!abuse

I'm a victim of rather severe child abuse, both physical and mental. I've cut my mother out of my life on several occasions, and disowned her husband on father's day a few years ago. Whenever they're in my life they make things slowly but significantly worse.

They'd been using my previous hard times to push their way into my life again, and are now trying to buy their way in -- this time not into my life, but into my 2yo son's life.

I've done everything I could to keep his existence from them. I hid pregnancy from them, dropped any mew mannerisms and cute vocabulary when speaking to them, never let them see toys or hear sounds if I needed to call them, hid the carseat, etc. I did a perfect job. Out of necessity I've been hiding my life from them since I was 13, and I've never done better than this.

But they knew his name, sex, and age. This means they went digging, and a bloody lot. There is literally no public info relating him to me, and nobody that knows us would tell them, either -- they all know and understand.

For years I've refused to tell these people where I lived, too. We've been here for over five years, and three years ago they just randomly showed up at our door. I never gave them an address, and the house isn't in my name. I never had any privacy when I lived with them, either -- literally not even in the bathroom -- but now we have our own house and they still randomly intrude? asldhflakshdf

But. This Christmas Eve, we got two large boxes (fruit flats) stacked full of presents from them. A third for me, a third for my girlfriend, and a third for my 2yo. Name tags and all.

Why can't they just leave us alone? On Christmas of all holidays? Why do they have to ruin everything? Why can't they just go away?

I've made things abundantly clear, and they just. won't. stop. I feel so angry and exasperated and helpless and trapped. I went from listening to "die in a fire" to crying helplessly on the stairs. All I want is to be left alone and not harassed and blackmailed and manipulated and guilted and given expired food as "gifts."

and before you ever even think to defend them, please re-read my first three sentences.

Just.
Merry fucking Christmas.

Friends Pandemic December proposal: "We should all get on Zoom every weekend, play Christmas trivia games and do shots"

Family ideal Pandemic December: "Lets send each other Secret Santa presents throughout the whole month, and get on Zoom and unpack them"

Me: Chilled out on a reclining seat next to a freshly slaughtered green fir tree, burning hearth fire, warm wool sweater, faux fur slippers, big mug of liquored up hot chocolate, keyboard on my lap, writing a Rust library on big screen TV.

Sorry friends & family, y'all are doing holidays wrong.

Happy holidays.
-- signed, Grandpa Bittersweet.

It's christmas you fuckers, turn off your damn computers.

Love you all, have a good one.❤🎄

Why are people already posting christmas presents? Its not even december yet! BTW heres mine:

When your best friend is also a lady dev, you get pretty awesome Christmas presents

This run up to Christmas is the shit. Everything is suddenly urgent. No time to do a proper job. If that isn't bad enough, you are also tasked with thinking up some ideas for family Christmas presents, as if i give a flying fuck. I dont mind the break for the holidays but i fucking hate Christmas but have to put a brave face on and celebrate (what exactly am i celebrating). And no scrooge comments please.

Just checking... I'm not the only one that has no presents for christmas yet, am I?

I hate buying christmas presents.

I wasn't planning on giving Christmas presents to the people I hate until I heard about those exploding Samsung Galaxy phones 😈

!dev

Already forgot how frustrating wrapping christmas presents is. >:(

The 'farewell great manager Jim' party on Monday.

The [insert name of a department] Christmas party on Wednesday, which you shouldn't miss because they want the company to be more integrated.

The [insert name of your department] Christmas party on Friday, which is separate from the other party because they want the company to be more inte... wait.

The hackathon on Saturday and Sunday, because coding all night for free to create buzz around the company's name is always fun.

The team meeting where the product manager presents all the shinny new things they're thinking about presenting to the client while our deadline is still a couple of weeks away. "And the engineering team knows exactly what to do, right?" Yeah, sure, if you say so.

I bonded a lot with a co-worker over the last several months as I had to mentor him in iOS and how to maintain our apps. We mostly bonded over how much we hate Objective-C and the management of the project. Now we are buying Christmas presents for eachother. Bad code brings people together

Any ideas for programming related Christmas presents for roommate?

I was thinking Java coffee mug or a binary clock.

Any ideas?