The "coin boys"

Of all the silly trends this one sounds very benign. They aren't hurting anyone. No one is bullied. They don't sound particularly loud or distracting to others not interested.

Coin boys, keep doing your thing. Even if I'm not into it, be the most awesome Coin boy you can today.

I'm going to bully them so this statement isn't true
- Good luck. Coin boys live by the coin and die by the coin, or so I'm told.
- There's only a 50% chance of them getting affected
Its the teachers bitch corner. Of course they're going to complain about kids finding something to keep occupied with.
Instead of, yknow, not being able to keep kids from bullying others into suicide. That's not worth having a grumble over, after all. They're not paid to care that much.
- Some people just need to vent to coworkers about mild shit. They do care about bullying, at least some, but they can still vent. If they aren't taking it out on the students, not punishing them or complaining to parents, it's perfectly fine to vent to coworkers.
  I do IT work and I vent about customers, but I still love helping people, and I don't let anything I find weird or annoying about them affect my level of service. Just yesterday I was chatting with my coworker about people asking us to shortcut minor issues (reducing a two click process to one click). It seems minor to us, and seems like a waste of time, but if they do that process 600 times a day that's 600 clicks instead of 1200. So we grumble to ourselves but we still do it.

Kids have always had a thing. This is not new. When I was in school 40 fucking years ago, Christ I’m old, there was a yo yo phase, a rubber band / paperclip phase, a bloody knuckles phase. I’m sure more that I’ve forgotten.

"Pencil Break" was the hot shit for about a year in middle school. This was right on the edge of when mechanical pencils started to replace wooden ones in school (not completely, I'm sure kids still use wooden #2s.)
It was stupid, but so many people would take turns slapping pencils together to see which ones would break. Obviously brand new pencils out of the box snap the easiest, while worn down nubs are impossible to break. The school eventually banned it and briefly flirted with banning wooden pencils after parents and teachers complained that all the really dedicated students had no writing instruments left.
Nation of geniuses over here.
- At my school there was a group of students who would steal unattended pencils and hoard them in a huge pile in a hole in the woods behind the school. Eventually they got caught but for a while it was easy to make the excuse that you couldn't do schoolwork because the pencils were gone.
Those little rubber domes that you can flip inside out and they pop up into the air
- Ah yes. The horrible bruise generators
- I miss those
Yoyos got supplanted by hacky sacks during my school days.
slap bracelets
- Koosh balls
I forgot about the bloody knuckles. You either got good at spinning a quarter, or you got good at taking pain.
There's a YT channel MrRebootFTW that Google fed to me where a guy goes through all of the old school tricks and how to do them. It's silly. Things like spitball guns, shooting paperclips or folded paper with rubber bands, rubber band guns with old mechanical pencils, and a bunch of other things. It's a fun nostalgia watch if you're into it.
- Bloody knuckles was the shit. I was the asshole that brought a huge Eisenhower Dollar to the game.
Grade 1 in 2001 was Pokémon cards, next was Beyblades, then Yu Gi Oh. Grade four was Tamogachi, and I forget if grade 5 had anything.

At least it’s better than stealing cars or ripping sinks off the wall.

Just wait until the coin tells them to do both.
I'm afraid to ask what the second thing is...
- Not sinks, but somee asshat in my high school wrecked two entire bathrooms, one boys one girls, by throwing a chunk of sodium down a toilet while it was flushing. The sodium exploded and blew all the toilets off the wall.
- https://www.npr.org/2021/09/17/1038378816/students-are-damaging-school-bathrooms-for-attention-on-tiktok

What is this, 1928 Boston?

Don't these fools know that with each flip they are creating new alternate timelines? This is extremely reckless...

Fuck Reddit and fuck Spez.

Hold on, let me flip the coin.
Okay, you're right. Fuck Spez.

As someone who loves random chance, I would gladly take that over them filming themselves on social media committing crimes like the average teenage t|kt0k user loves to do from what I hear, I swear.

Assume you've read The Dice Man? What a book.
- I'll have to look into that. Never heard of it. I'm sadly one of the adults who doesn't read as much as I should from books/ebooks. I'm working on changing that, so I'll absolutely look into this.

They must love this guy then.

power move would be to get one of those kennedy 50 cent pieces or a silver dollar and learn to do that knuckle thing

I used to do this with a french 5-franc coin back in the 80s. inspired of course by Real Genius.
Haven't ever done that with anything as big as a Kennedy50 cent commemorative dinner plate, but I could do it with a quarter once upon a time.

You're telling me that someone who has been teaching for 10 years uses the abbreviation "s2g"?

Fuck am I that old?

Millennials are ~30-45 now, and we pretty much invented text abbreviations like that 🤷‍♂️
- I'm millennial and have never heard of that one.
- GenX’er laughing at the cute millennials that think we weren’t abbreviating shit on BBS forums and usenet.
- Ehh, I think it's more fair to say we had our turn at making up abbreviations that made sense in our world as it briefly existed.
  That commercial "IDK, my BFF Jill?" Was targeted at us, but 100 years ago telegraphers and ham radio operators were inventing abbreviations and slang in Morse code. 73 OM
- I heard Blink-182 being interviewed on NPR. We're all old now!