5 Dimes Media
Daily blog/podcast where we break down a subject into it's core attributes, then we snitch or drop the dime to educate our readers and listeners.
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The Kissner Pamphlet
04/24/2026
The Kissner Pamphlet
Hi everybody. I wanted to discuss a situation that is very personal to me. A year ago, I stopped working for a company after spending 10 years with them. It didn’t end well, allegations were made, the company doxxed me and blamed me for several discrepancies in their books. Let me start by saying, I never took anything from them and I never did anything “rogue”. They were always either aware of what I was doing or I was acting on their direct orders. I was in charge of the I.T. and Accounting departments, I also filled in as needed in almost every department in that company…other job duties as assigned, right? For 10 years, the company relied on me as a “fixer”. Anyone, anytime had an issue, I fixed it. I secured loans for employees down on their luck, I trained new employees whose skills were sub-standard for the positions to which they were hired (which typically meant months of retraining and hand-holding to get them to perform the simplest of duties). I carried inept upper management through the pandemic by maintaining every note and number as it related to federal employee retention credits and PPP loans with the SBA. I was the cornerstone of their corporate compliance, keeping them legal in situations where there was no one else capable of handling these situations. Why was I tasked with renewing our DOT licensing? Because the vehicle shop manager was too busy selling company trucks and pocketing the cash to actually deal with legalities and compliance. Why was I tasked with renewing tags for the car of the wife of our VP? Because that VP, the one in charge of production for a $25 million company, was incapable of handling it. Why am I the one telling HR that they cannot provide personal employee banking details to the girlfriend of a deceased employee? So, in true 5 Dimes Media fashion, let’s break down the 5 most ridiculous/illegal/morally questionable things this company asked me to do or help them accomplish (aside from the above mentioned items or the speed camera we were asked to build by the owner because people were speeding in his neighborhood)… 1) Sadly, during my 10 years with the company, the original founder/owner of the company passed away. He was amazing and kind and he treated everyone in the company with respect. When he passed, his son whom already had the 60% ownership share sought to purchase the remaining percentage of the company that the father had left to his other son. The point being that the now owner would need to compensate his brother for the fair market value of the ownership percentage that he had. So essentially, if the company was valued at $1 million dollars and one son owns 60% of the company, he would need to pay his brother $400,000 to secure 100% ownership. Seems simple enough, get a valuation on the company and pay your brother for his portion. The owner flat out hated the estate lawyer, called her every vile name in the book and resented her reaching out to a 3rd party to handle the valuation. Now, this person had handled several valuations for us in the past, so I’m not sure why this time it was unacceptable for him to do the valuation again…except that, if he valued the company too high, that would increase the amount the owner would need to pay to secure his brother’s ownership shares. So, I was tasked with tanking the financial reports and submitting them to the owner’s friend, who also happened to be our rep for the CPA firm that handled our annual audits and reviews. Not an impartial 3rd party as requested by the estate lawyer, but the investing brother’s close friend. Shady? You decide. 2) Ok, well that’s family turmoil. What about some legalities? During my time in charge of the accounting department, I was responsible for 3-5 people at all times, this included a desktop I.T. support employee and 3-4 members of the accounting team (Payroll, AP, AR and Purchasing). Let’s focus on Payroll for a minute…In 2022, after documenting several failures of our payroll clerk including incorrectly filing weekly federal taxes, falsifying her own timecard, after 7 years she was still unable to void a paycheck and reissue it without assistance and asked me to talk to upper management when she had questions because she didn’t want to appear “dumb” to them. In March of 2022, I terminated her with the consent of ownership after showing them my long list of issues with this person’s performance. I hired a woman who was perfectly capable of performing the job. She hadn’t worked in a bit because of some prior medical issues, but was all healed up now and she was excited to get back into the work force. Our company provided full health coverage for single employees, you only paid out of pocket for insurance if you added kids or a spouse, but your individual insurance was 100% free. The owner, out of fear that this obese woman would get health care coverage in our company and out of fear that she would single handedly drive our premiums up, terminated her 5 days before her 90 eligibility period was up…she was 5 days away from having health insurance and because she was fat, she was terminated. He used the excuse that she had botched an employee’s paycheck as the reason…I botched several employee paychecks in one payroll run, big deal, we fixed it and set everything straight. Her eventual replacement ended up having a stroke and the owner decided to hire someone new immediately, in full violation of her FMLA rights which would have protected her job. Now, to be fair, the stroke did basically leave her far too incapacitated to perform the job, but had she made a full recovery, she certainly would have had a legit case against us. There’s also at least one instance that I’m aware of where the company committed wage theft against an employee who was in training with us for 3 days and decided not to take the position. The VP noted to not pay him unless he called and asked about his paycheck and to my knowledge, he was never paid. I tried to point out that he legally had to be paid but my objection was ignored. 3) Well that’s pretty crummy, but did they ever do something shady during audits? Funny you should ask…Let me start by saying they falsified employee data, with the full support and help of our worker comp insurance rep, to reduce our worker’s comp audits and thus receive credits and discounts to which we were not entitled. This includes noting that office employees were working in Virginia (with a lower worker comp rate) when our one and only office was in Maryland and the employees listed had worked for us for a grand total of 3-4 weeks. These false audit reports led to tens of thousands in refunds and experience score discounts. They were also an AISC certified company, which is the construction company equivalent of being ISO certified for Fortune 500 companies. During these audits, the VP who was incapable of renewing his own tag work, was suddenly proficient enough to falsify purchase orders and job data so that these annual audits wouldn’t hit any snags. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in materials were never charged to their proper job projects because of these purchase order and inventory “modifications" 4) That’s a lot of info regarding actions against employees, surely they would never have falsified data to the state of Maryland? Au contraire, mon frere. Maryland decided that employers must submit unemployment data electronically and their system identified/rejected folks with an ITIN. That’s an Individual Tax Identification Number, it’s like a temporary social security number for immigrants who are pursuing naturalization but have not become U.S. citizens yet. Technically, you can only employ a person with an ITIN as a 1099 sub-contracted employee and usually only for about 2-3 years before you have to let them go, The whole point is that they should be in the process of becoming a citizen and if that process takes more than 2-3 years, there’s an issue there. People are not supposed to obtain an ITIN and keep it in perpetuity for employment, it’s meant to bridge the gap between being an illegal alien and a naturalized citizen. With that being said, Maryland’s new online State Unemployment guideline would not accept employee submissions from folks with an ITIN. I was tasked with modifying the system in such a way that these employees could be added to the system but then ignored when submitting unemployment data to the state. For reference, I have made several Maryland state officials aware of this, even inquiring about WhistleBlower protections…David Trone never replied and April McClain-Delaney refused to get involved. 5) So, we’ve read this to the end, clearly there’s one last item? Oh, for sure! Let’s talk about those ITIN employees again, but at the Federal level. Obviously, as I noted before, an ITIN is not equivalent to a social security number when it comes to employment verification. An ITIN is not accepted as an identifying document on a Federal I-9, which means folks with an ITIN cannot be legally added to your company payroll. By virtue of signing the I-9, you are certifying that you have received the required federal identification forms listed on the I-9. They can be hired as sub-contracted 1099 employees, but they cannot be added to your company payroll, they are ineligible for health insurance and 401K benefits and they are paid in gross wages, not taxed at the state/federal level and they receive no FICA benefits. But that didn’t work for the owner and VP. You see, all of our construction contacts had verbiage in them that made using 1099 employees disallowed for our contracts, meaning if we used 1099 employees, our contacts could be canceled or voided. At the time we had approximately $52-$53 million in ongoing construction contracts. So, in order for the company to hire this cheap labor, they had to falsify the I-9’s of these folks, put ITIN employees on payroll illegally and they had to falsify certified payroll reports to government agencies. The HR manager and I sat down with the Owner and VP and explained that this was not ok and we were told there was no other option as they couldn’t just release two-thirds of their field employees and that we had to make it work. The HR manager refused to sign off on the I-9’s after this and she left the company shortly thereafter. These ITIN employees were given insurance and 401K benefits, had federal and state taxes taken from their checks and paid into the FICA programs. The company had to falsify W-2’s and W-3’s for them annually and the IRS was constantly sending us verification reports because we were not legally allowed to withhold taxes for 1099 contracted labor. And that’s not even discussing the illegal drug use on property that the owner knew about and ignored, the scheme to defraud the SBA or the hours spent fixing the problems caused by employees that were ill-equipped to handle the work they were assigned. The last time I looked at the logs, I had clocked over 600 days of remote work in the 5-year span between 2020 and the end of 2024. It doesn’t sound that crazy until you realize that TeamViewer clocks a day as 24 hours, so I worked 600 24-hour shifts, or the equivalent of 1800 additional 8-hour work days. For reference, a typical employee working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks would clock 2,080 hours. As I mentioned, I was also the I.T. manager. I’m proud to say that we had almost 99.9% uptime on all of our servers the entire time I was in charge. We had backups of backups, multiple levels of redundancy and we were allowed to utilize computer infrastructure in any way I saw fit. If it increased efficiency, no one batted an eye on the spending. With that, came a lot of maintenance, working nights and weekends to perform server updates and maintenance, the kind of work that can’t be performed during normal work hours. But all of that was in addition to putting in 40 hours every week in the office. There were employees who were given the ability to work from home who never even remotely logged into the system. In fact, the only thing their logs ever showed was when the software would update…most places would call that time theft? It was allowed. We had an employee leave from our engineering department. Everyone in engineering had massive flat screen monitors for reviewing digital blueprints. After about a week, the monitor vanished? After some checking around, I found the engineering manager had taken the monitor/tv home to use as his personal tv. Now look, my hands aren’t clean in all of this as the Hamilton title reference implies. I facilitated a lot of this by just doing what was asked of me, I honestly always wanted to do a good job and there was value to the company in the service I was performing, I was helping the company, I was keeping the ship running, I was helping the employees do their jobs and I was keeping us in compliance with various state and federal agencies. So please, read this and take it with the grain or grains of salt it deserves. I’m sure the vile, disgusting things the owner said about the estate attorney pales in comparison to what he says about me and that’s ok. At the end of the day, what I’ve written here can be corroborated by several current and former employees, I’m still in touch with many of them, still assisting them because I can’t not be the fixer. All, this may be my last blog post for a bit, but I want you all to know I appreciate you all for checking out my content and reading my blogs, it has been an amazing way for me to process this situation and the feedback across this community has been amazing!! Thank you all!! —Benjamin
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My Take on Disney Adults
04/14/2026
My Take on Disney Adults
OK folks, One of the things I want to accomplish in this blog is giving folks unfiltered, unadulterated truth about stuff I’ve done or experienced. Let’s all just agree, the sun is too bright to stare at, all shit stinks and my mental health is crummy enough that the idea of sugar coating this blog, which I’m writing for my own sanity, is utterly impossible. I’m going to be sharing a lot of personal things here on this blog over the coming weeks and I hope some of you can find a few nuggets of wisdom in my journey. That’s the point of the Grainger Danger blog…I’m glad you’re here, now let’s go break some stuff. Today’s topic, a popular and divisive one…Disney Adults. Step One: What is a Disney Adult? In the most general of terms, it’s an adult who is deeply passionate and enthusiastic about Walt Disney movies, characters and theme parks. On the surface, that’s not overly different from a football fan that wears their favorite player’s jersey to the games or while watching the game on tv. Maybe they make the trek to see their team practice at training camp? Maybe they have some memorabilia, like an autographed helmet or jersey (sometimes framed as a cherished collectible). How does that compare to a Disney Adult which can be characterized as an adult that visits the theme parks, usually without children, collecting merchandise, participating in Disney bounding (dressing in outfits inspired by Disney characters) and incorporating Disney into their lifestyle and home decor? Let’s investigate further... Step Two: Isn’t Disney just for kids? The quick answer is, no. There is a lot that does cater to kids, after all, that was Walt’s original vision. He wanted to build a place for his daughters that would be a clean, safe and imaginative space where kids and parents could have fun together. Originally, Magic Kingdom was a dry park, but over time, they have added the ability to get beer and cocktails in the sit down restaurants. And, in the last year, they have added a pirate themed bar lounge, The Beak and Barrel. Epcot has added an adults only lounge bar, Geo 82 which you cannot get in to unless you are 21 or older. And there’s always the wildly popular “Drinking around the World” game, where you can snag an alcoholic beverage in every country’s pavilion around the World Showcase. On top of that, Epcot also offers a tequila tasting with tequila that you can ONLY get in Epcot at that specific tasting. Even Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom offer alcoholic variations of many of their drink offerings. That’s not to say there’s nothing new for kids, Disney is adding a Cars theme land, a Bluey meet & greet, an art studio experience where you can learn to draw and animate from Olaf and Epcot just finished refurbishing a large playground for kiddos. Step Three: Aren’t the rides kind of boring? Ok, admittedly, it’s not Cedar Point, the absolute gold standard in thrill rides with 18 reported “high thrill rides” and 70 overall ride attractions. But that was never Walt’s intent. Again, the goal was to create a space where kids and their parents could all have a fun time together. So there’s no-height requirement rides for toddlers, like Dumbo’s Flight, Aladdin’s Magic Carpets and The Barnstormer, which sells itself as a nice gentle roller coaster to get kids familiar with coasters and thrill rides. My theme park experience growing up was Six Flags of America near DC, KIng’s Dominion in Doswell, Virginia and Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia. One of the things that has heavily influenced my love for the Disney Parks is theming. Those parks I grew up on, they had the usual queue of switchbacks, maybe a few fans to help with the summer heat and if you were really lucky, a sign that noted your probable wait time. But almost all of Disney’s rides have some sort of themed queue. Interactive elements like the gemstones on Seven Dwarves Mine Train or the shadows on Peter Pan’s Flight. Then there’s the entire pre-show for rides like Haunted Mansion, Guardians of the Galaxy and Rise of the Resistance. In fact, fun theming and interactive elements exist on most of the Disney rides. Now I can admit, Magic Kingdom, the park with the most rides in Disney World, has maybe 4 of what I would consider actual thrill rides between Tron, Seven Dwarves Mine Train, Space Mountain and Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (if you count the big drop hill). As of right now Big Thunder Railroad isn’t open, but when it does reopen in early May, then Magic Kingdom would be up to 5 thrill rides. But it’s not the ride we’re judging on entirely, it’s the sum of their parts; the interactive queue, the themed elements and when you treat the ride as the culmination of the story telling, it creates an experience that other parks either struggle with or skip out on entirely. Step Four: Why is it so damn expensive? I got nothing on this one, folks, I have to agree, it is expensive and it prices out many of the families for whom these parks were designed and built to serve. From flights and price tiered resorts and date based tickets to lightning lanes, food and merchandise, Disney is designed to drain wallets at an exponentially fast rate. Most folks now consider a trip to Disney to be “once in a lifetime” because they will probably never again save the amount of money needed to go back OR they will be paying off the credit card debt for the next 20 years. And sadly, in 2024, the number of people going into debt to make their once in a lifetime trek to Disney was a staggering 24%, up from 18% just 2 years earlier. That number jumps to 45% when we look at families with children while 33% of park goers going into debt earn over $100,000 per year. So, even if you make 6 figures, you’re probably still going to go into some sort of debt to make this trip. But I have buried the lede a bit here and that is that 59% of Disney park visitors, the same ones spending thousands on flights and hotels and park tickets and food…have no regrets. And based on a 2025 survey, would do it again! Ludicrous? Absolutely. But let this other point sink in, the Disney Parks in Orlando are crowded, there’s no shortage of guests, the prices still aren’t keeping people away. But why?! Step Five: Why?! Because the energy, the trains, Main Street and Walt’s contagious smile in his photos are shared by the kiddo faces when they meet Mickey or Minnie, the adults singing along to Guardians, the damn full-size Millennium Falcon bringing so much of my childhood to life, the dole whip and the fireworks…the magic is real. It makes you feel. Something you’re supposed to give up as an adult, right? Fairy tale princesses and animated characters, that’s kid stuff. But here’s the reality…it’s NOT. It’s Walt’s idea, remember? A place where kids and their parents could have fun together. For the kids, it’s easy, they’ve never had to meet a work deadline or make a mortgage payment, they are the purest form of Disney magic and excitement. For us adults, we have to let go and do a bit more pretending than our younger counter-parts. But if you do it, if you let go and allow yourself to experience the magic and believe, it changes you. And this kind of change isn’t bad or childish, it’s personal, it inspires growth and healing. There has to be a reason that 59% of people have no regrets from their way too expensive trip with all the boring rides. I want to close with a bit of a personal reaction: Quote from The Polar Express; At one time, most of my friends could hear the bell. But as years passed, it fell silent for all of them. Even Sarah found, one Christmas, that she could no longer hear its sweet sound. Though I've grown old... ...the bell still rings for me. As it does for all who truly believe. In June of 2025, I started hearing the bell again. Take Care everyone and remember, it’s your life, live the version that makes you happy.
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The reality of portable chargers
03/10/2026
The reality of portable chargers
Good morning Nerd Herd and welcome to another blog post...this time we are tackling portable chargers. These super convenient battery packs can keep your phone alive when you're not home or near a wall outlet. They can be life savers or help you get through that extra lengthy weekend long baseball tournament without missing all of the exciting moments. First up, i want to tackle the form factors. Typically these battery packs are square or rectangular and provide several charge ports for you to plug in various devices, from Micro USB to USB-A and USB-C respectively. These will usually require a wall brick with a USB type port to connect the battery pack for charging. Then once charged, you will need whatever charging cable is appropriate for your device. This is by far the most common application, but it is fading in favor of some other more convenient options. The caveat here is to get a good quality wall brick, I recommend getting a 45-100W wall brick for charging these units and these are easily found on Amazon. These battery packs will offer a variety of ports as well so you can have multiple options to recharge your unit. There are also some battery packs that come with wall prongs so you can just plug it into the wall for charging, no cable needed for that...you may still need one for charging your device, but you won't need a wall brick for these units. Next, let's look at one of the newest convenience options, built-in cables. I'll tell you up front, I had a unit with a built-in USB-C cable and I babied it and it still died after 4 months. Now the battery pack did have additional ports so i could use a typical phone cable and charge it, so all was not lost. But still, it is very frustrating to pay for a feature that is so flimsy. I have seen units with multiple attached cables (USB-C and Lightning) but i think I would steer clear of these units. Maybe other brands will have better quality and if anyone out there would like to see a stress test comparison of battery packs with built-in cables, let me know in the comments. Lastly, let's look at MagSafe or Qi charging which allows you to "wirelessly charge" or magnetically attach the battery to your device without a cable for recharging. These are very convenient but you will probably need a wall brick and cable to charge it up. Once that's done. you can leave all the cables behind, magnetically attach it to the device and off you go. These units are getting thinner, sometimes come with a charge level screen on them and generally keep the cable mess to a minimum. Next let's look at juice, because that's what really is going to drive the recharge on our devices, right? Battery packs measure their battery output in Milliampere Hours (mAh). I've seen units ranging from 3,000 mAh all the way up to 25,000 mAh. So, in the real world, what does that mean? Generally speaking, 5,000 mAh will give your phone one full charge from 0% to 100%, so i try to use that as my baseline. These units out here that push 3,000 mAh are for topping off a device and if you have a newer phone, that may be all you need to get through the day. Ultimately, you're still only going to get 60% out of it, so if you plug in your device at 10%, you'll drain the battery pack when your phone hits only 70%. I use a 10,000 mAh battery pack for travel days (equal to 2 full recharges) and i have a 25,000 mAh pack for when i'm camping (equal to 5 full recharges!) and while I've never drained either one, i will be honest, a 25,000 mAh unit is probably overkill in 95% of situations. Now, we've looked at different styles and power ratings, let's look at cost. Right now on Amazon, Ridge has a MagSafe battery pack featuring 2 built-in cables (USB-C and Lightning), a digital screen to show charge level %, a divot specifically for charging an apple watch and boasts 10,000 mAh of output for $79. In my opinion, it's a good deal but i personally would get no use out of the attached cables or the watch charger. Now, for a direct competition comparison, Anker offers a MagSafe battery with 10,000 mAh but without the built-in cables, apple watch charging capability or digital charge level for $60. A bit more bare-bones, but for me, this would be all i need. Gopetl offers a 3,000 mAh MagSafe unit that is ultra low profile for $50, which i can't recommend if the Anker offers 3 times the capacity for only $10 more. Lastly, there's a unit on Amazon named LuckyFellow, it offers wall prongs for charging the battery, MagSafe charging for your device, 3 attached cables (Micro USB, USB-C and Lightning), a spot for charging an apple watch and 10,000 mAh for $35. <-- IF anyone has this unit, let me know how fast it died because i can't believe at that price point that it's a solid unit. At the end of the day, decide what features are important to you and don't pay for features you won't use. I would also like to throw in a couple extra notes here, one being that I would not recommend attaching a battery pack to a device when the charge on the device is above 20%. Let the phone get down to 10-20% before attaching the battery, this will help your device battery cycle its power more efficiently. Secondly, these units can provide some serious heat, so whenever possible, charge them in an open area i.e. on a table while you eat, for instance...not in your pocket! These things can get hot enough to explode and if you opt for a cheaper unit (looking at you LuckyFellow), they may not tell you if they have safeguards in place for overheat or voltage protections, so don't take the chance. As always, if you ever want more information or would like to know more specifics, i'm always here to help and I hope some folks out there find this info useful. You can reach us on the contact form on this site or by email at and we are graingerdangertv on instagram. For reference: The units in the thumbnail are all chargers i own. From the top, is a 5,000 mAh Anker wall plug unit, I can actually plug it in the wall and charge my phone from it at the same time, essentially using it as both my wall brick and a portable charger. The next unit down is my oldest 10,000 mAh Anker battery pack, it charges via USB-C and uses USB-A for output. Below that is my 25,000 mAh charger from Anker and you can see it's gigantic and bulky. It uses a USB-C input and both USB-A and USB-C for output. The two on the bottom, the one with the cable loop is my "broken" Baseus 10,000 mAh charger with the built-in cable that no longer functions. I use a standard USB-C cable to charge it up and charge my devices. I like the amount of power it has and the small size and that's why I keep it around. Next to that is my 10,000 mAh MagSafe phone charger, small compact and thin and it does require a wall brick and cable to charge it.
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