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He found out his son had cancer. His coworkers answered with unbelievable kindness.

Andreas Graff, a single dad based in Hesse, Germany, faced one of the most difficult decisions of his life when his now-4-year-old son was diagnosed with leukemia last year.

Graff's paid time off wasn't nearly enough to accommodate his son's needs, and he feared losing his job — which would put his small family in an even tougher position.

Fortunately, his company's head of human resources worked with senior management and the workers' union to create a voluntary donation pool of other employees' overtime pay.


Remarkably, every single employee — more than 700 of them — contributed to the fund, donating nearly 3,300 hours so Graff could care for his son.

"Without this great support, I would be unemployed," Graff told local German paper Oberhessische Presse.

Photo by Anna Spiess, used with permission.

Family leave laws often can put people in vulnerable positions.

Germany has largely gender neutral laws when it comes to paternity leave. However, those benefits become less clear when a parent needs to take time off to take care of family needs that aren't directly related to childbirth.

In the United States, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requires that some employers allow certain employees to take up to 12 weeks off in a 12-month period for family and medical emergencies. However, that time off is unpaid.

Qualifying employers can't fire an employee during this period, but they aren't required to give them the same position when they return to the job. Some jobs let you combine paid time off (vacation, sick days, etc.) for family emergencies, but employers aren't required by law to do so.

Some states, like California, provide more generous paid time off laws, but even those are fairly limited.

Management and the workers union came together to find a solution this time — which is all too rare.

The voluntary donation system at Graff's job may have been the first of its kind. It's not uncommon for coworkers or communities to raise funds for a friend in need. But the direct pooling and transferring of employee benefits from a group to an individual is newsworthy both for the kindness involved and for the unique approach the company took.

Graff's personal challenges grew only more complicated after he lost his wife to heart disease in 2017. Compounding his family leave with bereavement time would have made his vulnerable situation all the more perilous. The extra time off donated by his colleagues has allowed him to spend more than a year away knowing he'll have his full job and benefits once he returns to work.

"The reaction of our employees was incredible," Seidel human resources head Pia Meier told the paper. "There is no one who has not donated."

Photo by Anna Spiess.

Graff's situation shows the generosity of people but also the need for better family leave laws around the world.

The example set by Graff's coworkers, and his company's management, shows the best of people coming together to help another person struggling through a crisis.

However, his story is still an exception to the rule that most workplaces are not prepared to respond when someone faces a serious illness or a family emergency at home. Until more sustainable family leave policies become the norm, the responsibility will continue to fall on the generosity and ingenuity of those like Graff's company and coworkers.

A pitbull stares at the window, looking for the mailman.


Dogs are naturally driven by a sense of purpose and a need for belonging, which are all part of their instinctual pack behavior. When a dog has a job to do, it taps into its needs for structure, purpose, and the feeling of contributing to its pack, which in a domestic setting translates to its human family.

But let’s be honest: In a traditional domestic setting, dogs have fewer chores they can do as they would on a farm or as part of a rescue unit. A doggy mom in Vancouver Island, Canada had fun with her dog’s purposeful uselessness by sharing the 5 “chores” her pitbull-Lab mix does around the house.

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Representative Image from Canva

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Things of course get even more complicated when one parent becomes attached to a name that they’re partner finds completely off-putting. It almost always leads to a squabble, because the more one parent is against the name, the more the other parent will go to bat for it.

This seemed to be the case for one soon-to-be mom on the Reddit AITA forum recently. Apparently, she was second-guessing her vehement reaction to her husband’s, ahem, avant garde baby name for their daughter, which she called “the worst name ever.”

But honestly, when you hear this name, I think you’ll agree she was totally in the right.

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An English doctor named Edward Jenner took incredible risks to try to rid his world of smallpox. Because of his efforts and the efforts of scientists like him, the only thing between deadly diseases like the ones below and extinction are people who refuse to vaccinate their kids. Don't be that parent.

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Kudos to the heroes who had 90 seconds to save lives in the Key Bridge collapse

The loss of 6 lives is tragic, but the dispatch recording shows it could have been so much worse.

Representative image by Gustavo Fring/Pexels

The workers who responded to the Dali's mayday call saved lives with their quick response.

As more details of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore emerge, it's becoming more apparent how much worse this catastrophe could have been.

Just minutes before 1:30am on March 26, shortly after leaving port in Baltimore Harbor, a cargo ship named Dali lost power and control of its steering, sending it careening into a structural pillar on Key Bridge. The crew of the Dali issued a mayday call at 1:26am to alert authorities of the power failure, giving responders crucial moments to prepare for a potential collision. Just 90 seconds later, the ship hit a pylon, triggering a total collapse of the 1.6-mile bridge into the Patapsco River.

Dispatch audio of those moments shows the calm professionalism and quick actions that limited the loss of life in an unexpected situation where every second counted.

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Yale's pep band had to miss the NCAA tournament. University of Idaho said, 'We got you.'

In an act of true sportsmanship, the Vandal band learned Yale's fight song, wore their gear and cheered them on.

Courtesy of University of Idaho

The Idaho Vandals answered the call when Yale needed a pep band.

Yale University and the University of Idaho could not be more different. Ivy League vs. state school. East Coast vs. Pacific Northwest. City vs. farm town. But in the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, extenuating circumstances brought them together as one, with the Bulldogs and the Vandals becoming the "Vandogs" for a weekend.

When Yale made it to the March Madness tournament, members of the school's pep band had already committed to other travel plans during spring break. They couldn't gather enough members to make the trek across the country to Spokane, Washington, so the Yale Bulldogs were left without their fight song unless other arrangements could be made.

When University of Idaho athletic band director Spencer Martin got wind of the need less than a week before Yale's game against Auburn, he sent out a message to his band members asking if anyone would be interested in stepping in. The response was a wave of immediate yeses, so Martin got to work arranging instruments and the students dedicated themselves to learning Yale's fight song and other traditional Yale pep songs.

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