I get that this is a shitpost but this story unironically happened to me at the herkimer diamond mines in upstate New York. It’s called that to be fancy but it’s actually just quartz. I went there with a girl, paid to get in, we spent like 2-3 hours literally doing backbreaking labor. Like I don’t know what we expected but it totally fucking sucked. But we kept going because we refused to leave empty handed or to buy one of the already found and polished overpriced rocks from the gift shop. We found absolutely nothing. On our way out this dude that was near us the whole time is like “are you really leaving empty handed?” and hands us a rock with about a 1” long piece of “herkimer diamond” (again, quartz) embedded in it, warning us that removing the “diamond” (quartz) would probably break it.
We thanked him, left, and went back to our vacation. When I got home I immediately broke the rock. I was successful and got the stone out unharmed. It looks like shit. I know it would look a lot different cut and polished but they’re assholes for calling quartz diamonds and were morons for thinking that a day of a literal fucking mineral mining would be anything but awful. like this is work that is in many cases done by actual slaves
That guy was nice though, shout out to that guy even if I totally ignored his advice