Minor rant thread. Post your rants o' the day here!

In reply to Pattyo :

Not yet. Im in ohio doing challenge car stuff.

I do NOT miss the rust belt. 

Got invited to fill in a vacant seat at the King Of The Heap, didn't see the alert on my phone till too late.  :-( it looks like fun, I hope to get out to the next one!

So since when does "want it by Friday December 1 order in the next 3 hours" mean it will only be shipped that day?

According to whoever the Hell I talked to at Amazon, that's how it has always been, and that's what that time means. 

Explains why the last 4 things I got with free 2 day shipping have taken a week. But no, supposedly that's how it's always been, despite 4 years of being a prime member and until recently everything showing up the day it is supposed to.

Now my package is sitting at a carrier facility all of 6 miles away, ready to be delivered, and they're berkeleying closed on Saturday and Sunday. Seriously? How is the biggest northeast hub of UPS closed on the weekends going into Xmas season?

No, I don't want a free month extension of my prime. I don't want a berkeleying gift card either, I want my E36 M3 here on the day it is supposed to be here.

Of course now it doesn't matter when it gets here as I won't even be able to open the box and check parts until Thursday, which has me fully expecting to be missing important components and adding another week of waiting. If I'd have known it was going to be like this, I'd have bought from a cheaper option who would have guaranteed me one week delivery and delivered in 7 days, not promised 2 and delivered 6. 

Tonight I'm missing The English Beat because my wife's flight was delayed just enough to miss the direct connection home at Amsterdam. That's annoying.

I think what's making me really annoyed is that this is five days after they stranded me in Amsterdam for 24 hours making the same trip home.

At least my stranding resulted in a place to get some sleep; she's stuck traveling for about 30 hours...

Mike said:

My new cell phone company is terrible. Thank goodness they're cheap, because they're downright awful.

Every single contact is a disappointment. It feels like they randomize my requests and double-down. Call to discuss activating a new phone? Nope, I'm going to give you the PUK for your old SIM card, and suggest you talk to a department that isn't here. Trying to get your service activated on our bring-your-own-device plan? Nope, I'm going to insist you have to buy one of our phones. Interested in a quote on a new phone from us? That's the business department. You're not business? That's still the business department. Asking the business department for a quote? Nope, that's consumer. Nope that's telesales. Nope, you need a department that went home an hour ago. Ordering new SIM cards on the web? Awesome, overnight shipping is $10, thanks and "see you back here tomorrow." Actually sit on the order from Friday to the following Wednesday, and ship 2-day.

The above may not be in chronological order.

Anyhow, I have a new phone, so it turns out I need a SIM. Phone support can't send it out. I have to go to a store. The closest store is across the street from where my wife is, so I call her and ask her to drop by and pick one up. 

Twenty minutes later, she arrives with a nano-SIM free of its card, Scotch-taped to the back of a business card. "No charge" she said. They admitted they didn't have one ready to sell, so they just gave her some old one. When I tried to activate, the online tool tells me that it's not eligible for activation, and that it may be associated with another account.

If I wasn't saving ~$140/mo against our old carrier for our two lines of service, I'd leave them in a heartbeat.

Finally fixed it by Googling the problem, and buying a new SIM kit from a prepaid MVNO that is on my carrier. Still wouldn't activate on the online tool, so the solution ended up being online chat. 

What carrier, might I ask?

RevRico said:

So since when does "want it by Friday December 1 order in the next 3 hours" mean it will only be shipped that day?

According to whoever the Hell I talked to at Amazon, that's how it has always been, and that's what that time means. 

Explains why the last 4 things I got with free 2 day shipping have taken a week. But no, supposedly that's how it's always been, despite 4 years of being a prime member and until recently everything showing up the day it is supposed to.

Now my package is sitting at a carrier facility all of 6 miles away, ready to be delivered, and they're berkeleying closed on Saturday and Sunday. Seriously? How is the biggest northeast hub of UPS closed on the weekends going into Xmas season?

No, I don't want a free month extension of my prime. I don't want a berkeleying gift card either, I want my E36 M3 here on the day it is supposed to be here.

Of course now it doesn't matter when it gets here as I won't even be able to open the box and check parts until Thursday, which has me fully expecting to be missing important components and adding another week of waiting. If I'd have known it was going to be like this, I'd have bought from a cheaper option who would have guaranteed me one week delivery and delivered in 7 days, not promised 2 and delivered 6. 

Oh I get it, you're just trying to piss me off

 out for delivery for 11 hours then back to the hub. Because letting me hold it there and drive 6 miles would have been far too easy. 

I normally love this time of year but now nothing seems to go right.  The last couple weeks I got my decorations and trains up and started getting ready for next weekend when we have our big family dinner at my house.  Since some of us work Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years or all of the above we pick a day everyone can come and have dinner together.  My outside decorations have been fighting me and after replacing some wiring and retiring a couple seized inflatables I had a string of lights on my porch quit that I can't replace.  Two pieces of track went bad in places that involved me hovering over the completed village in one leg to replace, and I'm hopelessly behind on cleaning and cookieing.  Even going out this morning, turning up Christmas carols and ordering my turkey, pork butt, bread, and pasta wasn't as enjoyable as it usually is.   On top of everything else  the wife is noticing my grouchiness and keeps telling me to be happy. Bah berkeleying humbug.     

I drug SWMBO's Christmas ornaments out of her crawl space. sometime between last Christmas and now the bin tipped over and the occasionally leaky crawl space filled it with water. Much of her long dead grandmother's ornaments are completely covered in mold. I have no way to consol her.

Not had the best of starts to the week...

Last night when being rambunctious the Dog jumped off the couch and apparently landed weirdly as he yelped and spent the rest of the night and this morning limping around pitifully. I halfway suspect he's badly hamming it up for attention and overdoing it, as the last time he was apparently injured he was miraculously fine when we left for a weekend vacation of hiking.

For some reason the snooze didn't work this morning on my ipad's alarm and I overslept by half an hour- and then had to turn around after getting to work and drive back home because I hadn't put my badge back in my work bag after taking it with us to the concert Thursday night (venue is right next to my work, so I bring the badge to get into the building to use the restrooms if we need to). Appointment at the doctor's office took twice as long as it should have because the new receptionist didn't get me checked in properly so the nurses didn't know I was there. And finally, had a mailing tube hit me in the face over lunch as the mail clerk was trying to balance it on the scale to get a weight for it.

And the day's not even half over...

My mail/UPS/FedEx all come annoyingly late. 

Mail shows up between 5:30 and 6pm, UPS delivers after 8pm, and FedEx delivers a full day after the tracking marks it "Delivered." 

I don't live in the middle of no where, I'm a mile and a half from the center of downtown, within 5 miles of the FedEx hub, and within 2 of the UPS hub. I guess someone has to be on the return to the hub side of the route, but why me? More than anything it sucks because by the time something does show up, I've essentially lost the day.

The FedEx thing is infuriating, especially when a package is due to arrive on a Friday, gets marked "delivered" Friday, but doesn't show up until Monday.

Never mind me, just waiting for packages instead of wrenching.

Damn it USPS just drove by with nothing for me, a USPS 2-Day was supposed to arrive today.

Gee, why are the chocolate chips in the microwave sparking?

They aren’t, the metal bowl is :(

Yesterday afternoon I picked my bicycle up from the bike shop after a long-overdue complete overhaul on its drivetrain- just pushing it around I can feel how much smoother it rolls and am looking forward to riding it to enjoy the new setup. Today the forecast was simply "Rain," and it has been living up to that- and the cold front causing said rain is going to have temps down in the teens (i.e., solidly below what I can comfortably ride in) for the rest of the week. So, the newly-upgraded bike will sit for a while.

So, have to drive to work- get in the Rampage and find that a) the top of the windshield is leaking and once I'm underway b) the wiper linkage for the passenger side popped loose.

Finally, we were supposed to be having lunch on the company today (they have a luncheon back at the main plant for the holidays, but those of us located remotely are allowed to grab lunch on the company dime) but my boss decided to move it to tomorrow- so I don't currently have anything for lunch. Granted, I work in the middle of downtown with lots of options- but again- today's forecast is 'rain' and it doesn't look to be changing anytime soon.

Shuffled the barely running challenge project into the garage on Friday evening, so it could be worked on for a bit before weather gets too bad and the Miata needs the space.  Have not been able to get enough motivation to actually do anything with it.

There's a special place in hell for whoever invented the laptop touchpad with integrated buttons, so that when you try to click on something the pointer always moves a little bit.

My 7 month old and I both got a stomach virus last week. (I don't know where she got it from but I got it from being projectile vomited on by a 7 month old.) And my wife got a cold. Then my 7 month old got a cold. Then I got a cold. Then my 3 year old got a cold. Everyone is sick and home and borderline miserable. 

At least it's not a hangover. Taking care of kids with a hangover is truly next level awful. 

In reply to dculberson :

Hang in there man, this too shall pass.  I had the hardest time accumulating sick leave when my kids were little because the shiney lipped germ factories were constantly bringing home a new bug for us to partake in. 

Rant:  I'm having a muscle spasm in my ribs when I move the wrong way.  Feels like a knife at times.

I think we've finally found our shop space, which is good.  The 10x30 unit next to my 10x30 unit just opened up and I went ahead and added it to my account.  When I first talked to the guy about it, I asked if we could take the wall out and combine the units and he said yes.  Now he's giving me some static about how he can take out a panel to make a doorway, but the panels provide structural integrity and he can't just take them out.  I don't want 2 10x30s. I want a 20x30.  Or maybe, down the road, a 30x30.  And I've seen other units in the same facility with walls pulled down. So don't give me this crap.

Plus, I'm not sure how that could possibly be load-bearing. The metal studs are bolted into the ceiling beams, but they're next to the beams -- the beams aren't sitting on top of them.  I was under the impression that you never relied on the shear strength of a bolt to hold up a roof...

In reply to wae :

Agreed, metal studs aren't structural in any application I've ever seen.

In reply to wae :

Yeah, you're right as far as everything I know goes.

KyAllroad (Jeremy) said:

In reply to wae :

Agreed, metal studs aren't structural in any application I've ever seen.

That depends entirely on how heavy a gage they are, how deep they are, and the spacing.  But mostly that first one.

Particularly if they are anchored to the roof joist,  this wall could be acting like a shear diaphragm to provide lateral stability to the overall building.  It's not so much holding up the roof as it is preventing the building from going parallelogram in cross section.  Think of this wall as the bottom of a cardboard box - when you cut the tape and open the flaps out, what happens to the structural integrity of the box?

There is a 924 sitting on Craigslist just calling to me. It is $400. But I keep telling myself I am not going to buy a Lemons Rally/GRM Challenge car until after I get the garage torn down and at least a new one framed in, the blue car sold and a pickup bought and the suspension redone on the black car... Unless it is something rare and "cool" like a Pug 504.

In reply to 93EXCivic :

A 924 generally won't rust if it is sitting around (due to the galvanized body), so even if you can't get to it right away, it can sit and wait until you're ready.

Jus' Sayin'

That said, unless you force feed the engine air, or swap another engine in its place, they aren't terribly fast in a straight line and tend to be outclassed quite quickly in cheap endurance racing.  With some 944 suspension and brake upgrades, they'll stop and turn with the best of them and ditching CIS for carbs or EFI tends to eliminate many of the reliability issues the cars have (aside from electrical connections and a few internal engine issues like the cam oiling and mechanical followers).  A Mercedes SLK MP45 blower fits nicely under the stock intake manifold where the A/C compressor is often found. 

Good luck with the garage rebuild.

In reply to Stefan :

I am not planning on doing Lemons racing. I just want to run the Lemons rally and the Challenge (but largely just for fun) so straight line speed is not a huge deal. I am planning on basically finding something older and European to do a resto-mod on to do for drives with the British car clubs, TSDs (if I ever see any in the area), the occasional autocross (basically if/ when the Civic is in pieces) and nice day drives the country. To some extent as much as I hate to admit it this is going to be largely a build based around getting the look and feel of the car just right.

I figure cheap 924s are not that hard to find so there is no need to buy one now and deal with shoving it around the drive or storing it somewhere else until the framing of the garage is done. Doesn't stop me from wanting it though.

Having just bought a 944 (one of the 3 944 build threads started here in the last month or so), I support the idea of a 924.

My rant:

Pretty much all I want to do is not look/feel goofy all the time at work, but this is apparently something I struggle with. I'm so often lost in thought about what I'm doing or trying to do that if a surprise conversation pops up, I *always* say something stupid. If by some miracle I avoid that outcome, then I have some weird vacant look on my face (or so I've been told), I don't register that I actually know them, or it takes me what feels like minutes to force my brain to switch gears. I have discovered I even make that ridiculous Midwesterner 'ope' noise when I accidentally walk into a wall, locker, pillar, or similarly obvious inanimate object. If you don't know what I'm talking about, google it.

Likely root cause: lack of sleep, which is proving a tough one to fix.