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

The email from the contractor reads, "I need a price on 4 automatic sliding doors. The door schedule is attached."

I'm looking at the door schedule that doesn't list accurate sizes because there isn't a manufacturer that makes a 5' wide slider. It also gives no finish information, or any of the other information I need to provide prices. Lots of boxes are listed as TBD. There is also no spec sheet. Sigh...

I shoot back an email asking for size and finish clarification as well as door specs so I can accurately price the doors. Crickets. Probably because the architect doesn't actually know because the owners haven't made up their minds. The odds are also high that the architect has never had a job with automatic doors in it before. Not only will he not know the answers to the questions, but he also won't even know what the questions are. 

I would really like to shoot them an estimate with all the price boxes TBD and see where that leads. Unfortunately, I'll have to email them daily to pry the information out of them one item at a time and then swag a high price to cover my ass, which will end up costing me the job. They will go with the low-bidder national company who will swoop in and do a E36 M3ty, incomplete job, and disappear behind their long list of contract exclusions.  The contractor will then have to call me at the 11th hour to come to fix the berkeleyups at very high overtime labor rates. At this point, I will point out the fact that if they had gone with my slightly higher bid they would have actually saved money and gotten the product the customer wanted the first time. 

The next job will go the exact same way.

It's slightly frustrating and I wonder why I bother to bid these projects to start with. 

Duke said:

In reply to stanger_mussle (Supported by GRM undergarments) :

I've been ignoring my cable/internet terms for a while. It's overdue for a revisit.

I review our accounts yearly and see where we can save, or earn - see bank rant above.

Because of where we live our only option for TV is satellite. We were allowed up to six receivers on our account, so we had ours, as well as friends and family with receivers in their homes and we split it evenly. Once they could stream they opted out. Which left us with a surprise hefty satellite bill. So I put together a list of channels we actually watch, went online and reconfigured our account. Now we're paying even less than we were when we were splitting it.

stanger_mussle (Supported by GRM undergarments) said:

I had a trial SIM with Mint, which uses T-Mo's network. I noticed no difference in service. The trial was only 25 messages, 25 minutes and 250mg of data. I blew through the data on my way to work the first day streaming music and using Google Maps. I can get a plan with both my GF and me with 10gb data for each line for $60 a month. She pays $80 a month with AT&T. So this will save us real money. 

I've had Mint for about 2 years. Works great for me and I can't imagine paying what some of the major networks cost for cell service. 

EvanB said:

stanger_mussle (Supported by GRM undergarments) said:

I had a trial SIM with Mint, which uses T-Mo's network. I noticed no difference in service. The trial was only 25 messages, 25 minutes and 250mg of data. I blew through the data on my way to work the first day streaming music and using Google Maps. I can get a plan with both my GF and me with 10gb data for each line for $60 a month. She pays $80 a month with AT&T. So this will save us real money. 

I've had Mint for about 2 years. Works great for me and I can't imagine paying what some of the major networks cost for cell service. 

Verizon was worth it to me when I was traveling regularly, as there were a decent number of remote locations where they were the only cell service that worked.  I really should have looked into switching a few years back, but too late for that.  With any luck, I'll be back to going to remote places this year, I should check out competitors' coverage maps.

eastsideTim said:

EvanB said:

stanger_mussle (Supported by GRM undergarments) said:

I had a trial SIM with Mint, which uses T-Mo's network. I noticed no difference in service. The trial was only 25 messages, 25 minutes and 250mg of data. I blew through the data on my way to work the first day streaming music and using Google Maps. I can get a plan with both my GF and me with 10gb data for each line for $60 a month. She pays $80 a month with AT&T. So this will save us real money. 

I've had Mint for about 2 years. Works great for me and I can't imagine paying what some of the major networks cost for cell service. 

Verizon was worth it to me when I was traveling regularly, as there were a decent number of remote locations where they were the only cell service that worked.  I really should have looked into switching a few years back, but too late for that.  With any luck, I'll be back to going to remote places this year, I should check out competitors' coverage maps.

US Mobile uses verizon and T-Moble towers. Got 5G too!

Daughter stayed home sick today. She's been sleeping for about 3.5 hours now. Which I guess is better than yesterday where she fought a nap and then taught going to sleep until 10:30pm, and woke up demanding Mickey Mouse on tv at 4am. 
 

But now I'm starting to feel iffy. E36 M3. 

It is damn near impossible to find 5x100 14" wheels.

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

It is damn near impossible to find 5x100 14" wheels.

I think there's a few 2nd gen Neons in junkyards down here that should have them.

In reply to eastsideTim :

car-part is basically useless for wheels and most places that have them won't ship.

In reply to Toyman! :

I always tell people that the cheapest bid is the most expensive, some get it but I feel your pain

Toyman! 

It's slightly frustrating and I wonder why I bother to bid these projects to start with. 

 

 

 

 

Because that sets you up as the guy to solve their inevitable problem, and you cam get good margin for the work?

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

I think I have a set from a late-90s Celica you could pretty much have. Too bad we live so far apart.

I have a sick dog with very enlarged lymph nodes who can't keep food down. Last weekend a very sweet stray came up to my porch and we took him to the shelter to see if he would be claimed. So far he hasn't been claimed and will likely be up for adoption next week and I'm just stressing out waiting for the biopsy results to see if I can take on another dog or pour money into the sweetest one ever.

In reply to EvanB :

Oh no!! Which doggo?

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

Mikka. She had some stomach issues a couple weeks ago but was doing better on chicken and rice diet. Slowly switched back to dog food and she got much worse this week. 

In reply to EvanB :

Sorry to hear that.  I hope she gets better soon.

In reply to EvanB :

Oh no!  I'm sorry to hear about that!  It's weird though...  My sister's dog, River, was just diagnosed with a cancer that is fairly far along and can't really be treated with any real success.  She found this out on a Wednesday or Thursday, I think, and had made an appointment to have her euthanized the following Tuesday.  On Sunday, she went downstairs to check on the poor pup and sitting outside the door, looking through the glass was this emaciated black dog, maybe a year old if that.  Just sitting there, looking in.  As though this was her door and she was simply waiting for it to open.  The poor thing had gotten attacked by something and had wounds on her face and was so starved that you could see all of every single rib.  No microchip, no collar, no tattoo, nobody in the area missing a dog of that description.  She called animal control about what to do with it and they said "uh, well, enjoy your new dog".  So she brought Unknown_Dog_001 into the garage and fed her, got her to the vet for dewormers and flea/tick meds, and made a space for her.  River has since perked up and doesn't appear to be in any pain or anything, so her appointment was canceled - she's still dying and nothing can stop that, but she's had almost two "extra" weeks of good days so far.  Unknown_Dog has moved from the garage to the couch, her face has all but healed, and slowly but surely her ribs are disappearing.  We all joke that when she was sitting outside she was really saying "I heard this household had an opening.  I'd like to apply for the position of dog".

So I don't know what's going on that the universe is giving out dogs to people who need them right now, but maybe that dog knew he was needed.

I'm currently scheduled to be in 4 meetings at once. Now we're dealing with a prod DB issue, so I'll not be in any of them.

This is fun.

I recently "upgraded" to a traditional "safety" razor. I don't seem to be qualified to operate this thing. I keep giving myself little nicks and cuts - no big deal, and they're decreasing over time as i get used to the thing. But then today it slipped out of my fingers and I caught it .. by the blades. I took the fingerprint off my middle finger and thumb. Just the outer layer of skin - not even enough to bleed - but enough for my fingers to be real sensitive and to make me question my intelligence every few minutes.

In reply to dculberson :

Sounds like something I would do.

Changing the oil in PW's car, which has a drain bolt that is notorious for rounding off which, when it did, I machined the head down and welded a bigger nut on. The welds broke as I was trying to remove it today. I had to use a pipe wrench to get it off. The filter housing is on the top of the engine and has never been a problem. Suddenly, 6 years into ownership, there's a hose clamp in the way and I can't get it out. And because the housing is in the way I can't get a tool in to move the clamp.

In reply to dculberson :

I did the same thing to my fingers about a month ago, but for the life of me I cannot remember how I did it now. I think I was moving something? Or trying to get something to snap into place? I know it was scraped on the back frame of... something... and it was really annoyingly painful. 

I put some Aquaphor on my fingertips and bandaged them twice a day, completely fine after about 48 hours. 

2 rants today (or rather, at the moment....).

Work Rant: The work on the project I've been working on for the last 6 months or so depends on my getting input from another group within the company to do the analysis runs that I'm responsible for. There is a LOT of data coming from them because of the complexity of this, and initially we assumed that what we were getting from them had been checked for errors and was correct. But very early on, we got some results from our analysis that didn't make any sense, and when we dug into things eventually realized that the problem was that the input data we'd been given was not correct. That was 6 months ago. I think we've gotten... at least a half-dozen sets of the same data (for 6 somewhat discrete things that need to be checked) and not a single one of them has been completely correct. There has ALWAYS been something wrong with the data for at least one of the 6 things. 

I'm fairly understanding of mistakes- I am NOT perfect by any remote means, and make a fair bit myself. BUT I work hard to not make the same mistake multiple times and put into place checks/procedures to prevent me from making common ones. The checks that I now do every time we get a new set of data from the engineer in the other group take me like 5-10 minutes to run through- it is frankly infuriating that the other engineer isn't willing to take the same amount of time (or less- they should have internal checks of their own for berk's sake!) to check his own work before sending it to me and making me waste my time doing it for him.

Personal Rant: Some time ago I realized that were anything to happen to me that The Dancer would likely have a really hard time with things since I handle pretty much all of our financial stuff and many of the things she'd need to help her out are through my work and thus kind of not easy to figure out how to deal with. So I spent a good bit of time going through and collecting all of the information that she would need about all of our accounts, insurance, and such and all of the contact numbers/websites for everything so she'd have all the info she'd need if anything ever happened. Because all of this info would obviously be incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands, I put it in a password-protected document so she'd be essentially the only one who could access it.

After the incident with our credit card having a fraudulent charge on it, I had to log on to the websites for the recurring payments that we had set up to be paid with the now-canceled card and was having a hard time remembering one of the passwords. Since I have all of that info in the file for her, I went to pull it up to figure out the password- and found that I couldn't open the file with any of the programs that should have been able to open it as they all claimed it was corrupted and weren't picking up that it was a password-protected file so were trying to open the encrypted document as a normal one so were just getting gibberish. 

I searched through my computer and couldn't find the backup copy that I had made of it- and realized that apparently somehow that file had not gotten copied over when I transferred the data over from my old iMac when I got the new M1 iMac earlier this year. And- of course- after having left it just sitting under a table in my office for the last 6 months or so, last weekend I finally went and restored the old iMac to a clean MacOS install and wiped both drives to be able to finally try and sell it- so it wasn't just a matter of starting it up and finding the file. The good news is that I downloaded a recovery program and it found the backup file on the deleted partition of the larger drive. The bad news- the free version of the program won't actually recover files, you have to buy the full version to do that, which is like $90. So the dilemma is do I drop the $90 to (presumably, not guaranteed I imagine) recover the file and not have to do all the work again, or start over from near scratch in getting all the information together again.

The fan switch in our fireplace stuck on for a few hours last week. My wife asked if the fan would burn up running like that (foreboding). Me: "No, it's designed to run for thousands of hours." I replaced the switch. Fan ran for a couple hours and died. I figured it was a bad switch. Nope. Fan crapped out. E36 M3! I just replaced the fan in January. It's not even a year old. The original fan lasted 10 years. berkeley!

Peabody said:

In reply to dculberson :

Sounds like something I would do.

Changing the oil in PW's car, which has a drain bolt that is notorious for rounding off which, when it did, I machined the head down and welded a bigger nut on. The welds broke as I was trying to remove it today. I had to use a pipe wrench to get it off. The filter housing is on the top of the engine and has never been a problem. Suddenly, 6 years into ownership, there's a hose clamp in the way and I can't get it out. And because the housing is in the way I can't get a tool in to move the clamp.

Let me guess, something with a GM 1.4T?