slefain said:Picking the wrong tool for the job then getting upset when the job takes too long doesn't make the tool bad, it makes you an idiot for using the wrong tool. The right tool is readily available, so why try to make the wrong tool work when it is clearly not up to the task?
Money and marriages and civic duty.
I volunteer for Trail Life. I am the committee chairman and the Woodlands Trail Ranger (I am in charge of the elementary age group). I volunteer at church as a deacon. I hold a professional job capable of supporting a family, for which I work a 40 hour week and ten hour weekly commute.
Tunawife treats all of these as annoyances. If I am a few minutes late, she complains about my job. If I have to travel, which is rare, she complains about that. If I have a deacon meeting, or need to spend some time talking to a family about their household issues, she gets huffy. If I have a Trail Life committee meeting, she gets annoyed. She tells me variants of "you spend more time helping the world than you do here", which is a real hoot because every single day I eat dinner with my family, I do the dishes and clean the kitchen afterwards, I make sure the laundry gets done, I empty the dishwasher in the morning. I pray with the kids and put them to bed every day. I wash the sheets on the weekends and fix everything that breaks on the house.
Tunawife works part time from home as a content manager for a hyperlocal website. It's fun and she enjoys it and brings in some money. I support that, and it's all fine. She feels like she's being productive and whatnot. Even when she's stressed about work, and I know that I would get no such luxury, I give it a pass. It's fine.
Without getting into great detail, here is a comparison of our gross pay
It's great, and I thank her often when she earns money, and she's even cool with me spending money on the truck.
Her website is having its tenth anniversary this weekend. They've rented the childrens museum and have vendors and local businesses and such. It is a neat thing. She will be there, working. That's fine.
She volunteered all of us, me and the tunakids, for various duties. We are not getting paid. Tunakid 1 (who posts here now, he's fourteen) would much rather be at the high school fellowship event (bimonthly) where there is a certain young lady he would like to continue to hopelessly get the courage up to speak to someday, tunakid 2 hates everything, tunakid 3 is fine and happy to do whatever, and tunakid 4 is meh about it. I would rather be doing something else, but I am happy to help Tunawife.
Needless to say she is very annoyed with all of us. Why are we not excited!? Why don't we care?! She is doing her part to help the community. It's not just a job, she's part of something. etc.
I pointed out that I design life savings fire protection equipment every day. Somehow that's different. It's just a job, but hers isn't. Somehow Trail Life, which is actually a volunteer organization at the troop level, and the deaconate, which is also completely volunteer, don't get the same sense of civic or community duty when I need to attend to them.
I've noticed that in single, or majority single earning households, the salary turns into an expectation. I've never heard "thank you", it's just totally expected that anyone can go bring home well into six figures without lots of hours and lots of travel. My grandfathers house was "worship the Dad", he came home when he felt like it, expected to be able to sit in the recliner with a drink and not be bothered for a few hours while he decompressed. He didn't want to deal with kids or minor things. He had a job to do. You couldn't call him at work because the sink was leaking, it wasn't possible. I am not advocating for that. It's a tyrannical way to lead a home, but I do believe that the pendulum has swung the other way. I heard, as an extreme example, from a friend the other day. This friend is married to a woman who runs a traveling personal trainer business. She's all over FB and likely IG about being a fierce and independent Momma, how men in the gym are lazy, etc. I learned her business is taking in hundreds of dollars every month, and he's paying all expenses, and she's after him to buy her a Maserati.
I don't mean to sound misogynistic, but something feels off. It's off in enough situations that there is some sort of trend that I can't put my finger on. It sucks and I'd like it to stop, please. Travis McGee is starting to feel more and more like a life goal every day.
In reply to tuna55 :
I am sorry to hear about your situation. I am a data sample of one, but DW and I are an equal partnership and we treat each other as equal contributors.
We both contribute fairly equally, both financially and in family management. If anything, she underrepresents the amount of daily chores she does. We tend to do different tasks for efficiency but I feel we put in equal effort.
Among the 4 coworkers I have with kids, I see pretty much the same thing. All 4 have wives who work full time, and at least 3 of them share family duties pretty equally. The 4th I suspect probably lets his wife do a bit more of the family stuff.
From my observations of others I don't see much of a trend as you describe, but other than my coworkers I don't have a big cohort of friends that I am intimately familiar with.
Please don't smoke where you are instructed not to. We are on a cruise and one of our neighbors is smoking on their balcony. Which is very prohibited.
It really stinks. Seems that we were conditioned to not think it was so bad, but in the long absence of it, you notice how disgusting it is to smell.
Maybe you like to stink, which is your choice. But the rest of us should not bear that burden in places it's prohibited.
In reply to alfadriver :
Agreed. Particularly cigars. I have come to feel cigar smoking is an act of social aggression, not an individual pastime.
You want to smoke in your house or in designated areas? Fine, it's your body, no problem. But don't make me share it.
tuna55 said:... something feels off. It's off in enough situations that there is some sort of trend that I can't put my finger on. It sucks and I'd like it to stop, please. ...
Trust your feelings, Luke.
Something is definitely wrong. I don't have the answer. Even if I *did* have something close to the answer, that wouldn't matter, because your wife is the one who needs the answer, and no one else can find it for her.
Something is bothering her. There is something she feels insecure, anxious, frustrated, etc. about. She needs to figure out what that is. I know enough to know that she hasn't figured that out, and is projecting that frustration and insecurity on everything that makes her feel 'itchy', but none of which is the root of the problem.
It absolutely is not fair to you for her to take that frustration out on you. You are legitimate to feel bothered by it.
She needs serious counseling with someone who understands and she can trust. Someone who can help her figure out what the real root issues are causing her frustration and anxiety, and come up with a plan of how to deal with them.
You are not that person.
The best thing you can do is to help guide and support her to FIND that person. Kind supportive words. Let her feel heard. Make it clear that you care and want her to be happy. I know you do. I also know that the times when we most want someone to get the help they need are the times when they're being most unfair to us. Resist that temptation, because you do not want that push for her to find help to come during a point of frustration.
I would first seek advice for yourself from someone close and experienced. Probably someone in your faith who understands that. I don't know the full experience of that. I don't think you are misogynistic, but you probably hew more towards traditional gender roles than I do. Be sure the person you speak to is someone who cares about you both as individuals with unique expressions of who you are and your roles in your family, relationship, community, work, etc.
Get them to give you a map to gently direct your wife to the guidance she needs.
Be sure you are ready and comfortable for the nature of your relationship to change. It will almost certainly be for the better, but it will certainly change in ways you did not expect.
In reply to Beer Baron :
thanks dude.
She is currently in counseling. It's okay. We were, but our marriage counselor fired us.
EDIT: While your observations regarding gender roles between the two of us may be somewhat correct, this isn't really a gender role issue. If she was capable of flipping the proportions on that pie, I would be a stay at home Dad and do homeschooling.
In reply to tuna55 :
I don't need to know that story (unless it is helpful to you to share it). But I strongly encourage you to find another marriage counselor you can work with.
I hope your situation improves. I understand from previous posts of yours that you're not entirely happy with how things stand.
Duke said:In reply to tuna55 :
I don't need to know that story (unless it is helpful to you to share it). But I strongly encourage you to find another marriage counselor you can work with.
I hope your situation improves. I understand from previous posts of yours that you're not entirely happy with how things stand.
Yeah man, thanks. It's been pretty tough from Day 2 of the honeymoon. I am not blameless, not by a long shot, but it's still puzzling.
My favorite part about counseling was a complaint she had from ten years ago. As far as I can tell, every time she tells this story, it paints me worse than before. I tried to explain that I felt as though I had asked forgiveness and admitted fault right away back then, and every time it came up since then. I wasn't prepared to ask forgiveness for something I did not do, and that I felt that she was building up the story to suit her feelings and not the other way around. I was told that I needed to accommodate that feeling regardless of what actually happened. I won't say I lost my temper, but I raised my voice. A thing either did or did not happen. I cannot be responsible for what did not happen any more than I can be responsible for a dream she had. I try to understand her feelings, but at what point does anyone care about mine?
Got an announcement of a good number of layoffs company wide. Some people found out if it's them, others are still finding out. I'm supposedly still working. They are calling for multiple web based meetings, but only some people are getting invitations to those. Why is a clear answer so hard? Oh in a fun side effect, we have armed security stationed outside incase of a disgrunteled employee....
tuna55 said:EDIT: While your observations regarding gender roles between the two of us may be somewhat correct, this isn't really a gender role issue. If she was capable of flipping the proportions on that pie, I would be a stay at home Dad and do homeschooling.
I do not want to give the impression that I think it's really a gender role situation. I really don't know what's in her head.
I'm hypothesizing that *she* does not perceive the work she is doing as that valuable. That she is projecting her insecurities of the value of her work onto you, as expressed by wanting you to tell/show her that her work is valuable.
Of course that's a losing game, because it doesn't matter if you value her work (I believe you do) and express that to her (I believe you are making a good faith effort to do so). What matters is if she perceives her own value for herself.
I think it is possible - but not necessarily the case - that she may have certain traditional gender-role expectations of herself that might reinforce these feelings.
I also suspect that... You're both very religious. This is important to you. You will probably do best with a counselor with a religious bent who understands the value of your faiths. Often times people of particular religions are prone to getting locked into more rigid worldviews and expectations. (This isn't going a traditional gender roles direction...) That to help her figure out what she needs or wants, she may need a counselor who is able to bring a truly outsider perspective that an elder within your particular church might not have. That it may be a tough balancing act to find someone who is close enough to your faith/philosophy to really understand, yet far enough away to bring a new perspective.
Please not how uncertain I am of all of this, and how pretty much all of this are big "MAYBE"s.
In reply to Beer Baron :
Loud and clear bud. Thanks again.
My wife used to work for the state. They have very rigid rules, lots of oversight, plenty of bureaucratic and political garbage to deal with, and the pay was abysmal with no raises for the last 12 years or so despite there being a law on the books to mandate raises. To be fair, they followed the law because the law essentially said "must give raises every year unless you have a reason to not give raises". Oddly the legislature found a reason every year. So she quit and went to work in the private sector. Despite her boss telling her that she was doing a great job she was all stressed out all the time because she didn't know what she was doing and didn't know if she was doing a good job. Naturally, my advice was to corner her boss and force a review out of her: "Hey, I sometimes feel like I don't have a complete grasp on what is expected of me. Can you give me some feedback on what I can do better or what I'm doing that I should do less of or what I'm not doing that I should do more of?" She got a very positive response from her boss and was told that she was exceeding all their expectations and she should keep up the good work.
After she had been at the new job for several months, more and more people left the state so it finally made them realize that they needed to adjust the pay scale and the working conditions a little bit. They started pinging her and offering her a fairly significant bump in pay from what she used to make there to come back. They even extorted her a little bit by saying that if she came back the other people in the office at her level would also get a raise, but if she didn't they wouldn't. She asked me what I thought and I told her that (1) It took 12 years and everyone quitting to get the pay back to something that was a little closer to market rate. Why would you take this deal knowing that it'll probably be another 12 years before the next raise? (2) She hated the inflexibility of the ruleset there and that wasn't going to change. (3) I'm generally a never-go-back, you're-dead-to-me type because I learned the lesson that when you leave something or someone, you do it for reasons that you don't always fully know and understand and those reasons don't often change over time.
But, says she, I had friends at work! And I don't now.
Me: ... da berkeley? What does that have to do with anything?
To be clear, it's not that she doesn't like the people she works with - because she does - and it's not that there are "bad people" there or anything like that. They just don't go and hang out and have group texts like she did with the people from the state.
Apparently that was the deciding factor. They told her she'd start back at just a little bit under what she's making right now and that in July or June there'd be another fairly decent raise. Figure in that we'd be able to switch over to the state's insurance and even at the new starting rate we'd come out ahead or break even. So the money is basically a wash. And our income pie graph is very similar to Tuna's up above so it's not really swinging us one way or another. So she puts in her notice a couple weeks ago and is all set to start in mid March. Mid-march? Yeah, see the state has something something something bullcrap something can't hire anyone until that date. Warning sign number uno.
Today she texts me that everything is all screwed up. Because when she quit she still had another month to go in her level 3 probationary period, they want to bring her on as a level 2. Oh, and they can't get her a start date before April 1. So that means less money than she's making now and, since she already gave her notice, a couple weeks of not getting paid at all.
And of course she put in her notice before she had a written offer letter so her last day is in about two weeks and she's already been training up her replacement.
I told you so, I told you so, I freaking told you so....
In reply to tuna55 :
Find another Christian counselor outside of your church. Wife and I are involved with our church and we have a child issue we prefer not to share with the pastors or the entire church. Yes, that stuff gets around.....
On a funny note when I was a church Deacon somebody would come up to me and ask..........Are you a Deacon? Then I'd cringe because the question, complaint or suggestion is going to be a doozy.
Once we had a new pastor from the south and some 80 year old man complained he couldn't understand his southern accent. Can you ask the preacher to speak slower?
Datsun310Guy said:In reply to tuna55 :
Find another Christian counselor outside of your church. Wife and I are involved with our church and we have a child issue we prefer not to share with the pastors or the entire church. Yes, that stuff gets around.....
On a funny note when I was a church Deacon somebody would come up to me and ask..........Are you a Deacon? Then I'd cringe because the question, complaint or suggestion is going to be a doozy.
Once we had a new pastor from the south and some 80 year old man complained he couldn't understand his southern accent. Can you ask the preacher to speak slower?
Happily we don't get many of those inquiries. The worse was asking to cut down a tree so the persons child would stop climbing it.
FYI the counselor who fired us was outside the church, and I understand that and agree with your sentiment.
Datsun310Guy said:In reply to tuna55 :
...Once we had a new pastor from the south and some 80 year old man complained he couldn't understand his southern accent. Can you ask the preacher to speak slower?
Asking a preacher from the south to speak slower is going to make for some loooonngg sermons. We don't speak real fast to start with.
In reply to tuna55 :
I mess with our current Deacons - are you one of the Deacons? .....they know what I'm doing.
In reply to Toyman! :
Familiar with preachers that huff? He was one and there's no way I'm mentioning anything to him.
I have a '22 Colorado with 2000 miles in for a weird noise, a popping noise from the right front that you feel in the floorboards when slaloming. I've spent two days on this thing and I'm no closer to figuring it out. So far I've:
So, after many phone calls back and forth, GM approves sending a Field Service Engineer out to look at it. Our FSE shows up this morning and immediately makes a beeline over to another tech's bay. The FSE and this tech have been fighting a charging issue with a Bolt and he wants to check something else out "quick". He then pulls it out back, hooks it to the charger and spends four hours sitting in it on the phone to GM. So I spent the whole morning doing oil changes, because I didn't want to get buried in some big project and then have the FSE come in and be ready to work on this Colorado. So 1pm comes around, FSE hasn't even been over to talk to me, and another tech is hunting around for the dealer plate. I ask him why he's looking for it and he goes "Oh, as soon as the FSE gets off the phone with GM, me and him are going to lunch at The Franklin." Five minutes later, the FSE comes in, he and this tech hop in a PDI with the dealer plate on it and took off to The Franklin, which is a sit-down restaurant, not a diner or fast-food joint, and they haven't come back yet. So I've lost my ass all week on this Colorado, and it doesn't look like it's getting fixed today.
In reply to NickD :
New sump pump has a bad float switch.
Yes the float is perfectly free, I watch group and down with the water. However, if I want the pump to kick on, I have to hit the top of the float with a stick. Then it kicks on for a cycle.
Back to Lowe's in the morning with a wet pump!
Pete. (l33t FS) said:In reply to Peabody :
German cars are not very complicated.
What they ARE is poorly documented.
I'll trust you on that one, my Volkswagen days are long behind me. But I think the impression is that they complicate things that could otherwise be done quite simply. Nonetheless, not a week ago I sez to my boss, I sez, you know, the real problem with these paint systems is that nobody really understands how they work and we have zero information on them.
Even the specialist doesn't know. When I told him I fixed a sluggish topcoat problem by replacing the B component pump, and it's not the first time, he told me, no, that is not possible.
I decided to request my ancient college transcript. I use their online form, fill everything out, and they ask how I want it sent to me. I can go pick it up, they can send it via first class mail, or they can send it electronically. Except that the electronic option means I have to spend an extra dollar.
berkeley you people. I'm going to make you print it out, put it in an envelope, and pay for postage.
Had a E36 M3 week at work.
Traffic driving home last night was horrible. I hate driving here. Contemplated commiting vehicular homicide multiple times.
I got about 3 blocks from home and the clutch and/or flywheel became VERY unhappy. Lots of vibration and won't shift into gear. Sigh. I have a clutch kit and solid flywheel (stock is dual mass garbage) already but limited tools and no space to work. Looks like I'll be farming this one out. Given today's labor rates and book time of 7.5 hours, I expect this to be $1k+. IF I can find a shop open this weekend. IF I can limp it to the shop.
In reply to Peabody :
Looking at the Mini in my garage, it has only two networks, everything else is done with discrete switches. I might as well be working with points and a carburetor.
Looking at a contemporary GM, it will have a minimum of three networks, plus multiple LIN buses, which is a fancy way of saying "module A communicates with module B with a dedicated communication wire"
Looking at pictures of E46s, it appears that BMW took the front of an E46 and turned its front framerails sideways to make the R50/53 chassis.
German cars are stone simple. They just refuse to tell you anything about how they work.
I was going to do spark plugs on my wife's Xrl5 N55 today, but turns out I should have ordered a vent hose to replace when it breaks upon removal.
As consolation, I went to do an oil change - but the drain pan bolt has the infamous spin that takes a time-sert or oil pan replacement to fix. Ugh.
Now, car will go into the shop to fix oil pan, diagnose which new suspension arm has failed, and find the coolant leak.
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