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

I absolutely hate these stupid security questions.  "What was your favorite toy as a child?"  berkeley if I can remember.  "What is you favorite beverage?"  Uh...  I don't have one..  I like all sorts of stuff.  "What is your favorite sports team?"  Well, today it might be The Heart of Racing, tomorrow it might be McLaren.

I don't have a favorite anything really.  I like all sorts of stuff and what I like the most today could be completely different tomorrow.  Or, more than likely, I'll be fine with multiple options and not really prefer any one option over another.  Do people really have major unchanging preferences about stuff like that?  That must be absolutely exhausting.

In reply to wae :

I recommend the secure way of dealing with it.  Give complete nonsense answers, and write them down somewhere safe.  Cuts down on the risk of someone being able to guess your info correctly.

The 75.6mm oil filter wrench that is supposed to fit our Mazda 5 is too big. The housing is 74mm across the flats. Naturally I discovered this only after pulling half the garage into the driveway and draining the oil.

The oil cooler on the same car has an alignment dowel that slips into a hole in the boss. Apparently it can also be installed in a position that allows the mounting bolt to tighten up, but does not seal against its boss. That gave me a nice mess to clean up and the opportunity to do the job again, on my back, in the driveway. 

I took a look at the tires while I was under the car. The "we're going to need to budget for tires" tread level evident from above was revised to "you can't drive the van" by virtue of the inside edge being scrubbed right down to the cords.

I hate cars.

In reply to wae :

trying to remember what your favorite band was 10 years ago when logging into an old account is always fun

eastsideTim said:

In reply to wae :

I recommend the secure way of dealing with it.  Give complete nonsense answers, and write them down somewhere safe.  Cuts down on the risk of someone being able to guess your info correctly.

This. "Somewhere safe" is inside a KeePass file BTW.

eastsideTim said:

In reply to wae :

I recommend the secure way of dealing with it.  Give complete nonsense answers, and write them down somewhere safe.  Cuts down on the risk of someone being able to guess your info correctly.

Right.  You change the frame of reference from "what is my favorite band" to "what is the answer I give when the security question is 'what is your favorite band'.". The answer could be "Mazda Miata", it doesn't matter.  Just make it easy to remember and hard to guess. 

Just put the same answer and ignore the question. What's my favorite car? Purple. Favorite movie? Purple. Fathers middle name? Purple. 

In reply to Steve_Jones :

Good idea. I have tried that but one of my (banking) websites supplied some suggested answers that you must choose from when you sign up, but then doesn't show the choices when you go to use it later. Not my bank any longer ...

I hate printers.  I hate trying to help set up a printer that's 4 counties away via phone call even more.  

Back to playing the insurance game again. I'm getting a bill for $285. The breakdown without insurance is $670. For 45 minutes of a couple of neck rubs and a crude runoff of movements to do at home. That's $893/hour.

GET THE berkeley OUT.

Appleseed said:

Back to playing the insurance game again. I'm getting a bill for $285. The breakdown without insurance is $670. For 45 minutes of a couple of neck rubs and a crude runoff of movements to do at home. That's $893/hour.

GET THE berkeley OUT.

It was cheaper for me to pay cash to my chiropractor than for them to bill insurance, and pay the insurance company for what my out of pocket portion would be. 

My wife's chiro gives an actual CASH discount, for literal, paper money payment, since they save on the merchant fees. 

But yeah.  It's berkeleying insane what places are charging.  We were out of pocket over a grand for my daughter's minor wrist fracture earlier this year, for a few X-rays and a brace.  Now when the kids are horsing around and it looks like someone could get hurt, I can't help but seeing dollar signs.  Which is pretty berkeleyed up, if you think about it.  You should want them to not get hurt because they're your children and you care about them.

I am a fairly literate person and can write pretty well.  So far in this semester, I've turned in two papers and my average grade for those submissions is a 97.5%.  I write prolifically for work and while I may not be Hemmingway or anything, it is something that I am fairly good at.  Way back when, in my first attempt, I didn't have to take any college English classes because I had a good enough score on my AP English Lit exam to get my 6 English credit hours.  This school, however, is only giving me 3 and they're counting that towards my "Culture And Creativity" gen-ed.  They want me to take either ENG 104 for 3 credit hours or ENG 101 and ENG 102 - 6 credit hours - before I can take pretty much anything else at this point.  Of course the 104 class isn't offered again until probably Fall of next year.  Good news, though:  I can take the CLEP test and get credit for ENG 101, which is the one that is really holding me up at the moment.  So, I find a place that does a no-cost online prep for it and I start through their program.

Believe it or not, none of that is my rant.

As I start sitting through this class the first half-a-dozen videos are all about the benefits of CLEP.  In order to watch those videos, I first signed up to take the CLEP prep test for the College Composition test.  Which means I'm already bought-in to the concept, I just want you to tell me what's going to be on the test and to help me get brushed up on some of the specifics that I don't use every day like the details of how APA and MLA work for citing sources.*  Please stop selling me on the thing I've already bought in to and get to the important part!

* This is a sub-rant.  I write a lot for work.  I mean a lot a lot.  Internal documents, customer-facing documents, RFP responses, all sorts of stuff.  Not one time in my three decades of professional life have I ever needed to follow any of these goofy standards.  The only people that care about this are people in academia because other people in academia make money because other people in academia "cite their sources using APA or MLA".  It's a damned racket, I tell ya.

In reply to wae :

Your rant inspired my rant. The name is Hemingway.  

In reply to wae :

In one of my college English classes, the big final project was a research paper on the topic of our choice. I thought about it over the weekend and determined the project was BS. We weren't meant to do any testing or studies or polling or anything original. pretty easy to see it was simply an exercise in citations, as you say. Being a contentious smartass, I decided to do my research paper on the topic of "college research papers". The prof liked me so he approved. So I conducted polls, and interviews, and pulled as much info in as I could. I interviewed several staff, in both the English departments and administration. "What if any, is the point of a research paper in this format?" I concluded it was a purely academic exercise that was of little to no utility in the professional world, and was therefor a waste of students time and tuition. And I sent it to all the faculty. 
I have no grudge against higher learning, but I have a big ass grudge against meaningless busywork that wastes time and money. 
 

Anyway, I got full marks. 

tester (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to wae :

Your rant inspired my rant. The name is Hemingway.  

Ouch.  So it is.  I'll take my demerit and go sit in the back of the class now.

In reply to wae :

90% of everything is crap.  This includes video content.

In reply to barefootcyborg5000 :

I used to tell my kids the uselessness of word searches for homework.  My wife did them out of boredom sometimes.

In reply to Puddy46 :

Printers are like utility trailers, I keep mine down the street at U-Haul and Kinkos.  I need of some sort a trailer 2-3 times a year usually for less than 24 hours at a time.  They will maintain them, put tires on them, and have the correct trailer I need for less than $150/year.  Kinkos keeps my printer, same arrangement.  I really don't "need" to print that often and when I do, I get the super fancy color laser super duper one to do it.  I email it to me as an attachment and when I walk in, I forward that email to the printer from my phone.  I have been without a trailer or printer for a few years now.

The propaganda bots are working overtime on my meme app. I'm here for boobs and funnies dammit, keep your wars to yourself. 

I am no longer good enough at my job and I am becoming more certain I will never be good enough ever again.

Last week The Dancer, The Bat, and I had a great vacation near Helen, GA hiking and enjoying walking around Helen which is kind of patterned after a Bavarian village. Neither of us was looking forward to having to get back into the routine of work this week after being able to sleep in late and relax for the week.

This week however has so far been one of the worst I've had at work in... well, nearly a decade and has the potential to be the worst in the next week. I came back to emails from letting us know that despite having already going through a round of layoffs back in the spring that there was going to be another round of them, which pretty much ruined Monday. Yesterday, our internet at home went down around 10am and after exhausting what I could do work-wise without the connection I packed up my laptop and for the first time since the initial shutdown in March 2020 headed in to the office to try and do normal work. But when I got there I realized that I could not hook up my new laptop to the network because I hadn't realized that it didn't have a built-in network jack and I'd not dragged the docking brick with me. Thankfully (though frustratingly) our internet had come back up about 10 minutes after I'd left so I could come back here and finish the day. Then after a meeting with my boss where I realized I was not nearly as prepared for it as I had thought, he had called a meeting of the whole group where he had to very somberly tell all of us that because of whatever arbitrary metrics that the company was using for deciding on the cuts to make that a much larger percentage of our group was going to be cut than what the company as a whole would be experiencing.

I'm far more concerned about this round of cuts than I was for the last one- roughly 1 in 7 or so of my group is going to be laid off, and it sounds like they're going to be aiming to cut more of the more experienced/higher paid people. I'm not the most experienced or highest-paid but I'm higher in the spectrum than the average. I'm also in an out-of-the-ordinary position in that I'm not formally assigned to a platform group and I'm not located at any of the company's plants, having been assigned to an outsource office for the last 17 years (and not worked in that office for the last 3 1/2 years because of Covid). I worry that since it's apparently not the actual managers of the people being cut who are making the decisions that the unique skills our group has been lacking that I've been developing over the last few years aren't going to be apparent and that they'll figure that I can be cut with minimal impact to the rest of the group. 

I hope that I'm just being paranoid. But I also know that the odds of my being able to find nearly as good of job here locally- or for that matter a job in my actual field at all- is pretty much nil. It's possible I could try and get a job at the outsource office I've been assigned to, but I'm not certain of how likely that is. And unfortunately relocating would not be anywhere near a good option- The Dancer's non-profit is here and even if I thought she'd want to there isn't any way she can hand it over to someone else to run because there isn't anyone else who can remotely do her job yet... it would mean the end of the organization that had been her dream to start for some time before we met. 

In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :

I can't do much except offer prayers (if you're so inclined), but you and yours are in them. 

If you have the audacity to fly into Charleston and close all the major roads during rush hour so you can spend a weekend on Kiawah, I hope your berkeleying plane crashes in the ocean on the way back to whatever rock your slimy ass crawled out from under. You are an inconsiderate piece of E36 M3 and this planet would be a better place without you. 

In reply to Recon1342 :

Thanks, I appreciate it! 

After having a bit more time to digest things, I'm getting less worried overall. I certainly hope that I don't get laid off, but I know that if I don't then someone else who I work with will... and I don't doubt there are many who aren't as well positioned to be able to roll with it as I am. With what it sounds like the severance would be, we could pay off pretty much all our remaining debts (including our mortgage) such that I could take a considerable pay cut and we'd still be fine. Honestly if it weren't for needing health/dental care, I could essentially retire very early and just make a bit of extra money doing something I really enjoy, like 3D printing, or even go really nuts and try and start the non-profit auto repair shop I've thought of for a while. I still hope I don't get laid off- but I know things will be okay even if I am. 

Sickness Season has started at the Casa de Queso. Everyone is sick and will be until June. Just like last year and every year that is to come. I was coughing while I wrote this. 

Edit: And before anyone asks, yes, we're getting enough platinum and Vitamin Q.  My wife lives for vitamins, drink concoctions, salves, creams, etc.  If that stuff worked I'd never be sick again.