In reply to wae :
When my son was in junior high I scanned his homework and asked if he was copying somebody's work. No, it was all his he said. It sure looked way above his level.
Then he got a PhD in Chemistry and I realized he was just a smart kid.
In reply to jmabarone :
In the business we call this "thermostat wars". Comfort is very much a personal preference but sometimes, yeah. I swear even in a fantasy world where we could afford to install systems with an infinite amount of control zones and infinite thermostat adjustability someone would still complain they were hot or cold.
Friend of ours is a single mom. Her 15 year old daughter has started skipping school, on the regular. School is apathetic about it. Last night the daughter came home at 5AM, and was discovered to have spent the night with a boy whose parents the mom knows (hence why she found out about it). I get to hear the whole sordid story, and just shake my head. What the hell can you do? I fully expect said daughter will be preggers before she can legally drive.
The poverty cycle continues unabated. It's so frustrating to watch people destroy their lives intentionally, through every fault of their own.
Streetwiseguy said:67 winter, 78 summer.
I don't know what these numbers mean.
My house was built long before forced air heating, and everything was added later, and not very well. So there's a lot of tinkering with vents to get it evenly distributed throughout the house, and the number on the 'stat is only a rough guide.
22 winter, 21 summer.
Duke said:Caffeine is a lousy treatment for depression.
It is but that and sugar are all Ive got right now.
Datsun240ZGuy said:Wally M came up in my faceballs friend requests. Freaking government looking at my business.
All kidding aside GRM Wally showed up in FB? WTF.
It happens. I'm slowly poisoning all of Facebook.
Wally (Forum Supporter) said:Duke said:Caffeine is a lousy treatment for depression.
It is but that and sugar are all Ive got right now.
Physical activity is a helluva drug.
wae said:
This is part of a (painful) course that is supposed to be test-prep for the College Composition CLEP exam. I'm sure glad they're teaching me not to palagiarize.
On the one hand, I appreciate the efforts of people like Aidan Millward to only use media that is licensed for public use, and he notes where EVERYTHING comes from.
On the other hand, I deeply appreciate the art form known as the AMV, which unfortunately is three or four minutes of copyright violation by definition, albeit in a rearranged/re-curated way.
In reply to volvoclearinghouse :
It was working well until it was decided I wasn't working enough hours.
Looks like I'm going to have to ship these drums if I want to sell them at all. I mean, I like the ad traffic I'm seeing, and the messages from interested parties, but damn if shipping a 22x16 drum isn't gonna be a hassle.
barefootcyborg5000 said:Looks like I'm going to have to ship these drums if I want to sell them at all. I mean, I like the ad traffic I'm seeing, and the messages from interested parties, but damn if shipping a 22x16 drum isn't gonna be a hassle.
Which drums?
In reply to Antihero :
i got them in trade for the old junk Gretsch. Came with a mystery snare that ended up being a B4514 Pearl CoB. Total win.
Rep and customer yesterday: "3-4 business days is too long, we need this equipment ASAP! Can we get it tomorrow?"
So I call in favors, whip our vendor a little bit, and have everyone ready to goose the process to expedite the expedite by about 2200 last night. I text, call, and email that it's ready to go and I just need final approvals.
Rep and customer: " "
So now I look like the idiot and have wasted a bunch of time for people that I will need to do favors that are more important to me later. When will I learn? Every time - every. damned. time. - that I break down and tell someone that I'll try to make the process different or special for them, we go through a whole crapload of work and effort to create the exception and then they wind just wandering off into the darkness never to be heard from again. I really just need to stop trying to accommodate people and just stick to whatever the policy is, no exceptions.
Less of a rant and more of a chuckle...
Why do the older women at the dentist treat me like I'm a retired 75-year old man (I'm 38)? I had an 8am cleaning and was met with "Gee you're up early aren't ya?" and "What you gonna do the rest of the day???" I'm like Susan, it's a Thursday I'm going back to work. I set up this 8am cleaning so I didn't have to burn PTO.
Dear Walgreens. Your private Disney only location in Celebration knows all my prescriptions. They've never had a problem getting them covered. My old, non secret disney walgreens knows all my prescriptions as well. CONVENIENTLY you have a nationally linked system, that has my insurance, my prescriptions, my refills, and everything, all nice and cozy.
Why the gee-golly-butterberkeley you can't figure out how to get my E36 M3 covered at the Longwood location so I don't have to drive to berkeleyin' mars to get it is beyond me.
In reply to Mndsm :
I appreciate the specificity of this rant. The Longwood location needs to get its E36 M3 together.
In reply to Sarah Young :
it kills me because I can basically throw rocks at the longwood one from my front door. Like, ultra convenient. BUT- I may not get my E36 M3, and that's a problem.
Something work related broke at 3 PM yesterday. I was up until 3 AM working on it. That's an 18 hour work day. After 4.75 hours of sleep I had to be up and awake to talk about why it broke and tweak some final things.
That is not the rant. That sort of thing happens. However, there is an institutional desire to get as many people on the phone as possible when something is broken. Most of them just make noise and ask questions without being able to directly help in fixing the problem. I got snippy and sarcastic a few times after asked for yet another status or whatever.
Look, y'all. I can talk to you or I can fix the problem, but I can't do both. Additionally, you can make all of the demands you want, but it's going to take as long as it's going to take. Do you think I want to be on the phone fixing something at 1 AM? How do you think we can pressure a third party, with whom we have no contract or direct business relationship, to join our call? That'd be like me giving out your number to my mother in law so she can call you up and have you walk through how to more effectively deal with fire ants in her yard.
In reply to Brett_Murphy (Agent of Chaos) :
The curse of the "instant notification" age.
When I started my career, we didn't even have reliable cell phone coverage in our county. I was expected to handle whatever came up, and I might get a phone call about it in the next day or two. By the time I retired, I had office dwellers in top management blowing up my phone before I even arrived at the scene of an emergency trying to micromanage me.
There's a balance in there somewhere, but it can be hard to find, especially without good leaders in the top spots.
Today berkeleying sucks. So I was looking for pics of a car I used to run with to post in another thread and stumbled across some terrible news. Steve Lewis passed away...that man is the reason I know everything I do about racing, he was the push for me to get on the track, he was my novice instructor, I got my TT license under his watch. He was just a kick ass no bullE36 M3 dude. He was a integral part of getting the hillclimbs put together and pulling them off, he would do anything he could to help anyone....and he was FAST!!!!! He will be missed.
In reply to Brett_Murphy (Agent of Chaos) :
The first week I started at the last place I correctly predicted the reason I would eventually leave. She was the kind of person who needed ACTION! and would join these tech calls sometimes with zero awareness of the issue or of reasonable causes but if someone accidentally let some tidbit of a speculation slip out, she would hold onto that thing like a pit bull and constantly chirp it back out to anyone who might listen. Due to her position, technicians of all levels on these mass Teams calls would waste hours chasing down these ghosts. It took a while before I figured out a way to politely stop her and become the sole technical spokesman for our team, but... man, I can feel my blood pressure rising even now.
At first I thought it was from a desire to hear her own voice, but now I wonder if it was more the ACTION! drive- and she didn't care how much time or effort was wasted as long and people were busy on her tasks.
Photobucket sends me an e-mail like once a week going "Better do something, we're going to disable your account very soon". You've been sending me these e-mails for two or three years now, just go ahead and berkeleying disable it. I haven't used it in 6 or 7 years easily and I barely had anything even loaded on it.
In reply to P3PPY :
I think it comes down to justifying their position. If they can't point out to their boss that they accomplished something, or had a call, or a meeting, their boss would realize how useless their position was and get rid of them.
Most of middle management accomplishes very little beyond making life difficult for the people actually doing the work. The business world would be better off without them, except then the boss couldn't disappear for those long lunches and golf meetings.
Peabody said:Streetwiseguy said:67 winter, 78 summer.
I don't know what these numbers mean.
My house was built long before forced air heating, and everything was added later, and not very well. So there's a lot of tinkering with vents to get it evenly distributed throughout the house, and the number on the 'stat is only a rough guide.
22 winter, 21 summer.
I did it for the unfortunate farenheiters in the audience.
19 winter, 25 summer.
In reply to Toyman! :
Good middle management is invaluable. The trouble is that most people don't understand what the job of a manager is and what it looks like.
The job of a manager is to make sure workers know what they need to do, provide them the support necessary, and insulate them from the b.s. that isn't their concern. To create the environment where they're able to get everything done. If done properly, their team is more productive with them "not working" than they would with one other person actually banging out tasks.
Saying middle managers get nothing done because other people are actually doing the work is like saying that I didn't get anything done as a teacher because I never turned in any homework assignments.
Unfortunately, most people in management positions don't understand that and aren't comfortable with it. They don't understand that being able to sit back while everything runs smoothly around them means they've actually done their job very well.
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