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

Dispatch assigns load. Due 7 am.

It's 174 miles, zip code to zip code. So really 190.

My truck is limited to 62 mph. So with traffic 4 hours. With hours of service regs I only have 3 hours I can drive.

I haddnt even gotten the trailer yet that was lost in the railyard and was getting fuel.

I'm glad it works in dispatches mind but in the real world I'm gonna be late.

Oh and if I'm more than 30 minutes late this place reschedules it for the next day. 

Ever see a semi truck take corners on 9 wheels?

Hold my beer....

Edit -- Arrived at 7:08. Told em it was gonna be late. Did better than I thought.

This is the third night in a row I've dreamed the whole night about work. And it's accurate down to the last detail. I need a vacation.

3 hours of sleep and a headache. Today is gonna be AWESOME. 

This is the fourth morning I've woken up just generally feeling like crap... either fortunately or unfortunately I can likely attribute it to a recent change in our evening routine, so it should be easy enough to remedy. Difficulty: the Dancer isn't likely to be too thrilled with said change. :/

In reply to Antihero :

Heh. Well, honestly they're not really all that complex- it is after all a 30-year-old engine so it's a lot simpler than anything these days. Still solidly more complex than something carburetted, but not too bad. 

Yay!! Annual Performance Review time!

Time for people who don't know anything about my work to tell me how well I performed.

Duke said:

Bent-Valve said:

Going to get Pyro a new vehicle next year. She's doing research and likes my CR-V. So we go to look at everything similar.

They should warn you, have a little flap with a red warning sticker, or something....

Sit down.....seriously.

I was at a Ford dealer a bit ago picking up a part for DD#1's C-Max.  There was a line of F-series trucks proudly displayed out front.  Each and every one of them had a sticker price in about that ballpark.

And then I thought about how many of those things I see every day, driven by regular people as regular vehicles.

And then I wondered what the hell all those people do for a living that makes them comfortable dropping that kind of money on something that will inevitably wear out and get replaced (numerous times) within their adult lifespans.

 

A lot of them, at least around here, are in debt up to their eyeballs. Sales came back to check over a '15 Buick Enclave I was working on the other day, which is usually a sign that the customer is looking trading it in. They asked me the miles, I told them it had 60k and they went "Oh, she said it had 40k miles on it." I asked if she was trading it in for sure, or I wouldn't bother trying to sell her brakes and they said "Well, she wants to trade it in, but she just bought it last year and still owes 35 grand. I don't see anyway we can get her into a truck like she wants." Later that day I see the same Enclave out back, with no plates on it, so she must have traded it in.

yea, co-worker of mine had a mint Dakota. He got tired of getting the front end fixed, so traded it in on a nearly new Ram 1500. Went from no payments with occasional repairs to over $500 a month for a used truck.

$6000 a year is a LOT of repairs I would have done to the Dakota

I'm a fixed wing pilot with the soul of a helicopter pilot. Because I know that if things haven't gone wrong, they soon will. Things have been going well in my life, and that makes me ill at ease.

In reply to mad_machine :

I just dropped a bunch on the CR-V to get suspension work done. But it's paid off. A few weeks ago it was the Ridgeline. It's paid off also. 

But we have about 189k on both of them so some struts and CV joints aren't unexpected.

The repairs are cheaper than a payment.

It would be cheaper still if I had time to do the repairs myself!

Women are goofy. SWMBO and I are house hunting. I show internet listings of houses we've looked at to others. I use it to gauge value. What do you think of this? 

She's completely bent out of shape because I'm showing what we look at.  "I don't want people to start congratulating us on  a house we don't get."

Big berkeleying deal. Why the berkeley do you care what they think? If they get let down, then that's on them. Why is this such a big secret? 

Appleseed said:

I'm a fixed wing pilot with the soul of a helicopter pilot. Because I know that if things haven't gone wrong, they soon will. Things have been going well in my life, and that makes me ill at ease.

Something I found when I was managing an IT department.  "There are two kinds of computers:  1) Computers that are broken and 2) Computers that are going to be broken". 

Simple word substitution makes that statement apply to all things in the universe. 

Haven't confirmed yet but am betting that the TPMS light on the Evo is *another* dead sensor. 

The thread topic header needs to be larger print. 

Yup, reaction to my objection to the recent change to our evening routine went over about as well as I expected it to. *sigh* On the plus side, I woke up feeling a lot better this morning- somewhat ironically given I had a difficult time getting to sleep last night so got about an hour less sleep than I have most of the previous nights this week.

Since the cabin is, at least in theory, coming up on finally being done I've taken back up trying to get sorted out a replacement for the Dancer's long-overdue-for-replacement 2008 Mariner. Frankly she would be happiest with another same-generation Mariner/Escape/Tribute with less miles/problems- but they rolled gens in 2012, so the newest of what she really wants would still be 7 years old. So, while waitinger for dinner to arrive last night I pulled up the websites of most of the major auto manufacturers and had her look over their SUV offerings to see if there was anything she liked the look of. Unfortunately after going through all of the domestic companies (except Jeep) and most of the Japanese manufacturers, she'd only found one model that she didn't think looked too much like a minivan to her (the HRV). Ironically, she has said she really likes the look of the Ridgelines (at least the older-gen ones with the slanted bedsides), so despite the premium they command here we may end up looking at trucks for her...

You should give her a fork the next time she wants to have a bowl of soup, and a garlic press the next time she wants to chop onions. 

Jesus. I do NOT understand the egotism behind the hate of minivans. 

mtn said:

You should give her a fork the next time she wants to have a bowl of soup, and a garlic press the next time she wants to chop onions. 

 

Jesus. I do NOT understand the egotism behind the hate of minivans. 

While this is a generalization - Much like baby boomers/GenX rejected station wagons as something their parents drove, millennials have done the same with minivans.  I’ve found most people my age (low/mid-40’s) really don’t have a problem with minivans, whether they have kids or not.  Go younger, though, and there’s a lot more minivan hate.  Late GenZers (and whatever comes after them) will likely hate CUVs, assuming they get much of a chance to drive before autonomy takes over.

In reply to mtn :

*shrugs* I don't either. Frankly, I think that she really needs something along the lines of a Transit to really carry everything she has to haul around comfortably, but I know that will never fly. A van would be the best tool for the job, but until her non-profit is at the point where it can own/lease a vehicle purely for all of the driving around she does for its business, whatever we get will also be her daily driver so there has to be a balance between utility and what she wants styling-wise. Which I'm OK with- I just wish that current automotive style trends and her tastes weren't so far apart.

mtn said:

Jesus. I do NOT understand the egotism behind the hate of minivans. 

There is a sector of the population with an irrational hatred for 4-door cars, too.

I have heard one - ONE - individual actually give me a logical reason for their dislike.

This motherberkeleying week needs to end. Now. 

Duke said:

I loathe every Adobe product I am forced to use.

I would suggest looking at Bluebeam, but the latest version is garbage.

Duke said:

I loathe every Adobe product I am forced to use.

What specifically do you have to use? I've found Affinity Photo & Designer to work extremely well as budget Photoshop/Illustrator replacements.

In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :

Maybe you can trick her into a Mazda5.  For some reason, if you tint the rear half, it looks a lot less like a minivan.  And it handles like a car.  And you can still shove 75%-80% of the crap into it that you can fit into a Caravan.  Mrs. Kazoo loves hers.  I don't have a decent pic of ours, but it's basically this with a tinted rear half.  It's really not a bad looking car/truck/van thingy.  

kazoospec said:

In reply to Ashyukun (Robert) :

Maybe you can trick her into a Mazda5.  For some reason, if you tint the rear half, it looks a lot less like a minivan.  And it handles like a car.  And you can still shove 75%-80% of the crap into it that you can fit into a Caravan.  Mrs. Kazoo loves hers.  I don't have a decent pic of ours, but it's basically this with a tinted rear half.  It's really not a bad looking car/truck/van thingy.  

THIS. jenny HATES minivans. She calls hers a microvan. Absolutely loves it. Only car she has ever asked for. Ill buy another in a damned skinny minute when hers is too long in the tooth. 

See if she'll bite

llysgennad said:

Duke said:

I loathe every Adobe product I am forced to use.

I would suggest looking at Bluebeam, but the latest version is garbage.

Thank you for that warning, because we’re thinking about Bluebeam. We handle a lot of PDFs with lots or markups, and scaled drawings.