@wizz said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
If I see one more dating profile about a married polyamorous woman just seeking a "belaytionship" or a TRUE THIN BLUE LINE patriot who just wants to square dance and sneers about vaccinations and masks I am going to hurl my phone into the sun and surrender to my fate of being a wild mountain hermit.
God, the dating scene is miserable out here.
....What the fuck is a belaytionship??
Working from home is awesome!
Being salaried is awesome!
Until you lose power in a storm late in the afternoon on the day before a major deliverable you owe your boss is due. Then you get to be squirreled away in your office, squinting at PowerPoint presentations at midnight.
So sleepy.
@bluebird Yes. I feel like with my general lack of applying makeup over the course of the pandemic, I am now way more familiar with the up-close appearance of Elizabeth Moss than my own face.
I finally got around to watching season four of The Handmaid's Tale because with pandemic brain, I just absolutely could not watch something that dark for the longest time (except Criminal Minds reruns because apparently those don't count?)....
No spoilers for anyone, but JFC, was that season ending just so satisfying.
Apparently, I slept weird and now I cannot fucking move.
@testament said in Good TV:
So, I came across this last night in my youtube feed. And I have to tell you, this hit every single bit of nostalgia that light up the 5 year old me that still lives in some unknown corner of 38 year old me.
I was never much into the She-Ra remake on Netflix(The Voltron was better, fight me)but a He-Man remake that's being overseen by Kevin Smith with a Mark Hamill as Skeletor channeling his Joker real hard? And being animated by the same company that did the Castlevania series?
Yeah. Yeah, I'm all about this. I'm here for it.
Hot damn.
That song choice is banging too.
They had me at the first three (synthesizer) notes of Bonnie Tyler, yeah.
@macha said in RL things I love:
@eye8urcake And here I was thinking my town of 140-150k is too small.
I will never forget the time we were on a very long roadtrip with my in-laws and their van broke down on the side of the highway in the middle-of-nowhere, Kentucky.
We were able to get it to the nearest mechanic, which was fortunately at the next stop on the highway. Having no idea where we were at that point aside from 'somewhere northeast of Bowling Green', we asked the mechanic, who told us that the nearest 'city' was Willisburg.
None of us had a smartphone at the time and honestly, even if we did, there probably wouldn't have been a signal. So I looked up Willisburg when we got home.
The 'city' of Willisburg has a population of 304.
I think one of us might be confused about the definition of the word 'city', sir.
@crawfish Yeah, sorry, dude. You live under that blanket now. Forever and ever.
@selira said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
Depression, anxiety and even PTSD rates all shot through the roof recently. There's help for all of them out there.
Take care of yourselves.
As someone who has legit been on and off meds for all three of those for the last... 22 years? And who has had multiple suicides in her family?
If you're overwhelmed by the mental health system* in the United States, I am more than happy to help you. Even if you don't particularly like me and I don't particularly like you, I will put that aside to answer any legitimate questions you have if you need help and have never done this before.
(*Note: I use the word 'system' as loosely as possible here. As loosely as possible.)
@arkandel said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
@aria Hahahah! The world is a small place.
I guess though it depends on how big or small a city you live in.
In Philly? 1.5 million people. In the metro area? 6 million.
The thing is, for as massive a population as that is.... there was a period there where my husband and I could not go to events in the city without running into at least one person that we knew. (The suburbs not so much, but.)
It was because we had both worked for several years at one of the more popular haunted attractions in the area, which tended to attract a certain crowd as far as seasonal employees go. So we'd go to the punk rock flea market... and run into three of our coworkers. I'd walk across UPenn's campus to the art school... and my manager would be biking to a class where he was modeling. We'd go to Dicken's Christmas Village... and the tour guide would be trying to maintain a straight face instead of laughing at seeing us out of zombie makeup.
Even the last thing we went to before the pandemic hit? A Silversun Pickups concert. We're standing at the merch booth and these two women a few people ahead of us in line turn around and.... it's my friend Laura, who used to live on the same floor as Insomniac and I in our first apartment building. She and her husband were around the corner and two doors down. A year before that? She and I were talking about our taste in perfumes and how she has a hard time finding her favorite one in the US. So I send her a Facebook message about the perfume shop I go to because I'm friends with the owner and tag him in it. Turns out they went to high school together.
Philly = the biggest 'small town' in world.
@derp Look, if ET's glowing finger can fix my back like that dead plant, I'm fine with it.
@greenflashlight That face is the reason my goal job is "stay-at-home dog mom", which unfortunately doesn't pay very well. Or at all. We're kind of obsessed with each other.
@arkandel said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
It's really weird how little we know or see even in the people we think we know the most.
I have a friend. We no longer talk as much as we used to, but I met him when I was 15 and he was 13, and used to hang out at his and his brother's house on a very regular basis over the years. We played Magic and D&D together, moved on to Vampire: the Masquerade, we went to (different) schools and hanged out during the summer. We ended up even being coworkers later on for a year and a half, literally in the same office. I've known the guy for 30 fucking years.
Neither of us had any idea we were both big time into basketball. All that time. He went and played with his group, I with mine. We watched games separately. It just never came up in any of our conversations over all that time.
I found out this week because I happened to see a reply of his on a post about the Portland Trailblazers' playoffs exit and when I sent him a WTF?! post thinking he might have at least gotten into it just recently... nope.
What the fuck. How much more have I missed about everyone I know? How much have they? How is this possible!
My favorite was probably the time one of my coworkers saw me reply on a Facebook post and lost his mind, wanting to know why I was on that person's page. I, meanwhile, wanted to know how he could even see it.
Turns out his childhood best friend of 25 years and one of my high school best friend had been college roommates and despite us both going to multiple parties and group dinners with the respective best friends, we somehow were never at the same one at the same time.
So Mike and I literally sat two desks apart from each other for four years, with no idea that when we were sharing stories about our weekend plans with old friends, we were talking about the same people.
@greenflashlight said in Critters!:
@aria Thanks so much for letting us know how Tibspupper is doing, Aria. How're you?
Enjoying watching him sleep, like I'm some kind of stalker.
Also, have a cute picture for tax on my blathering.
My dog is almost 11 years old. For his breed, the average lifespan is about 10-12.
And thought the vet said he was in remarkably good health for a dog his age and his size just two weeks ago, his back legs gave out on our stairs today. He went sliding backwards - fortunately just three steps - and hit the landing before I could stop it.
He's not hurt, I don't think, except for being even more sore. He's going to vet tomorrow tomorrow to refill his pain pills, now that we're pretty sure the ones that he had previously been on were the source of the coughing that brought him in for a checkup that last time. Will be having X-rays to confirm both.
So follow up from else-thread because I know how the internet works and I'm not just going to be like " a bad thing is probably happening to my dog" and leave y'all hanging. I, too, am the person who watches the horribly gruesome and violent scene in the movie and is like, "But is the dog okay?!?"
Tibs went to the vet again. And fell, again, getting out of the car. At home. Afterwards. Because of course that's when he would fall. (Yes, we have a special system to help him in and out. It usually works, but even that doesn't do much if his legs just cave under him. Yes, we have a helper-harness. No, he won't let us use it to help him because it smashes up against his boy bits when we slip it under him and he understandably Does Not Want.)
He had a little bit of a limp that seems to have resolved within a few minutes and @insomniac7809, being the fucking champ that he is, then carried our old man up the steps like a confused, furry sack of potatoes. He doesn't like being scooped, so he gets hoisted from the middle and just kind of goes limp and dangles. All eighty-five pounds of him. If not for the necessity of it being so super sad, it's also fucking hilarious to watch.
X-rays come back next week to rule out a) any injuries and b) any heart or lung conditions that might've caused the coughing. In the meantime, he's off the old pain meds that probably gave him an ulcer. Dog ibuprofen can do liver damage, which he'd been tested and cleared for, but it can also upset tummy linings due to increased acidic activity. He probably got an esophageal ulcer from it, hence the coughing and the coughs smelling like metal. He is on new pain meds that should significantly improve the issues with his legs and get him back to a point where he can go on short walkies for muscle tone and that will keep him steadier on stairs.
Barring bad x-ray news, World's Best Doggo should be okay for awhile more. And is currently napping on his $100 orthopedic mattress, letting loose a barrage of farts because I gave him bacon for being good at the vet's. Napping and farting from special treats = Tibs living his best life.
(Pro Tip: If you smell something metallic on your pet? It's not metal. That coppery smell is blood and you can't find out why they smell like blood, you need to take them to vet ASAP.)
@arkandel In our case, they've decided that pretty much everyone except for people processing customer transactions can WFH two days a week. And for those folks processing customer transactions, the speed of them is mandated by federal regulations that were temporarily loosened due to the pandemic. That one is really not our call. Home internet simply cannot support the infrastructure required to meet those restrictions once they're restored.
The trouble is, they've decided that everyone on the hybrid schedule is going to be in the office and working from home on the same days.
Our space issue isn't going to get any better because we're going to need the exact same number of desks for our employees. Our parking and traffic issue isn't going to get better because all the same people will be on campus on all the same days. Our conference room issue, which has been a problem at least since I started in 2014, is actually going to get worse because people will not be shifting to Teams meetings despite our increasing number of offices globally. They're going to try to cram five days of in-person meetings into three days of conference room availability. Meanwhile, because we own the bulk of our buildings (at least in our US offices), that means that for the other two days of the week.... most of campus is just going to be sitting largely empty, costing us money to operate for the very (comparatively) small number of people on campus.
For people at my company who have both spouses employed there -- which is not unusual, as we have over 15,000 employees -- family care is going to get harder rather than easier because both people will have to be in the office on the same days. Including people in departments who already had customized schedules that will now have them overridden, even if those arrangements have been in place for years. I know at least one couple whose family is completely fucked now because of the shifts his wife works as a nurse really needing the schedule he'd had so their young children aren't left alone for two hours every morning, which just isn't an option at their ages.
It's especially aggravating given the fact that our space issues had necessitated that entire departments in certain areas work on a 3/2 model already, so it's been proven that with a rare few exceptions due to the nature of certain jobs we can manage just fine when employees pick their days with manager approval. Is it harder to keep track of in the paperwork? Yeah. But it works, we know it works, and because of the allotted flexibility, most of our employees are more than happy to shift their home lives around without any complaint or excuses for big lifts that actually need them, if you just give them a little warning. And for the departments that were used to it, there was absolutely no stigma associated with attending meetings remotely because literally everyone does it. It was just a question of which meetings based on which day they were booked, which actually made them easier to get on the books.
Whose stupid "solution" was this?!
@tinuviel said in [Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.]
Similarly, we shouldn't be aiming for 'back to normal.' Normal got hundreds of thousands of people killed. We should be aiming for better than normal.
^ This. If there's one thing I think the pandemic demonstrated, it's how many things were just.... fundamentally non-functional in our society and that I don't want to go back to.
So seeing so many different groups from schools to businesses to government agencies bungle it so badly in the hopes of rushing us back to things the way they were before we have the chance to notice or object is infuriating.
Even my own company, whose decisions I laaaaaaaaaaargely approve of (which is a big part of why I work there) is making a return to work plan that, while not dangerous, is inherently stupid. It absolutely takes zero advantage of a model, does nothing to lower our costs, actively exacerbates a few key space issues we've been having for several years now, and is pissing off employees. And the response by management is to shove their fingers in their ears, shout "LALALALALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU", and double down.
I know everyone says they have the best dog in the world. And everyone is absolutely, absolutely right. But man, this guy.
I broke my foot in 2014 and given the layout of our house, was basically confined to the second floor bedrooms and bathroom for several weeks. For the entire time, he refused to leave my side except when he needed to go use the puppy facilities, and even then he'd fly back into the house and up to me as quickly as possible. He wouldn't even go downstairs for dinner because huMom was broken and needed protecting. It reached the point that @insomniac7809 had to start feeding him in our bedroom and bring his water fountain upstairs because otherwise he just wouldn't eat.
Tibs is the very best boy.
My dog is almost 11 years old. For his breed, the average lifespan is about 10-12.
And thought the vet said he was in remarkably good health for a dog his age and his size just two weeks ago, his back legs gave out on our stairs today. He went sliding backwards - fortunately just three steps - and hit the landing before I could stop it.
He's not hurt, I don't think, except for being even more sore. He's going to vet tomorrow tomorrow to refill his pain pills, now that we're pretty sure the ones that he had previously been on were the source of the coughing that brought him in for a checkup that last time. Will be having X-rays to confirm both.
But fuck I hate this. And yes, this is also a RL sad. This is a big RL sad. But my crying is angry crying because he is a good boy, and he doesn't deserve this, and I can't fix it for him, and also because he doesn't understand why I'm crying and I can't explain to him that he hasn't done anything wrong.
Fuck time.
Fuck everything.
