start a victory garden and ration your IRRATIONALLY ANGRY feelings, part 3

Very true. I used to be temped for Accounts Payable jobs, so the most hilarious thing to me was knowing the 'big secret' of exactly how much the company was paying for my services because I was the one processing the bill! (Of course temp agencies never ever want their temps to know this stuff).

I recall more than one job where I got hourly $13, and the agency was getting $22, and that this ratio was pretty usual, so, I got more than half, but less than 2/3 of the payout.

However, and this really ticked me off, one job that was largely funded by taxpayer dollars paid me way less than half of the outrageous sum the temp agency got! I think I got $9 out of $25 bucks on that one! No business like soaking the people.

temp agencies take that much?! damn.

i guess companies will pay to screw people out of benefits

Most of the times I was ever offered to 'go perm' it was usually with a pay cut from what I had been getting as a temp ('but you'll get benefits') so, no, thanks.

One reason I did temp for a long time was that the pay rates had at least something to do with demand, whereas permanent positions tended to be successfully squashed. While it was humiliating in some ways to have the agency taking a lot of money for doing nothing but landing me the spot, that did save me a lot of dreadful human resources interviews and frankly, I just wouldn't have found those positions on my own. I also used to see the most interesting trainwrecks: places where I'd take over the suddenly vacated position of an embezzler, a revenge case, a blazing incompetent. Whole little histories there. The work of course was more boring than not so regular changes of scenery were helpful as well.

lol Radio Shack was way ahead of the curve, they used to ask for your address years ago

That reminds me of this collection of anecdotes (I thought it mentioned the hassling-for-address thing but it doesn't seem to):
http://www.ihateworkinginretail.com/tag/i-hate-radioshack/

I particularly enjoyed VIII and XV, if you've got better things to do than read the whole collection of longwinded rants. But who would have better things to do than that?

omg XV is amazing, I have no idea what that is

http://i157.photobucket.com/albums/t53/baldie0522/doin-brum.gif

baldie doin-brum.gif

ia: egregiously bad service in restaurants. i'm sooooo chill and forgiving about minor food service slip-ups. i don't care if you smile. i don't care if you refill my water without me having to ask. if i don't say when i'm ordering that i'm allergic to XYZ food item (which would be a gross overstatement, since my food allergies are really trivial), it's a minor inconvenience but not the end of the world if the kitchen forgets to leave it off. i just want a baseline level of transactional ease if i'm gonna choose your place over other places. i had work to do last night and i ran out to get a quick takeout order so i could scarf down some food and meet my midnight deadline. i ended up waiting probably 40 minutes for a dish that at most would take ten minutes to cook from pre-prepped ingredients and assemble in a styrofoam box. and the restaurant was busy, but not slammed. it just made me very stressed out. which is my problem, not theirs. i don't handle stress well. 40 minutes is a long time to wait though.

no i in yr a

so to speak

the level of stress made my a feel i

_lol Radio Shack was way ahead of the curve, they used to ask for your address years ago_

That reminds me of this collection of anecdotes (I thought it mentioned the hassling-for-address thing but it doesn't seem to):
http://www.ihateworkinginretail.com/tag/i-hate-radioshack/

I particularly enjoyed VIII and XV, if you've got better things to do than read the whole collection of longwinded rants. But who would have better things to do than that?

Whoa thank you, aps! I read the first few of those when it was first posted, but missed the great ones you pointed out plus my favorite, the one w/ Stoned Craig going "I'm hungry, Paw." (Which I've said a lot to various people over decades for no reason I can discern, so maybe it's just part of the collective human drive to say it.)

Stoned Je55e

OK that Brum story looool
Original Brum theme was instrumental but TIL there is an extremely lengthy modern version

bill gates the spider

News sites showing handheld video but blurring out the edges? I feel like I see something like this every week or two. Sorry, this is some really traumatic video.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/dying-among-strangers-metro-victim-found-fellow-riders-who-tried-to-save-her-life/2015/01/13/98f6c37e-9b7a-11e4-bcfb-059ec7a93ddc_story.html?hpid=z3

lately every time i watch some crappy viral video prank, i get IA imagining myself just out and about trying to run an errand and getting trapped in a viral video prank. like that dumb telekinesis coffee shop thing.*

*maybe the reactions are fake, idk.

It's very likely my last dying words will be "Turn your phone sideways if you insist on recording this."

Yeah, it's not because something is being blurred out, it's because people don't shoot in landscape and for some reason news organizations have chosen to present it like that. I think they should just reject all portrait videos.

Why can't phones just format videos in landscape regardless of the position of the phone?

camera sensor orientation? the actual sensor isn't square iirc, I may be wrong

those takeout containers with interlocking flaps - eating from them makes me ia bcz the flaps get in the way

i usually dump it out onto a plate of something but sometimes you can't & raaaaage

Like Chinese take out containers?

if you hold it from the side you are holding down three of the flaps automatically

Blurred margins - you'll also see this sometimes when shows re-run old 4x3 segments in their new 16x9 format.

Was cutting up a carrot for some soup for dinner and lost about half of it to the 3 slices just rolling right off the cutting board and onto the floor.

Weather getting even worse and still not collected flat pack. Had stiff neck on Monday the one day this week when there hasn't been really bad weather, think it was actually calm and sunny.
Snowed last night and now there's a major storm happening tonight and tomorrow.
i was just hoping I'd be able to get this thing home on the bus. Which will be a load of fun in itself. Thing is about 5 foot or so long which means it's a bit awkward. Maybe will have to get taxi and I'm really broke this week.

xp
I don't know your floors but you can rinse stuff off.

Having so much fun trying to get my cursor to keep things selected so it can organise them. Not sure where flaw lies is it a thing with Windows 7 or something.
JUst tried to sort out a load of music on Foobar and instead of it clicking ad dragging a set of tracks it would just shift the highlight across other tracks or click and start playing on any track among several selected.
Then just had even more fun trying to scroll up a page elsewhere on this site to try to click on the link to here.
aaaaaargh

These cutsey little browser messages that appear when a problem occurs.

For example, I guess Firefox didn't shut down properly last night, so now I've got it over here in the other window saying "Well, this is embarassing…" Like it somehow dinged my bumper as it was trying to back out of its own driveway.

The worst is Chrome. "There's no way you can see this PDF of your parcel map because we're Chrome and AWWWWWWW SNAP!"

while we're on computer issues - windows programs which, when you go to open a file, always take you back to some obscure folder on your hard drive rather than the last one you were on, meaning if you want to open multiple files you have to go through the rigmarole of locating the folder you wanted each time.

Oh yeah that sucks. Why do they do that?

there must be a 1337 way of stopping that. it's so frustrating.

i can admit that i am irrationally angered by the npr program "invisibilia"
i hate the way they edit it
the topics are just barely quasi-deep and today i learned the urgent lesson of "your fears aren't real"
the style of speech exemplified in that program annoys me
ugh

invisibiiiilya
so precious, so deep

ok i feel better
definitely need to avoid this program though

Ha Just 15 minutes ago I subscribed to this podcast b/c my therapist recommended one particular episode (not the fear one).

I do hate that but I also hate it sometimes when programs do what you suggest and default to the last one, e.g. if 99% of the files I edit are in a standard documents folder but one day I need to use the same software to edit some configuration file in an obscure location or something that e.g. Google Talk has hidden in its own downloads folder, and then next time I open a document it shows me that folder and not the standard one

in short, why can't software just read my mind

(but please don't actually read my mind either, it is full of junk and secrets)

xxp I just heard the first Invisibilia double-bill this week and kind of liked it - it was good for my walk home, where I don't want to think too hard about anything because I might have to check out for a minute and concentrate on not being hit by a car etc - but while the interviewees were interesting, the questions the presenters asked were so point-missingly "so, a bad thing happened. did that feel bad?", and at one point they were almost falling over each other to emphasise that they totally didn't know anything about this mental health gobbledegook because lol not crazy, I mean this stuff is for the crazies, right? and I felt embarrassed

(ok, I just checked and I've heard the Thoughts double-bill but not the Fear one yet)

i heard the thoughts one
it wasn't so bad tbh
it contained some essential truths -- i guess it's the way they're delivered that makes me want to barf

mostly it's the radiolab-style
my irritation is totally irrational

the radiolab guys make me IA so I can totally relate

Me too. I thought this was way less irritating than Radiolab though.

have not heard yet

Radio lab cuts right through me, so so annoying.

wow i was thinking invisibilia was local because its ad spots sound so low quality. i already hate it without hearing it. i hate the radiolab style so so much.

(how do you feel about people whispering on the radio)

because i totally hate it

yeah what's that thing it says at the end? go into the light? something?

i am just getting increasingly stressed and IA at npr-y things, yelp, gentrification, obama, idk

same

I actually got legitimately IA to an extreme about Serial, as you can read in the clusterfuck Serial thread

Fair enough.
Many a true word is spoken in Chester.

There's a new limited edition Coke flavor called Coca-Cola Spiced, which I expected to be similar to the limited Coca-Cola Cinnamon from a few years back which I liked.

Nope, it's fucking raspberry! In tiny print elsewhere on the label it says "Raspberry Spiced." Why you do this to me, Coke?

If you're going to make a spiced Coke, how about Coca-Cola Clove?

I donate blood pretty regularly. Sometimes there's an added promotion of a gift card or something to attract donors, and I figure "bonus!" because I'm going to be there anyway. But I've never actually been given a gift card!

Things that make me rationally angry: Not being allowed to give blood anymore

Changing it from a lifetime ban to like, I don't know, a one-year ban? That's even worse, because then it's like, when was the last time you had gay sex? Like I'm sorry I'm voluntarily giving you my precious bodily fluids here, that's a pretty rude question.

Of course maybe there's now no ban at all and I just never got the memo.

I think there's no ban on gay sex anymore (or whatever the catch was). For sure I know my wife was banned for 20+ years because she lived in Germany for part of the '80s (mad cow), but even that ban was rescinded.

There's a new limited edition Coke flavor called Coca-Cola Spiced, which I expected to be similar to the limited Coca-Cola Cinnamon from a few years back which I liked.

Nope, it's fucking raspberry! In tiny print elsewhere on the label it says "Raspberry Spiced." Why you do this to me, Coke?

If you're going to make a spiced Coke, how about Coca-Cola Clove?

― Hideous Lump, Tuesday, March 12, 2024 7:36 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

That sounds vile. I was skeptical of the cinnamon diet coke but I actually really liked it. Cinnamon is one of my fave flavors though.

Since when is raspberry a spice?

ever since the marketing department decided "spiced" did better with focus groups than "raspberry enhanced"

I bought some “Christmas” flavored Bundiberg root beer a few years ago that was out of control with the Christmas spice, like drinking a cold candle

Might as Well Go All the Way with new Coca Cola Spiced: Raspberries. Buy now!

lol no

"It's Coca‑Cola, only spiced. Coca‑Cola Spiced transforms the familiar into the extraordinary. Blending the iconic taste of Coca‑Cola with a burst of refreshing notes from raspberry and spiced flavors, Coca‑Cola Spiced offers an uplifting taste experience."

This sounds so weird. Why would they do that?? Raspberry doesn't go with spice! This makes no sense. I have to find some.

Please do and let us know.

I saw the raspberry Coke Zero at the store today and passed in favor of cherry Coke Zero, which is pretty bad, too, but I thought it would go well with the turkey sandwich I was having for lunch. I was right.

Cranberry Coke Zero might have gone even better.

I think that's called Dr. Pepper?

I thought Dr. Pepper was originally flavored with prunes?

spraying champagne (or sparkling English wine as it was on this occasion) at the end of a sports event. wasteful at best but mainly i am angry about the sheer and utter lack of imagination.

So I don't sleep so good, I got terrible insomnia. I'm up at 2 AM every day. And when I'm up at 2 AM, I got 2 AM thoughts, and they're not always, like, happy, positive thoughts.

And today, I'm just fucking pissed about, like. This boss I had a fucking decade ago. I mean seriously, it was 10 years ago, for me to still be mad at him, that's irrationally angry. It's not just that, though, it's what I'm irrationally angry at him _for_.

I maen this guy, this guy was a real piece of shit. When people talk about "privilege", this guy could be the poster child for it. A lot of, you know, you see these incels talking about "alpha males" and they're thinking of people like him. And to me, this is a perfect example of why incels are fucked up, why incels have it wrong, because they buy into this bullshit idea. Because it's all superficial, it's all bullshit. He _looked_ like the kind of guy who would be successful. He was born into a powerful Republican political dynasty, white, silver hair, good teeth. The kind of guy dodgy car salesmen _try_ to look like.

He was born for success and he kept getting all kinds of opportunities, but he didn't succeed like some of his relatives did because he was a fucking grifter and a fraud. I mean even compared to his relatives. All Republicans are grifters and frauds to some extent, it's kind of baked into the ideology. IDK. I guess maybe it's irrationally that I should hate him at all compared to his less obviously evil brother. Because it is just a mask, right? Is it irrational to hate a guy who openly embezzles from his employees more than a guy who works to systemically unjust system in ways that _seem_ sensible and reasonable but aren't, really?

I guess if I hated him from embezzling from me personally, it would be rational. Except not a decade later, not when the amount of money he was embezzling from me was basically peanuts. But that's the thing, right? We're out here making fucking peanuts compared to his CEO-ass salary and he's embezzling from us _anyway_. And then goes off and literally sacks one of my most competent co-workers when she asked for a raise. Because she was _supposed_ to get one, the silent partners said hey, give your employees raises, and _that_ was what he embezzled. So he fired her because what she was asking her would have exposed his embezzling.

The thing is though I'm not really mad at him for that. I didn't know about any of this until long after I was out of there. He was mad at me for quitting. I mean he was fucking embezzling from us, I went out there and got a degree, he offered _nothing_ in return, and he was mad at me for quitting. Just, like, smdh. That ignorant-ass motherfucker. I'm not mad at him for that, either. To me that's hilarious levels of short-sightedness. You lose one of your best employees who you pay peanuts, who has worked hard and now has opportunities beyond what you can give them, and you're mad at _them_? This is, like, Frank Zappa being mad that Adrian Belew quits to work for someone who can pay _way_ the fuck more than he can. Like, what the fuck, you're the one always going on about how great capitalism is, and this _one time_ you wind up on the losing end of the stick and you're a little fucking bitch about it. You dumb motherfucker.

Like I said. I'm not even mad about this boss for that. I'm not mad about him taking a company that was not doing _great_ but which had a solid market niche and running it into the ground by being an asshole to all of the contacts the previous owner had carefully built up over the course of two decades. Nah, because the thing was, he and his partners were stupid to buy the company in the first place. The entire business model was built around the company having a patent on their one profitable product. There was nothing else in the pipeline. Nothing else to keep the company going. And the patent was about to expire. Of fucking course the owner was selling, because he knew there was no future to the company. The old owner was gonna take what he could and retire, and he was happy with that, because even though the company wasn't, like, fuckin' Amazon or anything, he'd been successful. The old owner worked hard and mostly been fair to other people and he had, you know, _enough_. Like he had that idea in his head, the idea of _enough_. The old owner didn't have to personally rule the world. Not the best guy in the entire world, this guy, but as small business owners go... I mean when people go around praising "small businesses", it's guys like him they're thinking of. I worked for him for seven years, and it was a good job. A good stable job that I worked hard at, and in return I had, like, the stability and the security to make something better of my life. I did that work, the job didn't, like, do anything to _support_ me in that. It just did the bare minimum necessary to allow me to do that.

And then this asshole took over and it went to total shit very fucking quickly. But the thing is, I'm not mad at him for _that_, either, because by the time he took over I'd done the work. I had what I needed. I was able to move on. Not smoothly or easily, but when I quit, a little over a year later I had moved on to better things. And this asshole... not only did he not get in the way of that, but by being such a grossly abusive fucking asshole, he gave me the motivation to pursue my dreams. So in a way I'm almost grateful to him, in a weird way, for being intolerably shitty. For being someone I couldn't _settle_ for. Because for me, I look at the absolute utter, utter minimum it takes me to survive, and I say "good enough", and I don't try for anything better. Because "good enough" is just so much better than anything I ever expected to have. That's the biggest reason why, you know, I haven't done a lot of the things I maybe could have done. Because being "content" is more important to me than actually being _happy_, because being actually _happy_ by pursuing my dreams, that feels like a fuckin' losing game right there. Because I only get that if people are, like, actually decent to me. Which isn't something I have a lot of experience with.

And I guess I could be mad at this guy, you know, for not being decent to me, to the people around him, but he wasn't the first and he wasn't the last. The world is fuckin' filled witih people like him. It's people like him who run this fuckin' world, who determine what the rest of us _can_ achieve, and the only way to change that is if people can work together against them, and they fuckin' _know_ that, and if they work at anything, at any goddamn thing at all, it's making sure that we never, ever work together. So I don't blame us for _not_ working together. Because it's hard enough without the assholes who rule the world actively working to keep us apart. We're doing the best we can, and if we're not able to make a just world with that, well, _we're_ not the ones to blame for that.

But I'm not irrationally angry at _him_ for that. Don't hate the player, hate the game, right? But I do hate him, because of _how_ he played the game. Here's what I hate him for.

We had, like... we had this kind of enforced recreation thing. This thing to build "morale". Wasn't his idea. Was the idea of the director of marketing. Who had her own problems, but I mean... as shitty as the idea of "morale" and "team-building" is, as shitty as it is for the business owner to talk about us being a "family" and then... I mean, from my perspective, he wasn't wrong, because I came from a shitty, abusive family, and he as the, I guess, patriarch certainly lived up to that standard. I do resent him for talking about the company as a "family". I actually am irrationally angry about that, about people who talk about "family businesses" when what they mean is corporate-run dynasties, like, sure, Standard Oil was a "family business", and that's supposed to be a good thing, a good thing that they weren't accountable to anybody but themselves because _family values_. That makes me rationally angry, the idea that "values" were something that was determined by these evil, abusive motherfuckers, whereas my actual values were and are condemned as evil, wicked, perverse. But that's changed some, at least, during my lifetime. There are people out there who think of me as good and virtuous and them as wicked and evil. I mean. I don't think of myself as "good" or "virtuous", I don't buy into that manichean worldview, but I guess if one of us has to be "good" I'm probably more deserving of the label than this guy. So I'm not gonna argue with it too hard.

Anyway I am irrationally angry at him, at anyone, who valorizes "family values", on like a personal level. I'm madder at him, though, for this enforced recreation thing. Because I did work hard for people to have some fun. The marketing director was all, hey, you like music, you know all kinds of interesting facts, you should put together a quiz! About music! And I was like, yeah, that does seem fun. But the thing is, like... I mean, I'm autistic as fuck, and in the past, I mean, I would have taken that opportunity to show off how smart I was. Because I didn't necessarily have the social skills to realize that, you know, hey, this isn't about showing off how smart I am, this is about giving other people a chance to have a good time. And looking at things from that attitude meant that I actually had a really good time putting together that quiz. I worked hard at it, but I also really enjoyed the process.

The thing was you have a workplace and it was a fairly diverse workplace, people from all kinds of different backgrounds, ages, races, etc., and people with different backgrounds have different experiences with music, different music they know about. I got a fairly diverse taste in music compared to most people, though probably not compared to your average ILX poster, but not enough to speak to all of the different experiences of all the different people there. For me that was a good thing, though, it gave me an opportunity to learn about music that I didn't know much about. These questions were nearly all superficial questions, there were, like, one or two stumpers in there but mostly they were superficial questions. Breadth, not depth. The goal was for each person, no matter what they knew about music, no matter what they _thought_ they knew about music, to have one question where they were like "Oh! I know that!" And even better, to have that be a question that's not like, "Oh well everybody knows that". To really... This was one of my strongest values at the time, _everybody knows something that most other people don't_, everybody has _value_, everybody has something to _contribute_ even though most people are taught to believe they're inferior.

And this, I think, this I think is what gets to the heart of what makes me mad about this guy. Because there's this prize, this kind of meaningless prize attached. No real value at all. Bragging rights, basically. Since there was no real value to the prize, I figure, you know, no point in googleproofing them. Because this is a quiz for fun. It's not a quiz for someone to show off how smart they are. And everybody else in the company, a couple dozen people, they took the quiz that way, they had fun, they were like "Oh! I know this!", and the quiz didn't, you know, make them feel stupid for not knowing the stuff that the people who are rich and powerful in this world act like are the Only Important Things.

But this motherfucker. This dumb motherfucker. He goes and GOOGLES THE FUCKING ANSWERS so he can win the contest and get a prize of, like, no value. I look at him doing that and I'm like, what the fuck. You're supposed to be the leader? Everybody else is smart enough to realize hey, this is something for fun, let's have fun with it, and this guy, this guy alone, he has to look like he's the Smartest Guy in the Room, that he knows more than everybody else. And people do actually buy into that bullshit. That's the sad bit. People look at that and think guys like that are "alpha males" or like "Oh well that's why he's CEO", and yeah, that is why he's CEO, he's CEO because with all the stuff he has in his favor, he has to cheat just so he can win at a meaningless fucking quiz that was _designed for him to not win at_.

Yeah fuck that guy. I worked to create something other people could enjoy, and other people _did_ enjoy it, and he goes out there and tries to ruin it for everyone else, because his fragile fucking cishet white male ego is more important than anybody and anything else. That fucking asshole. Of all the heinous and reprehensible things about him, _that_, _that_ is the thing I will hate him until my dying day for.

Anyway. Gonna try to go back to sleep now. I think... I think being angry is important for me. I think getting out this irrational anger in this way was good.

If you're irrational for being angry about this then I must be irrational too. I have two bosses, two separate companies, plus another employee at one of those companies, that I still have so much anger toward. If you want to go further back I have a stepfather I haven't seen in about 35 years who is fucking lucky I live on the other side of the world because if I now, as an adult, saw him on the street, i'd rip his fucking head off.

The Red Cross is always running promotions for blood drives - a gift card with each donation, a t-shirt, etc. - but whenever I donate I'm never given the promotional offer. I know I'm not there for the shirt or whatever, and I would (and do) donate for nothing, but it still feels like a bait and switch.