I ended up having a stairlift installed in the house i just inherited, best $3000 i ever spent. It may not be financially practical, but depending on your medi-whichever status it might be covered.
I have been known to pull myself up stairs like i am using a climbing rope with a bannister at friends houses.
An informal poll of coworkers all point to a check and/or gift card. When I mentioned that we’d already given them $ at their engagement party last year and that the wedding itself is this summer, they were aghast as in “How much begging are they going to do?”
I don’t think it’s so much the couple begging as it is my niece’s (and therefore my husband’s) family being sticklers for now-outdated etiquette. Niece and her fiance have been on their own for a few years now. I know that Niece inherited most of her mother’s kitchen items when her parents moved out of state; ergo, she doesn’t necessarily need a shower, as my coworkers pointed out. I quipped, “She’s the first granddaughter and it gives my MIL something to do.”
You must be male.
And if yesterday’s pants are in the laundry basket?
Keys and wallet go in the coffee mug on top of the refrigerator as soon as I walk in the door.
Doesn’t everyone do a self-check in the morning? “Keys, wallet, badge, phone, pen - Check!”
Not if I haven’t had coffee yet.
Seriously, I often start my day by apologizing to a barista: “Sorry, what did you ask, room for cream, what does that mean, does cream need an entire room? Wait, now you just mentioned a number followed by the word dollars, I what? Oh, it’s time to pay, no, yeah, I have… cash? Is that a word in English, oh, right, the foldy paper stuff. Here, can I pull this assortment of bills out and sort through them on the counter, y’know, you should deal with me after ten, I’m much more capable then. Jeez, sorry you have to put up with people like me who haven’t had their coffee yet. Have you seen my keys? Did I just toss them in the tip jar?”
How do you arrive at the location that employs this barista? I sure hope you are not driving there.
Biking (less fatal to pedestrians, scarier for me), and I usually stop at the closest caffeination source a couple blocks away if I’m this foggy.
Perhaps someday a smart scientist will invent a way for people to ingest caffeine in their living quarters so as not to subject the public to foggy-minded bicyclists?
My problem for lost items generally starts after I have used the item and have returned home, in the kerfuffle of returning, getting in the door with bags, dog barking, the keys and/or phone, wallet, what not, will get lost in the shuffle and end up in my linen closet with the toilet paper. Alas, I have tried all forms of remembering tricks. None have helped. It’s my lot in life.
So, I’m a 1st year mature student, moved to a new area for the course. There’s a few other mature students on the course, and I’ve become good friends with one in particular; she got me a part-time job at the same place she works, I’ve been round their house often, we’ve been going to events together and stuff.
Generally been great, she’s really nice… except… we have a new lecturer for this module, who is Chinese. Turns out new friend is seriously racist when it comes to the Chinese. She absolutely hated the tutor on sight. Constantly insults her. She can’t come up with any reason aside from ‘Oh god, she’s one of them, they’re all like that. Like what? Like her!’ Then starts putting on a terrible fake Chinese accent (the lecturer really doesn’t have much accent) and shouting. She wants sympathy from me for having to deal with one of them.
I have no clue how to react. But… I actually kind of know where this is coming from; friend lived in Hong Kong as a teen, after her parents dragged her over there because their marriage was breaking up and they decided that a fresh start in a new place would help. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t, so friend spent two years with arguing parents who divorced at the end of it, in a school she hated, having been dragged away from her family and friends, being very unpopular with the teachers because the local syllabus was totally different so she was way behind, and the teachers were far stricter than what she was used to. They were some of the worst years of her life, and that’s spilled over to anyone who reminds her of it.
I get it.
But that’s spilling over onto a real person who’s only trying to teach a class, and the stuff she’s coming out with is nasty. I’ve tried calling it out a bit, but obviously it’s just a joke, and I shouldn’t take it so seriously, c’mon! Anyway, I criticised one of the other lecturers, right? Well, yeah, I criticised a guy because he put no effort into teaching (he was leaving and he knew it), skipped chunks of the course content, told us stuff that was outright wrong and contradicted his own presentations. Not because of his race.
Yeah, this lecturer’s been chivying us along a lot, and she’s a bit abrupt, but half the class are barely showing up (right from the first session), we missed two sessions of 10 due to weather and losing power, and this module includes the compulsory prep for next year’s major project. Chivying is pretty necessary, we don’t really have time for a nice relaxed discussion.
I can’t really talk about it to anyone else here, because I only really know people on the course, or work, and they all know her too. This area’s 99% white, and she’s been totally fine with the few other POC around from different countries. Just… not the Chinese.
“Excuse me, but what you are saying is extremely racist. I don’t care if you are joking or not. If you can’t control yourself any better than that, I’m going to stop hanging around you. You decide”
What’s wrong with that?
I’ve always wondered if sending the person a copy of what was posted here would help, or if it’d end the friendship. I’ve often seen this with spousal problems: “You’ve got to show your husband this thread – that’ll wake him up!”
What if you just said what you said here: you understand why the person feels this way, really you do, but it does make her look very bad to others who don’t know her background, and makes her look incredibly badly informed (in addition to racist). Maybe starting a little gently would get her to actually listen to you, and maybe she doesn’t really want to look badly informed?
There’s an idea. Recruit a third party (C) who doesn’t harbor ethnic hatred for all Chinese into your circle of friends, and display concern that (C) is having reservations about hanging around with (A) (you’re (B) in this scenario) on account of her being a bit of a twit with this ethnic grudge.
We had another class with said lecturer today, and friend was noticeably more polite to her, though that might just be because it was a much more relaxed session, and the lecturer was joking around far more than she has been (I think friend has also been taking the angry emails we got about the class personally, when they were obviously -to me- aimed at the people who weren’t turning up to class for a compulsory module).
I suspect friend’ll just drop it, at least around me.
Turns out today’s was the last class for a while (I though this module went on for a few more weeks, apparently not), so it probably won’t come up again, at least unless we have lecturer again next year. There are very few people of Chinese background in this area, which is probably the other part of why she’s kept hold of those views-almost no exposure to Chinese people as, well, people, not angry teachers or unfriendly school cliques to sneer at with friends.
She’s pretty much my only real friend down here, I don’t see the much of anyone else outside of work/class. I was mostly venting, really 
Fuck your Sears. There has never been a retailer more deserving to go out of business.
I need some more 75ft 5/8ths rubber hoses. We aren’t quite into gardening season yet so no one has them locally. I normally buy them on sale for $30.
I find them on Amazon $50 free shipping but no prime option. 5-7 days estimated arrival.
Sears has them $40 each. Site claiming free shipping on orders over $50. So 3of them easily over the $50 threshold. Seams like a fair deal.
It’s not till you’ve enterered all the information into the cart that shipping options show up. Shipping options were something like expedited shipping $35 7-10 days, regular shipping $25 two weeks, free shipping 3-4 weeks, in store pick up free 7-10 days. To me that was very deceptive, free shipping implies to me I’d get standard shipping for free not some service where they ship it at thier convenience. Rather than canceling I figure I’d like them earlier than 7-10 days but in-store pick up will save me $30 bucks over Amazon.
8 days later Sears let’s me know the hoses are in. Sears is about 20 minutes away. I schedule to have dinner with a friend at a restaurant a parking lot away at 730 the next day.
I go into Sears at 7 to get my hoses. There is one person at customer service who is doing double duty as a register. I wait in line while they go through the 20 questions sales process with the two people in front of me. They can’t find the hoses. The system says they are in the store but nobody put in the location. By this point it is 730 and I need to be at dinner. I tell them ‘I’m going can you locate them before i come back’ they assure me they can.
I go to dinner. Spend a little to much time but get back to Sears at 8:50. Posted hours on the door are closing 9pm. I was at a side enterance so maybe they lock that early. I go to the main enterance and that’s locked too. The manager I dealt with earlier sees me outside the door. He turns his back to me and walks away.
Lesson learned is I should have just paid more on Amazon. I’m undecided as to wether I’m going to cancel the sears order or not. I don’t even know if they actually have my hoses. When I went to make a complaint on the online order the system is temporarily down…
Sorry you got hosed…
very very nice.
Wife broke her phone a while back. Trying to get a replacement has been a real clusterfuck. First she ordered a replacement online from some website, and they said it would take 7-10 days before it shipped. So in the meantime I had an old LG 3G smartphone that we thought we could activate for her in the interim. I have done this before on Verizon’s website and it will show me every phone that anyone on our plan has ever had, back to when everyone had flip phones. This time, I only get two or three choices in the list and none are my old LG.
So she takes it into the Verizon store to see if they can activate it, whereupon she finds that her broken phone was insured and we can file a claim for replacement. (We thought we only had insurance on my grandson’s phone, since he manages to break or lose one about every six months.) They also told her she probably didn’t need a whole phone replacement, just a screen repair. They get the old LG phone activated for her and she tries to cancel the order on the replacement only to find it has shipped already.
We decided to go ahead and file a claim for her damaged phone, and keep the one she ordered online as a backup in case we need it in the future. In the meantime I was going to have the phone switched over again from the old LG to the new replacement, to hold her over until the claim went through, but found out that if we activated the replacement it would cancel her insurance, so we couldn’t do anything until the claim was filed.
I filed the claim and got an email that there was a problem and I needed to call the customer service number. So I called and the lady says “I don’t know why there is a hold on this. I’ll remove that for you.” I also found out that wife’s phone was not a model that was eligible for screen repair. So instead of paying $30 for screen repair I have to pay $150 for a replacement phone. We completed the claim and I was told that the phone would be delivered the next day, but someone needed to be home to sign for it. When will it be delivered? Between 8 am and 5 pm.
You know where this is going, right? I had to take an entire day off of work to wait at home for the phone, which of course was NOT delivered between 8 and 5. I had to leave at 5 to go pick my granddaughter up from her after-school program. I left a note on the door saying I’d be back at 5:30. UPS guy finally shows up at 5:45.
TLDR version: fuck Verizon, fuck Asurion, fuck UPS.