August Wrong! (Monthly Mini-Rants)

The BBQ Pit
1

Continuing the discussion from Rant, Write, and Boo (July Mini-Rants):

…But I’ll keep trying!

I feel torn about work. I have a whole lot of new responsibility by necessity. We are in bad financial shape, being a government agency for a state going through a budget crisis, and so I’m wearing extra hats. Because there aren’t enough people to do everything. On the one hand, I feel like I have a really good reputation at my work, which is especially good with our restructure (required because of said budget crisis) leading to having new bosses.

On the other hand, I struggle to do my actual job at times because I’m tied up in other projects and doing favors for people. And most of all, I’m just tired. Some of what I’m doing is temporary (including a huge project that has to be completed by November) so it won’t be totally like this forever, but still.

I also sometimes get worried that some days I feel more like a manager, with all of these committees and meetings and helping make decisions that affect the whole agency. Which sounds good if I was ambitious in that way but I’m not. I like doing what I normally do, which is fixing things and helping people. I don’t like being a manager, which I’ve done before.

Oh well, I have a good job, and it’s stable, and i like where I work and who I work with which is more than most people have. It’s just exhausting sometimes.

Rant, Write, and Boo (July Mini-Rants)
2

Let me help inaugurate your new monthly rant thread by congratulating you on at least having a job instead of trying to live on an inadequate retirement pension, and curse you for reminding me that the usual round of monthly bills will once again come around to haunt me. I was feeling like such a Good Boy only a few weeks ago, and now it starts again!

Also, I think you should be appointed the official Monthly Mini-Rant starter. In the immortal words of Carly Simon, Nobody Does It Better!

3

You do you, but this to me is a red flag.

It’s real easy to find yourself reveling in that warm feeling of being needed by co-workers when in fact those folks are just offloading their work onto you. If it’s not a favor your boss can see the results of and would approve of the time spent on, maybe it’s not what you ought to be working on at all. Especially not just after a re-org.

All the above may be a complete misreading of the situation. But maybe not.

Even if all those favors are helping lots of other workers get around backlogs and get more stuff done for your agency, you aren’t being graded on the agency’s throughput. You’re being graded on your throughput as assigned by your new boss(es). If you are overloaded, and it sounds like you are, dump stuff in reverse order of your boss(es)’ ideas about importance and urgency. Not your ideas, or your co-workers ideas.

That’s bog-standard advice in the cutthroat corporate world. It sounds like that world is being forced into your formerly more collegial job.

Good luck navifgating all this crap. Seriously, not snarkily.

4

I have a rant where I’m both the ranter and the rantee. Bad Guy! Bad, Bad, Bad!

I have a Sirius XM subscription, mostly for use in the car. Streaming off my phone with another music source like Spotify works, but the UI is awkward and the phone will overheat if I’m magnetically charging, and using the nav app and streaming. 2 of 3 is no problem, but all 3 is an overheat failure after 30-45 minutes. I’d much rather use the car’s XM receiver and my phone’s nav app than vice versa. So XM it is.

We mostly all know that XM has a rip-off business model. Like they charge $25 plus BS fees plus tax per month adds up to about $30 / month. Unless you threaten to cancel, then you get the special introductory rate of $7 / month for a year. Plus BS fees and tax is $9 / month. When your year is running out they send a reminder email that your price is going up next month, then next month they hit you for the new price. So they’re scammy, but they provide a workaround. If you bother to use it.

That’s the background; here’s the rant.

A bit ago I got that “time’s running out” email. And filed it where I file all to-do emails, right in my email in-box. I delete or file everything as I handle it, so my in-box stays small and everything in there is actionable. Plus a few “round tuit” barnacles.

I first noticed I got charged the higher rate a bit ago. So resolved to make that call. I’ve been dreading calling their stupid CS, waiting in queue for my important call to get important enough for them to actually answer, then talking to “Peggy” in Bangalore who I can barely hear, much less understand, Going through their scripted sham argument about canceling if I don’t get a break, escalating to a “manager”, etc.

Anyhow, yesterday I gird my loins to lance this festering boil. I try to be a smart prepared customer before I call anyone’s customer service department, so I visit the website to see the current state of play before I make my much dreaded and much procrastinated call.

On the homepage before I even log in they’ve got the now-common link in the corner to open a text convo w their chatbot “agent”. On a whim I click it; anything to delay making the dreaded call. With this result:

Me: Click [Chat]
Bot: Hi! how can I help you?
Me: I want to reduce my bill.
Bot: Give me your phone number so I can pull up your records.
Me: 345-567-7890
Bot: Hi Mr. Guy! I see you’ve got a subscription for your car at $25/mo plus fees & taxes is $30. Is that correct?
Me: Yes.
Bot: I can offer you the $7/mo intro price for one year effective today. With fees and taxes it’s $9/mo. Would you like that deal?
Me: Yes.
Bot: Done. You’ll get a email with details. Is there anything else you need?
Me: No. I’m done.
Bot: Goodbye.

Total elapsed time: about 90 seconds.
Total frustration or irritation experienced: zero.
Total months I procrastinated over this oh-so-onerous task: 6. Yep: six. That original warning email came in February! At $20/mo. That was a $120 lesson in the stupidity of procrastination.

:man_facepalming:
I sometimes swear that procrastination is the only superpower I have.

5

And some great news from last month’s thread:

Woo-hooooo! Way to let those ignored deadlines be the perpetrators’ problems and not yours!

6

It’s just what I’ve done for 12 years. It does get reciprocated to an extent. And my performance reviews are always very good, sometimes embarrassing in how much I get praised, so I think it pays off. Word gets around. It’s just tiring sometimes.

It’s mostly a problem of my own making; I’ve put myself out there as someone willing to help, and I’m the go-to guy for a lot of people at work from all over the agency. It’s just that right now it’s a bit much because we’re all stretched thin.

It’s also awesome to see Republican ads that talk about greedy state agencies spending recklessly and needing their funding slashed. While at work we are struggling to get by with almost no budget and everyone doing the work of multiple people. I’m so glad that Democrats are in charge for the most part (though Trump’s vindictive pulling of funding from blue states is a big reason why we’re in this mess; not the only reason, but part of it).

7

I’m genuinely sorry you’re living through this mess.

Starve the Beast was a Reagan play, but it took all those years before the Rs finally had the numbers and the 'nads (read “total absence of brains”) to gut funding, not merely reduce it.

My large caution is that your new bosses may not in fact care whit one for your old reviews. They are under crushing pressure too. And not every boss understands that getting more out of their employees is more useful than beating them.

8

True, but a majority of this new work is directly for them. We have something called a “position description form” which is supposed to define what our job is, and I’m going pretty far past it. But much of it is at their request, or at least indirectly (because it’s for other people that report to them).

Not all of it, but most of the extra stuff is for them. This new major project taking up so much time is being sponsored by my boss’s boss.

9

As long as they’re fully read in on that reality to the point they don’t have plausible deniability in the unlikely event you drop a ball then you’re (probably) golden.

When organizations are under unfamiliar stress, they often turn into a short-sighted dog-eat-dog world where throwing one another under the bus is the new way to survive. Do the right thing for the agency, but play active defense with the paperwork and CYA.

Again best of luck; this is a hard spot.

10

I have a bunch of rants but pit my procrastination which makes me put off posting.
Heres one.
This guy I follow on fb posted about having the parasite, then his dog got sick. It actually passed. Then he posts his stepfather and stepsisters names and states they poisoned his dog and him also. He videos himself crying over his dogs death.
Then he posts he was drinking because of grief and deletes the libelous posts. Then a famous singer sends him a check for a lot of money.
There was a full moon but this was just too ridiculous for me.

11

Thanks; at least we have a good union if nothing else.

12

At work this morning, I was making my way to a computer workstation when the waistband of my pants got really loose. I looked down and saw that my belt buckle had broken.

I spent about half an hour trying to figure out if I could fix it (I couldn’t), then went into the general shop and cut about fifty inches of nylon rope from a spool, melted the ends with my lighter, and threaded it through enough belt loops to keep my trousers on.

(Not to sneak brag, but I’ve been losing weight lately, and the pants falling down has become a real possibility.)

13

I hope you were able to get some onions to hang on that rope belt. Would’ve really completed the look! :zany_face:

More seriously …
Some years ago I went through a similar weight loss phase and there was awhile in the middle where a belt failure could’ve been real embarrassing. Still wearing fatboy clothes on the way to becoming skinny boy then get new skinny clothes.

Congrats on your successful journey and your resourceful solution.

14

@LSLGuy

I’m pleased to hear you could sort this out via a chatbox. I’m considering getting a new car soon and will eventually be faced with this dilemma.

Also I love your description of how you manage your email inbox. I do the same including the barnacles of round tuits :joy:.

15

Someone posted in the MMP about how the XM Chatbot could quickly offer you the $7/mo. price without the whole retention kabuki rigmarole.

16

One of my beefsteak tomatoes has just a touch of red.

We’re going on vacation on Sunday. According to Google, it’s too hot for it to ripen properly.

At least we have cherry tomatoes. I should go pick them.

17

I got up today to find that a mattress has been dumped on the curb in front of my house. For the second time this year. I know who did it. There is a house, two houses down across the street, where several families live. And I know why they did it. There are seven or eight vehicles associated with the house. If they put it on the curb there, chances are good that cars would block the city trash truck from picking up the mattress. But it’s a shitty thing to do and they are very lucky that I’m not a vengeful asshole.

18

A week and a half ago when I left for work I found an old Miata convertible against the curb in front of my house. It looks OK from the outside ( nothing a few hours of cleaning and detailing couldn’t restore to good condition ) but the interior is an absolute pig sty. After a few days it remained, so I thought it was abandoned or dumped after someone stole it and dumped it. The car did have a license plate, albeit 4 months expired. Called the county and I guess they sent a police officer, who then traced it and contacted the owner. Turns out some girl from elsewhere in the subdivision owns it and the car broke down right where it sits. I was told that the owner is making arrangements to have it towed/repaired. Not seeing any action as to this for near a week…nor did I think I would. Between the visual cues and the expired plates I’m thinking this is somebody of insufficient means.

I guess it could be worse in that at least it’s not a mattress. ( which I agree is a shitty thing to dump where they did )

19

The bombardment of political texts continues. I had to delete over 500 of them from my wife’s phone. I delete mine at least three times a day. Blocking the numbers does nothing, as they just roll to another call number. A lot of them, if not all of them, are likely scams. They mostly start the same way, with an alarming announcement or clickbait headline: TRUMP IS RUNNING FOR A THIRD TERM!!! Then comes the request for money. Well, here’s the thing: anyone who donates to any of these people is a moron. If I want to donate, I’ll send it directly to the person I’m supporting, not to some anonymous computer generated glurge. Sadly, this will likely continue over the next two years.

20

I think I may have to try that with my landline provider, which is also my ISP, which landline is costing me more than twice what you’re paying for Sirius XM. I know that they’ll offer a very substantial discount for two years if I outright threaten to cancel, because I’ve done it twice before. I also know that the last time I tried to be honest and just ask for a lower rate, after a lot of clacking of keys I was told no, there were no offers available. So I’m not sure how to pursue this as I don’t actually want to lose my landline, or at least, not until I get a new cell phone with a better plan.