Oh Good Fucking Grief.
Bus company changed our bus schedule slightly.
The 4:05pm bus is now the 4:00pm bus.
The 4:37pm bus is now the 4:30pm bus.
Apparently they are completely unaware of the concept of people getting off work on the hour or half hour and then attempting to go home. :smack:
This just reminded me of something else annoying the hell out of me. 
My son’s bus is supposed to arrive at 7:03 in the morning to take him to school. The bus driver, however, for whatever reason frequently shows up at 6:55 instead. I know it’s not THAT big a difference, but it sure the hell is if my eight year old misses the bus because the driver came earlier than the time they indicated and sailed right by the house when my son was not there. I’d be ok-ish with a few minutes late, but a few minutes early at that hour in the morning is too fucking early for anyone but the bus driver.
It’s a conspiracy to get everyone to stay an extra 15 minutes.
Pretty much, because the next buses are 4:20 (really) and 4:52. So unless you can magically get off work 5 minutes earlier, you’ve got 20 minutes to make it to that bus stop.
And now I feel old, I just ordered my first pair of bifocals. I’m more worried that they’ll make me look like I have googly eyes than anything else. So vain. But it’s getting harder to write with pen/pencil on paper at my desk, and to read my phone at a not-weird distance. I commandeered a new Ikea desk lamp from the lobby makeover and that helps, but dang!
Ok, lady, I’m officially unfriending you on Facebook. Your godawful ‘‘Family Guy is not the way of Jesus and gives me the vapors’’ posts are dumb enough, but ‘‘Ray Rice shouldn’t have had his career ruined nobody’s perfect11!!!’’ is the last straw.
Also, we were in grad school together, and I’m still pissed you agreed to adopt an 8 year old girl and returned her to foster care when you learned she’d been sexually abused.
I’m wondering if I could send my mother over to babysit…
She’s good with kids (except her own, but that seems to be ridiculously common) and has serious bondary issues re. my work-from-home, but not yours (since you’re not her daughter).
That’s awful, Spice Weasel 
No, I have a real rant now.
Why is it people expect their own beliefs to comfort you when they know you don’t share them? I’m still pretty fucking upset about having a miscarriage but I can find very few websites that address coping in anything other than Christian terms. I have nothing against religion, it’s just not helpful to me because I find no comfort in things I don’t believe in. Basically it just makes me feel worse because other people have some outlet or source of healing that I don’t have. Finally I found something that better fits my beliefs.
I posted it on Facebook. It includes this quote:
Then my Mom is all, ‘‘I respectfully disagree. Everything happens for a reason…’’ because God blah blah blah.
Yeah, that’s great, for you, and useless, for me. And you know it, because you’re my Mom and we just had this conversation yesterday. I know she is going through a hard time too because it was her grand baby we lost, but it seems like fucking everyone on the planet has a faith-based explanation for this and it just makes me feel more alone.
(jawdrop) WHAT???
OK, can I go please whomp her with DH’s morning star?
:eek: Really?
On reflection, maybe the little girl dodged a bullet. You should be grateful the bitch didn’t decide that an honor killing was in order.
I’m so sorry you’re having to go through this, Spice Weasel. if Facebook is more painful than comforting to you right now, maybe you could consider giving yourself a break from it for a while.
We can take up the slack for you. Peace.
Why do people tell me these things when my clue-by-four is in the shop?
{{{{Spice Weasel}}}
Goddamn it so much, I am getting so angry at this ‘screw you, I got mine’ right wing philosophy.
A work friend of mine* who is in a wheel chair and rides the same bus was going on and on about how the handicapped parking spots in town aren’t proper legal width and how he should sue the city for not properly enforcing the law and sue the bus company for not having them the legal width in the transit station, blah blah blah.
Next breath he starts complaining about Obama’s speech last night. How he doesn’t want to pay to bomb Syria and Iraq and “If he’d just take a million people off food stamps for every bomb he dropped, I’d be fine with it.”
Me (stunned): “I don’t like the idea of people starving in this country because you don’t want to pay for it.”
Him: (Turns and rolls away)
You fucking hypocritical turd. You’re railing about how they won’t spend money to enforce handicapped parking spot widths and you’re going to SUE!!! because of it - because that benefits YOU, then you whine about other people not being left to STARVE because you don’t want to pay to feed them?
Oh, fuck that nonsense to hell and back.
Then I was doing our company’s Diversity training. They ask you three very basic questions up front, then ‘grade’ you on a scale of 1-4 of your alleged diversity sensitivity. Bullshit thing tried to tell me I was level 3, which is good, but not good enough, and that at that level I allegedly think everyone in a particular group thinks the same. :rolleyes: Um, NO. And I don’t get how it drew that conclusion from those three questions.
Then of course, while continuing to tell us how we have to recognize people as individuals and how all of the various factors (income, language, religion, etc) influence how people think…
On THREE different pages, it tells us how Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millenialists… all think alike for their group. :smack: (Hint: NO THEY DON’T)
Fucking wildly inappropriate in the context and I filled out a complaint this morning about the materials.
On the flip side of that coin, beggars can’t be choosers. Your mom tried to say something comforting. You can’t get mad at people for trying to love you, but going about it the “wrong” way.
Hell yes you can. If someone says something insensitive and upsetting, f*ck their “good intentions”.
Damn right you can, when the result of their actions is more harm.
“Everything happens for a reason” is a completely fucking stupid assed thing to say to anyone who is hurting, not to mention that it is patently false.
Damned true. Especially when, if I recall correctly, her mom has a history of making such deliberately hurtful remarks.
For whatever it’s worth, SpiceWeasel and anyone else, I’ll share what a grief counselor told me when The Other Shoe died. It was one of the first things she told me:
I was all :dubious: 
:eek: :dubious: and I believe my response was, “But my husband just died; people should be NICE to me!” and she just patted me on the shoulder.
She was right.
Boy, howdy, was she right.
So, SpiceWeasel, take it from a trained grief counselor. She knows more than we do! People will tell you all kinds of weird shit, some of which is ***way ***more hurtful than helpful. Not that it helps, in the moment, but … put on your emotional armor when dealing with those people, is all I can offer.
I have a leather jacket that feels like physical armor when I shrug it onto my shoulders, and sometimes, in the worst of shit, I’ll mentally imagine myself putting it on.
It helps.
Very mild rant ahead.
I live and work in a part of California where water use is always something to be careful about, even when the state is not suffering a drought of historic proportions.
A few years ago, the university where i teach removed the old, auto-flush urinals in the men’s bathrooms and replaced them with waterless urinals. Each one apparently saves thousands of gallons a year. They work fine, and we save water, so everything is great.
But the actual toilets are another matter. They, like the old urinals, are auto-flush toilets, with sensors that are supposed to activate the flush mechanism when you finish your business.
The problem is that these motions sensors are apparently more sensitive to movement than the ones protecting the Hope diamond, because unless you sit as still as a Rodin statue you cannot get through the duration of a typical dump without having the damn thing flush three or four times. Any movement of your upper body will trigger a flush, and there seems to be absolutely no way you can turn to dispense toilet paper without activating another rush of water. And, of course, there’s a farewell flush when you actually stand up to leave.
So much for saving water.
If it’s important to you, you can prepare yourself, and always carry Band-aid in your pocket. Fits nicely over the sensor, and you can put off any flushes at all until you’re ready to tip your hat to the bowl and bid it a fond adieu. You could use electrical tape to invisibly cover the sensor and just leave it there. Don’t worry about stranding people with a non-flushing toilet; they have a little button at the top of the control unit for manual actuation.
Or, you know, write a nicely-worded memo to the facilities engineer explaining your concerns (cc anyone who might have a stake in saving money on excess water-usage penalties), and asking that the sensitivity be adjusted.