My SC town got hammered by Helene. Nothing remotely like poor NC, but it’s put a wrench in everything. And I’m beyond pissed at people who apparently are stopping to hurl abused at lineworkers because they don’t have power yet! Seriously people, our entire county and much of the state were down, and you think you know better how to get service back … why??
Idiots.
This has always pissed me off. What is the point? These people are working eighteen hour shifts. It’s not like they can go and flip a switch. Most of the time, they have to hang new lines (if they don’t have to replace the poles frst), and that is hard, incredibly dangerous work.
It’s like people have forgotten how to be adults.
Plus, there’s just never enough manpower. Our little corner of southeastern Georgia got very little of Helene’s ire, but a baby tornado snuck in and snapped off the tops of two consecutive power poles, one of which had the transformer for our neighborhood. We were without power for about 20 hours and Internet for a full 48 and I consider us extremely lucky. We went for a drive into town and saw the guys working on the power — two big trucks for replacing the poles; there were probably fifteen fellows working on the situation and none of them were leaning on their shovels! But all of that for one transformer and two poles. Gave me pause.
I am not registered with any political party. Nor am I signed up on any political sites. My politics are private.
Yet multiple times a day, I get texts from both sides asking for money or badmouthing the other side. Thankfully, I am no longer on a cell plan that charges for each text - that would really piss me off. I keep blocking numbers, but it never stops. Just another month…
My employer has is starting to push me to donate to United Way again. I don’t know on what planet someone thinks it’s appropriate for an employer to tell an employee how to use their pay. I’m sure United Way does good work, but this just feels unethical to me.
I’ve also asked them to stop importuning me every year, at three different employers now, but they never do.
I teach voice, including a couple of university gigs. Today I was scheduled to teach seven lessons, three hour long lessons and for half hour lessons. Schedule to start at noon, teach for two hours, an hour break, then teach again from three to six.
First my 3-3:30 cancelled (sore throat). Then my 1-2 cancelled (nasty cold). Just after I got to work my 12:30 cancelled (Covid-like symptoms). Making I taught from noon to 12:30, and now I have a three hour break. I hate extended breaks. I have things I can accomplish during this time, but I’m just not mentally prepared.
Also, coming in at noon to teach for a half hour and then sit around for three hours is super annoying.
More Mundane and Pointless than a Rant, but yesterday I finally stopped procrastinating and went in for both a shingles and a tetanus vaccine. The arm is tender as expected, but I just feel useless today. Lying in bed because sitting up is tiring. I’m hoping this only lasts a day.
I would never yell at someone doing such a dangerous job. Then again, I am in WNC and appreciate greatly the hardworking folks who got my power working yesterday afternoon after five days in the dark.
Tha asshole who keeps making the cell service go out, on the other hand…
Years ago I was contacted by someone from United Way and I told them I wasn’t interested and basically hung up on the guy. They sent some stuff in the mail, which I discarded unopened.
The nice thing about United Way is that they funnel money to the smaller, more local charities. That’s the main way charities like the Smallville Food Pantry get funds.
RotD: Damnit! Spectrum, would you at least fucking call before you dig? You’ve cut our fiber at least forty times in the last two months. I have field techs in Texas who cannot work on any of my projects because they’re spending all their time repairing fiber.
Upgraded my iPhone from a 13 to a 16 yesterday. First downside: as I drove home, I spent every traffic light trying to plug my charging cable in my car into it. I eventually found out that it doesn’t accept the lightning connector (rendering every lightning connector-equipped cable that I own completely worthless to me).
Second downside: It doesn’t seem to be able to connect to my Apple Watch, so I haven’t been able to pair it.
Third downside: it also won’t pair, or even attempt to pair, with my car’s sound system.
The bluetooth at least acknowledges that I own some AirPods, although I haven’t attempted to connect them yet.
Not necessarily. Though they are barking at the wrong people. When there’s mass outage, someone is restored first & someone is restored last. Those in a more populated area tend to get prioritized to the front of the line as fixing one line restores power to a bunch of people instead of just a handful. Everyone wants to be first & no one wants to be w/o power for days more than others, especially if those others are near you. Short of a bribe, there not much the linemen can do to get your power restored sooner as they’re usually not the ones making up the list of what gets done in what order.
The iPhone hasn’t used the lightning connector since the 14. It was big news when they switched to usb-c.
I don’t get your point. Or you essentially re-stated mine.
Yes, they are abusing the people who are there to help them. There is a process to this whole thing, and what you see in front of you (trees on wires, some houses with power and some without) is not the whole story. It’s exceedingly complicated, and being nasty to these workers is not going to get your power on any faster.
There were underground cables flooded and ruined. There were substations underwater. There were transformers smashed and fried. This is a very heavily forested area and wires run for miles through acres of trees, much of it pine that snaps. Those areas are hard to get to. There are also two different power companies and their service areas are oddly overlapped and intertwined.
I get that it’s awful to have no power and often no water along with it, but they are doing the best that they can. Back the eff off already.
You and my mom need to get together for a chat! She can absolutely rant about her experiences with Spectrum (and, before them, Time Warner Cable), including the time they came out to replace a line, left it exposed for over a week, then sliced clean through the landline when they finally showed up to bury it.
You’re lucky, at least you’re being pushed to donate to a recognized charity. Our acting human resources/purchasing agent (we’re too small for a proper HR department) sent out a company-wide email announcing that she’s collecting money for her church, which plans to give the money to a Baptist Mission headed to western North Carolina.
Some of the religious charities actually do have effective disaster relief arms. Baptists on Mission is one of them and is listed on NC VOAD’s page as a legit charity for disaster response. Though there are many others, and it would be wise if your HR person would send VOAD’s page to people rather than cherry-pick her own if she really wants to help people on both ends - matching people who want to donate with those who are in need.
That said, I remember pages-long hateration threads from people toward United Way, as it had managed to infiltrate its way into so many corporate consciousnesses, who then pressured the shit out of employees to donate since it made the companies look good to say they had 100% participation. That right there is some serious bullshit.
Way back in 2002, a group leader where I worked sent out an email asking for volunteers to help build a wheelchair ramp for a disabled person. It was part of a United Way project.
I volunteered. It was estimated to take three days to finish the job (Friday, Saturday, Sunday). The group leader gave out the address of the person’s home. He told everyone to bring whatever tools we think we might need.
I gather a bunch of my tools and headed to the place Friday morning. At least 15 other people from my work showed up.
It was a nice ranch home in the (very) affluent Dayton Ohio suburb of Beavercreek, Ohio. While I was busting out the old concrete steps using a sledge hammer, the homeowner came out to chat with us. He was walking around and smoking a cigarette. He never said anything along the lines of “Thanks” or “I appreciate what you’re doing.” I said he had a nice place, and asked how much land he had. “We have 10 acres.”
That sorta pissed me off. I knew for a fact the area he lived in had very high land values. Why couldn’t he sell a couple acres of land? He could then easily pay for someone to build a ramp. Here I am, busting my ass trying to build this guy a ramp, and he lived in a much nicer place than me.
Around noon some guy from the United Way drove up in a brand new Cadillac, smoking a cigar. I guess he was the project manager, and wanted to see the progress. He didn’t lift a finger to help, nor did he thank us.
After that experience, I never gave another fucking dime to the UW. What a scam.
I must have missed that Pit thread. Was it in Evil Motherfuckers in the News (sometimes I just skim that one)?
My mother had her pacemaker replaced recently. The new one can be monitored remotely, eliminating the need for me to bring her into town for a hospital appointment. The heart clinic had the monitor shipped to me, and I checked it out. The link is via an app, which is compatible with my iPad. Nice!
Not so nice is the response when I tried to download the app - “This app is not available in your country/region”. Apparently it is US only. Now I have to contact the heart clinic to see how this is supposed to work in Canada.
Blame the EU. They basically said if Apple wanted to sell iPhones in Europe, they had to use the same connectors as everyone else, which I think is actually reasonable.