Okay, fair enough. Really, though, if you just say “I’d rather have non-smoking, but smoking is fine if that’s what you have,” my life will be easier. (And everything is downstairs at our property. I have no issue with someone phoning in a reservation and asking for a ground floor room, but it’s kind of annoying when walk-ins drive up to our very obviously single story property and ask for a first floor room. Or better, a second-floor room.)
I’d rather have a real non-smoking room, not a smoking room that had Febreze sprayed in it. 
To the guy in the monster truck behind me this evening:
We just had a surprise snowstorm of about 5 inches, in case you hadn’t noticed. The plows haven’t gone through yet. The roads are a mess of parallel tire tracks; you can’t see where the curb is, let alone the painted lines. I can only assume you saw me fishtailing through that left turn we just made. The roads are bad, see? Bad. Not impassable if you go slower than the speed limit, but your brakes aren’t going to stop you in nearly the distance they do on dry pavement. This goes for large monster trucks as much as it does for sedans.
Please back off so I can at least see your front bumper in my rearview mirror, 'k? Also, turn your highbeams off. They’re not helping. [del]Also, eat a bag of dicks.[/del] Have a nice day.
No problem! We use an ozone machine to “de-smoke-ify” our non-smoking rooms if some moron has smoked in it. (And we charge that moron $150 MINIMUM for the cleaning fee - per the agreement they signed at check-in, because the room has to stay off-market for a bit, and we incur extra cleaning costs - minimum of 2 hours closed for the ozone machine, stripping out and cleaning all linens, curtains, etc. And often, the same treatment for adjacent rooms, since the smell can permeate. There’s a reason that our smoking rooms are isolated in a separate building from our nons! Just ask for a damned smoking room, for pity’s sake! It costs the same as the non-smoking room!)
And Jenaroph, I drive a 4wd truck about half the time, and I still hate most of the morons who drive them. Four-wheel-drive does not equal “my truck can do anything.” Inertia being what it is, my truck won’t stop as fast as your car or motorcycle, thanks to mass. And that headlights in the rearview mirror is highly, highly annoying! (Even in my mini-van, I hate being followed by a truck at night, because I will go nearly blind after a few minutes. At Christmas, hubby and I caravanned to his parents’ house in the truck and the van. After just a few minutes, I had to telephone him and tell him to pass me, because I couldn’t see, even though he had the low-beams on.)
Most people don’t have as much college as I have.
Rethought it: Credit cards + payments on our single car = roughly $2000/month now.
Better than the last time I did that calculation.
Apparently there is some sort of big football game today.
I honestly do not give a fuck.
Chealsea-Liverpool? Don’t worry, it was kinda dull.
Hey morons on another message board,
Stop with the stockpiling shit, you dumb fucks. The world is not going to come to an end in 2012 because Nostradamus and the Aztecs said so. The riots in Egypt are not going to push up the price of shampoo to a hundred bucks a bottle. Wall street may be evil but all you do when you buy sixteen hundred rolls of toilet paper is inflate the profits at Sam’s Club. You don’t need a few dozen loaves of wonder bread that will still taste like cotton and have no nutritional value five years from now. The five hundred dollars you spent extra on groceries would be far better invested in a 6% dividend paying AT&T stock or even a lousy federally insured CD.
More importantly stop buying the canned veggies, the crappy cheap apple juice that’s nothing but sugar, the lousy garlic salt and eat some authentic food. Eat real garlic, good olive oil, cheese that isn’t velveeta and fresh bananas. Try the fresh cilantro and the carembazola. Treat yourselves to a nice bottle of wine and leave the shitty cola on the shelves.
Good food spoils. Stocks and bonds don’t. Good food is meant to be seasonal and delicious. Good food is not the shit you threw in a pot from a can at Aldi’s. Get a financial education instead of trying to figure out how to reconfigure your basement to hold enough rotting food that your grandkids will still be cleaning it out.
I swear some people are too stupid to live.
Dear Veterans’ Administration:
As it has apparently escaped your notice, there are in fact women veterans these days who are in combat, in addition to suffering from things like military sexual trauma. Therefore, constantly deflecting criticism with, “But we don’t need womens’ groups!” is not appropriate. As you are located across the road from an Army base full of female combat veterans and have been located there since my grandfather fought in WWI, your surprise at the existence of women veterans is getting stale. Putting me, first, in a therapy group full of rapists and wife beaters and sexual harassers, and then putting me in another group full of housewives while admonishing me to be ‘tactful’ about the bloody side of war is not ethical on any planet. Fighting insurgents was easier and I think a good case can be made that they’re more honest about their mission in life. What’s yours? Because helping veterans is apparently not what you’re going for.
Also, if you had bothered to read my medical records, you would know that penicillin was a bad choice. I guess that constitutes proof that reading medical records is not a priority.
Dear former shrink of mine: in letting four major medications lapse while you played your little battle of wills with me, you violated major medical ethics for the last time as my doctor. You are now fired and the state medical board will be hearing about this. Any doctor who gave a damn about their patient would not have done this. I hope that if I have anything to do with it that you will not be a doctor much longer.
Finally, VA pharmacist, stop fucking saying you’re sorry for not putting the pain medication for my abscessed tooth in the bag when it’s clear that you 're not going to fix the problem. “Sorry” without making it right is worse than useless. It’s clear you want to make yourself feel better, not right any wrongs committed by your staff—especially after they gave me that patronizing little lecture about how careful and cautious and professional they were with the meds. They were so careful they didn’t give them to me. I once broke my leg in three spots and hobbled around for an hour till my First. Sgt. ordered me to the ER. That did not hurt as bad as that tooth. Let me cordially wish you an unmedicated dental injury, to be treated at the nearest VA emergency room.
Heh, I have managed to not ask for a downstairs room at an all downstairs motel yet. On the other thing, since I really don’t care what sort of room I get as long as I don’t have to climb stairs, I thought I was being nice to the clerk by letting them put me in whatever room was easiest for them. Didn’t realize you get so many jerks complaining about their room!
An online show I like has suddenly decided to require payment. I think this is douchey. It’s something they planned to do for a while, but didn’t tell anyone. And it’s retroactive: meaning that I can’t even view shows that previously were free.
If I’d known from the get go, I wouldn’t have gotten so invested. If they’d even given us a bit of time, or at least offered a free trial for their new system, I’d be okay.
You made a big deal about wanting to get in on Internet TV, and you can’t actually conform to usual boundaries of that medium. The show is so cheap that one commercial would have paid for it. Google ads would have probably given them a profit (even with the millions of people who adblock). You really just did this to fuck your audience. So fuck you.
I note with shadenfreude that their official forum is now full of spam. I mean, pages and pages of it. If they can’t even be bothered to maintain their own site, I’d guess that the previous 10,000 viewers aren’t sticking around and giving them any money.
But I like top-floor views! 
waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
One of my coworkers once disuaded another from writing “room reeked of smoke” on the evaluation form of a hotel. You did ask for a smoking room, yes it smells of smoke! That’s why those of us who ask for non-smoking prefer if those of you who smoke do ask for smoking, ok? Keeps our rooms smoke-smell-free! Thank you, now please don’t complain that you got what you asked for.
Morons,
How about you clear the snow off your roof rather than cry about it collapsing on the news? Your roof can’t take more than five feet of snow piled on it, it’s not magical. And how about we stop building flat roofs on businesses and schools in the snowbelt, huh? And if that’s too hard, then actually expect to need to shovel it off every few weeks. Jesus people, winter and high snow totals aren’t new, so you should know how to deal with this.
They evacuate the entire building because someone’s smoke alarm goes off!? 
The smoke alarm in my kitchen goes off roughly 30% of the time I cook. No, I’m not that bad of a cook–it’s just that my apartment has NO ventilation. No above-stove fan, no fan of any kind, and a super-sensitive smoke alarm that is about 10 feet from the kitchen. The smoke alarm goes off when I fry sausages, if something gets on the burner, or if anything drips on to the bottom of the oven, or if my stir fry gets a little over enthusiastic. It regularly goes off when there is no visible smoke, or even, for that matter, anything burning at all.
If we had that kind of system, we would probably have to be evacuated on a daily basis. :eek:
It is caused by the morons who open a window and then open the hall door to air out the smoke. Drives some of it into the hall where it hits the building wide system, at which point every hall (3-4 levels, 4 wings) has BLASTING LOUD ALARMS and flashing lights going off.
Then they want everyone out until they figure out where it was in the building and deal with it, and that is after the fire department arrives, which took about 15 minutes this time, even though the station is 2 miles from here.
This time I walked around the outside of the building and then went back to my apartment because I didn’t see any smoke or smell anything in my wing. But this time last year I had the misfortune (read: stupidity) to walk down toward the lobby with no keys, glasses or winter coat, and to be forced outside into 10 below temperatures without any of that (Can I at least get my coat? Chorus of “NO. Walk across the street to the building over there.”). I walked around the side of the building to my wing, where there were no police or fire department people, arrived just as someone was walking out, and went back inside. That one was the only possible dangerous alarm, and it was a gas leak in a laundry room in a different wing on the opposite side of the building.
In my old university residence, the smoke detector regularly went off when you boiled water. I’ll admit that I was a pretty crappy cook in first year but I’m pretty sure that I never managed to burn water.
I’ve been away from the Dope for a while - what’s been happening? What’d I miss? Did anyone die?
Computer @ home died as detailed in previous minirants thread. One helluva snow/ice/sleet storm came into the DFW area as detailed, well, everywhere. Even though every single school district, etc. was completely shut down for the entire week, our friggin’ office decided we all need to come slip-sliding in. My job could be done remotely, with no adjustments on how I work or communicate, but noooooo, they won’t let me work from home. I burned some vacation hours because, quite frankly, the roads were im-fucking-passable, and it’s IMHO a crime to require us to come in. I did go in for a while on Thursday, after what was the single most harrowing half hour I’ve spent behind a wheel. The adrenaline coming out of my system felt like it would kill me.
Friday, our pipes at home burst, despite our very best efforts. I spent a big chunk of my “day off” collecting snow in old cat litter buckets so Mr. Horseshoe could melt it in the microwave so we could at least flush the toilets. That was … fun.
Yesterday he plunked down a couple hundred (ouch!) to get a new <The Good Guys> computermachine </The Good Guys>. Plumber came out, after a couple of days of zero water, so life is slightly improved now. But for a while there, I had quite literally joined the ranks of the unwashed masses who don’t avail themselves of the Dope!
Mine in my house does that, too; drives me (and the cats) crazy. I’ve actually brought my hearing protection earmuffs that I use for mowing the lawn into the kitchen so I can keep cooking while the stupid thing is going off. I should probably move it - it’s about five feet from the stove right now - it goes off when I open the oven door when baking, for heaven’s sake.
My Half & Half came out of the carton in chunks this morning. Expiration date: today! I guess they meant it. Had to drink my coffee with that non-fat crap my wife uses, and my coffee tasted like ass. Life is just so hard.
A couple of weeks I grudgingly went to my husband’s family photo shoot - I have zero interest in having any photos taken, and less than zero interest in having family shots taken, but it was a family thing, so I went and tried not to let anyone except my husband know how much I didn’t want to be there, and smiled pretty for the camera. We learned this weekend that the photographer’s memory stick didn’t work, so we have to do it all over again. CRAP! Well, this time it will be at a convenient time for US, instead of the “race around and try to get almost completely across the city at rush hour to do something you don’t want to do in the first place” that it was last time.