It's time for June mini rants. Be the second...

The BBQ Pit
101

Too late to edit, but I remembered what I actually came in here to rant about!

In April, I had to have my entire engine replaced as a result of me being a dumbass and throwing a rod. It seemed to work just fine after that, no problems.

Well, as it happens, my AC hasn’t worked since I got the car in March of last year. Well, I eventually figured out the problem (simple electrical issue, needed a new realy) and it was working right in time for the first real warm days fo the summer in early June. That is to say…it kind of worked. It was cool, but not as cool as it should be…barely kept the car cool. And then, while I was driving around and stopped at a red light, noticed the AC stopped being even a tiny bit cool, and went to warm…and my engine temp gauge was creeping up much faster than ity should…from barely above halfway to the redline in about a minute! :eek:

I turned off the AC, opened the windows, and cranked the heat to keep my engine from overheating. It worked, and it went back to a respectable temperature. When I got home, I popped the hood and took a peak inside…hmm, something isn’t quite right…the radiator fan isn’t spinning…THE RADIATOR FAN ISN’T SPINNING?!

I then looked a little more closely at it and saw that it wasn’t plugged in…christ. A few seconds more searching and I found the plug for it drapped over the battery mount, so that the actual “plug” end was dangling down below the battery. I plugged it back in, restarted my car, and voila, fan’s a spinnin’, AC a workin’, and car no overheatin’.

But to the garage that forgot to plug in the radiator fan after replacing the engine: fuck you! If I hadn’t been as observant as I was, or if it was a little warmer that day, my car could have overheated, seized up the engine and required another replacement. Between that, the waaaaaaaaay underquote of the estimate (quoted me $2000, was much closer to $3000,) and the absurd amount of time it took to do the repair work (over a month,) you can rest assure I will never frequent your services again, and advise all my friends to avoid you as well.

102

I feel your pain, bouv.
Many, many years ago I had to have the transmission replaced in my hoopty. Picked it up, got on the freeway, was in a rush to get to work.
Car died.
Managed to pull off to the side, sat there for a few minutes not knowing what to do. It was my first break down, prior to cellphones being a common thing, and it was 95F. Oh, and it was during rush hour and the nearest place to walk to was over a mile away.
A woman eventually stopped, offered to drive me to a place with a phone. Called the repair shop - the pissed and moaned the entire time about having to come out and look at the car. They pulled up to where I was waiting, not in a tow truck, mind you. In a broke down El Camino. No room for me - uh, no, move your asses over, I’m not just handing my keys to you guys.
Turns out they failed to put the transmission fluid cap back on. They told me they would drive me to a phone and I could call for a tow. Nope. They then found a stick on the side of the road, crammed it onto the transmission, filled it with fluid, and told me “It should hold”. Oh. Hell. No. They ended up driving it back to their shop.
They tried to charge me for yet another transmission, stating I should have looked. My dad, who supplied their business with the majority of their new parts, put the kibosh on that.
FWIW, the only gripe I have today is just that it’s miserably friggin’ hot and I don’t want to put the AC in, as it’s supposed to cool down later this week. The AC goes in the window where we get cross ventilation. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.

103

Ah! Yes, I agree that the one with all the stuff on it was a much better fit.

104

Bwahaha. Dumbass spammers.

When I checked my mail about 2 minutes ago, I had an email entitled “For Your Consideration” allegedly from “George Lucas”.

Right. Sure thing. George Lucas, who doesn’t know me from Adam, is emailing me with something important.

Delete without opening.

105

Goddamn my landlord! I rent a duplex. He is responsible for the yard work. Last fall he planted some nice stuff beneath our front windows. This is a maybe ten foot stretch of yard, maybe three feet deep that runs between the two front porches. Last week his guys pulled the weeds on my neighbor’s half! My half? Three foot tall weeds! Are your guys stupid? Or lazy? Or not well paid by you and they don’t give a shit so they leave half of the job done? Why why why can you NOT do anything right the first fucking time? If they couldn’t get it done that same day, why have they not been back in a week?? Three foot tall weeds!

106

Cheese department, Daimaru Namba, Osaka.

You stock cheese from all around the world. Rare, exotic soft cheeses, hundreds of Italian hard cheeses, even plain old mozzarella. I wonder what you do with all those cheese that you don’t sell because no one every buys them. Blue cheese? No one buys it. Pultost? Not selling well right now in Japan. Three of your staff were shadowing me as I walked around - I think they were just excited to have a potential customer in the vicinity.

And you would have had a customer too, if you’d only had a block of plain old aged cheddar. I am a man of simple tastes, I just want some good cheddar. But your buyers are SHIT! You never have any cheddar. And no one else does either (well, hardly anyone, and I have to go miles out of my way to get it).

I have explained this too your staff, but I know they don’t get paid to think or to report this kind of thing to management. You are missing a staple of any cheese shop! It’s like an ice-cream shop having no chocolate ice-cream.

107

Fuck the braintrusts at the post office (on a national level) who decided that computers could sort so much mail, and then they could cut costs by making carriers spend lots more hours on the street delivering rather than sorting in the office. That might be fine for people with driving routes, but that just means that carriers who do walking routes will be spending a few hours more every day on the streets, lugging around a ~50 lb bag and walking many more miles each day. My husband’s route had 40% more mail added to it. People will get more injuries - including faster need for joint replacements - by doing this level of work.

My husband got back from vacation yesterday to his first day on the new revised, lengthened route. The computers had set up his route in a back-assward way, which he couldn’t deviate from, and he called in to the office to tell them that he was going to run deep into overtime - which is fine because he’s on the OT list, but he was worried it might run over 10 hours. The office said everyone was running behind and they’d do what they could for help.

He felt bad about this. He was probably moving faster than he should have been in over 90 degree heat, and was chugging Gatorade and water. Our house is just off his route, so he spent his lunch period (30 min) in air conditioning, trying to get his heart rate down.

Right after I got home from work, I got a text from him saying he was driving himself to the local ER. I grabbed my purse and walked there (about 15-20 minutes). His muscles had been spasming heavily, he felt weak, his head had been pounding, and his heart rate was through the roof. They pumped him full of 2 liters of saline and did a bunch of tests. He’s going to see his regular doctor today to make sure it was just heat exhaustion, as he had some tachycardia on the EKG, and some kidney stress on the urine (IIRC - they also drew blood) test.

He got out of the ER after 9 pm. We grabbed a taxi over to the post office so he could retrieve his car. The supervisor who’d grabbed his truck and dropped off workman’s comp paperwork at the hospital was still there, as people were still coming back from their routes at that time of night. These were people on a 8-5ish schedule.

And honey? Please don’t do that again. I know you do care about your job, your supervisors - who had no say in the implementation of this massive route change - and your customers, and you wanted to try to help. You had no idea people would be getting back 4 hours later than normal and thought you were just lagging behind because you’d just been on a week of vacation. The machine-read EKG said “cannot rule out inferior infarct, age undetermined” (possible heart attack, unknown when it might have happened) and that’s why I stuck the post-it on the printout asking your regular doctor to see if he thinks that’s really the case. (Machine-read EKGs aren’t necessarily the best interpretations; you need a doctor to look at it.) If the post office is going to work you so much harder now, you need to look out more for yourself.

108

“Shut that bloody shamisen player up!”

Sorry. Python moment.

109

Miniest of minis, but … I wanted cheese and crackers to snack on at work. I bought a thingie of Laughing Cow cheese. All well and good … but sharper minds than mine may notice that I missed something there.

Now I’m staring at a wedge of cheese and wondering if I can somehow smear it onto a couple of cornflakes.

110

That stuff is perfectly good all on its own. I vote for just eat it plain.
Went to the grocery store for a few basic things. Remembered everything EXCEPT the main reason we went there - charcoal.
Have been very tired lately, even after getting decent sleep. I just feel weary. Well today I also feel queasy and I have what feels like menstral cramps even though I’m nowhere near being done with the pill for the month. I have to take a test today and all I want to is climb back into bed and sleep. I can barely keep my eyes open and I got 8 hours sleep and have only been up for 2.5 hours.

111

That really sucks, Ferret. Your job shouldn’t kill you in this day and age (especially because of management incompetence).

Day 3 of my cold - still feel like shit. Out of fruit juice - have to get some groceries. It’s moved into my lungs now, so I guess I’ll be driving instead of having a nice walk.

112

Just had a mini panic attack. Finished taking my test and submitted it. Went back in to review my score. It said 67! No way in hell I only got a 67 on that I thought and started getting pissed about these stupid computer tests scoring wrong. Then I clicked once more and the 67 became 67/70 - in other words, 95.7. :smack:

113

Hey, that’s awesome! Congratulations!

My ridiculous mini-rant of the day:

My husband claims to sleep lightly. Very lightly. However, somehow he manages to sleep through a parade going down the middle of our street last year. And last night/this morning, we had an earthquake. Granted, it wasn’t a shake-the-mirror-off-the-wall earthquake, but the house was fucking moving! At the start, it felt like a bus had hit the house. And he still didn’t wake up. Light sleeper my ass.

114

I had too many margaritas last night and now I’m grouchy.

115

Not only did you completely ignore the whole ‘How long do you want to keep it’ convo at the beginning of the session, but you cut, blew dry and straightened my curly hair BEFORE CUTTING IT INTO A STYLE I WILL NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS BE ABLE TO APPROXIMATE AT HOME BECAUSE YOU BASED IT OFF STRAIGHT HAIR THAT I DO NOT HAVE!!.

AND, it looked like shit even after your spent an hour trying to fix it.

So, now I’m home, wearing a hat, with hair shorter than my husband’s.

HOW is this haircut even CLOSE to ‘Shoulder length, but up to chin length if needed; absolutely no shorter than that’???

On top of which, for some inexplicable reason, you have the hair on the sides way longer…not to chin length, even, but…now that it’s curly, it sticks out like bozo the clown and there is not a FUCKING GODDAMN THING I CAN DO ABOUT IT!!!

Oh, let’s add the fact that it looked like hell even when it WAS straight.

signed,

Wearing Hats For the Next Three Years, GODDAMNIT

116

I hope you didn’t pay for it. I also hope you complained to management.

117

I mean, she’s awful, miserable, deserves a punch in the face, and you certainly shouldn’t have paid or anything like that. . . but why didn’t you get up and leave after she started straightening your hair? Or when she started trying to lop off 7 inches of your hair? Hindsight and all of that, I suppose. Take some biotin- your hair will grow back much, much faster.
I’d like to mini rant about my “friend.” Friend is very competitive with me-- literally goes so far as to EXACTLY copy the outfits I buy and wears them EXACTLY the same way, wears her hair exactly like mine, and- most of all- has decided she has to bang every single guy I do. Literally, the last three? Yeah, she’s banged them.

I’m not a jealous girl, so my problem isn’t that. Really. I promise. It’s more that her bunny boiler behavior has gotten out of control! All of those little things from before? Those are weird but I can let them go. . . but this? This is inexcusible.

What did she do, you ask? I finally met a guy who I clicked with. See, I usually get terribly bored talking to guys and lose interest pretty fast, but this guy was different- we had a ton in common, we could talk for hours, he was just generally fabulous. I really did love talking to him. The only downside? He’s in Vegas, but I’m there every two weeks for work, so no biggie. We went on a date and it was literally perfect, I had an amazing time. But then, after a few days, he basically stopped contacting me, which was really weird because for the weeks leading up to that, it had been non stop texts, phone calls, emails, etc.

Lo and behold, it turns out that my friend was the reason for this. You see, that next weekend after my date, she went to Vegas. She went to Vegas and even though I explicitly told her to not to, she contacted him. Now, you see, the week before, she had told me, “You better hurry up and fuck him, because if you don’t I will! hahahaha!” I very calmly explained to her that this guy is different, he’s not just a hook up, so she needed to back off. She said of course, she was just joking, blah blah blah. But apparently not. I don’t know what she said to him, but the other day he finally texted me back and said that my friend REALLY weirded him out because she’s obviously super competitive with me and he is not some trophy to be won or some check mark on someone’s list. He then said, “This is EXACTLY why I don’t date girls in their 20s, immaturity.”

Ouch. I pride myself on not being quite as immature as the average 25 year old (this is why I usually date men, like this guy, in their early to mid 30s, in fact). But what makes that sting even worse is that I had nothing to do with the immaturity here– it was my fucking 34 year old friend! :mad: I get where he’s coming from; I mean, if I were in his position I would be hella weirded out, too (and that’s without me evening knowing what she said or did). But man, this fucking sucks.

What pisses me off even more is that when I brought up to my friend that I found out she had been messaging him, she lied. Three times. Three different blatant lies. And when I called her out on each one, she would just change the subject.

Fuck her. Seriously.

118

Fucking crackheads broke into my car last night and stole my cheapass $49 Walmart stereo! Grrr! Bastards! I hope you burn your stupid lips on your crackpipe and then they get infected with syphillis while performing blowjobs on congressmen!

119

How did your friend get dude’s contact info, Diosa? Is he a mutual friend or something? I’m prepared to be very sympathetic if she stole it from you or something, but my sympathy drops way off if you gave her the info and told her not to use it (when you had every reason to believe she would).

My tiny little rant - I really want people on tv to stop saying, “Chop chop,” when they want something done quickly. It just gets right up my nose. If someone said that to me in real life, I’d want to punch them.

120

DiosaB. you oughta re-read what you told Taomist and then apply it to your own rant. I mean, you can’t be that shitty a human being that this is the best you can do in the friend department. You need to do the friendship equivalent of getting up out of the chair and walking out.

Sorry about the dude, though. Maybe he’ll come around. (Then again, if he’s punishing you for a situation you didn’t cause and had nothing to do with … well, let’s just say I had an ex just like that. Hey - is this guy blonde with blue eyes, big hockey fan?)