You know former boyfriend, I thought we could be friends on Facebook. I thought we were mature adults and we could treat each other with honor and respect. I was wrong. You’re still a smug, obnoxious jerk. Congratulations. You have officially managed to make me feel totally not guilty about the fact that I was a really terrible girlfriend to you at sixteen. Thank god I dumped you. You deserve every single rotten thing I did to you as a teenager. Any marriage of ours would have been over very quickly because you are still fundamentally an asshole with the mindset of a bratty twelve year old and I am a mature adult.
Fuck cars.
I’ve been working a ton of overtime at my job while “auditioning” for a promotion to manager of my department (I got the promotion, yay!). Thanks to all the OT (they haven’t gotten me on salary yet), my last paycheck was the biggest paycheck I have ever received in my life, $1500+. Yay! Now I can get caught up on some stuff, and I can quit pawning my guitars! On payday, I hit the pawnshop and bailed out one of my bass guitars. Except …
The very next day, my car blew up.
Well, the serpentine belt in my 2001 Ford Taurus broke. And, naturally, there was a reason it broke, which my mechanic quickly discovered: my AC compressor had seized up. So, since that one belt runs everything (AC, alternator, water pump, and various other things), the AC compressor had to be replaced.
Final damage: $944.34
Payday was the 7th, and I pay all of my bills other than my rent out of that paycheck. I pay my rent with the paycheck I get on the 22nd of each month. So I got that huge (well, huge for me) paycheck, and thought that I was going to have a big surplus after paying my bills. Nope. After paying all but one of my bills, I was left with something like $985, and after paying my mechanic, I was left with $41 in the bank, and the one bill I still needed to pay is $67 (my Charter Internet bill, and I’m not fucking going without Internet). So I had to go home and grab that bass guitar that I had just bailed out, and also my other bass guitar, and go right back to the pawnshop so that I would have enough money to pay that last bill and have some pocket money for the next week.
However, I will confess to experiencing a feeling of exhilaration while paying my mechanic. The simple fact that I could pay that repair bill without needing to ask for help from my church or my family was extremely satisfying.
But then there is the problem of my previous car. It’s dead. It blew up about six weeks ago. And it has four brand-new tires on it (well, the tires have fewer than 2,000 miles on them), as well as a freshly-replaced wheel bearing. All of which I’m still paying for. I got the new tires in November of last year, and while replacing the tires, the guy at Les Schwab pointed out that the bearing on my right-front wheel was so far gone that he was surprised the whole wheel hadn’t already fallen off. I got the tires and the bearing replacement thanks to my sister, who has a charge account with Les Schwab, and she let me use her account to get the tires and get the work done. I ended up owing her something like $750, and I’m still paying her back. For work on a car that is dead.
So now I’m trying to figure out how to sell those tires. The car itself is going to be sent to the junkyard, because it’s not worth fixing at this point. It won’t run at all, so it’s going to have to be towed. But I’m not sending four brand-new tires to the junkyard. And, unfortunately, those tires won’t fit on my current car. They’re mounted on rims that are 6" wide, and the Taurus has 7" rims. I posted a thread here asking if there was a way to make those tires fit the Taurus, and the answer appears to be, “No.” Though perhaps I will consult with Les Schwab to see if it can work. Otherwise, I’m going to have to figure out how to sell the tires while they’re still mounted on the dead car. Perhaps I can search for other local Ford Contour owners who might need new tires, and arrange for them to come to my apartment and just swap wheels and tires straight across. I need to get my dead Contour out of here - I can’t just leave it sitting, dead, in my apartment building’s parking lot.
I joked with my mechanic that I’m starting to suspect that I radiate some kind of “anti-car field”. Because I keep getting these used cars that run perfectly for about a month, and then something goes catastrophically wrong.
They need a way to prove that you’re still alive and kicking. Think about a database of thousands - millions - of account numbers, just line items in the bank’s books. Not to be too morbid about it, but a non-zero amount of those account holders will keel over and only be found by the smell.
And I think you replied to the completely wrong thread.
giggles Nope. Starts at #237. Maybe missed a page reading?
And, sorry about your car issues - sucks it does. But! Congrats on your promotion! Here’s to larger paychecks to come!
Check your couch and chairs under the cushions and in the seams. We don’t eat on our couches but cutlery still ends up there. Kids do mysterious things…
I am the foodservice manager in a retirement home. The residents here complain to me, “Why don’t we have spoons?!”
One week ago, we received a shipment of brand new spoons. Enough spoons to make sure every table is set properly, and then some.
One week later, we don’t have enough spoons.
Attention old people: STOP CARRYING THE FUCKING SPOONS BACK TO YOUR APARTMENTS! LEAVE THE FUCKING SPOONS ON THE FUCKING TABLE SO THAT WE CAN WASH THEM AND RESET THE FUCKING TABLES PROPERLY!
Likewise, the glasses. We’re not in the middle of the fucking Great Depression any more. If you can’t finish that last 1/4 of your tiny glass of orange juice, you don’t have to save it. Leave it on the damned table, and we’ll take care of it. Stop taking the fucking glasses back to your apartments!
My computer died today. I brought it to a repair place to see if the files could be retrieved. The guy plugged it in and it booted fine. He explained that the processor fan was choked with dust and the microprocessor had shut down due to heat. I brought it back home and attempted a startup, only to find that he had left the dust inside the heat sink (he had also declined to sell me a can of compressed air). I removed the heat sink and fan from the motherboard and cleaned the dust out.
The fatal problems arose when I tried reinstalling the heat sink and fan. The plastic bits that held the assembly tight to the MB (and the heat sink to the microprocessor) had deformed, and there was no getting it back on. I THOUGHT it was back on, but the two-second power down when I tried to boot up revealed that I had been mistaken.
Oh, well. I had been resigned to an eventual upgrade for the past year, since support for WinXP ended, so I bit the bullet and went down to the Goodwill Computer store, where I scored an adequate used low-profile machine with Windows 7. On my way home, I stopped at another repair place and arranged for my old HD to be copied to an external HD. Then I took my new computer home, set it up, and prepared to log back onto the internet.
Imagine my surprise when the computer could not recognize the wireless USB adapter. The old one had been periodically returning the same fault during the past couple of weeks, as well as sometimes dropping the internet connection and reverting from my home network to “Access Point,” so I thought I’d pick up another adapter on my way home from work in the morning. As a “just in case” measure, I decided to seee if I could download the driver for my Linksys WUSB11 onto the micro-SD card in my tablet, and transfer it to the desktop. Looking up the device on Google, my first hit was a message board poast asking for assistance with a Windows 7 machine not recognizing the WUSB11.
Turns out this piece of gear is only compatible with my OS if a very complex and dicey procedure is followed in installing the driver (to tell you the truth, I feel a little betrayed that it’s not plug-and-play, the way it was for XP). And apparently, if it’s a 64-bit system, it’s not compatible at all. :smack:
Now, I don’t know for certain whether I’ve got the 64-bit system, but I’m disinclined to take the chance.
Grr.
What the fuck are you talking about? Her post clearly shows she is replying to the post she quotes, post 249 from THIS thread.
Are you new here? Do you not know how the quote function works, and that that little blue arrow in her quoted text takes you to the post she’s replying to?
No, I’ve been here for years, but I completely brain-farted with that post. Mea culpa.
Ugh internet dating sucks. Women say they want to go out again then just don’t get back to you at all. I can see not wanting to say that face to face, but if I ask again just say sorry not interested. If need be block the damn user after that so you don’t need to get any crappy messages from them.
It really sucks when I get along great with someone, they even suggest doing things in the future, hold your hand when walking, and then nothing. Just fucking say sorry, I’m not really interested. The funny thing is the last woman I went out with really has written articles and edited books on dating and sex in the internet age! Of all the damn people she should know better.
And no, this isn’t some “I’m a nice guy why can’t I find a woman” rant, it’s a be polite rant. The women who do say they’re not interested get my respect and I tell em good luck to ya.
Eight hundred bucks out of pocket for my daughter’s braces today. I’m trying to be grateful we don’t have to pay the entire four thousand it really costs . . .
Fuck you, chipotle*. Go away. You’re gross, you smell funny, and you show up everywhere I go. You are an embarrassment to lovely jalapenos everywhere. Why must you ruin once delicious food like tex mex burgers and taco salad? You’re that loud smelly guy who comes to every party but nobody knows who invited him or why. You suck, chipotle. That’s why nobody bothers to even say your name right.
*chipotle. Not Chipotle. Them I love. Yummy burritos. 
Grumpy Cat
I posted this earlier, apparently unnoticed. Found out in the last couple days uncle has pancreatic cancer which has spread to the brain, father’s initial neurological diagnosis indicates dementia, cousin has breast cancer in both breasts and refused masectomy. Friend’s biopsy went well but no results yet. Somebody please call me and tell me about someone who isn’t dying.
Jeez, Toxgoddess, that is several metric tons of shit to have land on you all in a few days. 
I don’t even know what to say that won’t sound incredibly trite, but for what it’s worth, you have my sympathy and your friends and family have my best wishes that something happens to help.
This is probably from people taking their cup of coffee or tea back to finish later, with a spoon in the cup. That’s why spoons, but not forks or knives. It’s kind of inevitable, so you have to deal with it.
One possibility: Announce a contest, to deal with The Mystery of the Vanished Spoons. Ask everyone to search & find (don’t say ‘return’) our missing spoons, and turn them in at afternoon break, with a prize for whomever finds the most spoons. Announce it at breakfast, for that afternoon (so nobody can hoard extra spoons each day to win this – even old people have cheaters). Have some colorful posters to put up around the building, special patches for your staff to wear, etc. – make it a big deal.
That afternoon, have a staffer count turned-in spoons and post on a bulletin board the names & numbers, then make a big hoopla of announcer the runners-up and the winner, and having them come forward to get their prize. And the prize? – go to Goodwill, and get some fancy spoon, quite different from the ones you use. Maybe those ones with colored ceramic handles, blue for the first place winner, red for runner-up, etc. mayber your janitor is there with an engraving tool to inscribe their name on the spoon. That becomes their special personal spoon, and your staff makes sure to set that one at the place where they normally sit every day. (Or maybe it’s easier that they use it today, then take it home to keep in their own apartment.)
End result is that you got lots of spoons back, for little cost, nobody is upset by accusations of taking spoons, and the residents had something exciting for that day, and to talk about for more days.
Note – you might have to do it again 6 months later.
If you are just going to junk it anyway, why not see if the junkyard will tow it and then take the tires off after it gets to the junkyard. They wouldn’t need them anyway once it hits the junkyard. I wouldn’t think they would mind as they will probably make enough off the remaining car(cass) (heh) to make it worth their while. You may have to take them rims and all though, but you could probably sell them as a unit.
That fucking sucks. I’m sorry.
Click Start then Control Panel then System and it will tell you if it is 32 or 64 bit.