Amen! I stopped in Rome for a few days earlier this year on my way to Cyprus with my wife and we took ONE two-hour tour through Viator. Now I’m continuously bombarded with special offers for tours in Rome, especially ones that are only good for the next two days. Yeah. “Honey, if we plan another trip to Rome for tomorrow we can each save 15 euros on a tour!”
The dental shenanigans continue! Found out today that my former office failed to transfer all of my records to the new place, despite receiving a signed form from me requesting that every bit on information – even my financial history – get transferred to the new office. People at the old office claim that they typically only send the past few years of a patient’s records. :rolleyes: Asshats. They did succeed in transferring part of my mother’s records – along with some other patient’s x-rays. WTF.
Speaking of my poor mother…her last experience at the old dentist’s office involved replacing a filling, and placing a filling near a crown. No biggie, right? She ended up going to the new dentist today because a crown on that side of her mouth didn’t feel right. Turns out that not only does she also have a defective crown – as in, it fits so poorly that it could come off at any time, which is why it felt ‘wrong’ to her – the replacement fillings are of very poor quality, to the extent that the new dentist referred to them as patchwork. And to make matters worse, they’ve apparently found decay under some other troublesome crowns that has been there for quite some time. :mad: I’ll be very interested to see if the old office manages to find Mom’s records…something tells me those old x-rays might be gone.
This is work related but also personal and pretty mini so I guess it goes here.
I feel like I’m drowning at work.
Nothing is ever complete, nothing is ever right. We need to spend our capital but only on the right things. Be realistic but your best isn’t good enough. I have a project to modify racks for our DC. This is difficult and I understand that we have to do this on the weekends to minimize impact to normal operations and to do it safely. So I have to work every weekend until its done. And the warehouse is like “I can only give you 5 locations at a time.”
So I’m stressed and I’m drowning. I’m eating my stress so I’ve gained another 20 lbs.
I can’t keep doing this, can I?
My Tale of Pizza Woe
When I was in college in Orono, ME, Pat’s Pizza was the balls. They delivered to the dorms, they were cheap and they were good. They have since franchised. In fact, when I first moved south after college, they had opened a location a half-mile from my apartment. Score.
Cut to twenty-five years and many franchises later and they are opening a new location practically across the street from my house. “Coming Soon,” said the banner … for four months. Finally they open and I’m excited. However, that first experience was not a good one. I’m off the red meat again, have been for quite some time now, but I love a good chicken pizza, and they had tons of veggie and poultry options. I ordered a chicken pesto pizza, large type. Mistake. Pat’s is famous for their thin crust. Pesto is famous for its oil. The twain don’t mix. It was basically a pizza donut as the center mushed right into a green mess in the box. Strike one.
Okay, fine. Large is not the way to go with Pat’s anyway. They are famous for their 9-inchers. I’ll stick to that. Second time around I order a chicken alfredo pizza. Here’s the thing - my usual go-to pizza is Amato’s chicken alfredo, which is delicious, so they had a high bar to clear. They failed miserably. It was as bland as a kitchen sponge. The chicken tasted like ham; I’m pretty sure it was shipped cooked and frozen and then thawed. No seasoning whatsoever. The alfredo sauce was utterly tasteless and the entire thing was under cooked. Strike two.
Then, the coup-de-gras. I figured I’d give them a break. One chicken parm sub, please. How hard could that be? Impossible, apparently. They told me it would be ready in fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes later I paid for the sub and I was told it was still in the oven and it would be a few minutes. Fair enough - make sure this one is cooked through, please. So I wander into the bar and watch a little Australian Rules Dwarf Tossing or whatever they had on before I realized I was just in everybody’s way, so I sat back down on a chair near the take out window. And I waited, and waited, and then I waited some more. Finally, I got up and, struggling to get anyone’s attention, said, “Excuse me, any idea about that chicken parm?” The gaggle of teen-boppers behind the counter look at me like I was shining head lights into their eyes before one of them blurted, “It’s in the oven.” At that point I was fuming and literally had to put into place my coping exercises. Deep breath, count to ten. As I’m doing that, a woman whom I believe was a manager says to me, “Hon?” Not, “Sir,” “Hon.” “Did you give a name when you ordered?” “Yeah, I did. I think. It was so fucking long ago.” No, I didn’t say that, but after a minute she opened the cash registered and handed me my money back, plus a dollar extra ($9 sub, she gave me a ten-spot), and said, “I’m going to get your sandwich right now.” So I sat back down and waited, and waited. This time after about a minute, I stood and loudly announced, “Well, fuck this place.” Strike three.
I went to Amato’s and got a delicious chicken parm sub for only seven bucks.
TL;DR: Yelp review of the new Pat’s Pizza - Fuck that place.
Just got an email saying I need to re-enrol on my college course for next year. It’s for the whole college network, so there’s a link to a bunch of options, which I should be able to select from and get a PDF of the info for my course.
Follow it, there’s the course, there’s the PDF link… for year 1. I need year 2. Year 2 is not there.
So I send off a grumpy message, and rummage through the site a bit, as there’s another course taught alongside mine. Sure enough, details for my course are listed as one of the variants on the PDF from their course, year 2.
:rolleyes: a bit, and follow the link to re-enrol. This leads to a page which says ‘to guarantee your place, please complete this survey by August 2017’.
More :rolleyes:.
The survey is basically residence info, contact details and next of kin, checking it’s not changed, plus some questions which appear to be basically demographic info, including 2 pages of questions about current employment. Check all the options about my job, how long have I been there, will it continue through the school year (yes), number of hours per week, blah blah…
Next page (check one) Are you; Unemployed and looking for work? or Unemployed or not looking for work?
How long have you been unemployed? 3-6 months? 6-12 months? 12-18 months? 18+ months?
Both compulsory, I cannot proceed to the next page without picking an option :smack:
And, for the punchline, when I then went back and double checked the info PDF, it turns out they’ve changed the days; last year classes were Mon-Thurs. They said they were thinking of condensing it to 3 days to make it simpler for those travelling some distance (rural campus, some people drive hours to get there). They have condensed it, but instead of dropping the Monday or Thursday like they said was the plan, they’ve switched it to Weds-Fri. I work Fridays. That’s the day I was planning on working year round. They know I work Fridays and I was assured that would work fine with the course, as were several other people. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to switch days at work.
I might need to go back and redo the employment information…
My colleague is driving me absolutely batshit. He’s a very competent man, he’s also hilarious and we share a similar sense of humor and I couldn’t have asked for an easier counterpart. BUT, since this is mini-rants…he is obsessed by tiny, stupid things and routinely encourages me to not be helpful to avoid adding work to our plate and it drives me insane.
For example - status reports. We co-own a product, but I own the strategy and development, he owns the day to day. For some reason it is very important to him that we provide the minimum information required. He also doesn’t think we should have more than one slide, even though the required information doesn’t fit on one (he also doesn’t want to change his format). This was so important to him that he IM’d me and emailed me every day for almost a week after I sent him a report, asking if my slide was what our boss told me to do (it was). We finally figured it out, but the amount of energy this guy spent on it was mind-boggling to me.
Also, he’s a “not-my-jobber.” I’m not. And if I answer a question about a product that’s related to mine where there’s substantial overlap with ours, he will IM me and email me to caution me about the dangers of doing other people’s jobs. I don’t consider it me doing someone else’s job answering a question to which I know the answer and copying the expert, requesting that future questions be directed there. But apparently handling it that way and being helpful are tantamount to volunteering for someone else’s work. Eh, whatever.
I still really like working with the guy. He’s like a disgusting older brother I never had and I keep reminding myself that he’s probably thinking something similar about me for whatever reason.
It doesn’t sound mini at all.
Mother-in-law rant. She wants the Call-a-Ride (Paratransit) bus to come pick her up at the house. I think she can walk to the bus stop, but at this point I’m just keeping quiet on this and many topics. She comes and asks me for a ride to City Hall because she says that she has filled out the online application and now they need to see her in person. This is where I should have stopped and sanity checked, well, everything, but I didn’t. We get into the car, drive downtown, park at City Hall, and I ask her where she needs to go next.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I don’t know what that letter said, so I just came here. They will tell me.”
After several minutes of tense negotiations, I establish that they didn’t send her anything telling her to go to City Hall, and she just decided to go there. I call the office myself and get the correct information and we go back home. They do everything online and would never ask a disabled person to come down to an office.
She also wanted to go a different grocery store, because the one near our house doesn’t have what she likes, and a bookstore, so she can go shopping. I noped out on both of those.
I’m hitting my MiL wall.
I made cheesecake today. Yay! You might say. Oh, no. No. Nope.
I went to get the cooled cheese cake to add the topping and return to the fridge.
Dropped that sonofabitch right in the middle of my kitchen floor. Aaaarrrggghhh. 4 pets got a fancy treat, I got to lick the bowl before baking.
I think I’m done with gardening. Two of my many cucumber vines had finally started producing; there were three cucumbers in particular that were ready to be harvested by this weekend. Since I hire someone to take care of my yard this time of year (please don’t judge – my house is on the main road into the neighborhood, and our HOA is very touchy about appearance), I make sure that any gardening activity is kept to an otherwise bare part of the yard so it won’t interfere with their activities. They still managed to mutilate the two largest cucumbers today. I have no idea what they were doing over there…there’s not even any grass over there, and I weed by hand. We’ve had so much rain lately that my other vines are starting to rot. I ended up pulling 1/4 of them when I got home today.
While I was pulling up rotten and dying growth, I did notice one huge-leafed vine that looked suspiciously like kudzu. I started cutting it out of the surrounding growth, until I encountered a flower. The damn thing was apparently just a morning glory with oversized leaves.
Did the leaves exceed the maximum size permitted by your HOA’s CC&Rs? Yeah, it’s probably just as well you took it out…
XD I didn’t think to check!!!
Fun HOA story: the house behind me has huge trees in the front yard; it’s pretty much impossible to get grass to grow under them. HOA repeatedly fined the previous owner of the house for failure to maintain the grass in his front yard, and also cited him for failure to aerate. I think he ended up laying down a bunch of mulch, and he found some kind of ground cover that would grow there. Bizarrely enough, to my knowledge they never cited him for the metric shit-ton of junk he used to keep in his backyard, which was visible from both my street and his.
Wow.
I went to UMO also, and way back when Pat’s was indeed the balls. My now-husband (then RA 
Dunn Hall) and I went there on our 1st date. Loved that grubby little hole in the wall!
Wait, did you just brag that you married a guy who used to be an RA in a dorm?
Although, I met this girl, and when she mentioned that she used to sell hot dogs in the King Dome… well, we’ve been married thirty years now.
He didn’t last long as RA. He had the misfortune to be one the year Maine raised the drinking age to 21, and the guys’ side of the floor was just insane. We were 4th floor, no elevator. The day he found muddy, knobby tire tracks up the stairwell, down the hall, and on the walls of the bathroom was the day he quit.
He was also the reason I passed chemistry, since he was a TA too …
That was 1980/81. God we were such babies back then.
I got a book and the idea is that it helps you find and pursue joy, right? So, I’m looking over these lists and I’m thinking to myself “can I just write not applicable?”
It’s possible this book may have been a bad idea.
I cut that book up for decopauge. It made me happy, happy and joyful.
A valid suggestion. I may take up decopauge.
My mother is in the cardiac unit of the hospital with a heart valve issue. I know this because I just opened up Facebook and saw a post by my nephew’s wife that says “Please pray for Mrs. Hedonia, she is in the cardiac unit of the hospital with a heart valve issue.”
It must have happened sometime between Friday ( the last time I talked to Mom) and today. OK, I know this is stressful for my family members that live with and close to Mom, but someone could’ve picked up the phone. Like I’m going to do now.
Just remember, throwing it at them won’t help. It’s unlikely to hit, too.
I hope she’ll be better soon.