TxDOT’s snow/ice plan was/is simple: It’ll melt tomorrow. Same for the counties and cities comprising the D/FW metro area.
They are evidently slowly waking up to the fact that somehow, in some mysterious magical and certainly unpredictable way, the climate is changing and them actually being able to pre-treat and post-plow roads everywhere is now a required part of their repertoire.
Of course the idea of raising taxes to pay for this new duty is beyond inconceivable. So they’ll cut routine maintenance instead.
I’m so glad I don’t work anymore where Dallas’ weather fate exerted so much influence on my life.
Why do I need a dog? Because there’s snow on the ground.
“Huh?” you say.
You see if someone has a dog & you see yellow snow in their yard, you just assume the dog peed there; especially if you see doggy footprints in the snow, no questions asked. I know your next question - “Why were you trying to make yellow snow, Spidey?”
Because I turned off the water. I turned off the water because the extended bitter cold & the piss (ha!) poor pipe placement (I luvs me some good alliteration!) in my house resulted in frozen pipes, which I had resolved but the pressure caused the water meter to fail, so I turned off the water rather than have a cool, new indoor swimming pool. I was thinking that peeing outside is much easier than pouring gallons of bottled water into the toilet to flush, but I don’t have a dog & don’t want the neighbors to think I’m a uncivilized savage! That’s why I need a dog!
Part B: I was speaking to a buddy who is a plumber last night; I even told him it was coming out of the meter; he said it was mine to fix & not the water company’s issue & that he would come by in the morning. He came by this morning & was here for 30 seconds & said, “Call the water company. Bye”. They were here within an hour or so, but they could have been here within an hour or so last night!
Feeling weepy today. Work is overwhelming, it’s so complicated and there’s so much of it and it just keeps coming. Everyone’s in the same boat so don’t bother asking for help.
A couple of weeks ago my little crooked dog fell and hurt himself. I thought we were going to lose him, but he’s made a miraculous recovery. He’s so tough! However, it wasn’t a complete recovery, and he’s lost control of his back end. He needs constant supervision because he falls over and can’t stand up. Plus he’s frequently incontinent. So no one’s getting a full night’s sleep anymore and everything’s a mess. He’s still happy as a clam and I’m so grateful to have a little more time with him that I don’t want to complain, but it does kind of seem like the weather sucks, and the news sucks, and life in general sucks right now.
The latest Windows upgrade did something to kill .pdf printing with my Brother laser printer, help forums have been useless, so I feel your pain.
My general mini-rant for technology…my monitor can refresh a ridiculously hi-res image in millions of colors a hundred times/sec over wireless, I should be able to have my printer start spitting out the Sistine Chapel ceiling in microseconds. Why does my damn printer (and Windows print spooler) still consider a simple b/w Scooby Doo coloring page to be a Sisyphusean boulder requiring 10 minutes of all of its CPU brains to reach the conclusion “yeah, I’ll print that”.
You definitely have a screwed-up something in there somewhere. I’ve got all the latest updates to Win 11. And Brother MFC-L3780CDW color laser printer/scanner.
I just tested printing a PDF using Adobe Acrobat Reader. I chose one middle page with color from a 14 page document. Once I clicked [print] on the print dialog it took about 3 seconds for Acrobat to do its thing & close the dialog. About 5-6 seconds later I heard the printer start from a dead sleep in the other room. By the time I walked the whopping 20 feet, the paper was out of the chute and ready to read.
I got an email from my work system that my bank account information had been changed. Logged in to see that the checking account listed for direct deposit was not my account.
Went to HR immediately. He said he received an email from me asking him to change my info, he sent an email back to me confirming some info, he changed the info. It was still going through verification at the bank, so it probably never would have processed when it was discovered I wasn’t the signatory on the fraudulent account.
But damn, man! That’s so incredibly shitty.
Ugh, I’m sorry. Work stress is hard and sucks. Keep on swimming. I’m rooting for you.
You need to immediately do some serious sleuthing on how the imposter was able to send email that your HR department believed was from you.
That could just be that your HR is clueless and didn’t think to look closely at the email address of the person who sent that request. The far worse alternative is that that bad guy has access to your real email account. Which means they can pose as you to everywhere you do business with.
He said my name was hiding the source. It’s sort of an Outlook thing, where instead of showing the email address, it shows the name. I think that’s what he’s talking about. The actual source was a different email. He has reached out to our IT company to see what they can do. We have all kinds of security issues due to ancient technology.
Perhaps I should change my login info just in case.
(I told him no way would I send bank account information in an email. He said “you’d be surprised.”)
You’d also think they’d have some kind of official documentation with HR to fill out, they wouldn’t accept a casual email request. That is opening them up to all kinds of liability.
My mini-rant. Which happily (not!) will be ongoing.
I live in an apartment building w ~450 units and ~700 residents. We collectively get a lot of USPS mail every day. And we get a lot of packages shipped through USPS, or through a commercial courier service, e.g. UPS, who contracts w USPS to do the last mile delivery to our building. As in 50 to 100 packages per day total.
We have the typical communal mail room with locking compartments for each apartment that each can hold a decent pile of mail & a couple flat-ish packages. Plus a couple dozen larger parcel lockers for the packages too large for anyone’s mailbox.
USPS has just announced that due to personnel cutbacks, they will no longer deliver any parcels to any individual apartment box at our building. And presumably the same to every other large building around here. Which is collectively WAG ten thousand postal customers from our PO alone.
Instead they’ll just dump the entire pile on our building’s staff to sort and store. And so now we all (so 50+ people a day) have to go bug a staffer to get our USPS parcels. Those folks are already pretty well snowed under with FedEx, UPS, and DHL packages. Now they get the blizzard of USPS added to their mix. We’ll be lined up 4 deep at the counter all day long.
I don’t know if this personnel shortage is local to our post office, is part of a state- or nationwide program or what. But keep your eyes peeled for further enshittification of USPS wherever you are as the current smash-and-grab being perpetrated on our society picks up speed.
I dunno, it depends. If the form was just “fill this out with the new info and sign it” that doesn’t really require a lot of inside knowledge. As far as I can tell the only thing they know is where I work and what my name is.
But where did they get it from? I would hope your work has its own forms. Unless what happened was that HR sent them the form after they emailed them, asking HR to change the info, so they responded with their form.
If the only info they asked for is a signature, I bet that’s some kind of violation. Not a lawyer or financial expert, but that doesn’t sound right. I’ve never in my life been able to change something like that with any employer or other organization without being required to provide a lot of personal info on it.
