Anti-rant: With help from my fellow-Dopers, especially Sario, who PMd me not once but twice with great advice, I have changed my cell phone provider. Buh-bye, evil Sprint. Hello, Madstar Mobile, who are saving me $53 a month and giving me EXACTLY THE SAME PLAN I had with those other guys. I love the Dope! 
IKEA snack counter guy? You have a tiny menu: hot dog, veggie hot dog, onion relish, fries, two kinds of donuts, cinnamon buns, milkshakes,tea, coffee and cold fountain drinks. I go there maybe once every few months, and I still know what you sell, and the prices; it’s very simple.
So. I ask you for a veggie hot dog and a milkshake. The milkshake is OK; you give me the token and even a cup (no straw like you should do, but whatever, I can ask for one). You then put a meat hot dog through the till. “It’s a veggie hot dog”
confused look “Yeah, one hot dog, is that all?”
“Veggie hot dog”
“Yeah…?”
grabs meat hot dog
I wound up just not having any lunch, due to your utter uselessness (plus a large queue and a short lunch break). You had the freaking things right in front of you, I could see them, exactly where they normally are. They’re advertised on the humongous notice board right above your head, and I used the exact wording on the sign, how freaking thick can you be?
Just bumping this so it doesn’t fall off the front page.
Hey, we’re all having good times??? Amazing!
Dear local rag,
Finding out this AM that you intend to limit those you don’t extort money from to 10 articles a month was a bit of a surprise. I’m all for you turning a profit, however, I feel that your chosen course of action is committing Seppuku.
The print copy of your paper is a joke, and is now small enough that someone with ADD could read the whole thing before their attention wanders. The on-line version is worse, with pages taking minutes to load because of all the ads, never mind having to close a half dozen popups.
How and why you expect to be paid for content that, if it arrives at all, days after the event, is biased so far to the left that my college newspaper advisors heads would explode, is beyond me. You have made it dammed near impossible to comment on articles, and now even that option looks like it is going away.
In conclusion, I wish your staff well in their future employment. It will not be with you, as what comments that do make it to be posted indicate that however little you charge will not be worth the effort. May the last reporter leaving the building turn the lights out.
And just for giggles, they gave 14 hours notice for their new policy.
GF took the dogs for a long walk in the woods Saturday. That’s great, but all three dogs rolled in something dead during the walk and I’m the dog bather.
My local paper went to 10 articles/month a few years back. Annoying.
Found that no such limit is in place for my iPad, possibly because of the privacy settings won’t let them store that cookie.
Except that lately, the damn pages scroll up and down constantly as it loads and unloads ads, (and constantly popping up more over the top) making it virtually impossible to read unless you want to load the page and wait 4-5 minutes for it to stop that shit. Which is not particularly convenient.
Between the never-ending grey wet days, having volunteered myself into doing something I REALLY don’t want to do that starts tonight, spending yesterday doing business & personal financial stuff, and contemplating putting an end to the life of a wonderful little cat who’s been dealt (quite literally) an unfair blow…
am I too old to hide under the bed and whimper?
(Yes, self, you are. You must work up a lesson plan for the class you volunteered to teach and gather up the stuff you’ll need. THEN you can go hide under the bed!)
Dear Amazon,
Size is a requirement, People care about price, and quality, but color is a mere preference.
When people buy bedding, they will know what size their bed is. Therefore the sensible way to market sets of sheets, would be to have them choose what size their bed is, then display what colors of sheets are available in that size.
The fact that you placed the size selection boxes above the colors suggests that someone there recognized this at some time.
Yet if a color is then chosen that doesn’t come in the chosen size, you randomly reset the size to one available in that color, without pointing out to the customer that this was done.
You also highlight the other available sizes…so it is obvious that the programmer thought people would choose a color first, then see what size bed they needed to buy to fit under those pretty sheets. Honestly, once the customer chooses the size, you need to lock that down and “mother-may-I?” them if they try to change it.
You could also show me all the thread count options available in that size on one page, but yeah, asking too much I’m sure. And the fact that you sold me the bed, and the duvet, and the duvet cover, and the mattress pads only minutes earlier MIGHT possibly lead you to suspect that maybe I made a mistake when I let your site change the size to something different than all that other stuff I managed to get the correct size.
Yup, my biggest rant is that after 8 months of enforced pre-maternal sobriety, I **still **can’t have a drink as I came home from the labour ward with a raging chest infection and am on antibiotics now.
But sleep deprivation plus an 8 day old to look after means that drinking probably wouldn’t have been a wise option anyway, so it’s not that big a deal after all. 
Anyone want a free van before I drive it into the ocean? Paid to have a new transmission put in, after one 125,000 miles, and there are still issues. This after rebuilding the front end and replacing a door lock actuator. And I still owe on it …
Goddamn it. There is no fucking way I can ever listen to Townes Van Zandt without feeling both amazed and depressed. Still do it every now and then.
I have spent the last five weeks covering the job of a colleague who has been off sick following a relationship break-up. Whilst the length of his absence is rant-worthy in itself, what really annoys me is that on returning to work yesterday he has just grunted if anyone spoke to him. Not a word of thanks has passed his lips for all the work that has been done on his duties - bearing in mind this is an academic institution and he went off sick in the first week of term.
Today he had a conversation with a member of academic staff who was querying a particular student’s attendance record. The only thing he had to say to this academic was that the attendance hadn’t been recorded properly becuase the group information hadn’t been set up properly…and of course none of that was his fault because he wasn’t here.
No mention of the fact that there were other errors that were his doing, and that he hadn’t correctly registered the student on modules in the first place. Plus the fact that we had to work out his group information from scratch with no previous year’s info to work from because he kept it somewhere other than our shared drive.
I could quite cheerfully punch him in the throat, but I need this job to pay my bills.
May I suggest just hiding under the covers? It’s a lot comfier, and no dust bunnies.
Me, I would like to know if there is any method to dump about half your relatives without causing undue stress to the other half. The only legal way my idiot relatives could kick me out of Grandma’s flat was if my aunt needed it, which she’s decided she does. On one hand it’s kind of nice and gooey that thanks to my hard work she doesn’t get flashbacks to childhood and teenage-hood mistreatment the minute she walks there, but on the other damn. On one hand it’s nice that I am back to being able to search for jobs in a much wider geographical area, but on the other re-damn. We’d agreed that I’d move my stuff out but finish the current lease-year (not any kind of legal or contractual requirement, just a date which happened to be convenient).
Sunday I got there to find
her placemats on the table I use as an office
her chargers on my side table
the big bed freshly made with my sheets but with her plush doll proudly sitting atop the right pillow and a small towel on the left pillow
the fridge alittlebitstuffedifyouknowwhatImean
half the kitchen stuff rearranged. The other half would be hard to rearrange due to volume and size constraints
her cookies and milk in my pantry
and her cans in my bedroom (still trying to figure that one out)
Yesterday I spoke with my cousin, once I’d calmed down; she asked if I would want her mother to move her stuff back out and I said no, I’ll just consider the lease has been terminated and will they please change the payments on the utilities pleasethxbye? Apparently I’d missed the three potted plants in the sunroom, but I think that may be explained by the sun and I not having been out and about at the same time between arriving on Sunday and leaving for the airport on Monday.
Someone stop this family, I want out! 
Our cat Roxie is missing. The last anyone has seen her was yesterday at 10:30 AM. It is not likely she got out of the house (although we did look around the buildings in our courtyard). Her litter box has not been used, and the gooshy food has not been touched.
The only thing we haven’t done yet is physically move the appliances. We have looked in every closet, cabinet, and cranny possible; we have searched under every piece of furniture, including those that go all the way to the floor with no “under” to them. Nothing. We have not heard any meowing, either.
She was diagnoses with hyperthyroid about 4 months ago; we’ve been giving her meds twice a day. Last week I noticed that her bathroom habits had changed - namely, she shit in the middle of the floor, twice, and not loose stools, either. When we realized those had changed, we took her to the vet. They ran blood work and didn’t find any kidney issues; their advise was to retrain her to the litter box.
Now she’s missing and I do not have a good feeling that we are going to find an alive cat at the end of this. She’s about 13, so that’s a fair run for a cat, but I am EXTREMELY pissed at the vet’s office for not catching this or doing more, even though it’s probably not their fault.
My husband had to go out of town overnight starting today. He’d depressed about it and didn’t want to leave. I’m worried that my daughter (who is having bipolar episodes) or I are going to find her while he’s gone.
This really, really sucks. 
I sure hope you find Roxie alive and well. Have you checked the drawers? I once shut a cat into a drawer and spend frantic hours looking for him while he was happily sleeping on my socks.
Nava, I’m sorry that you are moving. That apartment has sounded like a bunch of drama ever since you first started posting about it and while its probably good that you can dust your hands of the whole thing…moving just sucks.
I want a new car. I was opening up the driver’s door from the inside and the entire handle just came off in my hand. Now to get out of the car I have to open the window and use the outside handle. I know I am not strong enough to rip the handle off a car door.
Also, my box spring broke. Luckily, I have an unlimited 10 year warrantee and they will replace or repair it. I called to see what to do and they said they would send an inspector on December 4. I already have a full schedule of patients that day. However, my sister is in town the next week so I called to see if they could change it to the following week so I can take a day and also spend time with her. They offer me December 17, which is after she is gone. I ask if they might have a cancellation and they say no. I ask if they can then push out the appointment further so I can schedule it for a day when I won’t have to cancel as many patients. They say they do not schedule that far in advance. I have a choice of the 4th or the 17th. I ask if they give me a window of time and they say they will give me a 2 hour window. I ask them to at least give me the times so that I can work part of the day. They say that they will randomly assign me the 2-hour window the day before the appointment which means I either have to take an entire day or cancel patients at the last minute (not going to happen). Meanwhile, if I want to take a day to spend with my sister I will now have to take 2 days off work, which I really can’t afford.
Yeah well, I knew that was its worst defect when I moved in: anything involving that side of the family…
Maybe I should grab some of the crazy 19th-century star-crossed-lovers stories from the other side of the family and write a telenovela. I think I’ll skip that chapter where they find out she is the daughter of his father, though (it always turns out that he is not his father’s son, of course, because otherwise they couldn’t get married).
Every time I go to a website to apply for a job, and it asks me to register, I want to cry. I have almost ONE HUNDRED passwords for different job and company websites already, all unique (I think) so sensitive information is protected, and I don’t think I can take much more.
My fucking family.
I don’t have the time or inclination to go into details about some of the shit they’ve pulled over the last few weeks, including when I was heavily pregnant, having labour induced, and post-birth.
But I’m trying to move forward, without letting them walk all over me, and build a healthier relationship with them where they don’t act like I’m just my eldest daughter’s childminder and that my sister is the “real” parent of her. (long story, like I said)
So this morning, when my sister emailed to say there was a present for the new baby at our parents house, I invited her to bring it to MY house for us, and even mentioned the bottle of bubbly in the fridge as an ice-breaker.
I was rebuffed of course. Why do I fucking bother. So, I’m now 10 days post-partum, and expected to stick the new baby in a pram and take her to my parents house of damp/black mould/falling ceilings/germs from my ill parents to collect a present that they couldn’t be bothered bringing to my ACTUAL residence.
I think that **won’t **be happening. They know where I am.