Thanks for all the advice. I will check NextDoor. We should have an IEP meeting soon and I think I can ask for a device then. Hopefully they’ll be able to get us one.
My anti rant today is that my daughter has been in panties today instead of pull ups and has gone potty on the potty all day (except for one accident just now when she almost made it to the potty).
awesome on the both of you! Great job! It’s all downhill from here.
She’s six and has autism. I’m happy for progress. She even used public restrooms today!
extra awesome!
She’s good to put up with us neurotypicals, we aren’t easy to figure out and not always accepting or kind.
My big brother (74yo) is autistic and I wouldn’t still be around without him. Hope I never have to try. The world is a better place for him being in it. Push hard for that Chromebook in the IEP meeting-she’s entitled to it and it may make a world of difference for her. Computers were my brother’s salvation (and my son’s) and I don’t say that lightly.
Critical thinking test.
You have a job. Your boss asks you to order some products from a vendor. These products used to be handled by an employee that recently retired. You are unsure of the proper procedure for doing this.
Do you
A. Ask your boss how to order these products.
B. Contact the vendor, explain that you are finishing up some work for a recently retired employee and ask them.
C. Call or email the recently retired employee
D. Send an email to the vendor requesting pricing and ordering info for the products you need. Make this email as perfunctory and generic as possible. Use bad grammar. “I am interest in purchasing this items. Kindly provide me with price on the attached product.”
Don’t take the time to explain who you are or why you are making this request. Just sign the email with the name of the recently retired employee. Create a throwaway email address to use in sending this email and create a CONTACT for this address that is the same as the email address of the retired employee ie: annhedonia@butteremails.com. That way, the vendor will think the email came from the recently retired employee (unless they look closely). If you don’t get an immediate response, keep resending the email.
If you answered A,B or C you might be smart. If you answered D, you work for the company I used to work for.
Last week,9 months into retirement, I get a call from the sales rep for one of my vendors, wanting to know about the pricing request I sent. I replied that I did not send them any pricing request and I asked them to forward the email. Upon review I realized it wasn’t from my email account, that it was just a lightly spoofed throwaway.
I told him I wasn’t sure what was going on but it appeared to be a scam. I then contacted my old workplace and told them someone had created a this fake e-mail account and was using it to attempt to do business with their vendors in my name.
Their response was “We needed to order some additional showroom product from vendor X”. No apology, no explanation other than the above.
I’m honestly speechless. Seriously. I’m staring at the screen of my device trying to think of something succinct to say that will convey the …fuckedupness…of this and I’ve got nothing.
That’s mind-boggling.
Y’know, if you still have contact info for these vendors, you might want to let them know you’re retired and to ignore any emails purporting to be from you. I don’t think you’d be liable for anything, but IANAL and people are crazy.
Damn, that’s beyond messed the fuck up.
Well, now that you know how it happened, send them a bill for your (grossly overpriced, preferably) consulting fee. Tell them they can remit the fee to you now, or later, when the legal fees for your inquiry re: how far does this cross the line into tortious identity theft? have been tacked on.
Whether you follow through with it is up to you, of course, but istm that this will adequately convey the fuckedupness of the situation.
Yeah, I might try billing them. But that action would not convey to them the fuckupedness of the situation. They would either pay it without comment (although it would boomerang back at some undefined point in the future in some bizarre way) or use it as an opening to relitigate some unrelated years old conflict. They are not at good at seeing basic cause/effect relationships.
I want be clear - these people OWN the account they were trying to order from. The bills come to them.Before I retired I placed orders from that account because I used to be their agent, an authorization I no longer have.
They are institutionally psychotic. There are two types of people that work there. People that cannot hold a job elsewhere because they are crazy and skilled professionals that realize they can make more money than they can elsewhere if they can navigate the crazy. I was in the second group.
When I was looking for a company to partner with, the standard “deal” was - “We will provide office space, infrastructure and leads, you do the work and we’ll split the profits”. Their deal was “we will provide office space, infrastructure and leads and a monthly retainer equal to a professional salary, you do all the work and we still split the profits”. So there was a reason I went with the psychotic company.
Even though the screaming matches in the background at work got so bad that if I was on the phone with a client, they’d ask me if I was safe or did they need to call 911. But I once saw someone decide they needed a bonus, so they hand wrote themselves a company check and told the boss and he signed the check. For sixty grand.
Once I generated a bid off a lead that came from the crazy boss. The bottom line on my proposal was 75K. My boss told me he was going to meet with the builder to negotiate this one. I don’t want to know what happened during that “negotiation”, but he came back with a contract for 135K for the same scope of work. Profit!
Good gawd. Then you’re probably right, and they aren’t reachable.
They will never see “the fuckupedness of the situation”. Do not try to engage them, just do what I did after I left PsychoWorkplaceLLC…
Back up slowly til you’re out of reach, then walk briskly until you can see daylight. Then run and, here’s the important part, never look behind you.
Oh, and be so thankful you’re not part of the insanity any more. Hopefully you’ll get to the point where you don’t even think about them on an average day.
My last job was like this. How did you know?
Because institutionalized psychosis is remarkably common. I made a very good living for a while as a consultant for a very large organization, a happy situation that was enabled by several factors. One was that the vast majority of their technical personnel were grossly incompetent and mainly good at politicking and brown-nosing. The other was that management – also mostly incompetent – was judged mainly by the size of their budgets. So which would you rather have: a group of your own useless imbeciles who’d only require a small budget and fuck everything up, or a big budget that paid for high-priced consultants and successful projects? So consultants were very popular there.
Boy, the stories I could tell. The main challenge was to keep their own people, both technical and management, from excessive meddling. I frequently met with a few people from other departments who seemed remarkably competent, only to find out later that, unsurprisingly, they too were consultants! 
Despite all of Tony’s doctors telling him that smoking tobacco is going to kill him, he continued smoking at least a pack a day. He has been hospitalized numerous times for heart issues, but continues to smoke. He has now had a stroke and is mostly paralyzed on the right side, but still manages to wheelchair himself to the road leading into the parking lot so he can smoke.
It is very possible that the smoking will kill him, but is getting much more likely that I will do it first.
You have one of the biggest hearts of anyone I’ve known. Most people would have given up on helping Tony years ago. I wish everyone in the world had a friend as good as you are.
That’s very kind of you to say, but you don’t know how much I HATE him right now.
He’s a horrible patient, so I’m bringing snacky food to the nurses and other workers a couple of times a week as a bribe to stop them from beating him to death with a bedpan. I went today, saw him on the side of the road, freaked the fuck out and screamed at him for a while and then took off. Without dropping off the ice cream bars that were intended for staff. Now I’m eating a chocolate covered vanilla ice cream bar right before dinner and its all HIS fault. Asshole.
So, how are the automatic feeders working out? Are both of your feline overlords approving of the change?
They’re doing well! The second feeder arrived broken, but Amazon arranged for UPS to pick it up (free!) and a new one was here the day after that. It took Eddy one feeding to figure out that sticking his head under this thing meant food and there’s been no looking back.
In that respect, at least, my life has become much more peaceful and pleasant. And I think Shiva is still putting on a bit of weight, which is just fantastic given his age and medical conditions.
Treating soil with scalding water kills everything, including beneficial soil organisms.
After that, an opportunistic mini-plague could ensue that would make aphids look like widdle Disney bunnies.
More on school - They had a school board meeting last night that lasted 7 hours. I watch 3 of them, all public comments about whether or not to send the kids to school. Ultimately (not that they made it easy to find out) they decided to postpone starting in-person schooling and to start everyone virtually for 6 weeks. My husband and I are still scrambling to figure out our plan but at least now we know what everyone is going to do. Hopefully, we can get into a daycare that will do school with our daughter. We had a tour yesterday and they said they’d get back to us today if they can accomodate her. I’m so stressed out about all of this. At least the center we are looking at is within our budget (barely. Childcare is EXPENSIVE).