Are they located in a spot where people might be likely to use their driveway to turn around in? (Or if not, perhaps their last house used to be such a place.) Irrational hatred of someone using their driveway for a Y-turn might explain the spike strip.
That’s possible, but we live on a fairly crowded street and I don’t think people would be more apt to turn around in their driveway versus any other. Also, I think the spikes are far enough back that you still could if you wanted to. Definitely a mystery.
That is the one that throws me off as well and has for years. I wondered about it before the housing bubble got in full-swing and people that I know for a fact made much less than we did were buying huge houses that they couldn’t afford in the long-term. We all know how that worked out with the collapse of the housing industry. Some of them lost everything when the payments ballooned but many didn’t.
I can understand how people get in severe debt to finance their lifestyle but you would think it would come crashing down at some point and they would become destitute and have to pay it back to make up for their transgressions. Apparently not. Some people seem to be able to pull it off consistently throughout life and never seem to suffer for material things despite clearly not having the money to pay for it. I have known so many of them as friends and family that I have lost count. I would probably faint if I got a close look at their financial records but they make it work and someone is out there helping them do it.
We are talking about big money stuff, not just a few thousand dollars. Call me old-fashioned, but I just spend less than I have but apparently that isn’t the smart way to do it. I would love to see how they are doing it. It makes no sense.
I just want to know why some members of the SDMB are banned. My wants are simple. Like my mind.
Didn’t something like this happen to a fairly significant historical figure in the USA? Was it Sam Houston? Whoever it was, he would never speak of it and I don’t know if the secret was ever revealed. I’ve now found something else to be curious about; I’ll have to dig into it.
What on earth was that nice lady on the light rail doing? She had a document on her laptop (word, or maybe powerpoint…not sure) and she was copying the same exact flyer over and over and over.
She must have had a 40 page document, and each and every one said, in bright blue, “Caution, Hand Tools MUST be placed in Appropriate Holder”.
??? Why not just make one, and then print that many copies? What reason would a person have for making such a document?
None of my business of course, but I’m burning with curiosity. 
That reminds me. What do some of my IT coworkers do all day? I am not talking about the ones that are obviously goofing off. I understand those. I am talking about the ones that always frantic on the phone, IM, and e-mail plus the meetings. They eventually seem to get things done but it takes an unusual amount of time. I have taken over their jobs when they went on vacation or quit and there is only about 2 hours of work a day there at most. I have sat right beside many of them for years and never figured it out. They are busy little beavers and get rewarded for looking that way I have no idea what they are spending their time on. Most things in the IT world simply aren’t that difficult. You just identify the problem and fix it. Done.
You know, I think there are a certain subset of people who manage to stretch out even a small amount of work into something that takes a long time. And it’s not necessarily that they’re lollygagging, at least as far as they’re concerned . . . it’s just that even small tasks are overwhelming to them to the point where they stress out and overreact.
I mean, almost everyone would describe their lives as “busy” and “stressful.” How many of them actually have jobs that take a lot of time vs. just being neurotic and poor at time management?
That is to say, maybe you’re on the opposite end of the spectrum, where you’re fundamentally more relaxed and focused and can’t see why everyone else is in a tizzy. You’re whole, “You just identify the problem and fix it. Done” statement makes me think that you just have a mentality that allows you to better handle a given workload.
Or lying and in hock up to their eyeballs.
I want to know what happened to my previous supervisor. She was there when I left on medical leave. I returned to work last week, and she had been replaced by some guy. He’s a good supervisor, as far as I can tell, but I still would like to know where she went. I get the feeling I shouldn’t ask, since no one will talk about it. Maybe she got fired?
Studies are showing that the more electronic distractions you allow in your day, the less efficient you become. Maybe that’s part of their problem - they don’t manage their day, their day manages them.
Maybe they’re afraid of their cars getting stolen?
I want to know why the (presumably) crazy lady sits in a chair on the sidewalk next to the police station, overlooking the patrol car parking lot every single day for hours and hours and hours, just staring at the parking lot. What is she watching? How can it hold her interest for so many hours every single day? I’ve thought about going into the station and asking at the front counter, but I doubt they know, either.
I want to know if the following two stories related to the Jackson family are true:
In the seventies, Joseph Jackson was suspected to have had an affair with somebody who worked around him, a younger woman. According to this story, his wife Katherine and his youngest children Randy and Janet (both of whom would have been quite young at this time, I recall that Janet wouldn’t have been older than about 14) cornered the woman in the building she worked at and Katherine beat the shit out of her while the children kept watch. Apparently a security guard wandered through and asked “What’s going on?” and Janet said “Get out of here, mister”, and then he obeyed the small girl and walked away. That part of the story seems so unbelievable, but is it an embellishment on an otherwise true story or is the whole thing made up? I know the Jacksons are crazy but are they really that crazy? Years of infidelity could have pushed Katherine over the edge and the kids would have been impressionable but really? I’d love to know if it was true.
Janet was married at 18 and divorced by the age of 20, back when she was just another Jackson and before she became hugely successful. According to rumor, around this time she gave birth to a child in secret and gave it to the oldest Jackson sibling, Rebbie, to raise as her own. It’s not known whether she supposedly did this because the marriage dissolved so quickly or because her career was quickly taking off or because the family thought it would be bad for their image (which was still quite wholesome in the mid-eighties, this was before LaToya posed for Playboy and before Michael’s image went to hell).
In addition, I hate blind items on Dlisted and blogs like that. I want to know who the blind items are about, dammit!
Not quite the postman, but check out the first few results of this google image search. Hewitt had an acknowledged affair with Diana and a lot of people believe he is Harry’s real father.
Anyway, I would like to know who keeps putting handwritten and poorly spelled bible quotations in my letterbox (and WHY??? 
). I have checked with my neighbours and they haven’t had any, but I have received about one a month since last October. My parents also live nearby and haven’t had any. I’m not offended or anything, just super curious.
I have no idea whether it was her case, but a 14yo doesn’t usually look like a small girl and may look (specially in the right light) very much like a grown woman - in this case, an extremely angry grown woman.
If she was able to pull the Voice of Authority (something I’ve had myself since my age was in single digits), the combination of two extremely pissed women, a youngster and the Voice could have been enough to make the guard reconsider his options. Depending on what the options actually were, perhaps walking away did look like the wisest choice.
Shagnasty, one of the reasons I hate presentialism is that, IME, the people who spend more time being busy little buzzy bees are the ones who suck at doing/managing their work: we have a programmer right now who makes more busy noises than the whole rest of the team, but who hadn’t even started reading the documents he should have been looking at on day one until he’d been here for several weeks. Sounds like you have a few buzzers at your job.
Their house got foreclosed on, they couldn’t take the financial pressure and he left. She tried to drown her sorrows in booze and wouldn’t leave the house because she wanted to cling to her broken dreams and life. 
Now the bank has legal possession of the house and wants her gone so they can sell it. At first she was hiding so no one would think the house was occupied, but now she’s so depressed she doesn’t give a shit anymore.
It’ll eventually end with the Sheriff giving her notice she’s being evicted. Then after 48 hours it’ll be police knocking on the door, her being ousted, and lots o stuff strewn out on the lawn.
I really, really want to know who staged that Max Headroom stunt in Chicago in the 80s and why. It makes me crazy that there aren’t apparently even suspects.
The same with the Tylenol killer.
Oh YES! There are a whole host of unsolved things like this that I’d love to know. One of the most interesting to me is the Taman Shud case, what I’d give to know what the answer to that one is.
I always wondered how this one turned out … not Bahamas, but they came here and got married, he got blind drunk on the wedding night and she ended up half way down the beach screwing a water sports guy in the bushes. We all knew about it because another couple went to investigate, they heard squealing and though some poor animal had got stuck in the undergrowth.
To be fair, Harry also strongly resembles Diana’s brother Charles Spencer (who is ginger) so it could be that he got the Spencer genes, but he really doesn’t seem to have many of the Windsor genes unlike his brother.
