That kind of situation is what the Five Second Rule was made for. 
Good question - I can only assume that there are profit-related reasons for it, and they don’t really care what we think.
That would be Satan.
See, this is why Powerpoint’s evil. It metastasizes.
How can this not be evil incarnate?
Let me just bow my head for a second … Thank you, Jesus, that I found a church where people can read their own copies of ancient technology called “books”. No busy, illegible, tool-of-the-incompetant-devil Powerpoint.
That’s a lack of thought - a very human quality.
It’s important that the people designing the slides think about who will be looking at them. Churches are fairly heterogeneous in many ways (ideally, anyway) and one of them is visual acuity. Slide designers need to take this into account - text should be simple and bold, with significant contrast between text and background.
It’s also good if it were legible to the users.
Good for you. How else would the people responsible ever learn that others are having problems?
Dear local airport, I’m sure you’re aware of this, but you’re a bunch of money grabbing bastards. I’m used to airports charging ludicrous amounts for parking- this is sadly normal.
What I am not accustomed to is airports charging simply for entrance to the drop-off point, getting cameras and barriers to enforce a charge of £1 for the privelege of having a car stationary for less than a minute, then painting both all road in the airport and all the surrounding country lanes with double red ‘no stopping at any time’ markings.
I know it’s a bit petty to get annoyed about losing £1, but it’s even pettier to charge people for the right to stop and let someone out of the car.
Yikes! I have often asked myself, regarding the greed thing, “where will it end?” Apparently the answer is, nowhere. This is amazing. Are pay toilets coming back?
When did they leave?
Dear Business Contact,
Okay, you want me to provide some consultation for you for a token honorarium which definitely does not represent an adequate ROI for my time and effort. This is a routine request and just part of how the process of peer review works, and the subject is interesting to me, so I said I’d do it.
And then you come back with the chirpy announcement that the sample file I’m supposed to be looking at is too big to email, so you’ve invited me to look at it via "Free"CloudComputingService ™.
Uh, no. I do not have an account on "Free"CloudComputingService ™. I am not signing up for an account with "Free"CloudComputingService ™ and providing them with my email address to pass on to more goddamn spammers and saddling myself with one more goddamn password to have to remember just because your fucking bloat-riddled software can’t produce sample files of a manageable size and you don’t know how to use gzip.
If you want me to do you a favor, don’t just cavalierly assume that I’m perfectly happy to comply with whatever nuisance-ass data handling procedures happen to be most convenient for YOU. Dumbfucks.
Two mini-mega rants for me in the last week.
First, the sale of the small managing general agency insurance company my wife works for was made official - although there’s still contracts and paperwork to sign. Post-sale, the new owners will be cutting the company’s staff from its current level of 50 to 30. She has to reapply for her current job if she wants to stay with the company and its new owners
She’s not worried about not getting her current position back, as the job description posted out there is exactly the one she wrote a couple of years ago (when she had to do one of those “describe your current job” things), and she’s the only one in the company with the Project management/systems management credentials and skills for the position, but there’s still the hassle of filling out a 9+ page employment application, which wants such fun details as her entire salary history. And of course, there’s always the uncertainty that they’ll decide they don’t need her after all.
Secondly, my mother (who I love dearly and is a splendid person) has been complaining for months and months about chronic stomach pain. All the symptoms she described - feels better after drining chocolate milk, feels better when she’s got something in her stomach - sounded to everyone (myself, my wife, my brothers, their wives) as if she might have a stomach ulcer. When you factor in that she’s been taking large doses of naproxen (sp?) for arthritis, it just seemed even more likely that could be the problem.
Well, either she downplayed the problem when she went to the doctor, or the doctor blew her off (I suspect the former rather than the latter), as nothing was done other than ‘taking Tums’ or Prilosec OTC to address the problem.
Sure enough, her symptoms got worse. She spent several days flat on her back a couple of weeks ago when it got extremely uncomfortable for her. When I talked to her I stressed that she needed to contact her doctor and have it checked out. She promised she would call first thing Monday.
Before she could see the doctor, she had a vomiting attack and passed out Wednesday evening. My father and brother took her to the ER, where they did an endoscopy and discovered (surprise, surprise!) a 2 cm ulcer in her stomach. They cauterized it, but had to do another endoscopy the next day when testing seemed to indicate there was still some internal bleeding. They found a few more minor areas that they fixed on the second procedure. Even that didn’t seem to clear everything up, so they ended up running a scope up the femoral and fixing one more spot. That seems to have resolved the issue. She was moved from ICU this morning to a regular room, and they’re letting her eat - only Jell-o, but at least it’s something - for the first time since she was admitted.
This is a 80-year old woman who had colon cancer several years ago. All of us are biting our tongues trying not to say “We told you so”, but she knows that’s what we’re all thinking 
Oh, and did I mention that all this took place last week while my wife and I were in Florida celebrating our 20th anniversary? Trying to get health and work updates while standing in the noise and bustle at Disney World wasn’t a lot of fun. Sigh.
Well dammit on the job search front! Saw a really great posting for a job on the bulletin board where I work as a p/t contractor. However, it’s only open internally and I don’t count as ‘internal’ since I am not a full employee.
Here’s hoping nobody qualified applies internally…
Oh, I certainly hope so. And I hope they start coming with little slots for sliding your credit card in.
Then I want to watch a commercial featuring one of them, and the narrator saying, “More people GO with VISA.”
You are a very sick man.
My cat Cobalt is hyperthyroid. Fortunately, he can be treated with a one-time injection of radioactive iodine to burn out the diseased parts of his thyroid, so we won’t have to deal with pilling him daily for the rest of his life. I’m grateful that this treatment is available in our area, that we can afford it, and that it should work. I still miss his sister whom we lost in January very much. But coming up with $925 on the spur of the moment and having to store his waste for months for the radiation to subside to a level that won’t get us a fine is annoying.
I truly love my daughter and think she is all sorts of awesome. However, if I never have to go to another classroom sing-a-long it will be too soon. It was cute when she was 3, 4 in pre-K doing “Itsy-Bitsy Spider”, but dammit, she’s almost 11 - isn’t she too old for this crap?
And if you’re going to do “This Land is Your Land”, show some balls and have the kids sing verses other than 1 and 2, OK? How about verses 4 and 5 where he speaks against private property and for “his people” at the relief line? 
FrancisCastle vs. Animals
Round 1: Friday night.
I’m driving home from my sister’s house and it’s dark and extremely foggy. As I come around a curve, I see a skunk waddling down the center of the highway. I couldn’t swerve crazily to avoid it so I moved slightly to the right hoping to miss him. That’s when he decided to take a sharp right…directly under my tire. 
To make matters worse, my 6yo is in the back seat wondering if we hit a mommy skunk or a daddy skunk and if the little skunk babies at home were wondering why mommy/daddy isn’t coming home. Ugh.
Round 2: Sunday morning
I had run the dryer overnight so the next day my clothes were dry, but wrinkled. Usually, I run the dryer again for a short time just to de-wrinkle. I shut the dryer door and turned it on. Suddenly, there was a crazy loud banging noise and in my panic I couldn’t figure out how to turn the dryer off. My husband yelled at me to just open the door! (Duh) Out shot a very scared but otherwise ok cat. I was bawling…and he was pretty upset too. He wouldn’t come out from under the stairs. I had to go to the store and buy some delicious treats, but it was still a full day before he came near me again. And I seriously doubt he will be hanging out in the dryer again anytime soon.
I don’t think I should be allowed near animals for a while.
That reminds me of a story about my mother-in-law - she was driving, and my husband said - “Hey, look, baby beavers!” She said, “Where?” and jerked the steering wheel - {bump} {bump} Oh. There.
Went to visit an old girlfriend today. We’ve been good friends in the FB/text sense since she moved away, she’s moved on to a new boyfriend, I’d moved on and I’m semi-dating someone now, and we were prepared to have fun today playing catch-up and shopping and having me meet the new beau and his daughter…
…what we weren’t prepared for was discovering that neither of us had moved on, and I wasn’t prepared to find out that she was profoundly unhappy where she’s at. I feel like I just threw a great big monkey wrench into the gears of her life.
Would it make you feel better to look at it in a bigger sense? You’re not to blame for messing up her life. Her unhappiness is, and unhappiness isn’t compulsory or healthy. You are the vehicle by which she may have been saved years of sorrow. That is, if you choose to be that vehicle. Maybe something will come of that revelation, maybe not.
Seems like you’re sort of unhappy or at least uncomfortable with your current life, too. Would you be ok with her blaming herself for throwing that same monkey wrench?
I’m not happy with my situation, and hadn’t been before going down for the visit, but I’m also in a position to change it (and have been working out how to do so beforehand). She didn’t throw any monkey wrenches into my works; if anything, I actually feel kind of good about my plans to move on and up.
She’s… not in that position. She was okay with things, if not happy, but my going down there seemed to upset that balance. I know I’m not the agent, perhaps just a catalyst, but I still left feeling like a cretin. “Hey, remember how happy you used to be? Yeah? Welp! Gotta go!”
Wait - you wanted it to go on longer?? 
This weekend our next door neighbor came over and complained that the people across the street have been parking in front of his house. I looked - their 2 SUVs in their driveway, their pickup and Toyota in front of our house - so, what? Did they get another car? He didn’t know, they didn’t even know who owned the car when it first showed up until his daughter-in-law saw the driver go over to that house. I had wondered why one of the neighbors cars was parked on that little strip between our houses - that was all they had left to use. Makes it “interesting” getting out of our driveway.
(I didn’t tell him that a bunch of strangers on the internet think he doesn’t have the right to expect to be able park in front of his own house…)
One of the humans who live in this house forgot to close the lid on the dishwashing bottle. While said human was at work, one of the cats who rule the home forgot the 2nd rule about playing on the kitchen cabinets. Do not leave evidence lest our slave does such things as get distracted and leave double sided tape where our paws land. She is stupid that way.
A 24 ounce bottle of Dawn all over the counter and floor and on cat feets and just all over the place.
Cats don’t like water baths to start with, rinsing soap off their feets was not a happy time.