Not me but my niece: she has suffered from irritable bowel syndrome for many years. Her doctor refused to take it seriously, stated that he thought she was just trying to game the system to lose weight, and finally handed her a FODMAP diet description and told her that was her treatment. He did not explain that the diet (essentially, reducing intake to a few very specific foods, mainly protein) was a temporary measure that is used under the care of a dietician to test what foods can/cannot be tolerated by an IBS sufferer, to build a healthy diet plan.
My niece, chronically depressed and generally passive, didn’t protest or seek a second opinion or even tell anyone she was on this diet, until she was discovered by her mother nearly comatose on the floor of her house, blind and unable to walk – she was in fact dying. She spent several weeks in the hospital undergoing a battery of tests to figure out what was the matter with her – it took so long to find out because nobody gets sick from thiamine deficiency (beri-beri aka Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome) in the country except far-gone alcoholics. But that’s what you’ll get if you eat nothing but animal proteins and no vitamin supplements. Who knew?
It has had very serious lingering effects. Lack of Vitamin B-1 causes brain damage. She has blood clots on her optic nerves which may never be resolved, so she has significant loss of sight, her proprioception is damaged so that months later she still cannot walk without falling down. She cannot drive or hold a job, and may never be able to. She lives with her parents, who are in their late seventies.
I asked my sister if they were going to sue the doctor for malpractice, or even let him know what happened from his ‘advice’ but she said they just wanted to move forward and not think about him and what he cost their family.
Now, another person who wasn’t so emotionally defenseless would have saved themselves, but that doesn’t in my opinion absolve that doctor of anything.
Have a good weekend! Relax and enjoy! From various people who know me well.
Who also know that I’m constitutionally unable to just “relax.” Stress is not unmanageable for me, but there a million things I have to take care of pretty much every day…it’s just not an option for my temperament to sit and binge watch movies and TV shows (unless I drink a couple bottles of wine and then barely remember what I’ve watched or done the next day after low-quality sleep that evening).
It’s a nice sentiment, I suppose, but at the same time it’s an irritating reminder that my personality is a little differently wired than “mellow, chilled-out” people who just “go with the flow” or whatever they do.
While working on the weekend - which is nearly every weekend - customers say “enjoy your weekend!” or “get out and enjoy the weather!” Um… I’m working here…
Yes, I know it’s partly reflexive, but it’s like many folks can’t comprehend that in order for them to have their weekend fun (including, apparently, shopping) someone has to be on the clock.
Even better, when working a holiday, a customer who says “You shouldn’t have to work Thanksgiving/4th of July/whatever!” Um… if you really believed that and thought about it you wouldn’t be shopping on a holiday, right? Because if my coworkers and I weren’t working the store wouldn’t be open and you wouldn’t be able to buy your beer and brats. Or at least would have had to think ahead and gotten them the day before.
I hated it when I had a technical question at work, and the guy (and it was always a guy) would not listen to me and would answer with an explanation of what I already knew and stop when they got to the part I didn’t know/understand. They’d look at me with this pleased as punch expression, and I’d want to smack them. Duh. Yeah, I understood that easy part. You didn’t help at all. Grrrrrr.
In reality, it was two guys in particular. They’d just be so proud of “helping” me.
When deployed to Iraq, we worked seven days a week. So it was always mildly annoying when people back in the states would sign off from a Friday phone call with, “Have a nice weekend!”
Yeah, that’s why their beaming smiles were so aggravating. I taught classes to non-computer-literate employees, and you have to understand it to explain it.
That’s tragic, I’m so sorry to hear that. It sounds like she was put on an elimination diet with no oversight. I’ve done the FODMAP thing for my own IBS and it includes plenty of fruits and vegetables so I suspect what the doctor ordered from her was much more strict than a standard low-FODMAP diet. But even with low-FODMAP it’s intended to be temporary, to identify possible trigger foods and then slowly work the rest of the stuff back into your diet. If I hadn’t tried it, though, I wouldn’t know about my trigger foods now.
I just smile sweetly and say “Thank you for confirming my knowledge up to this point, but what I need to know is…”
When peole say “Have a good weekend” I don’t get mad. What’s the use of that? It is still the weekend and I might, just might, have plans outside of work that will make me happy it is the weekend regardless of having to work. When working Christmas Day, I was thankful for the extra pay and the excuse to get away from my brother’s in-laws. Sometimes you have to look around to figure out what to be thankful for, but there can be ways of turning things around.
I can say this today, because despite the efforts of some to prevent me from having a good weekend, I am having a productive weekend and that’s a good thing. And back to the trenches, I go. With luck, what I am doing today, will give me the opportunity to move into an almost-affordable apartment.
You will never hear that from me. Why not? Because I really do believe that you shouldn’t be working holidays so will not shop on holidays. I know just one person boycotting all stores on holidays won’t make much of a difference, but if more people join me it might.
Honestly, I really do not mind working the holidays. Do you know why? I have few family left and the nearest is 500+ miles away. There is no way I could just pop over to her house on Thanksgiving. Given a choice between sitting at home, alone, on a holiday and working on a holiday I’ll choose work because 1) other people and 2) extra pay.
Fortunately, these days I have friends who make sure I don’t have to spend holidays alone and I’m grateful. But I still don’t mind working on a holiday because, in our current society, someone has to and it might as well be someone such as myself who either doesn’t mind or actively wants to get out of the house or make extra money.
I’ll further emphasize that I like working in my current job because I can work the Christian holidays (which, not being Christian, is not a big deal to me) and I can arrange to take off MY holidays if I choose to do so. Sure, I’ll work Easter Sunday, no problem - but I’d like to take off the first bit of Passover, please, thank you very much. And so on.
Around here the only holiday the stores close for is Christmas. But I also don’t shop on Easter, Memorial Day, Labor Day or July 4th, Well, for the latter I’ll shop for fireworks but that’s different. One time a long ways back I traded shifts with a coworker who was Jewish for a holiday, but I forget which one it was.
Back when I worked as a baker in a well known mental hospital Hospitals are not stores, they can’t close. I didn’t mind working Christmas because my shift was always early and my family ate later in the day. So I could work and have the holiday too. I would trade with others to get Easter off though because I will not miss church on Easter Sunday. But most people cared more about Christmas so I always managed to get Easter off.
My brother-in-law worked for Fermilab for many years, and he always worked Thanksgiving (you can’t leave a particle accelerator unattended any more than you can a hospital). He got double overtime, and he was able to travel to New Mexico to see the family at Christmas instead.
My store closes only 3 days a year: Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving. We have shortened hours on some other major holidays like July 4th and Memorial day, but otherwise it’s business as usual. Granted our normal hours are 10-6, and 12-5 on Sunday, so it’s not a total sweatshop.
I don’t mind being there on a holiday. I’m not at all a holiday celebration kind of person, I have no near family, and I don’t much like to entertain. I might as well be at work possibly earning some extra holiday pay.
I certainly do mind working on the holidays, but we do not have enough people to staff a store without a bunch of us who would much rather be home with loved ones instead grinding away at the job. And it is always crowded on holidays. Always. Were the crowds only smaller…
Thus that “you shouldn’t have to work on holidays” bit always irks the hell out of me. But I am ultimately a worker. And while it is a shame workers have to work instead of being with their families, the reality is a worker’s first priority must be to work so non-workers can do what they want.
I can remember when almost everything was closed on Sundays. Small rural town, 1960’s. There would be a skeleton crew at the hospital and the fire/police stations, I imagine. But the idea was that it was a day of worship and family recreation. At that time most family recreation was self-created. It wasn’t 100% of course, but generally people were home.
Of course that was also a time when middleclass women with children were mostly out of the workforce. Seems like a strange dream I had, now.
You may disagree that it’s “civilized,” or desirable, but surely you know that it’s the way many societies were once structured. The whole idea of the Judeo-Christian Sabbath is a day when nobody works. (And yes, there may have to be some exceptions, but they are in fact exceptions. Things like food are easy to stock up on if you do a little planning ahead.)
I remember when almost every store was closed on Sunday in the '70s (and in my neighborhood, plenty of non-chain stores are closed on either Saturday or Sunday even now.) But even so, there were plenty of people working - just not as many as there are now. You had people working at the hospitals and police/fire stations. (although there’s no reason to think police and fire would have had skeleton crews). But restaurants and bakeries were open on Sunday and closed on Monday and sporting events happened on Sundays which meant people were working at those venues. Movie theaters and parking lots and bars ( after noon ) and bowling alleys and amusement parks were open so people were working at those places.
My guess is that your experience was different from mine mainly because you were in a small rural town which probably did not have many people who worshipped on a day other than Sunday and not because it was the '60s rather than the '70s