Perhaps if men didn’t jump to the use of the term "Rape them" when they get pissed off, @Eyebrows_0f_Doom and I and many many others wouldn’t get so triggered.
ETA:
Some time ago they gave me shit for talking too much, in the opinion of said Eyebrows, about my beloved new Camry.
You should have started a thread on it. You had a zillion posts about your new car.
I agree. The point is that even in the Pit, it’s sometimes preferable to criticize a long-time inoffensive poster diplomatically rather than rudely when they make a slip like this.
Have you seen how many, many thread digressions we have in the Pit? It can sometimes be annoying, but other times part of the charm.
I don’t make major purchases very often in my retired old age, and was just sharing some innocent excitement. Eyebrows was the only entity that complained, and it follows a history of being abrasive in other contexts. Some people’s mothers taught them at a young age that if you don’t have something nice to say, it’s often best to say nothing at all, particularly against inoffensive topics and posters. Not all of us have learned that lesson.
Eh … New Yorkers are forthright speakers.
And in the immediate case, I agree he was right & I was wrong.
And now he has gone.
Now, see, that’s diplomacy!
When my older brother first relocated to Manhattan from the extreme politeness of relatively small-town Canada, he sent me a book titled “This is New York, Honey!”. The title comes from an incident related in the book where the writer hails a cab (possibly on a rainy day when Manhattan cabs are almost impossible to get) and as she is about to get in, another woman brusquely pushes her aside and gets in instead. When the woman who legitimately hailed the cab complains, the other woman utters the sentence that became the title of the book, reflecting some of New York City culture.
That’s not how I choose to live my life. Yes, I can be rude, derisive, and hostile, but only when the object of my hostility clearly deserves it, not as a way of life.
Living here w so many of them, I too have my issues w some of that gratuitous aggression. Especially when exported here to less-crowded SoFL where it’s almost always unnecessary.
But at my prior condo there was a retired couple who both grew up in the residential part of Manhattan proper. Sweet people; now almost 90 both of them. We (back when my late wife was reasonably healthy) became good friends. Now several years later they’re some of the very few condo crowd I still interact with.
Anyhow at one time years ago we were discussing the aggressive nature of many NYC types. To their credit they only ever showed it themselves when it really mattered, not for a place in line at the grocery store.
Their comment paraphrased:
“Get or be gotten”; it’s drilled into every NYC kid from an early age.
OTOH, a couple days ago I was chatting w a retired NYPD high level chief. We happened to sit adjacent at breakfast at a resort. A real gentleman executive of wisdom and integrity. And no sign of random me-first thinking.
Takes all kinds to make a city of 8 million.
Update to my OP in this thread… I was back today to put things back together, and to finish the job. And they weren’t ready. Nothing was ready. They think that it should be ready to put back by Tuesday, so my plan is to go back on Tuesday. But that pretty much means that my whole day today, which was planned around putting things back and getting the office ready for folks to come back, was wasted. And I have other customers; my regular customers that rely on me as their main IT guy, who I have to keep apologizing to because I’m busy running around trying to support other people in another area to try to bail them out.
So it sucks because my own folks aren’t getting support, and the people who were expecting to come back to working desks next Monday won’t be able to, and I’m again exhausted just from all of the hours on the road and the running around trying to figure out what is going on and why there are delays and trying to piece together the story so that I can pass that on to other people. And at the end of the day, I feel defeated and guilty because nothing got done. It wasn’t my fault, and again I’m putting myself out there and running myself ragged in an attempt to keep the ship from sinking, and other people are apologizing to me for wasting my time and thanking me for being so flexible and all that, but I still can’t help but feel bad about all of it.
I will just be glad when that’s all over and I can get back to the regular amount of stress and going nuts. 
I hope like hell there’s some grandboss somewhere who knows and appreciates all this and can prevent your layoff at the next round.
We don’t really do layoffs here; we are public employees in a union.
I mean, it can mean having a secure job at a place that is a shitty place to work, and it’s sort of getting to be like that already, but that’s not something I should have to worry about.
What they do instead, is when vacancies occur, they don’t fill them. It’s great that I don’t need to worry about my job, but when the state is cut into 6 pieces, and I’m responsible for 1 of those pieces, and another piece hasn’t had anyone there for a full year now, it just makes everything suck just that much more.
The whole reason is because we have a massive budget shortfall. It’s a crisis at this point. And unfortunately, it feels like a big part of the response to that is “doing something”. Day by day, it feels more and more like this:
That comic pretty well summarizes modern management. And especially modern politics of the more right-leaning persuasion.
Take care not to burn out. It’s nice to be proud of going an extra mile. But they can build a stone so heavy you’re crushed while not-quite-successfully lifting it. BTDT; have the T-shirt & the hernia belt to show for it.
Thanks, I won’t. I’ve done that at two different jobs before. I know what it feels like now, and I know not to fall into that trap again.
Sorry to hear that. My condolences
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Yes, condolences @Mk_VII - sorry for your loss.
Micro-rant.
As I, as normal, sowed too many vegetable plant seeds too early, so I’ve been obsessively checking the weather as there’s still a tiny risk of frost.
In the UK, the met office website is one of the best places.. except.. the daily lows never made sense. It will have a daily low of, say 4°C on the summary, but if you check by hour for that day, it never gets below, say, 7°C at any time in the 24 hours, while the next day it says low of 6°C but there’s clearly a 4°C listed in the morning.
I’ve eventually figured it out; the daily low is not for the actual hours that comprise the day given, no, it’s for the low during the following night. So the ‘Sunday’ low stated on the summary is actually due at more or less 5am on Monday morning. I could understand fudging it for 1am, but it’s light by 5 here, that is definitely the next day!
I like to monitor my neighborhood when I am traveling overseas. It’s a wild feeling.
Yeah. Most meteorological agencies define the statistical “day” as running from sunrise to sunrise, or something close to that. Temperatures, humidities, rainfalls, etc., are all are recorded on that basis.
So the daily low on the e.g. 8th will probably happen in the wee hours of the 9th.
For similar reasons meteorological agencies have their own definitions of the climatic seasons. UK Met uses these seasons:
The US NWS uses
I had never seen that laid out in such a way, but that fits exactly the way my brain organizes the seasons.
Of course the astronomers do it differently. Their definitions run from solstice to equinox to solstice.
The rest of the story on seasons is fascinating and complex. Even now in 2026, the idea there are 4 seasons is not universal. Some places have 5 or 6, others just 2. See Season - Wikipedia for lots more that you probably never imagined existed.
I lived on Guam for two years, and yes, we only had two seasons; rainy and dry. When you live pretty much at the equator, it’s basically summer all year round.
Only if you live at the correct altitude for that. Weather depends on altitude at the Equator, and I know this by living in a country that had lots of differences in altitude. So you might have summer, spring, autumn or winter all year round depending on where you live.
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