Out of curiosity, does she happen to have a bottle of Purell or other hand sanitizer in her purse? One of my husband’s friend’s wives is rabidly anti-vax, yet carries all kinds of cleansers with her and keeps different varieties of them at home. There’s the purell in her purse, the toilet wipes in her diaper bag (which she still carries for a 3-year-old kid), the clorox wipes in the bathroom next to the antibacterial soap and the special, germ-killing butt wipes on top of the toilet tank. Then in the kitchen, there are several varieties of antibacterial, antimicrobial, anti-anything-else-that-may-make-you-sick cleansers. She gets really snippy anytime she talks about how vaccines are evil and I comment that researchers are finding that kids actually get sicker when houses are disinfected to within an inch of their lives.
Dear Teenaged Daughter -
I realize that you are largely unmotivated, and how at the start of the summer you thought it would be cool to have one more summer “off” instead of finding a job, which is what we wanted you to do. I realize that family issues have prevented you from going out job hunting as such, and now you have 6 weeks until school starts, making you a less attractive employee.
However, if you don’t SHUT UP about being “stuck” in the house every day, when you didn’t listen to Stepdad & I and find a job BEFORE school let out, I’m going to smack you one of these times. Get a job walking dogs, or babysitting, or something. Or volunteer at a homeless shelter, or a hospital, or something else. Good Grief - clean your fucking room while you’re there, since you’re tired of us bitching at you about it.
Find some fucking motivation and DO SOMETHING instead of whining at me about it on a daily basis. I’M not keeping you trapped in the house, locked away from everything. If you showed some fucking motivation, maybe I’D be more motivated to help you finish getting your driver’s license (even though we both volunteered to drive you to jobs if necessary).
Sooner or later you’re going to have to wake up and realize that people aren’t always going to do everything for you, and that sometimes you have to work at a job you don’t want to, and that demonstrating some motivation in general, not just about stuff that you like, will get you much farther in life than whining.
But what do I know? I’m only your mother. :rolleyes:
Look, I support everything else you’re saying, but I gotta ask about this. Her school starts the third week of August? When did it let out? Not to excuse her attitude and such, but knowing you’ll be going back to school when it’s still (presumably; I missed seeing your location; where are you at?) ungodly hot/humid is kind of a demotivator. (But then so is not getting out until the last week of June, which has also happened to me.)
Detecting no sarcasm, I accept your apology on behalf of the world’s beekeepers. However, I must opine that Mr Olives has never seen a beekeeper in the big gloves and veils. Your hat looks just like the very popular sun hats I see on heads every Saturday at the farmer’s market. Although the tan ones do seem more popular than the white ones. If you’re not blending in where you live, you just need to move to the sunnier areas around San Francisco.
We’re in Indianapolis; her school district starts back on August 18. Her last day of school was the day before the Memorial Day weekend. I get that - it SUCKS; I’m mostly just tired of being whined at because she’s bored and “stuck”, when she had opportunities to do something about it. As I said in my rant, there’s no reason why she can’t do babysitting or dog-walking or something.
Well that’s obviously becaue researchers are EVIL. They’re the ones who supported the vaccines despite all the baby-crippling things that come out of them as a result.
School in Arizona starts middle of August too. It’s hateful and nasty.
If it takes 10 minutes to get a fucking cup of coffee then you’re not a convenience store. First I had to dodge various people wandering around oblivious to other people holding scalding hot cups of coffee. I finally make it to the island where they keep the cups and creamers and more than half of the area is taken up by a store worker who chose this very busy time to restock and has to have all the cabinet doors open and pulled out several large containers and spread them on the counter. Some other patron decided to camp out in front of the coffee lids and chit chat with the worker making her even less attentive to people trying to walk around her while holding scalding hot cups of coffee.
When I had to go to the other side of the island because I couldn’t reach the stirrers or lids, the worker chose that second to bend over and stick her big ass* in the way almost causing me to spill scalding hot coffee on myself or her big ass. Make it to the other side of the island, dodging a couple more people. Worker decides to plop another container down on that side and take up more space. Now someone else wants to get to the stuff where I’m at and can’t wait.
I finally get my coffee together and a lid on my scalding hot coffee and walk to the
counter where there are 3 registers and someone at each register. I stand in a line in the middle ready to go to the next open register other people line up behind me but out of the corner of my eye I see a woman standing off to the side. The worker at the first register has trouble resetting one of the gas pumps (recent power outage messed stuff up) so he has to ask someone else to tell the customer at that pump that they
need to move to another pump. Thing is, he was already talking to that person on the intercom but he couldn’t bother to talk to them again, better to pull someone away who was working the middle register. The first register opens and lurking lady jumps forward. I say out loud, “you’ve got to be kidding me”. Well, karma got her because her card got declined and while she was arguing with the guy the middle register
opened, I paid for my coffee and left, dodging a few more people with my cup of scalding hot coffee.
There were several times I thought about just walking out and leaving the coffee and I wish I had because the coffee sucked.
*In case I offended anyone with a big ass, I also have a big ass for my size and I am keenly aware of where I’m placing it when other people are trying to walk around me especially if they are holding SCALDING HOT COFFEE!
From the way you phrased your post (one last summer of freedom), she’s gotta be at least 16 or 17. Tell her to grow the fuck up already. She’s old enough to be responsible for making her own summer plans. Read a book–or even watch some fucking shitty daytime television, if that’s what it comes down to.
ETA:
I mean, what the hell was she expecting? Not to have to work, but to have some magical income source that meant she could spend the summer in Cancun?
People like that suck.
Been there and done that.
Just keep repeating to yourself (as I believe Samuel Johnson wrote) you cannot reason someone out of a position they have not reasoned themselves into. There’s always going to be a significant segment of very stupid people. Fortunately the rest of us can vaccinate ourselves and protect our community against their idiotic desire to play nice-nice with really dangerous diseases.
Here’s a really good resource to help fight them off:
You may not be able to reason with the crazy but you may be able to convince bystanders that the crazy is indeed crazy.
Oh how I feel your pain, being the stepfather of a very similarly responsibility-handicapped teenaged girl. Except my wife and I get the added bonuses of prescription drug abuse (Oxycontin), cigarette smoking, promiscuous sex, staying out all night instead of coming home when she’s supposed to, her telling us “fuck you” and various other sundries to our faces in front of our young boys, the police constantly at our house (“hi neighbor! why are you slowly stepping away from me?”) and a level of apathy towards her alleged loved ones that is breathtaking.
On the brighter side (I’m 90 miles east of you in the 'Nati), the weather the last few days has been gorgeous! Mid-70’s, no humidity…its very un-July like.
Oh. My. God.
Earlier I’d referenced a cluster-fuck of a project that both drives me to tears and makes me furious. The lastest you-have-GOT-to-be-kidding-me moment is this: There is a technical problem involving Excel. I’ve been going back and forth for three fucking weeks trying to get a solution from them. “Try this”. Nope, doesn’t work. “Ok. Try THIS!” Nope, doesn’t work. “Huh. Trrrrryyyy THIS!!”. NO! It doesn’t work! It never works! Stop telling me to try shit that doesn’t work!
Today I mentioned that maybe it’s because I have Excel 2007, and that even though I’m saving my docs as XML Spreadsheet 2003 as required, maybe this is something endemic to Excel 2007?
“Oh, you have 2007? Well, that’s your problem right there!”
You mutha FUCKERS. You couldn’t have thought to ask me that three fucking weeks ago?
“Ok, here’s what you do. Try this. If that doesn’t work, try this.”
Guess what, shitheads. It. Doesn’t. WORK.
What does work is when your office submits the spreadsheets. Can we please please please stop fucking around with these non-solutions and just have you submit them? Christ! I know you have to bill us for that. I will take the heat from the CEO, just fucking do it!
Urrgh. My sister went through the same thing at Christmas. Right down to the insane mother, and new baby nephew to remind her of her loss. Today would have been her due date. I totally understand. It sucked.
I hope your sister finds herself in the same situation as mine in a few months…
well into a healthy pregnancy.
I can’t *believe *the kinds of shit that pops up between 2007 and earlier versions. I had to set up one of our guest computers as a second machine for one of my actuaries, just so that she could work on troubleshooting a problem that’s showing up with one of the models she developed, but only in the newer Excel.
Hate Office 2007 with a bloody passion. And I’ve never even used it. It’s just that annoying.
Someone in our department intentionally did something so mind-bogglingly stupid that he’s not only going to be fired, but could end up sued from here to oblivion and blackballed from the industry.
They don’t know who it is. But they most certainly will, within 2-3 days.
So what do they do? They pull us into a meeting, one team at a time, to demand that this person come forward and/or that if any of us know about it, come forward with the information.
Ok, fine, no problem there. Fully expected and understood.
But what does stupid motherfucker jerkface DICK of a Director do?
Say that his first thought on hearing about the issue was that he was going to fire our entire 60+ person department.
Thinking such a thing? Lame. Sign of a bad manager.
Saying it out loud to your people? Unprofessional beyond measure.
Dude, pack it up. You don’t know how to manage people.
My thoughts on hearing something like that from a director - “Dude. Is there something wrong with you?” Unprofessional indeed.
What did the guy do? Huh? Huh? You can tell us. 
Any chance of getting details of whatever the epic screwup was? Sounds massively interesting.
I’ve had it with this melonfarming dirt on my melonfarming baked potatoes. Am I totally out to lunch, expecting a baked potato skin so clean that I can actually eat it at a restaurant? I finally complained to a manager about it yesterday, and he brought me a second potato that was as dirty as the first. If I can rub a bunch of sandy black dirt off the potato, it’s not clean. I’ve given up on trying to eat the skins of potatoes in restaurants - apparently their idea of “clean” is not the same as mine. Funny how mine get completely clean when I give them a quick scrub with a scrub brush at home, though. :dubious:
For fuck’s sake, Panera, turn down the AC. It’s freaking cold in here! All year long.