1994, I was... A manager for Radio Shack. No, I didn't wear bad pants.
My District Manager (DM) promoted me to a larger store from my current store. The other manager was being demoted... To MY store. Which made the whole thing a bit awkward. The other manager and I also were not getting any more help. We literally were going to do the takeover inventories ourselves... both stores.
I got up Saturday morning at 7:30 and got into my store at 8:30am and worked till 6pm, when my store closed. One of my employees said he'd help with my store's inventory, but he couldn't work past 10pm. We entered final counts and started reconcile at 4am. Reconcile is typically left to the manager taking over, but I didn't trust the guy, so we both did the reconcile (comparing what we counted in the store vs what the computer said was in the store and explaining any variances). That was done about 6am, largely because he wanted to dispute items that were at the repair center that I had documented. We then moved to his former, my new store. Which had a much larger inventory. We stopped and picked up breakfast and started counts around 7:30. By this time I had been awake and working for 24 hours.
Inventory of my new store was a fucking nightmare. Counts were WAY off from computer's inventory. Entire computer systems were missing, monitors, a couple of hi-fi receivers. Don't even get me started on force feed. At about noon, I called our DM and said I needed either him, or a senior manager onsite to cover this inventory and some helpers. My DM's lazy ass wasn't about to work on a Sunday, so he sent a senior manager and two employees. The senior manager, someone that I knew and trusted, did reconcile as we finished counts. Boy was the inventory completely screwed. That was just the large items, by 10pm we hadn't even gotten into the force feed items (items hanging on pegs). We finally got counts done at 6am and I signed off on the reconcile around 7:30. The store opened at 9am, but I lived 25 minutes away, so I just freshened up in the restroom, went and bought a case of Cokes and opened the store. I was supposed to have an employee come in at 1pm and another at 5pm...
The employee that was supposed to work from 1pm to close (9pm), decided to just never show up, he was also the other key holder. RS only had two key holders in the store back in those days. The one at 5pm was a part timer and could not close. So I ended up working until 9:30 that night.
I got home at 10pm, made some dinner and got to sleep at 11pm and it was Monday night.
So I was awake from 7:30am Saturday till 11:00pm the following Monday and was at work all but maybe 30 minutes. I think that was about 63.5 hours and I still had the rest of the week to work. It took me about a month to get my sleep schedule back into any semblance of normalcy.
I will starve and die in the gutter, before EVER working retail again.
Absolutely agree.
I tightly control every piece of media that comes into my house. My kids have never had to sit through 10 minutes of commercials to watch a 20 minute program. When they go to a friends house and watch TV, they can't stand it and go do something else. My oldest loves Figure Skating in the Olympics (he's a competitive figure skater himself), but all the commercials made it all but unwatchable to him. He just waits till the skaters programs, he wants to watch, are on Youtube. This has had the added benefit that my kids have been completely unaware of the "latest and greatest" toy or thing that all of their peers absolutely had to have.
The absolute frenzy to "make a buck" on freaking everything has made almost all forms of media devoid of worth. An oxymoron I know, but it is the truth. The cost in time and attention to sit through so many advertisements is way too high and I refuse to pay that price. If that means I don't see or hear the latest and greatest movies, TV series, or music... Oh well.
54m here, married for 19 years.
My wife has a very demanding career, so really needs her hobbies to let go of the stress. What I do is listen when she's talking about what has her interests. Then if there is anything I can do to facilitate it, it will suddenly materialize. This is not always something expensive or even something material.
Just before COVID the entire family got into playing D&D. Being an artist my wife went bonkers on painting miniatures. So I made sure she had all the paints and brushes she needed. Plus, the dining room, which is actually our "hobby" room, got a lighting upgrade
How bonkers did she get? This bonkers and there are many many more:
Here's an exchange between my wife and I, while she was in urgent care after severely spraining her ankle and breaking the 5th metatarsal in her right foot. She has danced ballet since the age of 4. We're in our middle-50's now. This was a couple of years ago and she's fully healed and back to dancing now.
Wife: Getting old sucks.
Me: It beats the alternative.
Wife, after a moment of reflection: Not by much.
But that really was Ricardo's actual chest.
Apparently he worked out... A LOT.
Another parent on one of my kid's team has a ridiculously huge Cadillac. It's the size of a Suburban. She has one kid and not planning to have more.
She made the mistake of making a backhanded comment about how my wife and I drive older cars to our faces. We have a 2014 Camry LE and a 2015 Lexus ES 300h. (Mine and wife's respectively)
So I asked her what type of contracting work she does. She looked at me with a bewildered expression. I went on and said; "well you drive a big work truck, I assumed you did construction or something."
The look she gave me could have melted steel.
Just to be clear, I have a great deal of respect for the trades. She however is married to money, not terribly bright, and looks down her nose at just about everyone. So I knew that would hit a nerve with her.
Given:
You lack the capacity to experience imposter syndrome.
Nail a few of these idiots with sedition charges and suddenly the rest might be interested in checking their sources. Even those in the so called "main stream media".
Just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Service Model". It was excellent. But be warned, if you're looking for military, adventure sci fi with snarky AI's this will not be your cup of tea. The author takes on modern societal issues in the setting of post collapse human society. Yes, I'm aware of the dichotomy there.
If you do want snarky AI's and adventure, then I recommend the following series:
"Backyard Starship" series. I think it's up to book 17 so far and the quality of the books have stayed pretty consistent. The prequel series "The Peacemaker Wars" is also pretty good.
"Expeditionary Force" The quality does NOT stay consistent in this series and quite frankly, it's not very well written. However, it's like Lofthouse cookies, a lot of mediocre ingredients come together to make something great. I am a die hard fan of the series and highly recommend it if you want something that just removes you from reality for a while.
Gen X'er here and an older one at that.
My two idiot older brothers, one of whom is an Oathbreaker... Keeper...what the fuck ever, are voting for that fucking asshole.
A lot of my fellow classmates of my highschool graduating class are also voting for him. I went to the same school, came from the same town had a lot of the same experiences. How the living ever fuck are they so bamboozled?
It's absolute insanity and it is not going to end here.
Sorry for the bad image quality.
The image is of the top of piston 4 and the cylinder wall in a Toyota 2AR-FE with 162,000 miles. All Toyota recommended maintenance was performed throughout the engine's life. I have the feeling those recommendations were written by marketing people and not the engineers.
Based on what the image shows, the engine needs a short block. Am I correct?
Guy who runs Plex on a Ubuntu container on Proxmox.