• 21 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 28th, 2024

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  • Tell me about it, and there’s always something better than what you have. How to be smart about buying tools deserves its own entire comment chain.

    I didn’t know about these until recently, but I now recommend folks check out local tool libraries to get started and see what they want or need for low to no cost.

    We have a one car garage full of maintenance and fabrication tools I’ve acquired over my life. They’ve paid for themselves multiple times over in even just the last decade, but the cost and space requirements are prohibitive for a lot of folks. It’s one of those “having money saves money” situations, but tool libraries can help a lot.


  • Don’t get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because wood is fiddly as fuck.

    OR

    DO get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because it will burn that shit right out of you If you don’t die from an aneurysm first. It’ll teach you to build all sorts of wiggle room into everything in life, not just furniture.

    People will think what you made was amazing, that it took so much skill.

    Nope.

    Only you know how you put everything together loosely, then tightened screws incrementally while adjusting clamps and smacking it with a rubber mallet until it looked right. There are pilot holes they can’t see that don’t go anywhere. You definitely missed gluing something important. You might have weighted a piece with epoxy and cat litter because you forgot to buy weights, it was 3 am, and you were unintentionally high as balls on stain fumes, but you really wanted to finish in time to surprise your partner for their birthday.

    They don’t know, they’ll never know, and they don’t need to know.


  • I worked for a call center as a stop gap when I was younger. The economy had shit itself and while this company was doing great, it was looking to save money because they knew they could squeeze desperate people. Annual raises were coming up. They were based on a system heavily influenced by disciplinary action, so many of my coworkers started getting verbal and written warnings for ridiculous things.

    I finally got written up for not pulling up a reference before telling a customer about a past event. I didn’t pull the reference up because I already had it and other common topics open for easy access, which my supervisor told us to do.

    I disputed the write-up but the department manager denied it as “the information could have changed between calls, so you should have looked it up through our knowledge base”. I asked how the past could have changed and was told it doesn’t matter: it’s policy. I asked to see the policy. The goalposts immediately changed: “disciplinary action is at management’s discretion and this was a serious error in judgment”. I told them that I was shocked anyone could say that and still expect to be taken seriously, even by themselves, and refused to sign my write-up. I was pulled into the HR manager’s office and given a “Final Warning” write-up for my attitude and not signing my initial write-up. I signed that one and got on a PIP, so they were happy.

    Annual reviews were that week. I had extraordinary performance stats but got a $0.04 per hour annual raise - $83.20 per year! I walked out once I got a new job.

    I just checked: my old manager is now a “boss babe” who sells essential oils and scented candles for MLMs. Sometimes a life well lived really is the best revenge.



  • I agree, you just should tell people first! Unsolicited story time:

    We had been dating for a few weeks. She was smart, nice, and very fun. I really liked her and had decided to consider getting serious. I thought she had ghosted me for our dinner date, though, so I had left and was feeling sad. She called over an hour later to apologize profusely and beg me to come back, saying she’d explain and buy everything that night as apology.

    What she didn’t mention was that she was going to alternate between incoherent rambling and staring, silent and unresponsive, into one corner of the cafe’s ceiling. I had no idea what was going on. I got ahold of her roommate, who said she had eaten a bunch of shrooms and walked to her friend’s house. I left after he arrived and I learned he was her roommate… and her boyfriend. Fun.

    I went full no contact. Years later, we worked together briefly in graduate school, where she pretended not to know me despite having already told our lab mates we used to be friends. Super awkward, maybe mental problems.



  • I had a formula: “Hi!”, my real first name, a brief mention and open-ended question about something I found interesting on their profile, then closing with something like “Online dating can be a lot. I’d love to hear from you, but only when you’re ready. No pressure. I hope you have a great day.”

    So about four sentences. It took me like two minutes. I got about 1 response in 10 instead of over 1:30 that way, at least from women. Success!

    I then proceeded to have all of the worst dates I’ve ever been on. One person showed up on shrooms, a woman interrogated me about marriage and children within ten minutes of meeting, another seemed to be fabricating their entire life story on the spot… and more! There were good dates too, but soooo much bad.



  • YES. I’m piggy backing on your post to drive home why you keep your receipts.

    I was fired for performance issues after a little over a year of employment. They claimed I was working at a level lower than an entry level new hire. This was a big surprise to me as my most recent review was glowing, my expertise was carrying the department, and no one ever mentioned any concerns. The company was having issues, though, and I was the highest paid person in my department.

    Unbeknownst to them, I keep a work journal. I spend five minutes at the beginning of each day reviewing what I did the day prior and what needs to be done that day, then recording it all in a little notebook made exactly for the purpose (I can link anyone if they’re interested). So I spent about 20-25 hours over my time there doing this and had meticulous records of the entire time.

    What’s fun about my termination is I was out for 2 months recovering for surgery from a work injury. They fired me the day I returned for unsubstantiated performance issues that I can refute by the day.

    Guess who is getting a $150k settlement.

    That little notebook, on top of keeping me on track and making work easier, earned me about $6000/hour.






  • Yep! Pollen are haploid, but technically they’re actually monoploid (or equivalent, depending on polyploidy) given they’re a fully functioning organism.

    This is surprisingly common. All the pollen, male bees and ants (and actually a bunch of males in the order Hymenoptera grow from unfertilized eggs), and algae, for example. Certain fungi go through most of their lifecycles haploid and have a brief diploid phase, which undergoes meiosis to get right back to haploid, albeit for gametes this time. Tons of stuff! Nature is fucking wild.

    Edit: haha, I just saw my Dad pun.