I feel like everyone deserves at least one job related “fuck you” style moral victory in their lives and that qualifies for sure.

For me it was when the WORST manager I have ever had called me back a year after I quit to ask me to come work for her again and got to laugh in her face and tell her I’d have happily accepted half the pay at her place to scrub toilets as long as it wasn’t working with her, but instead I was making double what she paid me to do my dream job.

I’ve never done cocaine, BUT I’m pretty sure I know what it feels like.

Pho!

In another life, I attended a large geology conference and went to a session with talks about this. They had two speakers back to back, one boiled down to “it was the asteroid” and the other “it wasn’t the asteroid”.

Not only did the speakers get heated in each other’s question sections, the whole ROOM felt like it was about to get into a fistfight - everyone basically taking over each other to the person to their left, right, front, back. Extremely hostile!

I can’t remember the evidence but I do distinctly remember thinking that it wasn’t my subject matter and I should probably avoid forming an opinion on it for my physical safety in my career.

Now I’m free to offend paleontologists both professionally and unprofessionally and I can’t remember how to :'(

Sent a relatively new and somewhat nervous co-worker a “grandpasimpsonleave.gif” responding to the 8 billionth mutual emergency of the day followed immediately by “I kid, I kid, we’ll fix it! 😉 [Relevant follow up question]?”

Guess which of those two messages was the last one unaffected by the outage? Yep. I got to watch her devolve into a panic as her messages reached me and my responses didn’t get sent to her, and THEN delivered in the worst order/selection possible. Felt like the more critical the message, the less likely to send.

And! She’s on the other side of the continent and all her location’s phones are through teams also! And it was time sensitive.

Rough Friday.

I moved to Edmonton, AB from the US South and holy crap, the darkness is unreal. Even the locals struggle with this pitch-black 4pm nonsense.

That said, the city has a lot of focus on indoor spaces that really saves it. I used to go to West Ed mall just to walk around somewhere without a coat for free, you know?

The real gem of the city is the Muttart Conservatory though - and a year-long pass is like $30?? For an indoor rainforest??

Makes it worth living in the winter.

Also they were HORRIFICALLY unreliable, to the point where my mechanic’s actual quote was “Folks, I’m not in the habit of talking myself out of a $10,000 paycheck, but this car is not worth it.” 30 minutes before we walked in his door it was working fine, by the time he went to drive it to the bay it wouldn’t start, and never did again.

It wasn’t even paid off yet.

To say nothing of the fact that one had to drop the engine to get to the alternator, the electrical blew itself out twice in the 4 years we owned it, very few of the features worked with any competence, and we just got our 3rd or 4th safety recall for it (or whatever is left of the parts at the scrapyard).

Consumer Reports rated its reliability as a six - not out of ten, but out of ONE HUNDRED.

Absolute lemons.

needing to ask people what 3rd party chat service they prefer

Yeah Signal’s great and all, but my spouse’s family refuses to use anything but WhatsApp, half my family uses FB Messenger while the other half use Discord (and they are feuding about it), the older folks in my hobby group refuse to learn anything but the default text on their phone (that group chat is an unmanageable NIGHTMARE), and anything from work uses teams…except the US folks who use slack, and now my friends want to get me on Signal, too? Relevant XKCD.

The solution to my problem is not yet another messaging app. I just want ONE inbox!

I’ve been pretty happy with Beeper so far. There are some features that aren’t quite as good as using each app natively, yet, but I think they’re off to a great start considering the sheer scale and variety of interfaces they’re working with. It even gives me tools to deal with the hobby chat anarchy, and now I can send default SMS messages from my computer!

I’m literally saying this as a visa holder / residence permit holder in my country of residence right now. When it was issued me, it was made very clear that my status in the country was a privilege that could be revoked at any time for a myriad of reasons. Now, “repeated wars of aggression by your home country with the specific excuse of controlling territory occupied by you” wasn’t EXPLICITLY listed, but I’d be shocked to retain my status in those circumstances.

I’m not their citizen - as of yet I haven’t started attempting to be one. Describing myself even as “from” here would be misleading. "Once a _____ always a ______” doesn’t even apply - I’ve never tried to be anything BUT a ______??

If article was “Lithuania strips citizenship and rights from Russian born naturalized residents” I’d be concerned. Instead, article is “Lithuania deports small fraction of its Russian and Belarusian expats identified as active threat during wartime”. Which is actually surprisingly restrained.

There’s a small difference between saying

“due to repeated wars by our neighbor explicitly using the presence of their citizens in foreign soil to justify annexation, we’re revoking temporary residency of their foreign nationals and deporting them. Return to your home country or go elsewhere.” And “Citizen or not, once a jap always a jap, due to our beef over Pacific imperialism we’re taking your property and imprisoning you in this concentration camp”

Bed sheet suspenders. Dumb problem, stupidly cheap, horribly made, and ABSOLUTELY fixed the friggin sheets being yanked off the corner of the bed twice a night by my tumble-dry-medium sleeper of a spouse.

When they finally broke after almost 2 years I sewed some that’ll last 10 years and I don’t regret them at all.