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I am a janitor at McDonald’s. Sometimes I find a whole-ass burger behind the fryers and it had to be there for at least a week, with how often we clean behind them, and they are perfectly fucking preserved other than the fact that they are rock hard.
IDK what they put in the food, but real food rots. I’m extremely wary of eating food that even microbes won’t touch.
One of the things I do at my job is emptying the trash bins of the car park, people throw away all sorts of things, some of them are useful, some of them are disgusting, some of them are intriguing. Then there are the patterns and trends.
I’m talking about a pay car park, all interior inside a building. There’s this spot where each week there was a gin bottle in the trash with three or four cans of tonic, but no plastic cups. Each week for maybe ten years then one day it changed to a bottle or two of Ballantine’s for two or three years and just recently it changed again to a herbs liquor popular around here.
Other times, not often enough, there are rejected presents, like a pair of new shoes that some guy tossed in the trash. How do I know it was a rejected present? Because it included a birthday note that read something like:
I’ve never forgot your birthday, I hope you enjoy it my dear [Joe], even though you hurt me that much you might know why you did it.
Sincerly [Jane]My friends tell me that I should write stories about the stuff I find but I’m really bad at that, it would be fun though.
My security clearance certificate has me listed as a Government Agent.
I work for a thankless and ungrateful store who successfully met its sales criteria and became the most successful store in the state. However, that doesn’t reflect in how the store is operated and associate morale is constantly shit on. I’m one of the more decent workers, however, my management works me to death and stupidly wonders why my performance fluctuates from time to time.
And this is all to make sure, stupid dumbfucks with wallets (yes I’m talking about moronic fucking customers, fuck all of you) shit is on the shelf so more dumbfuck moronic customers can ask even more dumbfuck questions that don’t relate to anything and shoving their phones in my face.
That I get paid what I do for the job I do. It brings no real benefit to society but it’s a living.
For me, it is bringing together a technical design that fits the best case for the various stakeholders and the client. It turns out that is a complicated thing to do.
The rare 10-30 seconds when something first goes wrong. The mix of surprise, concern and instant mental troubleshooting. I’m an engineer in a big power plant on the operations side. My job 99% of the time is to take numbers and do some wrenching/maintenance when needed. 1% of the time I earn my money by running at the scary shit and figuring it out.
Hats off to workers like you. The unsung heroes of modern society.
I had a stint in IT many years ago. I remember being at my first IT job, working as a help desk person. Months in and there was a lull in work for me. Things were all working just fine or better. It was at this point that I mentioned it to my boss (IT Manager of the whole multi location business). ‘Man, there’s nothing really to do. It kinda makes me feel guilty that I’m getting paid to basically sit around.’ I’ll never forget what he replied with after giving a bit of a laugh. He said, “We’re here so when a ‘fire’ breaks out, we can quickly put it out and assess the cause. Then make a preventive plan for this issues like this.” I laughed and smiled. As I then realized that I was in a lesser way, a electronic device ‘firefighter.’ We standby to quickly and effectively address network, computer and printer problems.
He gave an example he had read online a few years prior, of someone who was working for a $4-5 million dollar valued, up and coming corporation. (This I believe happen in 2012 or so.) While the execs were in a meeting, trying balance the books, I guess the founder realized that they were paying for a small team of four IT people and wondered why they had to have so many of them. He complained about how much they were paying to have them staffed and how expensive it was for the two senior IT people they had. I guess they were paying them each over $110,000 salaries. (Each of them specializing in key systems the corp. used daily.) He pointed out his observations, that he would often see and hear them sitting around in their office space, talking and joking with one another. He wanted to know why they kept them onboard if they hardly ever worked and why they ‘deserved’ to be paid so much. This went on for two days or so where the execs kept trying to find ways to cut costs and balance things out. And the ‘IT cost’ would keep coming up. They were planning to cut the team down to one or two people and maybe contract out one or two remote, to save money.
Well, on the third day of the execs going over the books and coming close to a final decision, there was a huge server crash that was caused by a hacker or hacker group who had gotten into the network system and into their email server. The IT team entered Red Alert mode and stayed there working until around 3 in the morning, ‘putting out fires,’ bring things back online safely, and without losing critical server data during it. Even though they had to pull nearly all of the servers to address the issues one by one offline. The company was losing tens of thousands of dollars every hour things were down. And so, come the next morning when the founder and execs came back into the office the next day and get the final report that about 90% of things were back to normal now, and the company had only lost an estimated $400,000 or so in work value while the IT infrastructure was down.
While the IT seniors reported on what had happen, how bad things had gotten and what course of actions the IT team had done to get things back to normal, all while only being about to get a few hours of sleep before the early morning meeting. The founder and execs realized how big of a bullet they had missed but having an in-house IT team and experts that could physically fix things.
Figuring out which parts of the vendors’ documentation is lies vs. what isn’t
Getting to be alone with the pets when the owner is out of the house (pet sitter)
Username disgustingly checks out.
This sounds like it could be fun and interesting, depending on the house owners.
Have there been any funny or interesting stories that came about from dog sitting at someone’s house?
Ill tell ya when I get some.
I’m unemployed, so I stay home to run errands, manage finances, cook, clean and otherwise manage the house.
I would say cooking is the most intriguing part, as it can be quite complex, involves creativity and skill, and can be quite rewarding.
Anyone who says being a ‘stay at home’ partner and are pretty good at it, isn’t a job unto its self, hasn’t seen someone do it right or are full of it.
What is your favorite dish/meal to make?
Yes, I treat it like a full time job with explicit responsibilities and a rotating schedule to keep myself busy. (Which is a lot, tbh - daily life is already stressful enough … my lease is up in a couple months and I am struggling to find affordable housing in a particularly bad housing market - it’s very stressful.)
I’m not sure I have a single, all-time top dish, but here are some repeat favorites:
- bierocks
- enchiladas
- chili (and variants: pumpkin chili, beet chili)
- Cornish pasties
- pizza (I like to stuff the crust with pepper jack cheese)
- cheeseburgers & fries
- nachos
- Nambian Butternut Squash Soup (this is a favorite - if I make this, my partner will eat through the whole pot in a few days, lol; I add red lentils to give it more protein and make it more filling)
- Souvlaki in a pita - basically Greek style grilled meat in a pita bread with french fries and tzatziki sauce, and fresh red onion and tomatoes - this dish is a total indulgence
- Thai curries (mostly panang, red curry, and Masaman)
- Indian curries (e.g. Punjabi rajma masala, butter chicken, etc.)
I could keep going, but I’m getting hungry and I should stop 😆 I love food, and I love cooking.
Nice. I have those “souvlaki in a pita” ingredients waiting in my fridge but have been putting that off all week
Oh my goodness! Can I come over for dinner!? :D
Seriously, I’m having a hard time stopping my mouth from salivating right now.
Nearly all of these seem like things I would want to make. Thank you very much for sharing! You’ve inspired me to take another serious attempt at cooking proper meals again.
ironically I put more effort into my cooking before I lost my job - I think it was a coping strategy, the worse my life got the more I relied on tasty meals to keep me wanting to be alive (and to stay busy cooking so I didn’t have to think about anything else).
Cooking is great - besides saving money, I just can’t get the quality I can make at home from a restaurant.
I miss this - when my kids were at home I was always so motivated to do a good job, to find and make new things, to spend extra tine. Cooking was interesting.
Now it’s just me at home and it’s really not a motivation anymore
Cooking is SO rewarding. I wish I were retired, or at least unemployed, so I could just cook for my loved ones.
yes, this was originally more of a retirement plan that I would eventually quit my job once we had enough saved up and it wouldn’t be too much of a financial burden for me to be unemployed (like, we were hoping there would be a point where we felt life would be overall be less stressful and better if I picked up the domestic labor full-time than if I worked a job full-time while still doing the domestic labor - I’m doing the cooking and laundry no matter what, so retirement is mostly a stress-reduction strategy).
But then I was unexpectedly pushed out of my job, so we found ourselves in this situation a bit too early. I’m constantly stressed about finances now and trying to find a path to get us into a financially viable situation (right now we are far from financially sustainable, the housing shortage and having to flee across state lines meant we were stuck in a massively over-priced housing situation).
Hopefully we find a path to cheaper housing and the stress settles down (and we don’t have any major health emergencies or other sudden extreme expenses - e.g. we were in a bad car wreck and we had to replace our car, and let’s just say the car insurance didn’t suitably cover the cost of replacing it, etc. we can only take so many blows).
But yes, theoretically there is a way this could work out that would be like a dream scenario where I am just taking care of the domestic labor I was doing anyway when I was working full-time, and that life is just easier and happier for it.
I wish I were retired, then.
But more than that, I wish the best for you and your family.
haha, three cheers to that - financial independence is the dream.
I tend to be very frugal, but you can only save so much money by being cheap (and a lot of the strategies take up your time rather than your money, and you also only have so much time).
And thank you, that is very kind. I think we’ll be OK - just in a stressful period with a lot of uncertainty, but objectively we are very privileged and I don’t really feel I have room to complain.
Your life could be better if selfish people weren’t making it worse. You should never feel shame for calling that out.
The amount of R&D and the sheer amount of technology that has gone into drastically reducing truck exhaust pollution over the years is amazing.
You learn some interesting things sometimes when reviewing medical records
Watching my designs come to life from CAD. The tooling I work on has hundreds upon hundreds of parts. I have had bills of materials that are 60 pages long. We have our own CNC machines, and an enormous industrial 3D printer. So, I get to watch my parts grow, and be released from blocks of raw aluminum. Then, slowly over the course of a month, the parts gradually come together to something resembling a machine. When air and power get plugged in for the first time and it comes to life? Magic every time. Those first parts are like newborns to me. Even if they are scrap/ugly. When they finally get tuned in to produce good parts every time, I’m always giddy. I made this. This is my baby.
I think the craziest tool I have had to design was roughly 2.5 x 1.5 x 1 meter. It made one part at a time. It had 25 “edgefolding” units, 7 slides, retractable skin pins, a retractable skin clamp, suction cups, grippers, two-stage vacuum for the skin, and three forms of heat. Hot air, hot water, and a big IR shuttle that came in and heated both the upper and lower tool and had to retract and close in 2 seconds.
figuring out other people’s mistakes when trying to replicate their results, closely followed by figuring out my mistakes when trying to replicate my own old results
