They have no commuter service, only private or chartered flights.[DOUBLEPOST=1493342186,1493342069][/DOUBLEPOST]
I live on the south side of town, so the drive to IAH is actually easier and faster than the drive to Longview or Tyler.
Presenting the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Nick's first day working at a bike shop:
Good: Really patient, understanding boss. Gave me a discount on new tires and tubes, and told me to replace them myself at home as a learning experience. Which...I succeeded in doing!
Bad: ...after almost three hours and getting the tires on the wrong way, having to switch them around to the proper direction.
Ugly: ...and somehow screwed up the gear shifting in the process.
Good: Really patient, understanding boss. Gave me a discount on new tires and tubes, and told me to replace them myself at home as a learning experience. Which...I succeeded in doing!
Bad: ...after almost three hours and getting the tires on the wrong way, having to switch them around to the proper direction.
Ugly: ...and somehow screwed up the gear shifting in the process.
I have taught myself to do a bunch of basic bike maintenance through trial and error. Fucking up brake tensioning was exciting.
Thank God for YouTube.
I don't even know what this means. Or that "trueing" was a verb.
Surprise!
I've paid other people to do it (for my car). It was a set of alloy rims, not gonna mess with 'em. I've trued my bicycle wheels, though.
--Patrick
GasBandit
Staff member
It means adjusting the tension of the wheel spokes to make the wheel.... wheel-shaped.
It's not limited to jyst wheels though. Trueing the leaning tower of Piza would make it much less interesting.
This is a minor rant thread, not the Impossibilities in Reality thread.
Had a long, dumb argument with someone just now in a YouTube comment section (I know, I KNOW).
They refused to acknowledge that there's a clear-cut difference between gender and biological sex. It's extraordinary how many people don't seem to understand the difference.
They refused to acknowledge that there's a clear-cut difference between gender and biological sex. It's extraordinary how many people don't seem to understand the difference.
GasBandit
Staff member
You're never gonna win that argument. "There are only two genders" has gone beyond mere sociological argument and has ascended into memehood. It's the new "Jet fuel can't melt steel beams." Whether they actually agree with the statement is largely irrelevant - they want to perpetuate the meme for the lulz. You're just basically gonna get into a shouting match with a room full of mynah birds.
GasBandit
Staff member
I'm putting this in the minor rant thread because it's a story about astonishing ineptitude and BS, but honestly I'm practically shaking with laughter at this point.
So, I'm doing co-op affidavits for end of the month billing. Basically, that's where, like, your local ford dealership buys advertising but Ford Motor Company pays for some of it, but they need a notarized affidavit of the script of the commercial before they'll pay. I'm the one who (among tons of other things, natch) puts together the affidavits so they can be notarized and sent off and everybody gets paid and happy.
Because there's so much of this, I insist that the salespeople have to send me a version of the scripts that I can copy and paste, because I don't have time to listen to and transcribe 900 commercials every month, and if I screw up with a typo, that's enough for Ford or whoever to say "NOPE THAT RIGHT THERE TEARS IT WE'RE NOT PAYING" and then nobody's happy and nobody's paid.
So anyway, this past month, apparently the media person at one of our local ford dealerships sends us some spots, and sends us the "scripts" for the co-op affidavits.
Thing is, clearly this isn't his original script, it's a PDF of a scanned copy of a printout of the script. And just to make it that much more useless, the scanned image is upside down in the PDF.
Our salesperson doesn't even bother to check the shit... he just opened it and hit print for us to produce the spot, and from a printout, "upside down" isn't a thing, so nobody continued to notice.
End of the month rolls around, and our salesweasel (after my prodding because he's slow and old and alzheimery and I am not saying that to be mean) forwards me the script that was e-mailed to him (again, I assume, without looking at it) so I get this scanned image PDF that is upside down and useless to me.
I let him know the problem, which kicks off a "discussion" about "wull, wull, can't you just fix it?" Sure, if I had software I don't have because this is never an issue and shouldn't be and even if I did it's still your job to send me something I can use, not something that I can't, because my time is more important than yours. So he goes and e-mails his buyer rep, has a similar "discussion" with them, and the salesweasel tells the dealership buyer rep guy "this will all go smoother if you can just send me the original word file from when you wrote the script."
But naturally the other idiot can't just do shit like he's spose'ta, he's gotta keep arguing. "Wull, wull, isn't there software you can use to turn a PDF into a word document?" So the Salesweasel relays this to me, and I say , "Yes, there is, but we don't have it, aren't going to buy it for this one idiot client's sake, and furthermore it would be useless here because there's no text in this PDF, it's a scanned image."
So the salesweasel goes back to the buyer rep idiot.
While I'm out at lunch, I get a text from the salesweasel "He's sending the word document!" Great, I think. Finally put this nonsense to bed.
I get back to the office, open my e-mail, there's a word document from the salesweasel. I open it up.
Word document.
With an embedded. upside. down. scanned. image. of the script in it.
I think this is what they mean when they say "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
Or, as Scott Adams said, there's nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot.
So, I'm doing co-op affidavits for end of the month billing. Basically, that's where, like, your local ford dealership buys advertising but Ford Motor Company pays for some of it, but they need a notarized affidavit of the script of the commercial before they'll pay. I'm the one who (among tons of other things, natch) puts together the affidavits so they can be notarized and sent off and everybody gets paid and happy.
Because there's so much of this, I insist that the salespeople have to send me a version of the scripts that I can copy and paste, because I don't have time to listen to and transcribe 900 commercials every month, and if I screw up with a typo, that's enough for Ford or whoever to say "NOPE THAT RIGHT THERE TEARS IT WE'RE NOT PAYING" and then nobody's happy and nobody's paid.
So anyway, this past month, apparently the media person at one of our local ford dealerships sends us some spots, and sends us the "scripts" for the co-op affidavits.
Thing is, clearly this isn't his original script, it's a PDF of a scanned copy of a printout of the script. And just to make it that much more useless, the scanned image is upside down in the PDF.
Our salesperson doesn't even bother to check the shit... he just opened it and hit print for us to produce the spot, and from a printout, "upside down" isn't a thing, so nobody continued to notice.
End of the month rolls around, and our salesweasel (after my prodding because he's slow and old and alzheimery and I am not saying that to be mean) forwards me the script that was e-mailed to him (again, I assume, without looking at it) so I get this scanned image PDF that is upside down and useless to me.
I let him know the problem, which kicks off a "discussion" about "wull, wull, can't you just fix it?" Sure, if I had software I don't have because this is never an issue and shouldn't be and even if I did it's still your job to send me something I can use, not something that I can't, because my time is more important than yours. So he goes and e-mails his buyer rep, has a similar "discussion" with them, and the salesweasel tells the dealership buyer rep guy "this will all go smoother if you can just send me the original word file from when you wrote the script."
But naturally the other idiot can't just do shit like he's spose'ta, he's gotta keep arguing. "Wull, wull, isn't there software you can use to turn a PDF into a word document?" So the Salesweasel relays this to me, and I say , "Yes, there is, but we don't have it, aren't going to buy it for this one idiot client's sake, and furthermore it would be useless here because there's no text in this PDF, it's a scanned image."
So the salesweasel goes back to the buyer rep idiot.
While I'm out at lunch, I get a text from the salesweasel "He's sending the word document!" Great, I think. Finally put this nonsense to bed.
I get back to the office, open my e-mail, there's a word document from the salesweasel. I open it up.
Word document.
With an embedded. upside. down. scanned. image. of the script in it.
I think this is what they mean when they say "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
Or, as Scott Adams said, there's nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot.
... how have you not burned the place down yet, @GasBandit?
GasBandit
Staff member
Because I'm a grown-up, and acting like a grownup is many things. First and foremost, it means doing things that you hate doing - like dealing with people who make you unhappy, being stressed about things you have no control over, and working soul-numbing jobs. Then, gradually, as we endure these hardships and eventually come to accept them as normal, that's when we finally earn the right to get drunk and be emotionally distant from our families.[DOUBLEPOST=1493761919,1493761793][/DOUBLEPOST]Also, in this particular case, I get paid whether everybody else does or not. That's important for my ability to laugh at the situation.
I had this argument with Kati just last week. About the difference between genotype v. phenotype.
Yes, that is a photocopy of an iPad.
At least it's right-side up.
--Patrick
Fixed that for you. And now, have a screenshot of a screenshot of the photograph of the photocopy of the iPad:
I'm wishing I'd clicked anonymous for that screenshot. I don't know why, but it seems like it would make the whole thing cleverer.
Is this memes?
GasBandit
Staff member
So a month or two ago, contractors for the power company came out and replaced a power pole in our parking lot - the one that fed us our power.
Ever since then, we've been having random power "sags," where the power would dip low enough to cause UPS battery backups in the building to trigger their alarms and to cause some devices without battery backups to reboot themselves (specifically, a gateway switch at the bottom of the tower that is technically our ISP's, not "ours," but when it reboots we would lose the internet for a minute or so). It's been a big irritant.
I put in a service call to the power company over a week ago, but heard nothing. Fortunately, our engineer knows a guy with the power company personally, and pulled strings to get someone out here to look at it today. Guy comes out, and standing in the parking lot looking up almost immediately said "yeah, I think I see what the problem is from here."
Turns out there were some crimps that weren't done as well as they were supposed to, and some other connections (two of which were on the high voltage side of the stepdown tranformer) where the connectors were loose, or the bolts were just "finger tight" and could still be turned by hand unaided by any tools.
So yeah, those contractors are on my shit list now.
Ever since then, we've been having random power "sags," where the power would dip low enough to cause UPS battery backups in the building to trigger their alarms and to cause some devices without battery backups to reboot themselves (specifically, a gateway switch at the bottom of the tower that is technically our ISP's, not "ours," but when it reboots we would lose the internet for a minute or so). It's been a big irritant.
I put in a service call to the power company over a week ago, but heard nothing. Fortunately, our engineer knows a guy with the power company personally, and pulled strings to get someone out here to look at it today. Guy comes out, and standing in the parking lot looking up almost immediately said "yeah, I think I see what the problem is from here."
Turns out there were some crimps that weren't done as well as they were supposed to, and some other connections (two of which were on the high voltage side of the stepdown tranformer) where the connectors were loose, or the bolts were just "finger tight" and could still be turned by hand unaided by any tools.
So yeah, those contractors are on my shit list now.
Good God! just the value of the electronics in a radio station would make you think they would be careful.
GasBandit
Staff member
They were already not my most favorite people. Replacing the pole was going to require a power outage for us, obviously, so we arranged for a time one morning for that to happen so we could be prepared.
That time came and went, and they told us they didn't have something they needed, so they'd do it the next morning. Then proceeded to pull the plug that very afternoon without warning to finish their work.
And frankly, the pole doesn't look like it's quite perpendicular to the ground to me, either.
The power company needs to vet their contractors better.
I hope your owner has one litigious bastard on the payroll.
A neighboring lab's PI and most of the lab are moving to another institution. That alone is a bit of a minor rant, because the PI is a solid dude and the lab does really interesting work. The real rant is the lab has slowed down their research, obviously, but they are getting louder and louder as they get closer to D-Day. Laughing and chit-chatting. It's quite distracting. I wish they'd just stay home if they aren't going to work or go have long lunches. I'll be happy when they are gone.
Best Buy, this is why customers never come back.
I went to my local store, bad battery in hand, to see if I could get a replacement. First I had to wait nearly 10 minutes while the Geek on duty tried to explain over and over again what they were going to do to the Mac the elderly guy in front of me brought in. Finally another clerk came to assist me. Sort of. After describing my issue, and her confirming it was likely the battery, she told me they don't carry laptop batteries. ANY laptop batteries. She offered to order it, but I can do that just as easily from home. I explained I came there so I WOULDN'T have to order it, and I could have an easy return if it wasn't the issue. Oh well. I return home with nothing. Proceed straight to Amazon to place my order. It should be here Tuesday at the latest.
On a whim, I try to find my battery on Best Buy's site. Search for the same part number I used on Amazon. NOTHING. I use the model number HP gave the battery. NOTHING. I have to slog through 160-ish items and hope I find what I need. The only sorts are by brand, price, and customer rating. Nope. You lose.
I did eventually find something that *might* match. But it's too late now. Amazon found me a sure fit at half your price.
I went to my local store, bad battery in hand, to see if I could get a replacement. First I had to wait nearly 10 minutes while the Geek on duty tried to explain over and over again what they were going to do to the Mac the elderly guy in front of me brought in. Finally another clerk came to assist me. Sort of. After describing my issue, and her confirming it was likely the battery, she told me they don't carry laptop batteries. ANY laptop batteries. She offered to order it, but I can do that just as easily from home. I explained I came there so I WOULDN'T have to order it, and I could have an easy return if it wasn't the issue. Oh well. I return home with nothing. Proceed straight to Amazon to place my order. It should be here Tuesday at the latest.
On a whim, I try to find my battery on Best Buy's site. Search for the same part number I used on Amazon. NOTHING. I use the model number HP gave the battery. NOTHING. I have to slog through 160-ish items and hope I find what I need. The only sorts are by brand, price, and customer rating. Nope. You lose.
I did eventually find something that *might* match. But it's too late now. Amazon found me a sure fit at half your price.
I didn't get the job at the golf resort I interviewed at. Partly because it was part time where I was looking at full time. But one thing is nagging at me. They seemed to treat the relative autonomy I have here as a net negative. Like holding my rewriting the nightly spreadsheet or using my own laptop and email to send the nightly report out against me?
I rebuilt a legacy report cobbled together over years into something easy to understand and fill out. New hires were having trouble filling it out and it was becoming irrelevant to the back office. Both issues were fixed.
Shortly after I started here, I was ordered to start emailing the nightly report to the owner. The report was filled out on a non-networked computer. I was not provided with the means to get the file off of that computer, nor was I provided access to an email account from which to mail from. I was just told "do it!"
The net result of both is the job got done. Why question the method? Where is the fear I may not do things "their way," especially as the FNG, coming from?
I rebuilt a legacy report cobbled together over years into something easy to understand and fill out. New hires were having trouble filling it out and it was becoming irrelevant to the back office. Both issues were fixed.
Shortly after I started here, I was ordered to start emailing the nightly report to the owner. The report was filled out on a non-networked computer. I was not provided with the means to get the file off of that computer, nor was I provided access to an email account from which to mail from. I was just told "do it!"
The net result of both is the job got done. Why question the method? Where is the fear I may not do things "their way," especially as the FNG, coming from?