My mentor at work is back from a two week vacation. Looking forward to catching up with him and asking for training on some very specific tasks because I’m 99% certain he’s going to announce his retirement before the end of the year.
Also, looking forward to the North London Derby this weekend (just watching, not attending). International football doesn’t carry my interest at all, for some reason.
Football Manager. I would be fired, but everything else would stay the same.
Ha, barely. The situation was closer to Roseanne than Full House, but I enjoyed it.
Also, true story, shortly after I moved out one of my younger brother’s friends moved into the guest room because of drama at home and our family gave him enough structure to straighten up and complete high school. It is exactly what would happen after my character got written out of the sitcom in season 4 and a beloved guest character got promoted to the regular cast…
Not a movie, but there was a period of time when my parents’ house had them living upstairs, my older brother, his wife, and their young son living in the converted basement, and me temporarily staying in a guest bedroom after I had just gotten out of the Army. And we all worked at the family pizza restaurant together.
It was the perfect TGIF sitcom scenario.
Boat
The owner hurt the dog by walking it without a leash and not having enough control over it to keep it from running into traffic. It speaks to your good character that you feel guilt over what happened, but you are not responsible and should not beat yourself up over it.
The need to make everything into a competition or to one-up any story or anecdote.
Work from home and live near a very nice park. When I am stressed or bored, I just put a fake meeting on my calendar or set my Teams status to busy and go for a walk to clear my head.
Got IT training during my time in the military that ended up opening the door to a network engineer position with a defense contractor after I got out.
I was a pretty poor engineer, but I was good at explaining technical details to non-technical people. The bosses liked this because they wanted constant updates on what was happening, the other engineers liked this because they didn’t want the bosses to bother them, and I liked it because going to sit in briefings got me out of doing real work, so I ended up in management.
Interesting article…let’s see how I score.
I am fairly below average, apparently.
My Hotmail account, which I’ve had since high school. Oldest email in there is from 2002, but I think I opened it up in 2000.
I think what you’re experiencing is people here being less tolerant of your assholery.
I have a Kindle from 2011 that’s still in perfect condition and gets daily use. Every now and then I’m tempted to get a newer eReader but I can’t come up with a single reason to actually do it.
My wife just dug an old iPod that must be from ~2008 from some box in the basement so she can listen to music at work all day without killing the battery on her phone.
I am a veteran (you’re welcome for my service) and I also find this annoying/over the top.
We have an auto feeder for their dry food that has a removable metal bowl beneath the spout. When the metal dish is in place, all the kibble pours out into the bowl. When the cats think the food is overdue, they will tap the metal bowl out of the way to get attention or wake the machine up or whatever cat reason…and the kibble bounces off the hard flat plastic surface and half of it spills onto the floor where the dog will gobble it up.
Sometimes I put the bowl back in place and sometimes I wait and see if they’ll learn the lesson on their own.
We went through a long phase of people being hyped about Marvel, followed by a phase of people shitting on Marvel…now I think we’re entering a phase of “people who like it can still like it, people who don’t like it can move on to something else.”
It will be interesting to see what comes next in the monoclture now that Marvel doesn’t have the same stranglehold on the box office as they used to. Most other studios seem to have already moved on from the “cinematic universe” model with a new tie-in blockbuster every 6 months forever…
Sparkling water.
The last time a question like this was asked, I said it was when I enlisted in the US Army on Sept 5th, 2001 instead of Sept 12th, 2001. But in reality I probably would’ve enlisted either way (I was drinking the kool-aid back then) and when I enlisted it was on something called the Delayed Entry Program; I still had to finish my senior year of high school and didn’t leave for Basic Training until June 2002.
The actual life-changing moment that came out of that was taking advantage of the Hometown Recruiting Assistance Program right after I completed AIT. It’s essentially a 2 week temporary duty to go back home wearing your fancy new uniform to convince all your old high school buddies to sign up and be cool like you. I took it, did a couple recruitment events, signed up no one, and just enjoyed some free vacation time. This was March 2003, just a couple days before we invaded Iraq.
When I graduated AIT (your actual job training after basic training) I got orders to report to Ft Hood. Another guy, Watt, got the same orders. We had gone through Basic and AIT together, had the exact same MOS. I took HRAP, he did not. At the time, there were 2 major units on Ft Hood: the 4th Infantry Division and the 1st Cavalry Division. Watt showed up at Ft Hood and was assigned to 4th ID. I showed up a couple weeks later and was told that 4th ID was all filled up, so I went to 1st Cav instead.
4th ID deployed to Iraq in 2003, 1st Cav didn’t deploy until 2004. Because units were basically on a “1 year deployed, 1 year back home, 1 year deployed, 1 year back home…” rhythm this meant I ended up getting stop-lossed instead of getting out of the Army in 2006 when my original 4 year enlistment was up. While I was extended, I was selected to receive retraining on newer, modern equipment instead of the old crap designed to fight the Soviets I was originally trained on. This new training, and some contacts I made while on my second deployment, led to me getting a job with a defense contractor doing the exact same thing after I eventually got out. That job was overseas, where I happened to meet my future wife. And even though I’m in a slightly different field of work now, I can still draw a straight line between getting that experience and contacts and how I ended up where I am now.
The alternative, if I hadn’t taken 2 weeks vacation in 2003, is that I most likely would have gotten out of the Army as scheduled in 2006 but without any training that was directly applicable to a civilian job and without the networking contacts to land an overseas contractor gig.