Right? The town I live in has a couple pretty good (for the area anyway) places that seem like they struggle. Meanwhile, everyone here raves about another local chain that makes what is IMHO easily the worst pizza in the city. Maybe even the state. That’s even counting the chains.
I used to be a believer that pizza is like sex, even when it’s bad it’s still good but, this place proved me wrong. Soggy crust, unseasoned toppings and, way too many of them (hence the soggy ass crust).
So, I work in a maintenance position that really isn’t possible to do remotely but we have a fair amount of desk work too. We’re in the process of setting up a workstation to program and new head ends for our systems. The first thing on everyone’s list when we were deciding on a location was “as far from everyone else as possible” because we all know that other people being around to make small talk is a distraction that will easily double the time it takes to get this shit done.
In every maintenance position I’ve had, every one of us has had our own secret workspaces where most other guys didn’t know to look for us just so that we could get some desk work done in peace. Co-workers are a distraction more often than they are a help and I think we’ve all known this for years.
The thing is, you don’t even need to manufacture a good story. You could tell the true story of how companies have slashed overhead by reducing the amount of office space needed or how employees working from home turn out to be just as if not more productive than those working in the offices and happier with their jobs besides.
There were companies planning to move more jobs to work from home even before the pandemic because it’s a model that just makes more sense for a lot of positions. The return to office crowd could be beaten simply by pointing out the for most positions, working on-site is a needless expense. The problem is, the media isn’t willing to tell that story.
That’s the one we had! I still have that zapper somewhere…
My last car was a Ford escape called 7 after seven of nine from Star Trek. I was feeling less creative when we got our current car, a tan C-Max, and it’s just called Sandy.
The first car I had with a name was a 93 LeSabre that all my friends called “The Beast”!
And on top of that, different translations can effectively make different stories as well. Just look at the story of Dinah. Most translations day that she was assaulted but some would suggest that she just had consensual sex. That’s a distinction that effectively makes it a different story depending on who did the translating.
That’s just enough to buy my wife and I ice cream cones at the best place in town and leave enough of a tip that we don’t feel like we’re being cheap. Date night sorted!
Depends on why/how my needs are being met I suppose. If this is a post-scarcity situation where everyone’s needs are met and no one has to work, I’d probably keep at my current job. I install and repair nurse call systems (the buttons you push in a hospital to tell the staff you need help) I mostly enjoy the work and someone is going to have to keep doing it. I live in a town with a huge hospital and could easily keep busy without leaving town.
If this situation where only my own basic needs are met and not everyone else’s, I wouldn’t keep going to that job. Management is kind of a pain and they can certainly afford to train someone who needs the work. I’d still fix whatever kind of shit I knew how to because honestly, I love working with a wrench but, I’d be doing it freelance at that point. I’d probably start by knocking on the doors of local machine shops, fixing machine tools and lasers was more fun than nurse call and if I wasn’t tied to one specific brand, I could probably keep busy without driving 4 hours a day (I quit that job because I was tired of travel). If that took off, I’d try to turn it into a business and train someone to pick up the slack so I could still take the occasional vacation without leaving regular customers hanging. If that wasn’t enough to keep even just me busy, I’d probably start asking around about other random shit that needed to be fixed. Lots of people deal with broken shit because they can’t afford to fix it and if I was only looking to stave off boredom, not having to make a profit, I could probably get it done affordably.
Pretty similar here. First time I saw a CNC mill run I was immediately hooked. I used to work as a field service tech for a CNC machine tool distributor and I can honestly say that I absolutely loved the work. You drop into some random factory, spend between 3hrs and a week fixing it and then probably never see the exact same issue again. It’s mentally engaging but almost never tedious or repetitive. You can get stuck working late or even spending a night out of town with almost no notice but, I like things a bit unstructured so for me that wasn’t a big deal. Also, I’m problematically introverted so for me the field service gig was perfect. I got to work alone most of the time but I was also forced to interact with complete or relative strangers virtually every day which is good for me because if I can avoid people as much as I’d like, I get a little weird.
I like to say “don’t become an anecdote.”
Lol, this makes me think of a guy I went to highschool with. He was a farm kid who would get up early and work around the farm before school. One day he spills gas on his flannel shirt before school but doesn’t have time to change so he figures it’ll air out enough on his way to work (it didn’t). Second or third class of the day was shop. He starts working in the welding booth without stopping to put on the flame retardant overcoat. A hot spark hit that gas soaked flannel and dude light up like the human torch. He had some serious burns but makes a full recovery. For years after that though, the shop teacher used to say to anyone who complained about the overcoats, “go ask Phil if they’re worth it or not”.
I had a friend in highschool who’s dad had lost part of his pointer finger to an encounter with a saw blade. He had just a little bit of the bone beyond the second knuckle that was weirdly pointed and it hurt like hell when he jabbed you with it. I know this because I used to help them build shit around their farm and if he caught us being unsafe he’d poke us in the chest with that damn half-finger while he yelled at us about it.
Those lessons really stuck too.
If your business relies of billions in VC money every year to stay afloat, then you don’t have a sustainable business and probably shouldn’t keep doing what you’re doing.
This right here. We need to see unprofitable “disruptors” close before they wreck existing systems and drive up the cost of living and/or drive down the quality of life for everyone. How many previously profitable businesses who provided decent jobs closed because they couldn’t complete with Amazon while Amazon wasn’t even technically making a profit? How much of the current housing crisis is driven by AirBNB and such? They drove up housing prices in the name of cheap weekend rentals and now the weekend rentals aren’t even cheap anymore.
There used to be lots of delivery models that were profitable while paying people fairly. Door dash and others just convinced us all to cut each other’s throats for a brief window of savings.
“Bro, we hitting the bar tonight?”
“Hell yeah! I’m three beers away from extra heavy drinker status this month. Let’s get that AB-Inbev cash!!”
(Sounds of chest bumping)
Ooof. Current job has a big problem with that.
I’m in facilities for a company with 2 dozen buildings. We’re big enough that we have a drafting department who needs to sign off on all of our drawings and documentation. For reasons that are always changing, they never want to convert the contractors’ schematics for remodels into something that can be shared. If we’re lucky, the contractors are willing to share prints with us directly more offen, we just have to hope the labels are still there when it breaks and/or ring out individual wires. Huge waste of man hours on our end but every time we suggest fixing it, the drafting department insists that it can’t be done for whatever reason. Our department has offered to handle these schematics several times but, “that’s not in our scope”.
They will switch jobs before things come crashing down. All they want to show is a slight uptick in sales or revenue to take credit.
I used to work in field service for a machine tool company. One of the machine brands I serviced had a couple years in the late nineties that hated to work on. The machines were always cheap but those years were egregious. Corners cut everywhere and the original parts were so shitty we’d usually have to retrofit shit from a different year. Eventually bumped into a guy who’d worked on them at the time who explained the history. The owners of the company at the time were about to sell out to another manufacturer and they wanted to jack up the profits before the sale so they cut every corner they that they didn’t think would be noticable before the sale.
The brand stayed afloat for another ten years but everyone I know who was in the industry at the time said their was never any coming back from the damage two years of shit machines did to their image.
Worst part about was, because the machines didn’t start having issues until after the company sold, the new owners got all the blame and got stuck with bill for all the warranty work. Literally no incentive for anyone else to not do exactly the same as the original owners.
Yeah, I also met my wife online back when you’d lie about meeting someone online. Spent our first couple years telling people we met “through a friend of a friend”.
I’m guessing this was around the time you guys met since she introduced me to StumbleUpon shortly after we started dating.
Have you ever read Command and Control by Eric Schlosser? I’ve never read anything that made feel so terrified and hopeful at the same time. The number of close calls (that we know about) that we’ve had but, cooler heads (or random chance) saved us at the last moment is both horrifying and grounds for having a fair amount of faith in most people to do the right thing with these things. Of course, the amount of times we were saved by random ass chance is absolutely terrifying.
If we’re talking strictly flavor, I guess I prefer pizza hut. Almost never order them though because if I’m looking for that style, Domino’s is noticably cheaper for pretty similar quality. If I’m in the mood to spend money on a good pizza, I’m going to a local place so pizza hut is just at a quality/price intersection that I don’t find myself looking for.