solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
Maybe it's the contrarian in me (I was a Paultard in high school/undergrad, so being at political odds with pretty much everyone is nothing new even if I'm more into Nixon than libertarianism these days and less ideologically committed in general.), but I'd take "no MAGA" as a challenge. Then again, I've always found blue tribe dilettantes to be charming, especially if they're smart and argumentative.
On a totally (not) unrelated note, I remain baffled as to why the bar I used to work at (which aspires to cater to grad students/professor types) hasn't followed my suggestion to do anything they can to market to the university law school. FFS law students might be the last group of young people that actually drink!
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
The New Job
We’re going on week three now, so while things remain inconclusive my impressions remain positive on the whole, so I’ll give it a go.
Starting with the good, the pay/benefits are quite decent, and life-changing compared to where I was at the service tech job. Working at the terminal I’ve been training at strikes me as unpleasant but doable with time. The terminal I’m going to be working at/have spent some time at is much easier to deal with, such that I dare speculate that this job won’t be that bad: occasionally annoying, tedious, and/or boring, yes, but not that bad. My boss is the sort who likes to leave early. This isn’t so much a good thing as indicative of the workload, but I’ve watched more Fox News in the last two weeks than in the last two years.
Neutral, dispatching in this context is a totally different exercise than dispatching a food delivery company. The theme is sort of the same, but it’s a different skillset, one that rewards long-term planning and resource management than sheer speed and/or clever route choices. Trucking is paperwork/regulation heavy and not all tanker trailers are the same. There will be a learning curve before I can do my job reflexively, but with time and practice I believe it to be an achievable task. The software they use makes the software I used to use look brilliant in comparison, but it can be learned.
Annoying/bad, onboarding has been a grind/exercise in helplessness. I’m assured that this is perfectly normal and that nobody expects me to contribute for another month or few, but we’re two weeks in and I still can’t log into the company intranet; allegedly this is an HR issue and IT has washed its hands of it (But I can’t put in a ticket with HR because that’s linked to the company intranet account that I don’t have/have access to.). I had to call IT just to get the login credentials to my company laptop/email address. My work-issued laptop does not have the dispatch software I’m expected to use installed on it (I don’t know, but I kind of expected to get an onboarding packet with all the usernames and passwords on a piece of paper and the laptop to come with a standardized image pre-installed with all the programs I’d need. I may be able to install the dispatch software from the vendor’s website if I have login credentials for that program but so far I don’t know if those exist or if that is possible.). I don’t even have a desk at my home terminal. I’ve spent the last two weeks watching people do stuff, but otherwise aside from assigned training videos have literally done nothing. I’m going a bit stir-crazy and, again, while I’m assured that things happening slowly is the expectation I can’t help but fear that I’m wasting time during which I need to actually be learning how to do my job and am going to wind up thrown into the fire and failing. My goal for the entire week was to get the dispatch software installed and acquire a working account for it and it’s looking like that’s going to be a failure given that I got no response to the ticket I sent yesterday and the guy who was supposed to be training me (but was in fact far too busy) also got no response to the ticket he sent. I’ve been told by other dispatchers at the big terminal that they’ve spent months waiting to get all the permissions they need and still don’t have them. Even higher ranking people don’t seem to have a useful answer as to how to get what I need done other than suggesting that I directly email somebody in the IT department that they know personally instead of submitting a ticket.
More importantly, what do I do with my life?
This is the first time I haven’t worked two jobs in three years, and while University to Go was an easy gig I put in more hours there than I’m going to here (It really does seem be to be in the 40-45hours a week range, roughly 8-4 M-F, whereas I worked 6-7 days a week at the old gig/gigs.), so I find myself with a bunch of free time that I’m not used to having. I’m currently working on catching up on personal maintenance backlogs (clean the car, clean the house, set up my plan to get out of debt), but that’s going to run out soon and then what? I’ve never been one of those enviable souls who enjoyed watching TV all that much, nor am I really into videogames. There’s only so much time Reddit, Youtube, and X can waste. I used to be an incorrigible barfly (This was easy when I didn’t have to be at work for University to Go until 11AM.), and admittedly have yet to case out all my town’s happy hours to see if one exists where people my age instead of 20+ years older than me actually go, but the signs haven’t been overly encouraging on that front (The place I used to work at is a nursing home/sausagefest during happy hour.) and 8-4 isn’t exactly compatible with late night drinking on work nights (and, frankly, mid-30s me isn’t as interested in closing down bars as I used to be; aggravating this, many/most of my friends have moved on from the college town I live in). I’m being a bit blithe or cynical here, but am I going to have to join a dating app just to find someone to hang out with?
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
But these days it feels like the budget can only explode, and if anyone tried doing something crazy, like balancing it, the whole system would collapse.
If we wanted to reduce healthcare spending's share of the economy back to where it was in 2000 under Bill Clinton (Most of the increase occurred under George W. Bush. Obamacare just froze it in place.), we'd have to cut it by 25%. This would cause a drop in GDP roughly equivalent to the 2008 recession.
Health spending is especially troublesome because it blows up government budgets and private spending largely draws from the same middle to upper-middle class taxpayers (If we wanted to be elegant, take the SALT caucus as avatars of this.) whose taxes would need to increase to balance the budget.
Even otherwise decent red state GOP governments have done nothing to address health spending in their locales.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
3mo ago
I have recommended that. The middle sister went and allegedly got the same initial reaction from her therapist that I got from mine (something along the lines of "How are you still alive?"). The little sister is more private and thus I have no idea.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
Republican Party Animal (an actual banned book, have to pirate it on libgen) is fairly entertaining. I found the bit about how the CA GOP types he was hanging out with (before being outed as David Cole) were legitimately surprised by Romney/Ryan losing and having a post-election meltdown to be interesting given that I considered that election to besuch a foregone conclusion that I barely paid attention to it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
No.
The closest person I can come up with who died of Covid was a coworker's (middle aged, obese) mother who I'd never met. Otherwise, I knew people who got it, and one who was hospitalized with it (twice, but he was on a "hospitalized every six months" schedule as it was before), but no one dead or seriously injured. As far as I know I never caught it (I took the initial two course vaccine but that's it, didn't make efforts to avoid it, lived with the guy who was twice hospitalized, etc.), and if Covid was indistinguishable from a bad hangover/routine flu-like illness that goes away after a day for a ~30 year old alcoholic (The bars being shut down really was annoying.) with a past history of smoking, that's on it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
Hey, there's nothing wrong with that. In my experience it takes a reasonable amount of education to be able to pick the right therapist, but you strike me as having a good grasp of the subject.
In my experience, therapy generally isn't a miracle worker (It actually kind of was in terms of acute anxiety symptoms I was experiencing.), but it can equip you with the tools to tolerate things going badly (It really does help to be able to say "This sucks, but I know that my emotional regulation is unusually poor at present. I am not insane and will get through this.) and, more broadly, to be your own therapist. I'd give the therapist that I saw for ~3 months an 8/10. The stuff he understood, he really understood, more than I was prepared to accept at the time (I felt like he was exaggerating the severity of my situation for the sake of being validating. In hindsight, I don't think he was.). The stuff I felt like he didn't, things could get pretty cringe.
If anything, I think the point of therapy is to speed run acquiring these tools and mantras instead of muddling through life never learning them or learning them the hard way and wasting irreplaceable time in the process. I am far from perfect or "fixed" (and at some point in the future may have to take advantage of the fact that my town's selection of therapists is vastly better than it was the last go around), and have generally erred toward learning things the hard way, but I am vastly better off than I was 10 years ago.
Best of luck!
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
Adding to this, reds don't even have a better offer to the write-offs within white America than "At least we don't blame you for minorities' problems.". The present Trump administration is flailing at a solution for high school educated male wages being stagnant at best for the last 50 years (This fucks over black men harder, BTW, given their lower level of college education.) and probably isn't going to find one.
For better or worse, IMO Trump's rise was fueled by a creeping sense within white America that the "writeoff" portion was being expanded from "high school dropouts" (who barely exist) to "high school educated". Nobody cares about this guy, but people get mad when their nice but unexceptional kid with an IT degree struggles to find well-compensated employment.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
Sometimes you are being selfish, and you have to realize that it's okay to have (or not have) wants and desires of your own. In pettier situations it does ring a bit hollow, but in my experience if you can't learn to say "No" to something that isn't really a big deal (and to be clear, you don't have to say "No" every time; doing favors can make for rewarding experiences), you'll get get stomped on when the big things do come up. You don't have to be specific, just "sorry man, I'm tired, have other stuff going on, or whatever it is". People aren't going to hate you for that just like I don't hate my friends/relatives for not answering the phone when I call them in the middle of a long drive because I'm bored and trying to kill time. Ask yourself, "Would I be really bent out of shape if someone said "No" to me concerning this?"
I had to kick out two roommates in the last year. One was a big contributor to that 30 grand I mentioned and the other one was an awful, sad story, the prompt of "I have the right to defend myself" as an argument (I'll admit that phrasing comes across as overly dramatic, but you'll see why.). Some spineless regular at the bar I worked at met her on a dating site, hooked up with her, and couldn't handle the crazy (I'm not one who goes around diagnosing every woman I don't like as suffering from BPD, but she's one of two or three I've met in my adult life who was a dead ringer for that malady.). She was homeless/living in extended stays, I had a spare room and could use some extra cash (she was employed), and she seemed nice enough, so I said "Why not?" and took her in. Note to self, Friday night at the bar is not the place to go shopping for roommates.
It was toxic. She's not a bad person and I wish her something better, but she was troubled in a way that I'm not qualified to fix. She was 36 and drank like I did at 22, blacked out every night and trauma dumping on anyone in earshot. Honestly, observing her behavior made me feel deeply embarrassed for myself and how I was at that time and understanding of why the 8th Step exists. During blackouts it wasn't just the mundane stuff about being sexually abused by her father and not believed by her family or being fucked over by every friend in her life, but hearing the most disturbing admission of animal cruelty/neglect that I've heard, being called while working at the bar and told that she'd been on the phone with the suicide hotline, her goading her boyfriend into dumping her because she liked me more (her words), having to reject multiple sexual advances, and her blowing up on me for neglecting her in favor of speaking with an old friend that I hadn't seen in years. All this happened within two weeks. It was a disaster waiting to happen and she had to go. I felt like a massive asshole as I endured tantrums, "Why do you hate me?/What did I do to you/I'm sorry!!!?", and so on with stone silence (precisely how I dealt with/deal with my mother's tantrums), knowing full well what I was exiling her to (where she was before). I did it though, because my only choice was to do the hard thing or get dragged down further into her Hell than I already was. I still think about her sometimes.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
I guess the difference between my sisters and I is that they still demand some variety of justice, some "thing" that's going to make up for their suffering and make life happy ever after, or at least punish our mother, as if being pensioned off the by the VA in her mid 50s and facing the rest of her life alone isn't sad enough. For the middle sister it's always the next man, so she winds up in horrible relationship after horrible relationship (Refusing to address her severe obesity doesn't help here; it's an ugly thing to say, but she could get a higher caliber of man than the trash that she dates if she weren't pushing 400lbs. Ozempic exists! She makes good money so there's no reason that she couldn't afford it or at least one of the bootleg versions.). For the little sister it's the next degree, with a PhD being the holy grail, so she has two master's degrees, 250K in student loan debt, and a job that barely affords her living in an east-coast city with roommates.
Dealing with the manipulation is hard because I struggle to set boundaries or say "No.", but that, reflexive risk-aversion, and trying to buy feeling worthy/like a not bad person through overcommitment are things that have gotten me in more trouble in non-familial relationships than anything else. I spent my 20s being the "functional" one in my friend group and a few friendships in particular (One at least had the excuse of being a woman that I was love with.) wound up costing me around $30K between unpaid rent, a damaged car that I had to sell at a loss, and then god knows how much in unpaid mechanical labor. I'm good at avoiding the violent psycho variety of crazy but realizing that I'm not obligated to drown myself in service of someone who elicits my pity or that I like was a harder and more expensive lesson to learn. There's no amount of doing for others that's going to award you a "you're a good person and I love you" card. You'll just wind up broke and tired, and unless you address that compulsion you won't believe people when they tell you all those nice things anyway.
The way I put it now is that I have the right and obligation to defend myself and saying "No" is sometimes a necessary exercise in that.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
They are comparing themselves to their parents' lives that they experienced. Millennials by definition aren't old enough to remember the malaise era, and the stereotypical ones with millennial parents who had them later in life don't remember their parents being broke 20-somethings. It's also worth remembering that the later part of the boomer cohort missed Vietnam/the draft, and your older boomer cohort's kids are more likely to belong to the tail end of Gen X. I see this a lot with my youngest (half) sister, an early Zoomer. Her material and class aspirations blow mine out of the water because she remembers being a kid during her father's peak earning years whereas I remember the time before that of perpetual financial crises and spent that period of time waiting for the other shoe to drop (It did.). My father has been successful and rebounded from the '08 recession fairly quickly, but I remember him being broke in his 20s.
It's easy to be tempted into envy, as my father has been more financially successful than I am, but the fact is that comparing is silly because we're very different people with different priorities. If I envy anything it's his lack of neuroticism and easy self-confidence, but there isn't a political solution to that (It turns out that I'm very much like my maternal grandfather, and I've had a vastly easier life than he did.). He's always been extremely career-oriented, willing to sacrifice personal/family life, has relocated every five years, etc. I work hard and do a good job, but I've always despised job hunting, didn't want to move, and stay in the same job so long as it's good enough. If anything, the worst thing that happened to me career-wise was lucking into a gig as an overpaid delivery driver in my mid 20s and staying with that company a few years too long. Objectively, if this new job (that I networked into from my time working a side gig at a bar) turns out the way I hope it will, I will have had my big career break a whole year later than my father did. Such horror! Really though, relative to what I've put into life I've been pretty lucky as an adult.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
Lower success level, but same. The mid-late 2010s were genuinely easier. Rent was still cheap where I live and I was making stupid money for what I was doing ($50K a year mostly driving for a locally-owned food delivery company and my rent was a shade under $500/month). Post-covid inflation blew all that up and while I just got my big career change break spending a year making less than I did straight out of college driving for Papa John's really sucked compared to the non-stop party that was my late 20s.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
I find it interesting how siblings who by and large grew up in the same house can have radically differing opinions of their relatives (and with that, which relative they clearly take after; my half sister is very much like the women on her father's side of the family in spite of having spent very little time with them growing up, while I'm so much like my maternal grandfather that my father believed my mother when she told him that I'm not his kid. Funny enough, my stepmother disagrees and loves to point out the dumb little habits and traits that we share.).
My mom (a former Marine, FWIW; my parents met in the Corps) was something of a cartoon villain of a parent, most likely suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder and the shrink I saw was adamant that she suffers from ASPD as well. My favorite story to tell about her is when she burned our house down for the insurance money two weeks before Christmas and then doctor-shopped shrinks and had me diagnosed with OCD and put on Zoloft at the ripe old age of nine because I was sad about having lost everything (There are details that make this story funny.). There are stories I've learned not to tell. Millennials love to complain about their families/childhoods but it's a party foul to throw real trauma out there. Failure as a sibling and murdered pets are a mood-killer.
The confusing part about it is that her parents were flawed but relatively decent people whose kids (my mother and aunt in particular) turned out to be Hillbilly Elegy-tier fuckups (My aunt was very much like JD Vance's mom.), and having mentioned the book one of the problems I have with it is that it comes from the perspective of the youngest sibling in which he claims a position of unconditional victimhood. I'm the eldest son, so it's not that easy, and one of the hardest things about adulthood is realizing that I have no more power today to save my sisters from their godawful decisions than I did as a boy in the face of our mother's wrath.
At the same time, while I still consider my maternal grandparents to have been good people (My theory is that the crazy skipped a generation. Apparently my great grandmother was infamous for being an ill-tempered banshee.), I differ with my sisters in that I consider my mother's complaints about her parents to have been more or less accurate. Her father wasn't around much because they were poor and he was always at work (Cat's in the Cradle was a hit in the 70s because it resonated with a bunch of guilty Silent Gen consciences. Gen X was prone to helicopter parenting in compensation for having felt neglected as kids.) and her mother was depressed and withdrawn (Two of her six children didn't survive to adulthood and died within 18 months of each other. No shit she was depressed.). I grew up watching the toxic push-pull of dependence and resentment between Mom and Mamaw. Mamaw meant well in her way, but was utterly smothering, controlling, treated my mother as an incompetent child, and had the gall to say that she raised me and is the reason I turned out alright, not mom. Mamaw was an astute enough critic, but utterly lacking in self-reflection such that she and her daughter were stuck in a perpetual fight where they were both right about each other but never willing to look in the mirror.
My little sister was chosen to speak in the commencement when she graduated from undergrad and gave a deeply moving speech about our grandfather, her hero (and mine). He really was a good man, kind and generous to a fault, and we were his little sidekicks as children. When the house burned down he took his shoes off and handed them to me, because he would be damned before he saw his grandkid go barefooted. We're so alike that I might as well be his walking clone. Thus, I say the following not out of iconoclasm, but self-reflection. He was a servant, but spineless. He was conflict-averse to a fault and didn't like exercising authority as the patriarch or dealing with drama and so rarely did, leaving his children feeling neglected and unprotected from their mother's maladies. Alzheimer's is an awful, but at times illuminating disease. I was fortunate in that I was able to catch him on a good day, tell him that he was the best grandfather I could've asked for (at which he perked up and asked, "Really?"), and promise to take care of Mom and the sisters for him. The sad truth is that he spent his life feeling like he'd never done good enough. When Mamaw died he woke up every morning thinking that she'd left him. I pray that being able to be the grandfather that he was gave him some peace for having been unable to be the father he wanted to be.
My mom? She'll never be much of a "mom", but she really did try to be better and to her credit is not a bad mom in the same way that her mom was bad to her. My little sister lives on the other side of the country and is still terrified of her in her mid-20s to the point that seeing someone who looks too much like her makes her freak out (Dear little sis, you have a Master's in psychology. Please see a fucking therapist for yourself because you don't have to live like that. Mom was the sort of awful that forced little sister's decorated Force Recon Marine combat veteran father into abject servility, but she isn't Agent Smith and is frankly far past her prime at this point. Sadly, for all his military chops her father is kind of a deadbeat and whatever differences I have with my father, I genuinely pity her for having a father best described as "useless".), but Mom is still a person. Inhumane at times, yes, but still human. I don't have the right to speak for my sisters, but speaking for myself if I have to be the only kid who talks to her, so be it. I'm not going to drown myself on her behalf (Mercifully, she's embraced "disabled veteran" as her latest identity, so she's mostly the VA's problem now.), but I do what I can. I won't cosign a loan for her because I know better than that, but I'll front her a down payment if I've got it. I'm the favorite kid, so she's usually good for paying it back. Having been the favorite and something of the sibling relations equivalent of a war criminal is what I have to deal with. Everyone has their cross to bear, I guess, and that one's mine. I deal with her so my sisters don't have to.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
That's because dispatching (at least for the food delivery company) is like playing an RTS that isn't fun. On that note I do find it amusing and maybe a little bit disturbing that there are food delivery simulation games.
Roughly speaking, it'll get me back to grossing what I was working full-time at University 2 Go in 2023 (so, around a 30% raise depending on where the final offer lands at), except with a W2 and nice benefits package instead of a 1099 and buying my own Obamacare, and without having to run my car into the ground driving ~30K city miles a year for work (I'm a decent shadetree mechanic, so I was able to save on expenses there, but post-covid price increases in used cars, insurance, auto parts, and shop labor have made being any variety of self-employed driver harder than it used to be.).
So, in short, I'm not going to be impressing anybody but it's an honestly life-changing difference while hopefully starting an actual career instead of a comfortable and easy but dead-end job at a tiny business (that I stayed at way too long; there was nothing comfortable about working for draft beer corp). I can go back to not worrying much about money, should be able to retire my debt fairly quickly, and so on.
Edit: I just got the offer letter and it was more than I was hoping for. Over a 50% raise. I'm honestly kind of floored/in shock right now.
Update on my last post.
It, uh...looks like I got that job as a logistics coordinator for the trucking company (Note, the trucking company is just a subsidiary of what is in fact a fairly large company.). I would give my interview performance a B (reasonably well prepared and did a good spin job about my time as the owner's crony at University 2 Go without exaggerating my experiences, but was overly nervous), but apparently it was good. It was with a panel of three (local guy, his immediate boss, and the boss above that, with most of the back and forth being with the latter) over lunch (The office had a burst pipe so we relocated to a quiet spot for lunch. I did crack a joke that Mexican food was a risky choice for the pastel shirt I was wearing.). They were pleased that I'd done some research on the company (I have very little job interviewing experience, but taking a look at the company's "about us" page and/or checking out their Youtube channel to internalize some key facts seems like an obvious thing to do. If it's a family owned company it helps to at least know the name of the founder and being able to recite some key facts of "Why do I want to work here?" seems like a no-brainer.) and apparently impressed that I'd cooked up my own excel spreadsheet to log mileage and earnings as an independently contracted delivery driver (There are apps that do this, but I didn't like any of them so I just went the old fashioned way and opted for a manually-entered mileage log. Add in tips, delivery fee earnings, and number of deliveries and you're a formula away from things you want to know like tip average, average miles driven per delivery, total miles driven in a year, and so on. I'm far from an excel guru, but this wasn't hard and generated a log that required 30 seconds at the beginning and end of a shift of punching in a few numbers on Google Sheets.). He asked if I liked puzzles, and I likened dispatching to playing Tetris (An RTS is also an apt comparison, especially in a food delivery context where it's all about fast, fast, fast, but I didn't want to explain to someone nearing retirement age what an RTS game is.).
Whatever the quality of my interview performance, the big boss stated that he was impressed with me and confident that I can do well at the job, that I reminded him of a guy that he hired back in Houston, and that while he rarely offers a job outright during the interview this was one of those times. Apparently their short to medium term goal is to have me take over the guy who referred me's position so that they can promote him. He stated that I should have a written offer by Thursday or Friday and that he could probably do a bit better than my asking salary. My contact within the company told me today that he's been instructed to decline other resumes and cease the recruiting process, that it's a done deal.
It's taking a bit to sink in (The interview was on Tuesday on one day's notice.), and I won't totally believe it until I sign that offer letter in put in my notice at draft beer corp, but holy fuck I might be out of that shitshow (The latest drama is that they were 15 days late paying the line cleaners their vehicle reimbursement, I'm still averaging less than one revenue-generating call a day, and my supervisor is so overwhelmed or disengaged that I feel like I barely have a boss and barely do anything other than clean beer lines in a terribly inefficient manner and ride the clock. I will not miss having to text my boss at 6:30 AM and ask her what I'm supposed to be doing for the day, nor will I miss driving 1500 miles a week.) and out of working two jobs and still being broke, taking on debt, and wondering at what point to I have to stop the bleeding by calling for retreat and picking a parent to move in with and start over. I still plan on doing some shifts on the side at University 2 Go (It's not a reliable full-time gig, but on the once or twice a week that they're short on a dinner shift or whatever it's easy beer money and I'd like to get out of debt.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
Translated to American sensibilities...
Conveniently enough, we Americans once made a propaganda map comparing our two countries, and in it we compared Ukraine to the American south, and the Black Sea to the Gulf of Mexico.
Recall that the American South once tried to assert itself as a new nation and true heir to the American Revolution. Sure, there are "realist" reasons why having a foreign/rival nation (that would be poorer than their richer Yankee neighbors and thus liable toward foreign alliance or influence) in charge of part of the Mississippi River would be a security nightmare for the USA, but that's not why we fought the Civil War (My fun take there is that the Civil War was fought over what western expansion would look like.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
Your job sucks...
Correct on all counts. The company (at least from where I'm looking) is clearly struggling for cashflow, and thus we get issues like personal vehicle reimbursements being paid chronically late (not an issue for me, but a chronic source of drama with the line cleaners), fleet maintenance freeze, overtime crackdowns, issues ordering inventory, layoffs, and so on. The job would be tolerable on paper if I were actually paid for all my drive time, but as it is I'm expected to drive 10 hours a week (barring the rare exception in which I get a call in the town I live in) for free.
With that, things were slow in Q1 (averaging two calls a day with occasional line cleaning days) but have gone from slow to apocalyptically dead in Q2 (Rarely more than one call a day. I had a whole week where I ran one billable call.). We lost a major line cleaning contract to a competitor and instantly laid off a quarter of our market's line cleaners (One was a new hire in the middle of training!), so I've been spending most of my time covering (now quite barren) line cleaning routes for the guys we laid off. My supervisor has all but given up (Today was one of her Thursday sickouts after having been seen at the bar the night before lol.) and just tells me to do whatever and find some lines to clean or go to the storage unit and rearrange my truck when I don't have calls, whereas before I would get a list of spots to hit in order of priority.
I doesn't take a degree in economics to see where things are going. Relative to most markets for service techs (who have apparently been quitting en masse in other markets) the service area in mine is gigantic. It can be made to work given sufficient call volume that I drive to the city 2.5 hours away (or better yet the city an hour away, but that's where we just lost that line cleaning contract) and have three calls scheduled or the 1-2 calls are sufficiently lucrative. When the call volume drops, we lose economy of scale and wind up doing money-losing things like sending me to the same city a 5 hour round-trip drive away on two different days in the same week to run two different one-hour calls. Adding insult to injury, the "run one call and then clean lines" routine isn't even productive for line cleaning because the cleaning routes are heavily morning-weighted to hit places before they open and are serving product. Tomorrow I'm going to drive that 2.5 hours for a 10AM call (Can't do it any earlier than when they show up.), and then am assigned to "clean whatever you can" in a city an hours' drive away, so I'll be showing up in the middle of places' lunch rush trying to clean beer lines on a route I've never run before. Such productivity!
In all seriousness, I hope my supervisor is keeping it professional, putting on a brave face, and looking for jobs herself instead of drinking the kool-aid because this situation isn't looking very tenable. I would be far from surprised if the new investors take one look at the books from market to market, start shutting down marginal/money losing markets, and pulled out of our market entirely.
On the bright side I submitted the necessary information for my background check at the trucking company gig, and hopefully we'll get to the interview next week.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
Yeah, if there's a next time (Uh, I don't know how many more "next times" can be done before the oil in there turns into 100% sludge.) they're getting invoiced for it. As it happened, I just didn't want to go on a 10 hour round trip drive mostly through the middle of nowhere knowing full and well that the engine was 1.5 quarts low, and I had a jug sitting at the house.
Want to know the punchline? That 10 hour round-trip was for nothing because the parts they sent me with didn't fit.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
FWIW, as a Trump voter in a state where it didn't matter, my vibes were somewhere between skeptical/cautiously optimistic, but mostly skeptical because I fully expected the GOP House and Senate to be useless.
Since then, it's mostly bad. DOGE has been a bigger clownshow than anticipated. Deficit hawks have nothing to be happy about given that the Johnson House is just continuing previous bad budgets. The trade war has been far bigger and dumber than anticipated. Biden's signature win might well have been running up the national debt to the point that any attempt at reform gets the Liz Truss treatment. Senate Democrats want to increase old people UBI spending, so maybe they'll manage to deplete the Social Security trust fund in ~2030 when AOC is President. LOL at spending more time and effort deporting anti-Israel academics than the mass of illegal immigrants. My expectations were low, but this is a fucking joke.
Fuck me, I wanted DeSantis.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
Despair, but hope!
I’ll start with despair. My work situation has been bad. We’ve been dead and so I’ve been dead. I took the service tech position expecting 45hrs a week and daring for 50, and have wound up struggling to hit 35 while riding the clock like a rented mule. The driving remains insane; I’m on pace for 60K miles this year, and oh yeah we’re into week six of a fleetwide maintenance freeze so I haven’t changed the oil (but have added oil out of my personal stash) in 15K miles in my company truck. Our phones were shut off for 8 days, allegedly a coordination issue with the new people who’ve bought us out. I hope (and, cynical as I am, expect) that they’ll make payroll on Friday. I’m bleeding working this job, and hearing the overwhelmingly positive feedback from my supervisor almost feels like gaslighting. If I’m one of the top techs in the company while barely doing anything and usually failing to hit 40hrs a week, what are the rest doing? I literally cannot afford to continue working this job. Upon telling my (divorced) parents about the job situation, both have offered a rent free place to stay and get back on my feet. I’m glad to have that option, but oof that hurts and I’d have to get rid of my cats (I…uhh…kind of like the little fuckers, and I don’t want to move if I don’t have to.). I’m on the verge of applying to a local box factory. It’ll suck, but if it’s as advertised there’s lots of overtime available.
Let’s move on and give a cheers to hope! I had a round one interview with a trucking company today for a position as a dispatcher and it went well. This lead has been months in the making, but I think we might finally be getting somewhere. The local guy (who I’ve known for years from my time as a bartender and would be my direct supervisor) clearly wants to hire me. He played it cool, sat on my application, and allegedly of the ~80 applications received mine was one of two his boss forwarded his way (better to let it be his boss’ idea to hire me). The way he tells it, I’ve got it in the bag, but of course I’m going to do my best in terms of interview prep and so on. I’m actually interested in the job (Trucking dispatch seems like a logical path forward from all but running a third party food delivery company.), and while I anticipate a learning curve I am confident that I can learn the job and do well. The local guy tells me that he’s dead convinced that I’m the guy for this job and spent more time trying to sell me on the job than interrogating me on my past experience. We’re more than in the right place in terms of compensation. I’m not going to count chickens until I make it and sign an offer letter, but holy shit I’m excited and this might really be my path into something better and a company that I can grow into.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
Seniors comfort themselves that they’re only getting what the6 put in, but really if you live 20 years post retirement and get colas on top of your earned benefits, then you’re taking more than you ever put in.
Another way to put this (and more important, given that Medicare is a bigger problem than Social Security.) is that retiring people today mostly paid for 1970s-2000s healthcare and expect 2020s healthcare in return.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
In the sense that everyone in politics is dumb? Yes. Do I think that their voter base being less college educated means a whole lot? No. The Republicans were just as dumb back when they were barely winning the college educated vote and running Romney. I mean, nominating a painfully patrician rich vulture capitalist for President one election cycle after the great recession who was also weak on the GOP's signature issue (It's hard to argue against Obamacare when there's a state level equivalent with your name on it.) is self-evidently dumb, one would think.
The actual politicians, staffers, and even primary voters are more educated than the average American. Even the Republican primary electorate is (or at least was circa 2018, and I doubt that the primary coalitions have changed that much since then) majority college educated with a relatively small four point gap between the two parties (This is dwarfed by the education gap between primary voters and the electorate as a whole.).
The current Trump administration coming up with these policies are all college educated, usually hold graduate degrees, and disproportionately hold them from the Ivy League. Unless level of education and the prestige of the degree-conferring institution are inversely correlated with intelligence, these people probably aren't dumb. Catch is, you don't have to be dumb to be wrong, and that's what makes Hanania's whole "elite human capital" argument so grating.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
Is it the ill-informed masses being driven insane by social media or the educated elites themselves?
I'd argue that media gatekeeping affected the informed policymaking class a lot more than the masses who never read, say, National Review. Speaking of gatekeeping, how many prominent political media figures aren't posting heavily on Twitter or some equivalent? Same goes for policy wonks.
This is an important distinction because it isn't mostly high-school educated voters who make policy, but the college educated, and most of those have graduate degrees. If the highly educated are just as prone to making bad decisions due to confirmation bias and/or falling victim to social-media driven stupidity, or are flat out uninformed, that's it's own problem, but these people aren't exactly "low information".
I worked with a guy like that at a locally owned version of doordash in a college town, one of many characters we employed (Our long-term staff from ownership down were ground zero of the male loneliness/failure to launch epidemic, referred to as "the lost boys" by one of the more clever among us or "the expendables" by the owner.). I don't know his specific story, but he's in his early 40s, single, lives with roommates, etc. such that he has insanely low overhead. He doesn't really drink/go to bars, doesn't do drugs other than weed I guess, and is into Marvel and videogames and that's it. If his car craps out there's always another relative with a cheap Toyota, but otherwise he's self-sufficient. Nice guy and perfectly competent, but infuriatingly lazy, truly dedicated to working as little as possible with the bare minimum of hassle necessary to meet his expenses. We jokingly refer to him as something of a monk, in contrast to the suckers who grind and spend insane amounts of money on bar tabs for the illusion that they might gat laid, or at least have a pretty bartender remember their name.
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