solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
I'm not sure that this is a behavior exclusive to progressive women. I delivered pizza during college in a mixed Southern town where the local black population is fairly ghetto, and the amount of whining about how dangerous delivering to the hood is (from an almost exclusively male delivery staff) was off the charts compared to how dangerous it actually is. To be clear, the amount of danger is non-zero (probably more than more people realize, though the occasional reddit talking point that delivering pizza is more dangerous than being a cop is incorrect and stupid. Cops would die in droves if they tried to do their jobs unarmed like pizza drivers do.) and I have been robbed at gunpoint on the job (Once in five years of delivering in that area.) but objectively the driving part of the job is more dangerous than the local crime threat (Birmingham, Alabama, on the other hand? Fuck that and RIP Najeh ). The real problem is that delivering to these customers is a money loser (These customers don't tip.) and often profoundly unpleasant. You're going to get harassed by the local street presence and customers are constantly trying to scam and get shit for free. You're not allowed to say that though (Hilariously, black drivers will and are highly sensitive any perception that they're getting stuck with the hood deliveries.) while you're allowed to refuse deliveries that seem unsafe, so there's a culture of hyping relatively tame but not nice places as dangerous (while we redline places that are actually dangerous). I'd imagine that dealing with the local losers on public transit is somewhat similar. You're probably not in much outright danger but you're going to be dealing with a lot of unpleasantness.
With that, in my experience women are more sensitive to danger in general, especially middle class and up white women, and they do deal with annoying behavior from customers that our male drivers don't (Porn is lying; nobody wants to fuck the pizza guy.). I've goofed as a dispatcher and sent one of those to a mid-tier hood at night and she called the office flat out terrified and hyperventilating. Lower class women complain less about this, especially lower class butch lesbians from the hood.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
On the other hand, I can also imagine him a sage of stoicism, someone who has so thoroughly embraced minimalism and detachment that he has transcended the weight of social expectations entirely.
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.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
17d ago
Mike Johnson was going after gamers because he's too spineless to admit that elderly dementia patients are what's actually eating up Medicaid's budget. Arguments about single mothers or NEET gamers are a distraction from the fact that the welfare state mostly exists to subsidize the old and that nobody really wants to talk about cutting old people welfare.
As for the social conservatives, I think the goalposts have moved past abortion (which was mostly made obsolete by Plan B being made available OTC) once many of the dare I say Catholics among them realized to their horror that devotion to the awfully Protestant and capitalist sounding "success sequence" doesn't so much lead to abortions as a lack of fertility itself. See also: The Conservative Case for Teen Pregnancy.
The relatively secular far right may differ with the relatively Catholic social conservatives (though Mike Johnson is an Evangelical, which itself makes for a fun divide among both the secular and religious conservatives on the Israel Question) on the Single Mother Question, but nowhere near as bitterly as they differ over the Immigration Question (The secular far right see social conservatives and especially Catholic social conservatives as being unreliable on the Immigration Question, in alliance with the capitalists who are otherwise happy to crush social conservatives' fruitful multiplication with careerism and contraceptives.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
28d ago
Work that should and could be done in weeks takes months
Coming from a history of working for small businesses to my first "real" salaried job at a large company I'm presently going crazy dealing with this. I'm current in "training" three weeks into the job and I've done next to nothing (My signature accomplishment so far has been performing a BIOS update on a coworker's laptop which just happened to fix his docking problem, sparing him a potentially weeks-long computer outage.). IT is either snowed over with work, incompetent, or just not a priority because their onboarding program doesn't exist and response time on tickets is glacial and requires escalating up the chain to get even basic shit done.
I was issued a company laptop without being told the username and password to log into it (had to call IT for that). The instructions for setting up the company phone didn't totally work and I had to figure it out myself (I'm a talented or at least "willing to Google it and try" or "capable of installing and using an easy Linux distro" user at best. I'm a car guy, not a computer guy.). It took me three weeks, multiple tickets, and multiple conversations with bosses to get the login to the dispatch software I'm supposed to use. I still don't have a login to the company intranet (Allegedly HR never created the account on their end.) and my email account is getting the wrong terminal's mail.
Call me crazy, but this is stuff that should've been done on day one, or week one at most. I should've been issued my devices with a piece of paper that had the relevant login credentials included and accounts already set up. My previous employer was a bunch of clowns that had their company phones shut off for a week due to non-payment and even they were capable of this. I'm assured that this is perfectly normal for the company, it's frustrating but par for the course, I'm not expected to actually contribute for a few months, and so on but I can't shake the fear that I'm totally wasting time in which I should be learning how to do my job and thus am going to wind up being thrown into the fire with little other than knowing the right people to call for help (because I've really spent most of my time hobnobbing and doing my best to present myself as eager to learn and do in lieu of actually doing anything) while I learn things on my own the hard way, under fire with expectations once the honeymoon period wears off.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo 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
10mo ago
Update:
The roommate is gone, as is his annoying not housebroken dog. Kicking him out wasn’t as hard as I’d expected, and that fact leaves me with more self-recrimination than relief. I aggravated an ankle and pulled some muscle or ligament in my hip moving his bariatric chair out of my place but that was worth it (and both are progressively hurting less day by day such that I’m confident that I didn’t hurt anything serious; I’m just on the wrong side of thirty and out of shape so these things happen when lifting heavy things and moving them in weird ways) I should have done this years ago and my failure to do so cost me an enormous amount of money. I take no relish in the situation I’ve exiled him to (a tenuous couch surfing situation in a cluttered up house that smells in a way that just stresses me out the moment I walk in the door, and I am pretty lazy/lenient about cleanliness.), but I had to do it. My obligations toward him ended long ago, I have to defend myself, and I’ll leave it at that. He muttered something about contacting his family up north and that’ll probably be the correct course of action for him to take.
I’m relaxing right now with my door open, cats going in and out, and the A/C turned off like I like it (I’m bad about forgetting to turn the A/C back on and he’d pitch a fit about it.). The last week or so has been a rough mess of feeling badly emotionally dysregulated but as I’m typing this I feel like I’m on the other side of it and past the worst of it. If everything goes right and I don’t happen upon anything better to do I plan on renting a carpet cleaner and deep-cleaning the apartment over the weekend.
This is what winning looks like. Maybe I don’t have it in me to feel satisfaction or elation over finally fixing my own fuckup but I do feel relief. I feel at peace. I appreciate everyone here (and my IRL friends) who pushed me to quit putting off/tolerating things and get rid of him. To my buddy RJ in particular, you don't owe me shit. Sure, I covered a $70 or so tab and stayed out with you on Sunday night till the bars closed against my better judgment but you busted your ass helping me move his stuff with little notice. You're a true friend and I'll never forget that.
As someone who works in a bar, I'm somewhere between amused and annoyed by the Bud Light thing (much as I was annoyed as a pizza delivering college student to hear about John Schnatter from people blissfully unaware of Tom Monaghan's politics). The place I work at is one of the more liberal bars in town, or at least liberal enough that Bud Light is one of our worst sellers. We keep it in stock for the occasional large party of tradesman types who will come in and drink lots of Bud/Bud Light, but for whatever reason Bud is so "redneck" coded that our patrons (mostly Millennials; happy hour is mostly Boomers) mostly don't touch it. Why Miller Lite isn't coded this way, why our customers have no idea that Kid Rock name-dropped PBR in a song, and why Yuengling's owner actually having endorsed Trump seems to have been forgotten all escape me. Caveat here: the local Miller/Yuengling/PBR distributor sends us 16oz cans for the same price as Bud sends us 12oz bottles, a price differential that only Michelob Ultra (Greeks and middle-aged former Greeks are loyal to it.) seems able to overcome (darkly amusing, as IMO Mich Ultra is even worse than Bud Light; Hell, I'd rather drink Natty.).
I've heard lots of jokes about Bud Light that get old fast, one regular who repeatedly announced his boycott in annoying fashion, but otherwise I sell no Bud Light and tons of Miller/PBR/Yuengling as per usual. I've heard more dramatic things from the sort of bars that do sell Bud Light (and wouldn't be surprised; this is an SEC college town), but people say lots of things. Concerning Gen Z, they either choke down $2 PBRs like the rest of our budget-conscious customers or drink fancy crafts (Sours seem to be in style now and IPAs out of fashion/relegated to alcoholic Millennials.)/mixed drinks. Hard kombucha is a surprisingly big seller along with the expected ciders for people (usually young women) who don't like beer. We sell surprisingly little Whiteclaw (mostly to one regular, and then the bar manager drinks it on the job because it looks like water in a cup); maybe it's class-coded in a negative way toward dilettantes in the same way Bud Light is.
For fun, my preferred domestic/InBev product (aside from Elysian Space Dust IPA) is Natty Light, because it's cheap, IMO no worse than other light beers, and does its job, i.e. one or two to finish off a night upon returning home from the bar won't get me too fucked up to work the next day. I'm not tough enough to drink Natty Ice any more, and as a rule I don't keep liquor at my house (My drunken idea of a good gin and tonic is not conducive to being on-time/sober enough to work the next morning, and I frown upon getting drunk and morose by myself these days.)
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo 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
2yr ago
I've felt this, coming from a mediocre rural area in Greater Appalachia (where both the top and the bottom were white and the black people I knew were in similar circumstances to myself; they mostly lived in modest houses like my family did, not in trailers or mansions) to an old Southern port city. The racial inequality there was very in-your-face along with the juxtaposition of dilapidated shotgun shacks being all but adjacent to million dollar historic mansions. It was deeply jarring and remorse-inducing (as was witnessing the poverty of the Black Belt, a region depopulated by the Great Migrations and which is probably about as bad and forgotten about as native reservations or the worst that Appalachia has to offer).
By contrast, IMO successful integration happened mostly in the New South. It's still a little weird due to the fact that underclass blacks tend to live in inner city apartments while underclass whites tend to live in trailers out in the country but once you get above that level (and ignore the mostly white elite, which are as out of view to the middle as the underclass) you get working and middle class white and black people who interact and get along with each other well on a day to day basis and as /u/faceh puts it, there's more shared culture and experience papering things over than there is racial divide. We all want our kids to go to good schools and do well, we all want nice houses and fancy cars or trucks, we love Jesus (but are imperfect sinners), and want our football team of choice to win.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2d ago
Broadly, it's bad fiscal policy in a way that fiscal policy has been bad in an escalating fashion for the last 10-25 years (Any self-described Republican fiscal hawks need to account for Hastert before we get to Ryan/McCarthy/Johnson.).
What I find interesting in the argument over Medicaid cuts is the fact that Medicaid spending somehow increased by 40% in the last five years? How?! I could see 25% given inflation, and a temporary covid bump makes sense, but we've allegedly had a strong working-class labor market for years.
Is a healthcare system that's rapidly approaching 20% of GDP even reformable?
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
3mo ago
In my opinion as an alcoholic barfly who actually worked for the bar for a few years: maybe (in the right bar in the right location, but sure as shit not the bar I worked at), but no. For context, the bar I worked at catered (or at least aspired to cater) to grad students and professors in a college town, wound up being a hangout for retired/nearly retired professionals during happy hour and townie millennials during night shift (This demographic is rapidly aging out of the bar scene to an extent that the bar faces an existential crisis because Gen Z doesn't really drink that much.)
The odds are long, and worsened by the fact that bars are A. sausagefests and B. often skew old in their clientele. The drinks are cheaper at the place I worked at, $10-$12 cocktails, yes, but we also sell $2 PBR pints as long as the distributor doesn't screw up and run out of them, $4 domestics (including Miller Lite and Yuengling pint cans, Budweiser stuff comes in 12oz bottles), and $8 shifties (any domestic plus any well shot; my usual is a Budweiser with a shot of Jameson). You justify the cost because you like drinking and talking, and while getting laid probably isn't in the cards a good conversation probably is. As the millennials age out even the "interesting conversation" part is starting to become questionable.
In my experience young (and especially young and attractive) women rarely come to the bar alone, usually with a friend/spouse or in a group of friends who are having their own conversation and don't want an outsider butting in. There aren't dramatic rejections; you just pick up on the fact that you're not part of the group and that their conversation, game, or whatever was for them, not for you. The rare young woman who does show up alone (usually in-between relationships) will be subject to insane amounts of competition for attention from every single guy aged 21-80. The older guys have the money to buy her drinks and are sexually non-threatening, and thus will win most of her attention.
Very early millennial to Gen X and older women (and men) tend to be way less introverted and more willing to talk. It's hard to pry younger people away from their phones.
Update on my economic and personal malaise. I wound up sticking with the beer line cleaning gig and got promoted to service tech faster than I found the motivation to job hunt (My self-imposed deadline there was Jan 1.). It wasn't great, but about another month in I improved at it enough that it became dead-easy and never difficult unless I slacked badly and backed myself into a deadline crunch to hit the bonus.
Apparently I interview better than I thought, as I was the "emotional choice" by the service manager who hired me (backed up by my immediate supervisor whose coattails are a good place to ride behind). This is good because I'm going to have to be the emotional choice a few more times until I earn myself a better resume. I'm not exactly brimming with excitement about the new position, but it's a rational step forward. If it goes well, I'll make enough money to make my life a bit more tolerable. At worst, I'll at least break even compared to the line cleaning gig (and I get a company truck, so I won't have to worry about commercial insurance and running my 15 year old car into the ground) and should make more money if by virtue of getting more hours if nothing else. Overtime is a useful antidote to crappy hourly pay. I care less about beer the older I get, but IMO learning how to fix anything to do with a draft system and demonstrating competence at it would be useful for the purposes of either moving into a gig with a distributor or making a career change into some other variety of repair work (I’m told that the usual career trajectory with this company is that people put in a year or so and then bail for a distributor with better pay/benefits.). I'm currently training for the new position at the company HQ for a month and my trainer is good. I like him, and he strikes me as doing a commendable job of being demanding enough that I actually learn quickly while not being an abrasive dick about it.
The not-so great news is that my suspicions about it not being a great pay boost appear likely to be correct. I was pulled aside by an assistant manager in my market and told not to take the job because the sales quota to actually earn commission is impossible to hit in my state's relatively poor, low-density market, and I likely wouldn’t be able to beat a retreat back into line cleaning without relocating unless the guy replacing me doesn’t pan out.). I don't know how it's all going to work because the company is presently restructuring the service department's role and pay structure. My first service meeting was...something, almost unnerving, dominated by 45 minutes of heated back and forth between a disgruntled tech and the new big boss/designated scapegoat about recent changes in pricing, low service call volume, and being diverted into non-billable (aka. line cleaning) work are going to fuck himself and several other technicians out of hitting commission right before Christmas (The consensus seems to be that said tech was badly lacking in tact, but wasn’t wrong.). I didn’t know that one could speak to a superior like that and remain employed outside of the restaurant industry or construction site (Then again, this is still food and beverage.).
I spoke with my trainer about this and got the following: The restructure is probably going to lead to his exiting the company, as it appears that it will badly limit his upward mobility within it (The management role he was being groomed for will no longer exist, and he’ll be stuck competing for other management roles that have far longer tenures with the company and thus deeper personal relationships with upper management.). The technicians’ complaints about changes in pricing and so on are valid. My predecessor (who was with the company for almost a decade) often missed the quota to make commission and he wishes he could’ve swapped markets with my predecessor to find out how much of that was him being too lazy/hungover to get out of bed on time versus the market itself being challenging.
Whatever happens, I figure that this is worth doing because even if it isn’t what I want to be it’s unlikely that I’ll wind up making less, and I need to push myself and become vastly more familiar with stepping outside of my comfort zone because being spending far too much time being overly comfortable, complacent, and okay with a mediocre but overpaid and easy job is how I got myself into the predicament of having mostly wasted the last ten years of my life in the first place.
How’s that for a segue into my personal life? It’s somewhere between “not great, but manageable” and “a falling apart disaster” depending on how neurotic I’m feeling on a given day (In therapy speak this means “I am struggling with emotional regulation and poor coping mechanisms that aggravate it.” or “I am presently realizing that I am not sufficiently functional to make the sort of life that I would like for myself. It only worked with the cushy delivery gig and easy financial situation.”). There was another roommate (I wasn’t looking, but it fell into my lap and I was sufficiently stupid/intoxicated at the time to agree without any vetting. 11PM on Friday night at the bar isn’t the best place to go roommate shopping, who would’ve guessed?). The good news is that I realized that she was insane (The worst alcoholic I’ve ever lived with and the most blindingly obvious case of Borderline Personality Disorder or something along those lines I’ve seen in almost a decade, one of three that I’ve met in my adult life that gave me the vibe of “RUN, NOW!”.), told her that she had to go, and after a few weeks of temper-tantrums and pleading left in peace.
The bad news is that between that, the job transition, and a rough Thanksgiving visit with my father I am a shaken-up mess in dire need of a hug/some serious reassurance. This is far from the first bad visit with my father but it just gets worse every time. He’s in his mid/late 50s and it’s now plainly apparent that if he makes it to retirement he’s going to drink himself to death within a few years or doing so, and that’s the optimistic timeline in which my stepmother’s codependence exceeds her self-respect (This is likely to remain the case.) such that she doesn’t leave him (If that happens, my sister will regret being his favorite child. I was our mother’s and she was/is awful, but is mostly the VA’s problem now.). There’s nothing I can do to stop it. The cool and adventurous if neglectful and a stereotypical bad divorcee (exceeded by my mother’s “monstrous divorcee” conduct such that I feared getting the Medea treatment long before I’d ever heard of the play) father that I grew up with is mostly gone, replaced with a rapidly deteriorating drunk whose only desires are to enrich Miller-Coors’ shareholders while chain-smoking and blasting Fox News in his garage or to go to the one bar in the godawful desert town he lives in where he is only tolerated because he throws tons of money at the bartenders. At least I didn’t have to defend him in a bar fight this time (Like fishing stories, that one grows more exaggerated with time; the latest version I’ve been told is that I brandished a barstool in his defense. I did nothing of the sort, just very loudly made it clear that we’re leaving and the fight was over, and if it had come to that I’d have gone for something less unwieldy as a weapon than a barstool.). Oh, and he’s hooked on crypto speculation now (and has made more on Dogecoin since the election than my entire debt burden. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being a touch jealous.). Yay.
I’m going to have a bunch of free time sitting in a hotel room during the workweeks for the rest of this month, feel desperately compelled to vent (That’s the polite term for emotionally vomiting on people/exploiting anyone willing to lend an ear as an unpaid therapist.), and need to stay away from the bars around here so it’s likely that /r/raisedbyborderlines is going to get the story about my mother burning down our house for the insurance money two weeks before Christmas and that the fine people are going to get my take on Hillbilly Elegy and Borderer honor culture as someone whose background was “Hillbilly Elegy, but in rural north Alabama and with more domestic violence and dead pets”.
Last thing: I feel a lot better having finished typing this out than I did as I was starting and doing it, like the storm has passed. I just feel tired now and am phoning this paragraph in. I am frustrated by the fact that I am not “over it”. This stuff comes and goes and sometimes I go long periods of being okay before getting smacked in the face with it all over again. I think it happens less as time passes or when my life is more in order. I’m going to make it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
7mo ago
For the extreme example, /r/raisedbyborderlines. It's actually kind of a fascinating place in that the median poster there is from an oddly niche demographic: They're usually the daughter (in an otherwise male-dominated website), almost always consider themselves the scapegoat child (and their brother the golden child who usually remained enmeshed with the mother and is thus some variety of emotionally stunted), and have a spineless father who remained married to their mother (when BPD isn't usually correlated with long-lasting marriages).
Anecdotal, but in my experience material concerning mothers with borderline personality disorder seems strongly oriented toward women, while the material oriented toward men is far more concerned with getting over a borderline ex-GF/wife than dealing with a borderline mother.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
Anecdotally, we're what, two weeks into this? One of my acquaintances works for a Budweiser distributor in west Alabama and from what he tells me (while being beyond tired of talking about it) things are apocalyptic, his employer is tightening the belt, they're not getting help from AB, he gets accosted by randos for wearing Bud Light shirts, etc. We're talking multiple bars pulling all In-Bev products, a whole Walmart selling two cases of Bud Light (on Rollback!) in a week, customers sitting on pallets of unsold product, nobody hitting sales quotas. At the least, this is worse than the Papa John's N-word saga and much worse than the John Schnatter comments about Obamacare (I delivered for a Papa John's while in college at the time; hearing about his antics semi-regularly got deeply annoying after awhile.)/hosting Romney in his mansion.
I don't have a dog in this fight (other than being deeply sympathetic to the local distributors who are, at this point, the ones taking it in the ass, not InBev, and who tend to be pretty red in my experience), but I agree that it may take time for the effects of a boycott to make their way up the chain.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo 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
1yr ago
A brief update to the roommate situation:
I have decided that I will kick him out, but this will need to be delayed for a few (as in three) weeks while I conclude the lease on the old place he was living at: get the last of the stuff out, keys turned in, power turned off, etc. If I were to give him notice now there's a chance that he would try to move back in there and squat after the lease ends, in which case I could be held liable for having had an additional tenant living there off the lease, and I don't want to get sued. I don't think that he would do that, but I am afraid that he would and I'm not sure if that's reflective of the level of scumbag I've tolerated over the last few years or the level of paranoia/dread with which I approach interpersonal conflict. I am less afraid that he will pitch a fit and punch a bunch of holes in my walls or whatever, if only because he'll run out of breath in 30 seconds. I consider it likely that he will threaten to commit suicide but unlikely that he will attempt it in a violent enough fashion to succeed. He can say whatever he wants to his friends about what an asshole I am, but it doesn't matter because most of them are ~15 years older than I am and the ones that know both of us will understand why I am doing this.
It is my understanding that per my state's laws his living with me sans paperwork is considered an informal month to month lease that can be terminated without cause with 30 days written notice (which can be hand delivered by myself, no need to have it served). If he fails to vacate by then I can then sue to have him evicted. If worst comes to worst I will ask my landlord to have him evicted at whatever price that may cost (Conveniently, my landlord is an old lady who likes me, and she knows about this roommate, so I don't think she'll elect to evict both of us.). My worst case scenario resort is to exercise the fact that my lease is month to month at this point, so I could just move and leave him there to be evicted. I don't want to do that because I'm paying below market for a nice apartment in a great location but I'll do it if I have to.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
You are no one's outgroup and everyone's far-group. You might as well be living in a different country. I used to think that I'd just learned some social skills and had the right attitude of "I can't lose friends over politics, because my views are too weird and I will have no friends."
Not OP, but one of my favorite party tricks is to critique Ronald Reagan from the right by taking the left's criticism of him as accurate (Tell a Boomer that Reagan was a continuation of Carter with a more optimistic demeanor and remind the social conservatives that he legalized abortion and no-fault divorce as Governor of California along with screwing the pro-lifers by nominating O'Connor to the SCOTUS. Heads will explode.). Really though, while my beliefs best map at whatever JD Vance is stabbing at (I'm not sure he even knows at this point.), I'm not overly ideologically certain compared to my youth spent as a firm member of the Ron Paul camp. I can be polite, though, and as long as their arguments are well-reasoned instead of being cable-news tier crap I'm willing to listen to and respect anyone.
As for my parents, they divorced long ago but they're both shrieking harpies when it comes to politics. Mother has been a Hillary Clinton Democrat of the worst sort as long as I can recall while Dad went from caring little about politics to being a Catturd following Trumper who worships Elon Musk. I just don't talk politics with either of them.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo 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
7mo ago
It's been a few years since I read it, but my impression of Hillbilly Elegy was that it was mediocre as a political polemic (mostly because the book was IMO too short to develop the many points it was trying to stab at, be it his political arguments or his personal story), but that Vance's personal story was very compelling. As someone who voted for the Trump/Vance ticket I was far more impressed with Senator Vance's growth through the 2024 campaign trail than the book, movie, or his Senate campaign.
With that, as someone whose background was "Hillbilly Elegy with the details shuffled and maybe a bit worse" I was not prepared for how much reading Vance's story would me down an emotionally ugly trip down memory lane that left me in tears asking God why we had to be like that.
My big reservation with the book is that I came away from it wondering if he was telling a story about Borderer honor culture or multiple generations of Borderline Personality Disorder in a family in a Borderer context. He mentioned having an ACE score of 7/10, and that is sufficiently severe/rare that I would strongly caution against generalizing about a cultural group (even/maybe especially your own) based on living through that.
I will say that I have a fairly critical view of "Borderer honor culture" because I experienced too much of its extreme, aka. the use of firearms in domestic arguments. That's just not okay. There is no circumstance in which it is acceptable to kill your daughter in a murder-suicide because your wife presented you with divorce papers. Shooting yourself dead in an argument with your girlfriend may well be the most dramatic way to make your point short of murder, but doing so makes you a piece of shit for what that does to her. Both of those things happened to close relatives of mine, and it's not okay. I blanched when the book mentioned his Mamaw (I had a chain-smoking Mamaw named Bonnie too.) lighting his grandfather on fire because that was something Mom would've done to us if it had occurred to her and it was fucking terrifying growing up under the thumb of a screaming, constantly threatening banshee. He captured the toxic push-pull dynamic of dependence and resentment between Mom and Mamaw perfectly.
Vance was right to say that his experience of interpersonal/familial relationships was so different from his wife Usha's that they might as well have been from a different planet. In my experience an ACE score of 7 comes with a bunch of fucked up stories that I now hesitate to tell because they're nuclear-level buzzkills in the typical "Millennial complain about your family" session and because I'm at a place in life where I'd rather not dwell on the shit I'm trying to move on from. If I were to write my own Hillbilly Elegy the cover would feature me sitting in a local reporter's car watching my house burn down and all my belongings with it two weeks before Christmas when it turns out that the fire was set by my mother for the insurance money.
On a side note, I wound up befriending a bunch of second-gen immigrants in high school/undergrad and for whatever reasons their first gen parents, be they Russian/Ukrainian or Indian, tended to instantly like me and trust me as a friend for their children who was capable of handling plebian tasks for them like changing a tire, putting out a fire, or teaching them basics like "how to fry an egg" or "how to do laundry". Likewise, as an undergrad I had certain professors who gave me a lot more leniency than I deserved or asked for (concerning turning in assignments late; writing apologetic emails for late assignments was something I developed into an art form as a student) because they perceived me as "not privileged" because I worked a full-time job as a student.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
It's been rough (especially anxiety-wise, but this isn't my first rodeo there and I'm reasonably competent at dealing with it at this point in life) but I'm hanging in there and am calmer about the situation than last week. My job situation is not what I want it to be but is not an outright emergency (I can string together enough delivery and bartending shifts on top of it to keep the bills paid.) so I can backburn that problem while I get the roommate situation dealt with and have a backup plan there that'll open up in a few months.
I am dreading the process of kicking the roommate out (He may legitimately have nowhere to go due to having burned every bridge, and if that's the case or close to it I expect much wailing and gnashing of teeth.), but he has more than overstayed his welcome and done less than nothing with the frankly embarrassing amount of aid I've directly or indirectly sent his way. His health problems are unfortunate but his refusal to manage them is not my fault or responsibility (nor is his failure to find welfare or employment), and allowing him to stay here is tolerating an incorrigible leech at best and putting myself at risk of being conscripted into caregiving at worst. I really thought I could help this guy and all I wound up doing was enabling his self-destructive bullshit.
As far as friendship goes (and this is something I'm going to have to work on after this is over so that I don't find myself in a re-run of this situation), I had a bad habit through my 20s of picking up "friends" who really just appreciated my being useful and disappeared/drifted away when I quit loaning them money, fixing their car, etc. If the only thing you value in yourself is being useful then you'll develop a knack for finding people who will exploit this mercilessly, and this roommate is merely somewhere between grandfathered in from the past and the worst case of all of them. It has to end, and I am not obligated to let this guy stay at my place until he dies because of whatever went wrong in his life that isn't my fault.
To be honest, whatever pity or desire I had to help him at this point has been overcome by disgust, at him for his shameless freeloading and refusal to even try and get his shit together and toward myself for having tolerated it for so long. I will not let anger get the better of myself when dealing with him but I cannot and will not continue to tolerate this. This won't be an ultimatum or intervention, just a statement of fact: "You need to leave."
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1yr ago
IMO while Trump is most likely going to lose, I'm not convinced that either Haley or Desantis have a chance of winning either. While I personally like Desantis he might be the least personable candidate since Richard Nixon if not Barry Goldwater. Haley, meanwhile, appeals to a coalition that's won the popular vote in a Presidential election once in the last 30 years (Dubya would get stomped in 2024 in the Electoral College as well as the popular vote if he performed as he did in 2000 given contemporary demographics.).
Put bluntly, save for a time in the 1990s when fiscal conservatism got trendy and people were really sick of crime and a shorter time in the 2010s when people were mad about Obamacare (which the GOP did a good job of milking for House purposes with REDMAP) the Republican platform has been dreadfully unpopular since the 1930s. For a Republican to win the Presidency they either need a God-tier candidate (Eisenhower and Reagan come to mind here.) or for the Democrats to self-destruct/be in office when something really bad happens. Richard Nixon didn't magically become more telegenic from 1960 to 1968, for example.
So, counterintuitively, Trump supporters aren't exactly wrong to value style over substance. A non-stylish Republican isn't going to win. Unfortunately for them Trump seems to inspire his opponents as much if not more than his supporters and was largely incompetent at governing, but it isn't as if the GOP had been putting forth an all-star cast before he showed up.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2yr ago
I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
As am I. I am disturbed by how much "I have been a good Bing." made me feel genuine pity.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
17d ago
Speaking as a Southerner, it's the petty vindictiveness of (literally, this time) beating a dead horse. The Confederacy has been dead a long time. Jim Crow has been dead far longer than the average black American has been alive. Banning rednecks from flying the rebel flag at Talladega and cooking up a noose hoax to try and shame the audience into submission (something I felt actual feelings about; it's irrational but it was infuriating) isn't going to do a damn thing to improve things for black Americans. At some point you're going to have to quit blaming those pesky Confederates and either come up with a solution or admit that you don't have one, because it's not our fault that black kids in Baltimore can't read.
As I like to remind my northern relatives (My parents met in the military so half is from Alabama and the other from Michigan.), once they got a taste of Coleman Young (first black mayor of Detroit, born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama) they voted for George Wallace in '72 (and George Wallace came home with a GM plant that my grandfather worked for, completely turning around the economic fortunes of my family; no shit they liked George Wallace.). Don't pretend that you're innocent and that your statues aren't next. You're not and they very much are next. We're in the same boat here.
As for the good old days, I'd settle for the pre-2010s racial truce.
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