There are lots of signals that you’re working too hard. A drop in productivity, negative attitude, dreaming about work, to name a few. Oh, and how about seeing UFOs and a giant praying mantis? Paul Froggatt, of Warwick UK, described his terrifying alien encounter to the Daily Star. Mr. Froggatt has resigned due to the trauma of his commute and the ridicule of his coworkers.
Pace yourself Deadsplinters, it’s only Monday.
Tough break, Paul.
Both are uncomfortable.
Wrong side of the pond, If he lived here he’d be elected to congress.
I’d like to know the dog food brand. What are the using in that stuff? I don’t want to feed to my dog but I might take a nibble. 👽
Only if he were a Republican. Otherwise, he would be a radical extremist left-wing universe-ist.
Right, remembere the Jeremiah Wright controversy?
hmmm… reminds me of a co worker i had previously who would only go outside for his lunchbreak if he didnt see any chem trails in the sky
he was an odd dude…also gave off plenty psycho vibes
that said tho…my current Q flavoured co worker is giving out some plenty wierd vibes too since his girlfriend dumped him…..i’d be worried if we had guns here
@farscythe I’d still give him a wide berth, crazy people don’t need guns to cause damage although they help.
eh….i give everyone a wide berth (aaaaaah rona cooties!)
but yeah…fair point
he doesnt seem exactly harmless to me anymore
(admittedly thats just my spidey senses talking)
Several years back, I somehow got in a conversation with a guy in a bar that believed in “chem trails”. At some point, he brought up “rocket fuel”, and gave me some really weird looks when I tried to explain that planes don’t use rocket fuel…
There was also one of our “sovereign citizen” types at that bar, and luckily they showed up on the same day, and spent much of their time arguing with each other, so it was pretty much a “let them fight”.gif situation.
Someday, I’ll tell you guys about my UFO experience. Maybe I’ll figure out how to make a DUAN out of it, but at the time (long long ago) it was kind of scary and unpleasant. I don’t really think it was aliens or anything (though it probably was) and I was just a kid and might have just been half-dreaming the whole thing (I wasn’t) but still…
I know what you’re all thinking: No, there were no anal probes involved.
I had one of those UFO experiences when I was a kid. Really odd shit. Although my mother and brother witnessed it with me at the time so I know it wasn’t just me and my imagination.
@Luigi Vuoto
That would be a good long read!
It is a Winter Wonderland here in the Greatest City in the World™! Snow is falling, whiteout conditions, time to hunker down. The Abominable Snow Beast couldn’t be happier, according to the Dog Walker-in-Chief, but alas I am still trapped in the the medical-industrial-insurance maw, so despite my many medical appointments my mysterious inability to walk on my left leg has been entirely ignored while they focus on two other entirely manageable conditions I’ve been living with for years, so I’m not out there diving into snowbanks with the hound as I would have been three months ago.
Because we have an all-but-abdicated Mayor Emperor Cuomo has big-footed in. He declared an emergency-vehicle-only travel ban, as well he should have. But he is the lord of all he surveys, and the news reports that he is driving himself to NYC (why? The capital is in Albany?) and from his car he has given a phone interview telling us that “it’s hell out there, stay home” and “The snowplows can’t keep up!”
Well. I will say that from my apartment windows I can see two fairly major avenues, one on which I live (great views!) and another close by. No snowplow has visited us, and we live in Manhattan. The Abominable Snow Beast decided to visit an even more prominent avenue and the Dog Walker-in-Chief reports that there was no sign of plowing activity over there either. Maybe the snowplows could keep up if they were actually deployed.
This matters not to me. We are well-provisioned. I came across a recipe for an Irish stew and I have all the ingredients. I don’t have a crockpot anymore, nor a stockpot, nor an Instapot, but in this recipe you do it as the Irish would have done it traditionally, in a big pot over a gas-flamed burner. It takes 3–4 hours, plus a little prep time. If it works out, you’ll see it in an FYCE post.
What do these people say when you tell them, “hey, look at my fucking leg, not at that other shit”?
Is Cuomo actually driving himself, or is he being driven? Either way, the whole “do as I say…” thing rings pretty hollow.
Even though it’s been snowing for hours, it has just started to overcome the salt on our road and accumulate on the street. Not quite whiteout yet, so I’ve seen some ice skaters and even a couple of people using theses sort of standing sleigh thingies. Mrs. Butcher isn’t having it.
It’s been snowing off and on for two days but we have very little accumulation. It’s just warm enough to keep things sloppy. The temps are dropping overnight so tomorrow’s walk will be treacherous.
They pre-salt the streets in the city very erratically, and they don’t like to do it because the sewer systems haven’t been maintained since the La Guardia administration, so that causes chaos with the run-off, despite a whole workforce dedicated to this mission whose motto seems to be “nothing can be done”.
I don’t really want to turn into a comment from the cranky old man yelling at clouds that I have become but one of the two conditions is high blood pressure. Half the country suffers from it. They’re obsessed with dicking around with various BP medications. I’ve gained a bit of weight during this pandemic and, as you know from my FYCE posts, we don’t exactly go hungry or thirsty in my house.
This is really only germane to me but because I can’t walk very well I found that there was a medical practice that took my (excellent) insurance very close to my apartment. I decided to enroll there. It’s somewhat of a teaching facility, so everyone is young but they’re mostly residents who rotate in and out. It’s like Groundhog Day when I go there. I repeat the same story over and over again and they do blood tests and focus on these other two things. I have another referral this week (snow travel conditions willing) and I’m sure it will have nothing to do with my left leg. I’m going to have it out with that consulting doctor, whom I’ve never met of course. But then there is a follow-up a few days later at my home practice and when they start jabbering on about non-leg-related issues I’m going to cut them off and say, “Doctor, my time is valuable and so is yours. So let’s talk about my leg.” I know what the response is going to be. “But your blood pressure is still a little high so I’m going to recommend that you stop taking X and I’ll prescribe Y instead, and a prescription for a supplement that is known to lower blood pressure.” This has happened, and I didn’t fight it before. But after three months I’m getting tired of my Emily Dickinson cosplay shut-in routine and even in pandemic-ridden New York it’s still a beautiful, wondrous city and I would like to be able to experience more than I can within one block of my apartment.
Rant over. I swear, on my deathbed, I’m going to to try to rasp out, “Get National Health insurance passed. This system is crazy. If you have good insurance you’re going to be milked dry to subsidize those who don’t, all in the service of the insurance conglomerates. Mommy, Daddy, I’ll see you soon. And don’t forget, I have money put aside for a good cremation party. And also, if you’re making something with tuna go for the imported in oil, not the albacore…”
Not sure how much experience you’ve had, generally, with teaching hospitals, but I used to work in the Graduate Medical Education area of my teaching hospital, and there’s a definite progression of how visits are handled. Before you see the attending physician (the one who will actually sign off on the treatment plan and send out the bill), you’ll be seen by any number of mid-level providers, such as nurses, PTs, ATCs, etc. Then you’ll be seen by a resident (and/or a fellow afterward if your facility is stacked with people to teach), who will then present your case to the attending along with their treatment recommendation. The attending will either agree and go in to see you for 30 seconds so they can sign off on the plan, or they will disagree and spend a little more time with you to determine the treatment plan.
So, with that being the basic setup, then jamming every single person who comes into contact with you during your journey will help with documentation, which will then help with keeping the issue at the top of the discussion. Now, if one of them can look at you and say, “Matt, your HBP is doing this thing to the blood vessels in your leg which is why you can’t walk on it,” then it certainly makes sense for them to focus on that as the root issue. But, if they just don’t want you to stroke out while still needing a walker, then that shit ain’t working and you’ll have to risk looking like That Patient Who Knows Better Than The Doctor, until they pay attention and start dealing with it. Failing that, you may need to find a new PCP.
The thing about the left leg is my right leg is perfectly fine. My two arms are fine. My blood pressure was fine for 20 years but I kind of dis-associated myself from the doctors office I had been been going to for years, vowing that I would just find another doctor, and then Covid-19 hit us pretty hard in NYC and with everything going on I ran out of what I was taking for the BP and just stopped taking it, so that was on me.
When I finally joined this medical practice because of the bum leg and they are pretty much across the street from me, they talked about the BP. “Well, that’s easy enough to fix. I’ve been taking X for 20 years, so just give me that.” “Oh no, we don’t really prescribe that anymore…” and then the medical carousel started up. At first I thought, “I have gained quite a bit of weight during this pandemic and maybe the BP…” It’s not that, I know it’s not. I’ve asked them directly, “Is it something to do with my heart? My liver? My kidneys?” One the one hand they say, no, it shouldn’t be, something like that would affect both legs, but on the other hand much more testing needs to be done. You should see the bills I get. I’m sure you’re well aware of this. $1,200. Negotiated rate through the insurance company $400. My co-pay $15. This is absolute madnesss.
I keep trying to tell the rotating cast of doctors that almost a quarter of a century ago I was out walking the dog we had at the time and she unexpectedly darted off the sidewalk. I screwed up my left foot, on to the medical carousel I went, CAT scan, the whole thing, and my ankle wasn’t broken and it recovered in due time. So I thought. Then, about 20 years later, My Left Foot started acting up again. I found it difficult and painful to walk on it. And armed with my gold-plated insurance I went through nine appointments to see what was up. A CAT scan. A sonogram to determine whether I had blood clots. The last two were with an orthopedist. He told me at the last one that I would need to go to physical therapy 3X a week for six weeks at least. I looked at the referral and what I had was tendonitis. Timing, for once, was in my favor.
That weekend I attended a small college reunion, it was just about a dozen of us. I used to host these all the time and we all will again once the lockdowns end and the virus goes away. One of the wives (brave soul, she was not an alumna but her husband was) said, “Oh, I had that! Did the therapist tell you to do this?” And she showed me a foot exercise that I tried and the tendonitis went away in a week.
This is way TMI but I have to vent. I guess the perpetual lockdown (sorry, Emperor Cuomo, I meant PAUSE) is getting to me.
@MatthewCrawley I’m sorry you’re missing out on the snowy fun with dog. My last dog loved playing in it, Fanny seems indifferent.
Butcher Dog loves the snow. She gets to romp and jump and eat it and have the best time…at least until she decides she’d rather be warm and then she’s at the door.
One of her favorite outdoor activities is playing Jenga with Mrs. Butcher’s wood pile. Mrs. Butcher has a teeny tiny wood stove in her studio shed, so she’s got a very meticulously stacked pile of wood just outside the shed, which Butcher Dog will pull from so she can chew on the logs. She never pulls from the top–always from the middle or the bottom–so there’s always a mess for Mrs. Butcher to clean up the next day.
Fanny doesn’t play in it all, it’s disappointing. But she also loves to pull logs from the wood rack, inside and the ones in the yard. I guess it’s like a candy store for dogs.
Do you, or anyone, remember the story of The Christmas Puppy? She was our first dog that we had as a couple and she LOVED the snow. Problem was, once fully grown she weighed 12 pounds, so you can imagine how small she was. It was a very snowy winter that year, and snowier the next, so she’d body dive into grimy snowbanks and I’d have to scoop her out and pull her back on the leash. Why we never got a harness for her I don’t know.
This will be my 1,100th comment.
That is all.
💥🍾🏆🎂🎉
you know….unrelated to everything… just watching random tiktok shit
made me realize….
thank fuck i got most of my stupid out of my system before smart phones came around
*cringe*
Same!
@farscythe I have had that same thought soooo many times!