urggurgguggghhh [NOT 11/7/21]

Hi, friends! Happy Sunday!

I don’t know about you, but I am definitely not ready for this week at work. We have a big planning session for a few days, and those normally are a combination of trying to herd cats and feel my brain leak out my ears.

On the upside, my garden is doing great! I’ve got something eating my chocolate cherry tomatoes while they’re still green. Just casually snipping them off the branch at night. Which is interesting because I have a monstrous cherry tomato plant about 10 feet away with fruit ripe enough to pick and it’s leaving that alone. Do opossums eat tomatoes? Based on the height and access of the ones getting eaten green, it would be easy for an opossum to chomp chomp chomp it. I’m not seeing half-eaten tomatoes nearby, so I don’t think it’s asshole squirrels.

Unrelated, because I have no account with them, but it’s a real dick move that Wells Fargo just decided to stop all their personal credit lines. It’s going to drop credit scores for clients who used them since ending the personal credit lines will increase the ratio of debt to credit availability for the those clients. Credit scores are a fucking racket, but they’re a thing we have to deal with nonetheless.

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39 Comments

  1. Weird that your green tomatoes are being eaten, but not the ripe ones.  I can’t even imagine what’s going on there.

    I can’t recall for certain, but I think one of the reasons why Wells Fargo is fucking everyone over is because they fucked everyone over several years ago with their phantom accounts and now they are finding themselves needing to dump some of their services in order to maintain something resembling a decent financial position.  Which, in turn, will result in more problems down the road, lather, rinse, repeat.  Remember, kids, short-term thinking will always result in a long-term problem.

    • Also one of the things that recent scandals have shown is that their upper management is  a freaking disaster. Completely out of touch with reality. They are on a par with Ford in 1946 or Kodak in 1995. Just incapable of the most basic business maneuvers.

      • Fully and truly: Fuck Wells Shartgo. 
        One of my great grandparents who retired in the Western US set up a gift account for all the children in my family as presents when we were wee tots, so when I came back to the US for undergrad, I felt reasonably comfortable applying for a student loan with them. 
        I then decided to go with them for a postgraduate loan when I went abroad to study a new program. I called them every day (pestering, really) after being approved to make sure everything was fine and got the thumbs up every time. Two nights before my flight, I received word that they decided to rescind the loan. During my panicked calls, a rep said “Well, your program is overseas. How can we be sure we’re not funding terrorism?” Yes, this was within 5 years of Sept. 11. I was in New York, the rep saying this to me was not. (Extra FUCK YOU to non-New Yorkers who love to wrap themselves in 9/11-justified bigotry without having personally experienced it.) 
         
        Anyhoo, I decided to keep my flight and go anyway (I’d already given up my apartment and job). I immediately contacted the bursar’s office and the amazing, hard-working, and incredibly sweet loan officer hopped on the phone and procured another lender for me that same afternoon. Fuck Wells Fargo, but a million thank yous to an exceptional uni employee. 

    • Yeah I picked one of the large green ones to try it myself because I was like am I the dumb one and are these ripe enough green to eat???

      They’re edible enough but not really that good. Like they taste edible but don’t taste like a tomato, if that makes sense?

  2. The only excuse for a 9 AM monday morning meeting is to announce everyone gets $1,000 bonuses so that the whole workforce hits the ground running. I can’t think of another reason.

  3. Many of the banks around us have been shutting branches, some like Bank of America are almost gone.  Chase used to be in my supermarkets but now gone.  Most people around us use the Boeing Credit Union which is kind of better I guess?  On a brighter note, orcas have been hanging out in my hood.  Saw a bunch today & snapped a few shots but they were far away.  It was a whole family of transients which is a good thing to lower our harbor seal population which is out of hand.  I wish our locals would switch from salmon only diet as some of them are starving.  Adapt guys, you are too smart for that.

      • We don’t have seal eating sharks in Puget Sound.  Orcas probably keep them out.  They are the only alpha around here & only transients eat seals & sea lions.

      • It’s a bit depressing, though, because as anyone who has lived through their salad days knows, going into a branch is especially important if you’re skating by such that you have under $20 in your account and need to withdraw, or you cannot rely on machine transactions because the fees will place you in the red. 
        By cutting in-person services, the poorest are going to be worst affected. 

        • Oh for sure. Also I’ve been in a bank before and had a teller pull aside an elderly person to talk with a banker because the request seemed sketchy and they were worried about the old person being taken advantage of. 

        • …I think about this everytime I hear people talk about how “we’d be better off without cash”…as though the only people who live in a cash economy are either anachronisms or breaking the law

          …could be wrong but I doubt any of the people I’ve heard argue that money “is just numbers on a balance sheet anyway” have ever really had cause to understand what counting the pennies can mean?

        • I haven’t incurred a bank fee in probably 30 years until recently. My local bank branch (the only one left of this huge multinational bank) is a nightmare. Always way overcrowded, people staring at ATMs like they’d never seen one before, people lingering at the teller windows like they were waiting for a bus…I feel bad for some of them because there’s a lot of people on fixed incomes in this neighborhood so the trip to the bank to withdraw $10 (yes, this bank’s ATMs dispense $10 bills) is probaby the highlight of their day. And also some of them are just that stupid, which is to be pitied.

          Anyway, I was rollig along at the local CVS and I noticed an ATM from another huge, multinational bank, so I decided to use that. I knew there would be a fee attached, but how bad could it be? Plus I took out a wad to last me two or three weeks. It was $3 to use that ATM and $2.50 from my bank for using a non-bank ATM. $5.50. Now what if I were so financially illiterate (as so, so many are) that I only took out $20 and believe that a $5.50 fee is just the cost of having access to my $20?

  4. Just got my class withdrawn from, and re-registered for, for fall (trying to cram a whole 15-16 weeks’ worth of info into *five* weeks DOES NOT work for me!)
     
    I also just discovered that two of the classes I was SURE I failed (because I missed major projects in both–one was the *other* summer class i took😖), I actually passed!😳🤯🥳
     
    I don’t know HOW or why my professors passed me–but both of them knew  I was struggling like hell, and apparently they submitted final grades for me, which didn’t completely tank my GPA, like *I* feel would have been completely deserved/understandable.
     
    I’m blown away, tbh, that I didn’t get F’s in them. Because that’s how I felt the quality of my work was, in relation to what the syllabi said!
     
    And I’m incredibly grateful, too!
    These last two semesters have been WHOLE struggle-buses!
     
    But I’m looking forward to retaking the communication disorders class, AND my other class is an Ed one–Introduction to Critical Race Theory in Education!
    😉😁🤗

    • If a prof nudged some scores or tweaked the grading rubric in your favor, I’m pretty sure they knew full well what they were doing, and were absolutely justified in their actions.  😉  congrats!

      • Thank you, my friend💖
        These last couple semesters, between having damn-near zero concentration,  trying to *somehow* balance both jobs, and dealing with the stuff here at home, plus a lot of physical soreness from standing still as front-end staff at the store have been rough. And between all of ^that^, and dealing with the associated ADHD shame-spirals coming out of all of it has been…. rough… to put it mildly.

    • …congrats…really glad you got the credit you deserve after all your hard work

      …it was a long time ago but I remember once having a very awkward conversation with a uni professor in which I was trying to withdraw from their course because I thought for sure I was failing & needed to cut my losses & make it up the next semester…while they thought they’d already told me the opposite was true

      …it’s a weird feeling but I hope you manage to enjoy it

      • Thanks, Jake!
         
        Thanks both for understanding, and for knowing that feeling–it’s a lot less lonely, knowing someone else i know has been there, too!💖
         
        It’s been a tough last few months, between school, work, the grocery store work (that’s SERIOUSLY just making me miserable, *and* sore most of the time now🙃), and the home difficulties… so getting that kind of grace, when *i* feel like an absolute fuck-up is just hard to wrap my brain around, you know?

        • …yeah…I mean I may not know exactly…but I know well enough that exactly might not be out of sight from here?

          …not to pry but I hope the smoking housemate managed to straighten up & fly right for you…because it always seems like you put in enough work on so many fronts that karmically-speaking you ought to be reaping more of the kind of result you got for the course & less of the other sort

          …so I’m happy for you…but I get that it might not feel like that’s the word you’d use…& you seldom seem to have the time to spare for the whole stop-&-smell-the-roses thing…so I’m going with it being one of those times to count your blessings, maybe?

  5. Hell, the other week I’d blithely gotten some checks together to deposit and the branch across the street from the deli, where I always get a sandwich if I’m taking care of banking business before work. I cruised through the drive-thru lane only to see the note that the branch was “temporarily closed” now.  Not only that, but there were too many damn people in line, so I had to scramble to another branch as well as find another damn place to get a sandwich.
     
    Oh, and I have a telehealth appointment with my deale- I mean, my psychiatrist tomorrow morning , but that should hopefully be short at least.

  6. I’m dreading the start of the work week as well. I have a 9am Monday meeting, which is such a crime, not least because I almost never need to speak or hear anything in the meeting. My direct supervisor also left recently, so I’m basically walking into a bunch of new, fresh chaos starting tomorrow. Not looking forward to it at all… 
    A hooray for today: Italy beat England in the Euro 2020 final this afternoon (on penalty kicks, no less), which means my sense of Englishness including never winning anything in sport can remain unchallenged. (But it also means being less able to say we’re shite.) 
    The bigger victory is that Messi and Co brought the Copa America home for Argentina. Finally, the greatest footballer of our current times gets his elusive national cup victory (fingers crossed for a World Cup title next year). 
    And, a related Urggurgguggghhh: Of course England fans have to be awful in their immediate racist abuse toward the players who missed their penalty kicks (who happen to be Black). Go ahead, remind me why I never support the English national team… 

  7. gross lochaber story incoing:
     
    So, way back on Friday or whatever, I did something dumb and smashed a knuckle twixt two rocks.  It kinda hurt, I recognized it was due to my poor judgement immediately, and then a few seconds later, thought, that still kinda hurts.  Looked at my rock smushed-knuckle just in time to see the blood filling up the wound cavity and about to start dripping.
    Ok.  went and washed/irrigated it in the sink, and taped a bit of paper towel over it.  But, since I’m working with water, and dirt, and dirty water, I went and cut up a disposable glove, and put a couple glove fingers over my injured finger, taped them to seal, and repeat for redundancy.  And then throw some duct tape on top of all that for durability.
    worked well enough, finger had that weird throbby thing minor injuries sometimes have, and typing was weird for a bit, but could continue my normal activities without much hinderance.  Got home, took off the outer duct-taped layer, and figured I’d leave the other waterproofing layers on while I shower and such, just to avoid disturbing the wound.
    Repeat for showers on Saturday and Sunday, and now I’m thinking I should probably take this off and let it air out a bit, it’s probably healed enough to not start bleeding over everything in the night, and even if it isn’t, I can do a minimal papertowel/tape wrap.
     
    I knew this was coming, but omigawd, the smell…  I’ve already washed that finger (and my hands in general) twice since removing everything, and I have a very dull sense of smell, and it smells so bad…  🙁
    At this point, I’m almost considering taping it up again because I think that would be more effective then trying to wash the 60+hours-of-unwashed-but-slightly-damp-skin-stank out of it…
    jeezusfuckingchristhowhaveinotdiedalreadywithjudgmentthisbad…

    • LOCHABER, GOTOTHEDOCTOR!!!!🥴🤣💖
      You WORK for a school, Yes?🤔
       
      You DO have health insurance now, don’t you?🤨
       
      Go to the DOCTOR!!!!
       
      Make an appointment NOW (if you have insurance, you should have a nurse number *or* a “make an appointment now” number on the back of your insurance card😉), to go see someone tomorrow or Tuesday. ANYONE in the network who can see you one of those two days!
       
      The last thing you need is gangrene, and to lose the damn finger😉
      Go to the doctor (Let your bosses know, if it happened at work, too,because if it IS, that’s a Work Comp injury–and you NEED to see A doctor–but *WORK* pays for it!), and get it cleaned out properly, then get the antibiotics they’re GONNA prescribe, and take them ALL, when they say you ought to.😉💖

      • nah, the wound is fine, it’s not infection stink, it’s just skin-wrapped-in-plastic-for-three-days-stink.
        and, right now, the wound isn’t even especially noticeable. Plus, I’m not really prone to infections.
        I appreciate the concern, though.
        This is just poor judgment on an olfactory unpleasant, but harmless scale.

  8. could be a short work week for me
    i mean theres plenty overtime to be had
    but i kinda lost my temper at my boss friday and called him a dickhead….might be a reckoning for that one today

    • …shame you don’t get credit for all the times you resisted that temptation…but hope the reckoning is on the mild end of that spectrum, either way

      …I know it doesn’t help any but I lean strongly towards the probability your characterisation of said boss was accurate, too

      …will keep metaphorical fingers crossed for you

      • Welp I didn’t get myself canned..had to have a little chat with the HR woman tho 
        Probably shouldn’t let my temper get the better of me again but I got away with it this time
         

        • One time when I was talking to my ex-boss I unconsciously pushed my glasses up with my middle finger and saw her eyes widen, no intention there on my part but impossible to prove otherwise, if you get my drift.

  9. I wasn’t dreading my work week until an hour ago. I haven’t worked on Friday in the summer for years so when an accountant called my work phone on Friday i ignored it, motherfucker went behind my back with his Q, and cc’d a fucking bunch of people, it is a non-issue, something that slipped through the cracks but he couldn’t wait until Monday? Oh, but take your time answering my fucking questions. arrrrgh.

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