Tip

When trying new recipes for yourself it's pretty important to pay attention to the 'Serves ___' section, lest you end up spending a week eating chipotle flavored mashed potatoes that made up the filling of your vegetarian tacos, a recipe which you neglected to understand served eight.

Compliment

One of the best compliments I've ever received was when a strange man told me "Your hair and your smile, you've got kind a Poison Ivy thing, you remind me of her."  And you know, I'm feeling pretty proud of that.

Tipping, you should!

I get that tipping is expensive.  I get that you don't like that people feel entitled to your money.

Perhaps you need to consider that you feel entitled to making an employee your personal servant for no extra pay.

There are all sorts of reasons people don't want to tip, but here are few that shouldn't be.

"It's your JOB."  Correct, however they are performing a luxury service for your benefit.   This is going to cost more than taking your chicken nuggets from the counter, which costs more than making rice at home.  There is a scale and you are only an ass for refusing to recognize it.

"I refuse to support big companies who are just making me pay fees for profit." (mostly applicable to delivery drivers)  You refusing to tip the driver has no impact on company policy.  None.  You refusing to tip the driver means the driver is going to be short money they need to service their car, fill it with gas, and pay the bills, because this same big company doesn't pay them anywhere near enough to keep up with the wear and tear on vehicles and in one recent case, require a class action lawsuit to increase the gas reimbursement to match rapidly rising gas costs.  You refusing to tip the driver tells them you think they're undeserving of the couple bucks they earned finding their way to your home at night because for whatever reason you couldn't make your own dinner.  What will get companies to change policy is for people to get carry out instead (the places usually don't expect tips for this) and then TELL THE COMPANY that you got carry out because you refuse to play into their unfair delivery practices.

"I can't afford it."  Then you can't afford this luxury service.

Seriously folks.  Tipping is a tricky road, but most folks who work for tips deserve them.  Please don't take out your irritations with the company with the person least likely to be able to change it.

My job rocks, it rocks so hard.

Because I got a new job, one that I'm going to stay with for quite some time I think.  (No, I know)

I now work at a zoo.  A ZOO.  I go to the ZOO EVERY DAY FOR WORK.  And yes, I do work things like selling and taking tickets that aren't terribly exciting, but I also do work things like driving people with mobility issues around the zoo in golf carts, and working in an aviary and showing people how best to feed birds and breaking up bird fights, and working concerts and getting to listen to the music, and watching out for an escapee from the wildlife show, and hearing the fucking LIONS ROAR, and watching the mountain goats and tigers all day, and I LOVE MY JOB.

And it's simple and largely stress free (though the aviary doors can be stressful since only about 15% of adults will read or listen), and I'm happy.  Just happy with what I'm doing.  Lots of my coworkers are planning on going back to school in the fall or moving on to other things and I am just content.  This is a perfect position for me to enjoy gov work, get paid appropriately for my time, and a great position to raise kids around, because I'm not stressed out of my mind and things like maternity leave can happen.

I started work at the zoo right before my high school reunion and I feel SO SUPERIOR to the rest of my class.

My job sucks, or, why I have a very good reason to say my job sucks

I"m getting really tired of hearing about how my generation (I'm a gapper btw, between Gen X and the Millenials) is lazy and can't commit and complains too much.  I'm especially tired of hearing this from baby boomers who have no idea the working class world they've created in their many years of terrible policy making.

I work retail at the moment.  I have a B.S. in Science and this is in the only job I could find in my city.  That's ok though, I'm willing to work and I typically advance in organizations quickly, so I'll do my best.  In my particular company I have experienced the worst series of trickle down, money saving policies I have ever come across.  To be trained for something, you read a worksheet, write down a few answers to questions and then must sign a form declaring you are an expert on the material.  Then you are expected to perform said task perfectly with little to no supervision, because having extra staff to train would cost more.  Any in person training (registers only) is completed within about 20 minutes and the new person is left to flounder with the remaining hundreds of (very serious) policies they didn't have time to learn while memorizing the process.  Employees are quizzed daily on things like the loss percentage and the yearly trends of loss, but not on standard register policies (guess which one is more useful?).  When policy changes employees are informed at meetings at the beginning of shifts, unless it's too busy for a meeting or you're not there that day, in which case you're screwed.  Employees are castigated at meetings for refusing to come in on days off (which the company is not entitled to and perhaps is a symptom of how awful the job is) and then castigated for working too many hours.  All part time employees have been cut to a maximum of 25 hours per week so the company doesn't have to pay health insurance, despite this making it hell as there are no longer enough people working on any given day to finish all the work when there are stock deliveries.  Raises are given once a year only, despite me having taken on managerial duties I will not make anymore for scheduling breaks and running the front end cash registers.  I will not get a raise related to extra duties until I become an assistant manager, which is two ranks, and a myriad of duties away.  I am at minimum wage and getting ulcers from the stress of my position.

Also consider that productivity has gone up 25% in the last 30 years but minimum wage has stagnated.  So I am doing 25% more work for less pay, while having to have assumed skills in many more areas (computer literacy is a big one), with the crazily heightened expectations of the entitled consumer public.  I get to absorb the blows from customers who are upset with corporate policy and want to feel like a big shot by yelling at someone about it, conveniently forgetting that these policies were made by men who do not care about customer experience.  People are mean to me all day, because I have to repeat that I can't return underwear, because I have to collect ID information to do a return without a receipt, because the store won't allow employees to search for items on the floor when a customer calls asking for it, because the company won't allow us inventory access so customers have to come in and look.  Doing any of these things may result in me getting fired.  When a customer dithers about whether to get something in the middle of a sale this actually harms me.  Most companies track the productivity of their cashiers by measuring how long it takes them to do a specific action.  When someone deliberates or can't find their payment, or refuses to move from the counter to reorganize their wallet so I can call someone else up, they are dropping my productivity scores, with results in lectures from management over things I cannot control.  This is why cashiers hurry you, because their employment may be in jeopardy.

To cap it off I get to spend all day walking on concrete floors and lifting and bending in repetitive ways.  I get backaches, and sore knees and am currently limping on both feet from the cumulative pain of long shifts (and before you start in, yes, there are 'anti-fatigue mats', which in my extensive experience do nothing but create trip hazards.  But I don't deserve health insurance.

When I do my job brilliantly I am beneath notice by the customers and just barely meeting expectations of the company.  When I make a single mistake I am treated as criminally stupid (I had a customer loudly claim that the reason ID was needed for certain returns was because all employees were thieves) and then made to feel by management as though my job is in danger.  Contact with management is limited to being told off about mistakes. This includes being marked down on scores because saying "Hi there!" is not an acceptable substitute for saying "Hello!" when greeting someone approaching the register.

You wonder why store staff act like they don't care?  If they did they'd die from the stress.

Butthurt

Not in the 'someone doesn't agree with me on the internet and I don't like it' way.

So my bike, the old Ross that I've riding the past three months, has had its final say.  On the way home yesterday I stood up on the pedal (as you do) to start off at a stoplight and the chain slipped, dropping the pedal and me about 18 inches, spectacularly bruising my thigh and ass on the frame and twisting my right foot  backwards.  After riding home in a wobbly, pained manner I spent the evening lying on my side, as my rear was too painful to put pressure on.  This morning I head off to work on the bike and can't figure out why the back wheel is wobbling so much.  Turns out that part of the frame that the back wheel attaches to had snapped clean through rendering the frame pretty damn worthless. This made for a pretty shitty day at work, especially considering I was already limping and sore from the chain slip.

I just didn't need that.  Thankfully husband has a bike he doesn't use, so I can pump up the front tire and be on my way, but ugh.  Now I have to see if it can even be fixed and how much it costs to do a weld, and most likely part out the bike.  I do live in a bike friendly area, so that shouldn't be an issue at least.

The insides of things are always fascinating

In this specific instance I'm referring to one of the bridges in town.  I got to go on a tour that went into the guts of the bridge while it raised, and have been geeking out over how cool watching a 3.5 million lb counter weight raise a giant chunk of road is.  (It's f-ing interesting and awesome)

Also, if you do anything naughty on a bridge you are being caught on camera and the people watching the cameras are alerting all the other engineers so they can laugh at you.