solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo 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
4mo ago
You have to remember that close to 10% of Americans are morbidly obese, and as with alcohol consumption the heavy users drag up the average (It's more dramatic with alcohol, but there are vastly more severely obese people than anorexics.). On that note, the "10th decile drinkers drink 10 drinks a day" is probably an overstatement, but 10th decile drinkers still likely consume far too much.
My roommate's diet is simultaneously infuriating (He's literally going to eat himself into being bedbound at this rate and that much fast food has to cost a ton of money.) and sad (Binge Eating Disorder is a thing.). I get that it's really easy to become overweight or obese (Otherwise most people wouldn't be one or the other.), but to get your BMI over 40 or 50 takes work (unless you're really short and inactive, I suppose).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo 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
4mo ago
In my experience, the main draw to addressing diet is either A: Culling excessive calorie intake and running a big enough deficit is a way to lose weight quickly, and it's easier to stay motivated when I see fast results. or B: My diet has become so bereft of nutrition that my lack of energy is interfering with my daily life (My job is fairly physical.).
I've bounced between "average overweight American" and "really fast weight loss" (My personal record is 25lbs in six weeks, starting at a BMI of 28.) more times than I can count, invariably prompted by something setting off my anxiety such that I totally lose my appetite (I suppose that being in a permanently agitated state might burn more calories than being calm, but surely not that many.). It's horribly unhealthy to have the majority or entirety of my calories come from Mountain Dew Voltage (If they made a sugar-free version I'd switch, but that's not what the Circle K is selling at 79 cents for a 44 ounce.) and alcoholic beverages (Oh, and you'll drink less and get more bang for your buck because the perpetually empty stomach and weight loss will wreck your alcohol tolerance. This can be dangerous when trying to have a fun night out.), but from the perspective of the scale it's almost amusing effective.
I'm actually kind of annoyed tonight because I went through the effort of acquiring a dinner that I was looking forward to/ meal prepping for the next few days and then barely ate any of it before getting too full to continue. I don't know if the stomach really shrinks after a few months of food restriction, being excessively tense tightens something around the stomach, or what, but when I get like this I have to force myself to eat at all or I'll go days without eating (By day three I'll hit a wall, run out of energy, and get really cold.). Oh well, I ate enough that the fat soluble vitamins should take, can refrigerate the leftovers, and I can always freeze the stuff I prepped.
My favorite bit of American puritanism (while not raised a churchgoer, I grew up in a churchy enough place that the values rubbed off on me) is that I refuse to take OTC anything to medicate a hangover. Hangovers are to be endured as penance for excess. With that, there is the very real thing that if you have anything like an excessive drinking habit you probably shouldn't touch Tylenol because combining liver killers is a bad idea.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4mo ago
"You can't outrun a bad diet." generally refers to excessive calorie intake above all else, and while you might think/feel like you're consuming a lot at 3,000 kcals a day you've got to think bigger. A quick google search suggests that your average American (who is overweight if not obese) consumes 3600 calories a day, so you're eating less than the average American and probably in the top 1% among them for physical activity.
I promise you can't outrun my obese roommate's diet, which I've started to occasionally observe as the fast food trash clogs up my kitchen trashcan. Some bangers from the last week: Thursday's lunch was a 20 piece McNuggets, three double cheeseburgers, and two medium fries from McDonald's (about 2800 calories). He came home from the bar with a Taco Bell bag later that night. Saturday night's dinner was eight 3 cheese chicken flatbread melts from Taco Bell along with a 7.75 oz bag of potato chips (about 3900 calories in total).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
Nah, I'm going to be alright. I'm just going to have to pay my taxes late because the money I had allocated toward that got eaten up by a big car repair (engine replacement due to a cracked block, but the car is fixed and should be reliable for quite some time now with minor to moderate work in the future that I can DIY on weekends). It's not a big deal, as IRS penalties and interest are much lower than, say, credit card interest. I'm just militant/nervy about money as a habit due to growing up in a spendthrift household with perpetual financial crises, and in a temporary crunch while I'm waiting for my belt-tightening to render fruit that I've known was going to suck for awhile.
If worst comes to worst, I can make it with the new job, University to Go dinner shifts once the dog days of summer in a college town are over, and picking up a bartending or door shift here and there, but I was just disappointed because I came into the new job feeling like I was taking a step forward and it's a sidestep at best.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
You're not wrong. In my experience most people, fat or thin, either lack perspective on what they eat or are sufficiently ignorant of nutrition/serving sizes such that they don't even know what they're eating and drinking (Fun fact: one of my favorite IPAs from back in the day is 250 calories per 12 ounce bottle, so we're talking 1500 calories for a six-pack.). Morbid obesity is just a different magnitude of scale.
With that, the "one true diet" in my experience is something that is sustainable enough to stick to but excludes whatever category of food that the given person is prone to overconsuming. So, keto or low carb diets work not so much due to ketosis or gluten sensitivity or whatever but because their restrictions exclude pretty much any pre-prepared junk/restaurant food (I guess you could get fat on pork rinds from gas stations, but I think that would take work after awhile.) that's calorie-dense and easy to acquire.
One of my favorite quotes on dieting came from a military history professor I had as an undergraduate: "If calorie restriction didn't work to induce weight loss, people wouldn't die of starvation in sieges."
The only thin women I've met who will admit to not eating a lot are the ones complaining about their eating disorders. The one I was thinking of when typing the last sentence breaks my heart.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
You know this already, but the answers to "Is he trying to help himself?", "Would I expect a friend letting me stay at their place to put up with this level of shit?", and "Would I do this to someone I call a friend?" are all no. I've had other friends in bad situations with broken decision making ability and they might've taken forever to repay loans, toed the line of "only calls me when his car breaks down", or whatever but they always did repay me eventually. I at least have the excuse of the first roommate being a woman that I was once very madly in love with. This guy doesn't respect himself enough to quit his slow-motion suicide in spite of a litany of friends who've tried to help him. I've done my damnedest to help, given him an insanely long leash, and he can't even be bothered to hustle and grind for welfare benefits, find some bullshit low-paying remote job, or even try to take care of his health, let alone repay me.
Fresh out of a brutal intervention on this subject from an IRL friend I arrived home and was asked to help make his bed (aka. just do it myself because that's faster) tomorrow because his knee hurts too much to move. Like, holy fuck, if you're that hard up you need to be in a nursing home and your needs are flat out beyond my ability to help, forget questions about deserving. We're reaching "I feel the need to defend myself" territory. If I let this fester I'm going to wind up a live-in caretaker and I'm genuinely afraid of what that would provoke from me in terms of anger and resentment.
He's lived here less than 30 days and isn't on the lease so there shouldn't be any legal issues. He'll be getting an eviction notice within a week. When talking with friends earlier I predicted based on my educated guesses that absent change he'll be bedridden within 6-24 months. If he's asking me to make his bed two weeks in that prediction might've been optimistic. My apartment is not a nursing home, end of story.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
The dog gets walked when he goes to the bar (which is whenever he can afford it/find someone to pay his tab and physically make it there) and lets it wander around, but otherwise rarely to never. Because of this, it isn't housebroken (He just puts down puppy pads even though the dog is 8 years old.). I know it isn't the dog's fault, but I hate that thing (and people who don't take proper care of their dogs, which is a lot of them). At least it can play with my cats now (The last roommate wanted a puppy and I put my foot down and refused, having correctly surmised that I would wind up caring for it. I think her cat has lived with me for two years now. Cats are relatively low-maintenance so long as you sterilize them and don't wind up with a bunch of kittens.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
I really didn't know before I lived with him. Like, I've been average Amerifat on and off (have gained and lost the same 30ish pounds several times since being the fat kid who lost the weight after high school) but morbid obesity is a different game. Like, I've seen him take down a 14 inch stuffed crust pizza with a quart of milk in 20 minutes. I hear obvious bullshit like "I haven't eaten in days". (I have gone days without eating because stressed out me loses all appetite and when that happens I lose weight fast even while guzzling full sugar soda and alcoholic beverages.) or "This pizza is the first bad thing I've eaten in two weeks, so my diet shouldn't be causing my joint problems" (Again, bullshit. You told me that you went to the Chinese buffet last week, I've never seen you cook or eat a vegetable, I see the junk food wrappers/boxes in the trash, and you forgot to mention the full order of cheezy bread that you took down with that pizza.) and don't even have a response. At least every drunk I've known doesn't pretend that their hangover came from nowhere.
One of my siblings is living her 400lb life and it's fucking depressing.
I don't know if addiction causes people to lose their tolerance for discomfort or if the low tolerance for discomfort causes the addiction in the first place, but having been around enough of it you run into ridiculous shit like my roommate complaining about the heat during a power outage 30 minutes after the power went out (Yeah, it got humid and a bit stuffy, but it was during the night, below 80 degrees outside, and dark. It didn't get hot.) or a buddy's pillhead girlfriend requiring controlled substances to treat a headache.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
One of the oddities of my company (which is a subcontractor for distributors, of which one of the two that comprise most of my route is presently breaking up such that we're essentially losing the contract to a competitor) is that they emphasize Cicerone certifications, which from my uninformed opinion seem aimed more at the serving/bartending end than the back end/dispensing side of it. I don't think that I want to pursue the beer industry long term, but I'll check out competing distributors/line contractors for what opportunities they have.
My mechanical background is primarily automotive (mostly picked up from fixing my own cars or other delivery drivers' cars), so my diagnostic approach sort of follows (how to find a leak in a gas line, for example), but IMO my training was lengthy but spent far too much time on easy stuff and too little time in coolers such that I had to learn how to do things like read kegs on my own, I have little idea how fobs work or why (just when to bypass them), why beer pumps are necessary, etc. If a problem is more complex than I can diagnose in five minutes I'm supposed to tell the account to call the 800 number and send out a service tech (who is booked at least a week in advance and whose fee is likely too high for a probably simple issue).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
I believe that you're absolutely right, and I do credit the bar gig for leveling up my social skills in relatively short order (such that my boss there remarked that it made him feel good to watch me "emerge from my shell"; I did discover that I'm actually an extrovert or at least an ambivert and genuinely enjoy talking to people instead of being afraid of them) to the point that I would heartily recommend that any young man with lousy social skills take a bar gig for six months to a year. If I had gone that route at 21 instead of 31 I suspect that I would be vastly better off, but I didn't know any better at the time. As things are, I did light prep for the interview (The first job interview where I didn't already have the job before I walked in that I've done in 10 years.) and the feedback I got was that it had been "the most impressive he'd ever heard" (So much for the "can't interview well" excuse that I told myself for years).
One of the reasons I don't see much of a future at my present company is that it's more of an overgrown small business with bad financials than a large company with limited opportunities for advancement (My current supervisor did my job for six years before she got promoted, and she really did go above and beyond. I really hope she gets the promotion she just applied for/seems to have been groomed for because she's done far more than just put in her dues. As for me, I don't have six years to waste.). I'm currently looking at manufacturing because my father did the same sort of thing in that field, I have a knack for vocational/technical stuff, and he swears up and down that industry is begging for people like me.
I'm not terribly pessimistic for my long term, but this last few months have been rough and if it makes sense I find the act of typing out my irritation to be therapeutic. Getting feedback from smart and usually successful people (You've always been one of my favorites from the old days, BTW.) is a pleasant and appreciated bonus.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
The Roommate
Continuing on the previous monster comment, by 2021 I wound up with two non-paying roommates. The first (and subject of this comment) is flat out my fault. I made a drunken promise to move in with this guy (and replace the last sucker that was letting him live more or less for free), felt bound by honor to do so in spite of knowing that it was a terrible idea, and did so. He’s not an awful roommate (lazy and useless, sure, but not all that difficult or disruptive aside from his annoying chihuahua that isn’t housebroken), but the place I moved into was as close to a third world slum as you’re going to find in an American metro area, complete with idiot upstairs neighbors doing laundry in the bathtub upstairs and leaking water everywhere (causing water to leak in and eventually collapse my bathroom ceiling, which took ages to get the slumlord to half-assedly repair), a junkie adjacent neighbor with the nastiest, most roach infested apartment I’ve ever seen (which meant that we all had an unkillable roach infestation), zero sound insulation or insulation at all (This made for obscene electric bills during the winter and I was still cold.), and everything was just so old and rundown that it was impossible to clean/keep clean; even the air perpetually felt dirty and humid (probably because of all the mold and because it was located in a swampy area; I suspect that the whole place and surrounding roachboxes have only been spared from demolition because the owner would have to spend a considerable sum improving the ground before constructing the three over ones favored by developers here), and a non-functioning stove. But hey, at $400/month for a two bedroom in a fairly nice neighborhood close to campus you get what you pay for, and I didn’t spend enough. I left and kept paying the rent rather than keep living there, the roommate inherited some money and paid me for a year up front, and all was fine until that money ran out, at which point I didn’t have the heart to kick him out because he makes basically zero income and has nowhere else to go (His parents are gone, he has no siblings, etc.). It was easier to eat the rent and utilities than to provoke the drama storm that kicking him out would be.
The second roommate (another friend of mine; I’ll never entangle myself financially with a friend again) had just broken up with her boyfriend, I got her a job at University to Go (She really was good and made the most money she’d ever made in her life doing it, but just couldn’t make herself wake up on time and show up when she said she would such that she burned the bridge with dispatch.), and for the first few months she paid her share and everything was great even though the apartment we moved into was a bit spendy for my tastes at the time ($900/month when I’d never paid more than $475 in my life. Three years later, that now $950/month is actually a pretty nice deal relative to what’s out there now such that it isn’t worth the costs of moving to downgrade.) until she just quit working/paying. I was already stuck with the lease so I just dealt with it and let her run up a tab that’s now over $10K in back rent that I’ll never get because she’ll never have it unless she wins the lottery. She did eventually find herself a rich boyfriend (a screwup/slacker whose daddy owns a coal mine) and moved in with him, so it was relatively low effort to kick her out, and now that the lease is ending at the shithole I moved roommate number one into my current place (As annoying as he may be, the marginal cost of moving him into an empty room is basically zero, vastly cheaper than paying for him to live in a shithole and have to hear about it every time something breaks.), so enter the current situation:
Last time I mentioned that he was in bad health (morbidly obese, congestive heart failure, takes more pills than your average 80 year old, etc.) and it hasn’t gotten any better. For reasons I don’t understand he was denied for disability, but the heart failure is probably sufficiently advanced (a high-end stage 2 to low-end stage 3 I would guess) that he really should be getting it (and food stamps, etc.). His condition is his fault (You can be 400lbs or a cocaine addict, but both are not sustainable, and his CHF would be vastly less problematic if he were a compliant patient and heaven forbid drop some weight. I have 70+ year old relatives with CHF, big people at that and one also suffers from COPD, who get around better than he does.), and at times its hard to tell malingering (wearing a fucking CPAP while awake watching TV; for fuck’s sake the oxygen concentrator, aka. smoker machine that he got during covid is less noisy/creepy and if he really can’t breathe sitting still in his gigantic recliner that takes up a third of my living room then he should start looking for nursing homes or call his drug dealers and beg for the strongest hit of fent that they have. Curiously, he doesn’t need that stuff when sitting on a barstool.), but he really is fucked and while I get mad when I see pizza boxes pile up by the trashcan (I guess he makes enough bumming off other friends/selling off his Xannies and whatnot that he can afford fast food and his phone bill.) I don’t have an answer.
My apartment is on the second floor and itself is a two story unit so the stairs (which mutual friends have told me that he bitches about incessantly) may correct this issue in a short time. Either he’ll get fed up and find another friend to crash with or that aortic aneurysm will blow up, he’ll be dead in 30 seconds, and he’ll finally get his wish (I’ve heard more than I care to about his suicidal ideation.). He’s recently developed a mysterious gout-like (but not gout; he has that too and this is allegedly different, some variety of autoimmune disorder he thinks/claims) illness in his knees that renders him nearly bedridden (or, more properly, recliner-ridden; the bedrooms are upstairs). At the rate he’s going he’s going to be immobile soon (One would think that watching his dad die 500lbs and bedridden would dissuade him from following the same path, but I guess not.) and if that happens I swear that I’m gonna call adult protective services or whatever and have him tossed into a nursing home before he can blink because I’m not a nurse and don’t plan on becoming one. I have the local social worker who deals with that stuff’s number saved in my phone.
The only thing I’ll say in my defense (and I really should be defending myself for being so spineless/conflict averse that I let these situations fester, even though the truth is that I don’t have a good enough excuse) is that I don’t hate him; I hate the situation but it can be hard not to conflate the two. I want to toss his stupid fucking yap dog (He does the fake “service dog” thing with it at that.) that he carries to bars to curry attention from women into a woodchipper/off the balcony (I promise that I won’t actually do that because in fact I’m touchy about animal cruelty.) but it’s not the dog’s fault that it was raised by a shitty owner. I swear that he was a much less shitty friend before the heart failure (why I feel obligated to help him, and I’m not the only one) and I remember the man he used to be (a fuckup self-sabotaging train wreck, but he at least worked and would drop anything to help a friend).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
My new job and my personal vibecession
This is an update to an ancient (back in the Reddit days) comment concerning being financially drowned by deadbeat roommates. I’m not trying to get too culture war about the economy, just remarking on my local, personal situation. I am well aware that I am a fuckup who spent most of his time/effort in college, his early 20s, and beyond drinking and delivering pizza instead of figuring out a career. Many of my problems are my own fault. That said, here goes:
Long story short, until recently I worked (I still do, a few dinner shifts a week, but it’s summer and they’re apocalyptically dead right now so I’m averaging 2 nights a week.) at a locally owned Doodash-style (We were around first, so not a clone.) food delivery company in an SEC college town (We’ll call it University to Go.), and did so for 8 years. Averaging $20/hr to drive in circles during the mid/late 2010s was crazy money for the low cost of living in my area at the time (I was paying less than $500/month in rent, for perspective.), better pay than a lot of “real” jobs. Sure, 1099 taxes suck and I became a part-time auto mechanic due to running my car into the ground for the job, but it was easy, genuinely fun, and it’s hard to beat being a small business owner’s favorite crony. In short, it was easy to stay comfortable, say “Fuck it, one more semester.”, and keep going.
Over time (Covid bought us a few years.) Doordash and Uber Eats ate us alive (It’s hard to convert students who enter town having already used one or the other for years, are already sunk in with subscriptions to Dashpass, etc.) while post-Covid inflation/labor shortages hit us from every angle (Anything to do with buying or running a car was hit especially hard, a lot of our restaurants went under or quit offering delivery due to short-staffed kitchens, and a lot of our customer base ran out of money quickly once the stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment ran out.) such that we’re more expensive and have a worse selection (In particular, the sort of fast-casual restaurants that used to be our bread and butter have nearly gone extinct.) than we used to (Still cheaper than Doordash, but we don’t deliver fast.). Stagnant income in a low-inflation environment was one thing, but this town is a lot more expensive to live in than it used to be (A process that was occurring throughout the 2010s, but Covid put it into overdrive.).
During 2020-21 (because I have no backbone, make bad decisions, and apparently acquired a friend group filled with terrible people during my 20s) I managed to acquire not one but two roommates that don’t pay their bills (I’ll get to one of them in the second comment.) and wound up paying for two apartments while going through a string of more bad decisions/luck with vehicles. Needless to say, my easy existence with plenty of spare cash transformed itself into an endless grind of working seven day weeks, picking up a second job as a barback and later bartender, and still being broke. Adding fuel to the fire, the bottom seems to have fallen out at University to Go and my potential as a bartender is not unlimited (I kind of hate bartending, have zero passion for cocktails, and am not a woman, so I’m going to be stuck working mediocre gigs or barbacking.), so I needed another job
In comes an old friend of mine with a job she’d just been promoted out of and thought I’d be a perfect fit for. How convenient, right? It seemed so, like a bit of a pay cut but survivable, more stable, and without the hassle of 1099 taxes and maybe I’d open some doors in a new field (alcohol distribution) that seemed like a logical step from bartending. I mean, I had to complete a 90 minute harassment training from HR, so this is a real job, right? Enter, being a draft quality technician, aka. beer line cleaner.
The Job
Pros: The hiring process was quick and relatively straightforward, management is relatively relaxed and hands-off so long as you do your job, and in 10 weeks with the company I’ve lost 25lbs (and wasn’t obese to start with, but was getting closer to that than I was happy with). Weekends off are nice, and I’m finally catching up on the backlog of stuff I have to do at home (My car is now fixed and has a radio installed that had been sitting in the closet for 6 months, the roommate’s car has a new fender installed, my apartment is passably clean, etc. Now I just need to get moving on getting my inoperative vehicles running so I can sell them.).
Things that annoy me about the job: The company phone and carrier get worse reception than my T-mobile ghetto android (and now every time I hear an iphone notification I think I’m getting a message from my boss) and the company app we use for logging tasks is glitchy and has to be babysat to make sure it doesn’t miss a stop that you actually cleaned. Bad cooler and line management are as rampant in food and beverage as bad cable management is in IT and there are few things as fun as wrestling the coupler off a keg in a tight space that was installed by a barback with the grip of Thor showing off his gains at the gym, having to move a bunch of produce stacked on the kegs, or coolers so nasty that I gag every time I walk in them (Thankfully the latter is rare.). The job is not technically challenging (If you can change your own oil, you can do this.), but it is boring, tedious, and heavy on details. The equipment we have to carry is heavy and unwieldy (~100lbs if my water and chemical tanks are full; you quickly learn to fill them all the way only when necessary to save your back) and the line cleaner is a lye-based caustic that makes gloves mandatory and will burn thin skin if not quickly neutralized by dumping beer on it.
Route management is the actual challenge of this job (Much of the technical stuff I thought I would be doing was omitted from my job title, training above what it takes to clean the lines was minimal, and I don’t carry anything more than a coupler and faucet, so even if I were to correctly diagnose a problem in a system I probably can’t fix it, and not being able to fix things drives me nuts.). In theory there’s a fair amount of flexibility as to which stop you hit when, but in reality you’re very much captive to time windows (Big places need to be done before 11AM as a rule, some spots have narrow time windows, and I have four days every two week cycle that involve driving an hour or more out of town because the local area doesn’t have enough taps to make a full route.) such that the workload is uneven (Some days are a cakewalk and others an ugly grind that leave me beaten down by the end of the shift.) and it’s hard to switch from racing the clock (In particular, I have one heavy day where I I could get one of my first three stops to show up before 8AM it would be easy, but that isn’t the case so I’m always behind on that day.) and feeling like you’re always 30-60 minutes behind to needing to slow-walk it and milk the clock for hours just to get 40 a week.
I don’t like this job, but the real dealbreaker is the pay. It’s $17/hr plus a $2/hr bonus for completing 100% of the route, and vehicle compensation that was supposed to be $500/month plus a mileage reimbursement that covers fuel (This sounded pretty generous so I asked several times about it during the hiring process. On the other hand the position used to come with company cars for everyone and $500/month is presumably less than what they would spend to lease and insure a car, so I believed it.) but is actually “in the neighborhood of $500/month” with fixed compensation plus mileage. The difference is about $200/month and I’m driving about 1800 miles a month for this job so much of that is eaten up in gas, let alone tires, commercial insurance, etc. The completion bonus should be consistently achievable moving forward but is easy to miss (I got docked last cycle because of places that were closed on Memorial Day in spite of taking pictures of closed signs and apping them as instructed in the meeting the week before. I was the only new guy at the meeting so I guess it was just taken for granted that I would know that I needed to make them up later, in which case I don’t see the point of taking pictures.). Before being hired I was told that they don’t care about overtime (and every other hourly job I’ve worked since college meant 45-50 hours a week, not 40). Welp, turns out they initiated an overtime crackdown and that if you get more than either 42 or 44 (I don’t recall which.) hours in a week you’re ineligible for the bonus. Including the fact that company policy is to clock out an hour after you left home and an hour before you get home on out of town days (which makes for 7 hours of unpaid driving every two weeks) and I’m struggling to hit 40 hours a week. I can’t afford the health insurance anyway, but it’s of the malicious compliance variety with a carrier that has no network in my local area in addition to being vastly more expensive than what I had through Obamacare. Adding to the suck factor, from what I’ve learned the jobs within the company I could gun for getting promoted into don’t pay much better than my current position (I’d get a company car, but that doesn’t pay my other bills and leveraging my mechanical skills to run a car cheap is something I’ve been doing for over 10 years at this point so I’d prefer even the mediocre vehicle reimbursement I’m getting.)
In short, adjusted for inflation this is worse money than I made delivering pizza for Papa John’s in the early 2010s (and my rent is twice what it was then), and dinner shifts at University to Go have been a bust because it’s the slowest part of the year in addition to the usual issues with them dying. I’ve picked up a few bartending shifts (As weird as it sounds, right as I put in my notice something “clicked” and I don’t hate bartending as much. I’ll never have the passion, but I play a character and it works well enough.). I’ve cut pretty much all of the lifestyle inflation fat I can cut, and I’m still going to be broke. I’m not going to starve, and if I have to tough this job out for a while I can, but I feel tired, defeated and like all the enormity of the mistakes I’ve made in my adult life are hitting me at once. I feel poor, afraid, and frankly angry and resentful. I’ve made my peace with the fact that this job isn’t going to work, have my backup plan in place (Go back to my old jobs; with my reduced expenses I can start getting ahead again and I think I can squeeze one last school year out of University to Go.) and am looking for better work (I have precious few friends who aren’t stuck in the service industry, but one I’ve helped in the past recommended a manufacturing plant and told me to use him as a reference to get over the “we want plant experience” hump.). It’s one thing to work a dead end job if it pays well (University to Go) or is stupid easy (barbacking and later bartending at the place I was a regular at and was probably going to be at that night anyway), and a different story for a rough grind with benefits that are worse than what I already had. I’m going to break my supervisor’s heart when I quit, but I’m trying to quit being a codependent/martyr in my personal life and damned sure can’t afford to do it with a job (because I have to pay for doing it in my personal life).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
War tends to be good for the incumbent, historically speaking.
Is this true? WWI is tricky because the Democrats winning 1910-12 was out of the norm for that era, but the Democrats did nothing but lose in subsequent elections and by 1920 the GOP had the Presidency and a massive Congressional majority thanks to running against Wilson's internationalism. WWII also gets tricky because the FDR coalition was so insanely dominant, but winning the war didn't save the Democrats from getting crushed in 1946. The Korean War likewise resurrected the GOP from the dead, with them winning a trifecta in 1952 (They wouldn't win the House again until 1994.). The Vietnam War arguably scuttled LBJ's Presidency and even winning the Gulf War in spectacular fashion didn't save H.W. Bush in '92. The W. era GOP performed unusually well in '02 and '04, but were dead in the water by '06. IIRC Biden's approval nosediving had to do with the ugly optics of the withdraw from Afghanistan.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
5mo ago
I was about to comment the same thing. With that, having lived in a really shitty apartment (I underestimated how bad it would be; the difference was between "crappy, but manageable" and "total shithole".), it was profoundly depressing in a way that's hard to explain.
The building was old, and in a swampy area, so the inside air was permanently humid irrespective of AC use. There was plenty of mold, but I don't think that was the particular issue. My problem was that it was impossible to clean/keep clean for any length of time due to old floors, counters, etc. Pest control was nonexistent/ineffective aggravated by an especially nasty next door neighbor, so the place was overrun by roaches, mice, and ants. The neighbors were loud, and sound insulation nonexistent. My upstairs neighbors would do laundry in the bathtub and spill water all over the place, leading to water leaks in my unit and eventually the ceiling collapsing in the bathroom. Rent was cheap, but I spent tons of money in bars just trying to stay away from home, and it was poorly insulated so power bills during winter were insane while I still froze. It felt like living in a slum. I didn't develop chronic pain but became badly depressed.
I wound up moving elsewhere and paying the remainder of the lease just to spare myself the misery of living there.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
6mo ago
Speaking for myself, with a caveat: Option two, massive. Not quite Treblinka, but I want skulls, family fortunes confiscated/destroyed, any resistance killed or imprisoned along with anyone they care about. Imagine Putin, but a lot more oligarchs falling out of windows.
The caveat is that this has to be done competently, and I don't think Trump or his hires have it in them.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
6mo ago
Shoes. I work on my feet in and out of restaurants, and the difference between shit or slippery shoes and a decent pair of non-slips is night and day, especially as the week drags on. My feet/ankles hurting for no good reason is a total mood killer.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
7mo ago
IIRC most of the reduction in US fertility has just been the result of a very successful campaign to reduce teen fertility. Nobody wants to be a trashy mom trapped with a loser boyfriend like on 16 and Pregnant.
Arizona, for example, had their teen fertility drop by nearly 75% from 2005-2021. Texas had theirs drop by 2/3rds. Alabama today has a lower teen pregnancy rate than New York did in 2005.
The catch, it seems, is that it's hard to turn off that "You're fucked if you have kids before you're ready" propaganda merely by reaching one's early 20s. It doesn't help that young adults are spending more time in school than ever before.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9mo ago
It's probably not everything, but it doesn't help that we've gotten a lot fatter and older on average.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9mo ago
FWIW, I was given IV morphine before surgery for a broken arm as a kid and still remember how amazing it made me feel. They could've marched a firing squad in there with my death warrant and I wouldn't have cared in the slightest.
OTOH, from a very small sample size it appears that I'm allergic to hydrocodone. I got some of those after having wisdom teeth yanked out and they just made me feel sick and unpleasantly intoxicated.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9mo ago
I don't exactly disagree with you, nor am I a big fan of weed culture.
I was just pointing out that there were places that did take drug enforcement seriously (sort of...this was the height of the "pain as a fifth vital sign" era of narcotics prescriptions such that pills were everywhere), to the point of alienating the sort of nice white collar folks whose support is needed.
Personally, I wonder how much of the drug stuff is just a byproduct of the explosion in prescribing children drugs such as stimulants and antidepressants along with the "pain as a fifth vital sign" era of doctors dishing out benzos and oxys like candy. I joke that I've never cared for cocaine because it just feels like Ritalin on steroids but IMO it's kind of fucked that I was simultaneously on Ritalin and Zoloft at the age of nine years old (Mom doctor-shopped psychiatrists until she found one who would diagnose me with OCD because I was sad about losing everything in a house fire and vigilant about checking lint filters in dryers after that; the story was that our dryer had caught fire and burned our house down.). Meanwhile, back in the early 2010s I got a script for some variety of opioid after a very minor surgery (more than I got years later for getting all four wisdom teeth yanked out) without asking, much to my confusion as the procedure had completely fixed my pain problem. I wound up selling them to a coworker for beer money for his pill head girlfriend's "headaches".
I just don't see how you keep taboos over drugs when they're so commonly prescribed. I hear so many people talking about being on this or that psych drug that I feel like I'm the only one in the room who isn't on anything. Even the druggies I know still hold the stigma over meth and crack, but that didn't seem to stop meth from taking over much of rural America. Overdoses seem to be a fairly straightforward problem of opiates and especially fentanyl having an extremely low margin for user error, but supply interdiction seems to totally failed there as well. At the same time, while we could probably kill the market for that stuff by mass-legalizing safer stuff (as with alcohol; most people don't drink rotgut vodka but something like Bud Light or Whiteclaws), but we don't exactly want a mass opiate culture, do we?
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9mo ago
FWIW, back in my youth in a deep Southern college town in the early 2010s the local cops still took the War on Drugs pretty seriously and weed was still very much illegal. I had multiple otherwise law-abiding friends get raided by the local narcotics task force and/or go to jail for simple possession. I myself had my apartment get raided by five undercover cops (aka. roided up thugs) because one of my retarded roommates sold a few Xanax pills to a confidential informant (I didn't go to jail because I didn't have anything illegal but it was a thoroughly unpleasant experience.).
Amusingly, aside from the driver's license impacts, the conditions to get a possession charge dismissed are virtually identical to those for a first offense DUI, aka. having to go through the local drug court's CLEAN program (at the cost of several grand). My buddy who'd been caught with a gram of weed and maybe drinks a six pack of beer a year was having to attend AA meetings.
The drug task force had their Pickett's Charge moment when they did a big raid on campus. They must've arrested a fed's kid or something because the FBI very quickly busted the former head of the force for embezzling seized funds and wound up throwing him in prison for a year.
A decade later and you can legally buy Delta 8 gummies that are vastly stronger than weed used to be (I don't habitually smoke weed, but the last time I took some of those gummies I was too fucked up to drive 14 hours later.), so I guess the cops gave up on weed enforcement, judging by how nonchalant the normies I know these days are about having it in their vehicles/on their person. Hell, one of the former cops who frequents the bar I work at usually has a weed vape on him.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9mo ago
I'm bordering on shitposting here, but it amuses me to think about Woodrow Wilson the son of Southern Confederates getting his revenge on stalwart Republican Germans.
The (arguable) long-term realignment of both sides of the Civil War into the Trump coalition is something to behold. I say this as an upper Southerner whose classmates frequently wore Confederate flag T-shirts while being blissfully unaware that their ancestors hailed from the most Unionist part of my state.
Here you go, courtesy of Jacob Sullum writing for the libertarian Reason Magazine. Amusingly, the one wrongdoing he accuses Purdue Pharma of committing was reformulating the drug to make it harder to abuse, which was correlated with an increase in overdose deaths.
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