The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Notes -
Hey folks, I've always had the problem of talking too much and too fast in almost any situation/interaction.
I'm also talkative and like talking. In that talking I do belabour a point sometimes adding a lot more info and context and belabor a point and because of that I tend to try to talk faster so I don't take too much time. Been a thing with me since a kid where I will much rather provide more info than less so there's less of a chance the information I'm conveying has a chance of being misinterpreted.
I'd say that just because I talk a lot doesn't mean I'm a bad listener. I'm actually not a bad listener. I know how to ask engaging questions that get people to get into points of their own. I will engage with those points, ask continuing questions, try to get them to talk more about themselves, the story, issue, point, ect.
I have genuine interest in the thoughts, stories, and experiences of other people. I can be a lot, but socially most people are generally fine with me? My intensity is not at a level that has caused serious issues I guess, but that's because over the years knowing this about myself I will recognize when I've taken up too much oxygen and switch to being more normal and guiding the convo to other people's perspectives/ect.
To get at the point of this entire essay. I'd like change this behavior. I don't like being the guy who talks too much or talks too fast. I understand intellectually that being particular about the words we use, the way I convey it and being slow and steady can actually convey more structured, understandable and engaging flows of information and conversation than my somewhat stream of consciousness rants.
Then there's the factor that like many I was diagnosed with ADHD a couple years ago after failing out of college and was about to lose out of my job unable to actually get to doing work. That's helped my executive function "enough", in that I no longer will lay in bed for days at time doing nothing at all but reading books and watching youtube/movies/tv.
Dextroamphetamine has had positive impact on my life and help me able to function somewhat, but being a stimulant it's made my normal behavior with talking too much and talking too quickly go into overdrive.
Though people understand me and they don't "mind" I think the fast speed and verbosity makes me sound more scatterbrained than I'd like and turns some people off and most of all I don't actually like it.
This isn't a life ruining characterstic, but its one I'm not a fan of and I'd like to correct but I'm not sure how to. If I'm sober, calm, collected and reflective I can remember all of this, but toss me into a social situation the mix of wanting to talk to people, wanting to share information, the fun of mingling, a slight nervousness, ect all just kind of make me forget and go into autopilot.
I don't like this aspect of me, but its one of those things I'm not sure on how to stop, change or correct. If anyone has suggestions on ways I could create habits, reminders, books, ect that can help me with this issue I would greatly appreciate it.
I do apologize for not being able to convey this in a more succinct and straightforward manner. (This "behavior" also extends to my internet commenting and writing stuff if it wasn't obvious)
Look into intuniv - it is commonly prescribed with stimulants and can mellow them out.
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I have found that watching podcasts has improved my ability to communicate. If you find a podcast where the host speaks in the style that you aspire to then watching that podcast can help you implicitly learn how to communicate in that style.
The other thing that might help is calming supplements/nootropics. They can help you relax and be less nervous in social interactions. You have to consider how they interact with any drugs/supplements you are taking and find ones that make you calm without making you too tired to socialize. Typically, calming nootropics will have GABAergic effects. Some that work for me are apigenin (found in chamomile), coriander (found in lavender), and lemon balm.
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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).
Man I feel you, as somebody whose high school best friend kind of turned into a lazy stoner with severe relationship instability who just keeps making bad decision after bad decision, believe me I understand.
But you really need to put some distance between you and your friend. Although we definitely have some responsibility towards our friends and offering them a place to sleep or some financial assistance during a hard time is maybe even an obligation if you are close enough, the key factor there is: “are they earnestly and honestly trying to get themselves out of that position?”
If yes, then help without question. If no, cut them off. Even people who are trying to improve their lot in life or get out of tough circumstances don’t always succeed, to not even try and instead to leech off of other well-meaning people is a recipe for disaster that you want to be as far away as possible from.
Seriously, start eviction proceedings tomorrow. You don’t owe your friend anything anymore. If you were in his shoes, would you expect people to tolerate your bullshit? Would you ever stoop so low as to treat your friend the way he is treating you?
This sounds harsh but I have been in your shoes with my own friend. This guy was like a brother to me but at a certain point I realized I would never have abused the friendship to the extent that he did. I have plenty of other friends who are losers with no financial or romantic prospects, the difference is they don’t take advantage of me and treat the friendship with respect.
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.
I work retail and can't really spare that much, but are you going to have any big expenses you're struggling to meet?
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.
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If your roommate is barely mobile, who’s walking the chihuahua? Seems like it might be the most miserable of you three in this situation.
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.).
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Fat people.
Not even once.
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.
It's about habit. Mind-patterns established by classical conditioning. Everyone feels that they need a way to cope with physical and emotional pains. If you establish the habit of pairing pain with [unhealthy thing], you'll automatically and mindlessly turn to that thing whenever you feel an ow. And because junk food, drugs, alcohol, etc, are addictive by their nature, the threshold for applying it to the ow goes down too. At some point, almost any excuse will be enough hurt to use the 'antidote'.
I noticed this phenomenon after I stopped drinking.
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While the scale that morbidly obese people lie on is insane, I see pretty much the same kind of lying and self-delusion even among people that aren't super heavy. Somehow, people really do become convinced that they're not eating that much, that there's just something different about their metabolism that prevents them from being able to lose weight. The obvious conclusion that you're still eating too much is treated as implausible, because they know they're not eating very much. I also know multiple people that did lose some of the weight but have become convinced that it's only because they found the one true diet, the one way that really works for their bodies (one guy insists that wheat specifically is what ruins him because of this stupid book). For people that have fully settled on these sorts of beliefs, having me stand in front of them and be thin without avoiding any particular "bad foods" isn't evidence of anything other than how cursed their metabolism is.
Food, Sex, and Shelter.
That the three of these things (and water) are so hard wired in as to be non-negotiable (with the exception of sex and a pseudo-exception of shelter) is why I think you see so much dishonesty around them.
Sex, more broadly, relationships, is the easy and obvious one. We all have the friend with the awful boyfriend/girlfriend that they just can't break up with. Many of us (myself included) have been that person at one time or another. Why not just cut and run? It's sex mixed up with emotional sunk-cost fallacy. This stuff has been fueling the music and movie industries since they began.
Shelter is a little weaker and less obvious, but you see it when people get evicted or when people refuse to move from obviously awful situations. I'm not referencing OP here. I have enough Appalachian Relations to know that people will talk a big game about "leaving this one horse town" but will also turn around and start spouting "but our history! is here" just as quickly. The inversion of this is NIMBYism in expensive enclaves in coastal cities. People tie a self-constructed history to land and dwellings. The truly ironic part is that everything material that actually services that "history" is utterly independent from the dwelling itself. No problem to take the pictures of grandma and grandaddy's old revolver. They fit in packing boxes just fine. I don't think anyone is really thinking, "Man those true 4x6 joists above the basement - I just can't go on without them" [^1]. But people invest their emotions in the the idea of a house, apartment, or dwelling of any kind.
Food, and associated weight problems, are almost as obvious as sex. Anyone who's dieted has probably encountered the self-delusion that is "cheat days" or "cheat meals." The sad fact is to really keep off the weight you have to fundamentally alter what and how you eat. Any even minor slip ups can really hold you back. Exercise is just as tainted by self-delusion and people fail to understand the adaptation principle. "I run three miles three times a week, and I've been doing it for three years!" Yep, and your body has become highly adapted to that overly specific and routine aerobic exercise. You're running those three miles incredibly efficiently compared to three years ago and, precisely because of that efficiency, burning nowhere near the calories you think you are.
I think that self-delusion and other cognitive failings occur so frequently with these areas because they have such a core place in human physiology. They're not negotiable. You can't ever put food / eating on hold for more than a few days. You can live outside, sort of, for a while but it gets debilitating. You definitely can remove sex as a component of your life but this is scene as so bizarre that's either (a) a religiously informed decision or (b) a horrible involuntary condition that may or may not make you a serial killer.
[^1]: Okay, seeing untrimmed 2x4s or 4x6s or anything like that would be really fucking cool, but I'm still not hauling them with me when I move to LA from Kentucky and rebranding myself as "Harlan Hazard"
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Yeah, the number of fat people I have known over the years who insisted they have totally eaten less than 800 calories a day while exercising 2 hours every day and could not lose weight is boggling to me. It's a very consistent pattern of claims that are so improbable as to be physically impossible, and 100% of the time I want to say "If I followed you around with a camera, I am absolutely sure I would find out that you are eating way more than that (and probably not exercising nearly as much as you claim either)." The "exercise" claims also frequently amount to "I have a very active child I have to take care of all day, he keeps me sooooo busy!" Like, no, occasionally lunging to stop Junior from drinking dishwasher detergent or picking him up when he cries is not an exercise routine, even if it does leave you breathless because you still have 100+ pounds of "baby weight"....
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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.
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I'm not sure I can add much to this beyond musical accompaniment.
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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).
Wanted to let you know that I greatly enjoyed your story and the way in which you wrote it (morbid though it may be). It has a David Foster Wallace level-of-detail quality to it
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Assuming you work a distributor, see if you can leverage your mechanical skills and work ethic to convince your supervisor to send you to Micro Matic Dispense Institute. It's only a few days, but you learn everything you need to know about troubleshooting draught beer systems (which is a constant problem for accounts) and installation (there are constantly new bars and restaurants opening all over the country). Once you have some experience with that, you should be able to command higher pay either with your current employer, one of the competing distributors, or if you're really motivated—starting your own draught installation/maintenance company.
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).
Cicerone is heavily geared toward the brewing and serving side of things. Micro Matic is what you want. You'll learn just about everything you need to know in 3 days.
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The best route for smart, capable people who find themselves in this kind of unfortunate predicament seems to be to find a job - any job, even if it’s as a receptionist or phone support or retail worker or caterer or whatever - at a medium to large sized company and then just aggressively promote yourself internally. It’s likely your years of bartending and other customer-facing work have made you relatively personable, and that’s the main ingredient. Talk to others in the business, get drinks, promote yourself as a highly ambitious and capable person, apply for any internal promotion pathways, then see if you can make a jump into a position they wouldn’t hire you in directly but might promote you into. I’ve known at least a few people who have come crazy far with this method.
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.
If your social skills are sharp, you should just go into sales. Any kind of sales, almost certainly you have some car dealerships around you and they basically take any warm body because there are an unbelievable amount of terrible sales people. Combined with your car skills you will likely become a top performer and then have a resume to go to more successful dealerships.
If you’re motivated, a good salesman, and have the knowledge, you can certainly carve out a comfortable life and maybe even quite a lucrative one if you are aggressive and make it an end goal to get to a good dealership. Some of those Finance guys and sales directors at dealerships comfortably pull in 100-200k and oftentimes more.
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I'm on summer break, pregnant, with a hyper child and a toddler.
It would be good to work on cleaning my house and tending to my yard. I have seeds that I could plant this week, and will feel better if my house is cleaner. It would also be good to make some art. Instead I'm acting a bit depressed and sluggish, taking naps at random times and reloading message board pages about things I'm not even all that interested in. Child talks and talks and over-explains and talks and wears us out. I'm glad that I'm not trying to homeschool full time, we don't seem up to it, especially me.
Are the kids able to help with the seed planting? My kids (4 and 7) love planting with me, though of course they need close supervision to avoid things like putting the entire packet of seeds in one spot or spacing the tomato plants 2 inches apart.
Yes, they were especially excited about the huge elephant ear bulbs and the bugs. Though the almost 5 year old kept insisting on ripping off pieces of rosebush and burying it instead of putting soil in pots, which she's clearly able to do. Two year old did mostly help with things like that when asked.
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If it makes you feel any better, I should be yet am not doing all those things, and don't have the excuse of being pregnant.
I really want kids, but having lived with a very talkative little kid for a few months the idea of spending years constantly worn out and never keeping a train of thought running is terrifying.
Its different with your own kids imo and you learn to deal with it. I used to be pretty awkward and easily annoyed around kids, nowadays I can spend hours even with other kids.
Also, you should simply keep them active. Most times when kids talk that much they aren't outside enough. And you can tell your kid to shut up once in a while, it's just that modern parents are absolute doormats way too often. But they're not gonna sit still, you need some activity for them to engage in, ideally you have some default things that you worked out together. For example, our daughter is three and on weekends if she wakes up earlier than us, if we tell her sternly that she can either come cuddle or do her own thing, but we will not get up earlier than ~8, she will just go to her art corner in the living room and draw things, or go to her toy kitchen and pretend-make coffee and so on.
In general my experience with having kids that things that I thought would be a problem weren't, and the problems were things that I wasn't aware of beforehand.
Can confirm on tuckering your kids out with physical activity.
My 2yo has just discovered she can sit on her sportsballs like a yoga ball. Naturally, I took mine out and showed her things I can do with my ball. Monkey see, monkey do. I get a little extra workout in by adding "dynamic resistance" to my movements (there's a proper term for it, but DDPYoga branding has broken my brain). She falls asleep within 30 minutes of being put to bed.
Keep them running, climbing, bouncing on large rubber balls. Keep em laughing. I expect this love-of-movement will help set her up for a glorious adulthood.
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I'm pretty sure I used to also behave this way before I had kids, it's just more obvious, because I can't just sit alone in a bookshop or park or something while being mildly depressed, I have to grudgingly get up and make someone else food. Which is, overall, not worse, possibly better, it just feels a bit worse.
Don't let the prospect of a chatterbox necessarily discourage you! There are options, I'm just not personally very good at finding and taking advantage of them. I hear kids used to find other kids in the neighborhood to play with, and then they would just go off and do that for hours a day. One of my co-workers is sending her school aged kids to three weeks of Parks & Rec discount camps, and maybe that will be me next year. Also, lots of kids are way calmer. I just seem to hang in the ADHD and autism spectrum part of society for some reason. My father built himself a detached study to smoke cigars and forbid his children from entering.
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