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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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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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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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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For me, the frustrating part is that I could be a lot better at this, but the training was just so limited that there's far too much that I don't know or don't know enough about to speak with confidence on. Post training, the problem has been similar to the problem I had during training: most of our calls are fairly unsophisticated stuff and our call volume has been low, so it's hard to learn and retain knowledge. TBH, while my supervisor is prone to excessively exuberant positivity, it appears that our standards are just low (in keeping with the pay).
During a call earlier this week I noticed a massive nitrogen leak on something someone else had done (I suspected us due to the fact that the gas lines were the same brand we use.), due to the fact that every crimp connection on a splitter was loose (fitting was too small for the size of gas line used, clamps can only do so much). I mentioned it to my supervisor and she laughed; apparently we installed that setup last year. I don't know if it was our install team (wouldn't be the first time) or the previous service tech (also wouldn't be the first time) that did it, nor am I immune to making mistakes, but come on, at least make sure your crimp connections are tight. Oh, and to add insult to injury the same supervisor forgot to add a gas regulator to the quote on the job I did. I should've caught that (and called my boss and was like "I feel like I'm missing something here."), but for some dumb reason I assumed that the pressure straight out of the non-adjustable blend box would be okay to run cold brew coffee since it isn't carbonated. Our parts inventory is a total shitshow so our other guy who could've done it today didn't have a regulator, nor did we have one in our storage unit, but I have two in my truck (but was on a call 200 miles away from where he was), so I get to drive 5 hours round trip to deliver him a regulator tomorrow and run one call, with another call possible/probable depending on customer approval.
The drive time can wear on you (I was a delivery driver for 14 years and loved it, but driving on the interstate is mind-numbingly boring.). If I'm lucky my calls are an hour away. My shortest drive this week has been two hours to the first call, 90 minutes home from the second call. Three days with 5 hour round-trip drives. I drove six hours round trip today to sell a restaurant manager a $30 coupler and tell her that her line was foaming because that product was either improperly handled, defective from the brewery, or had a bad keg seal (My guess is one of the first two because the seal looked fine, but I'm certain it was a bad keg. If you swap products to different tap lines and the problem follows the keg, it's the keg.). We charged her nearly $500 in labor for drive time (not so much because of pure distance, but because it was to a part of the state that we don't normally do much business in). I get that we quoted her that much in hopes that she'd call someone else, and it's not my fault that the restaurant manager didn't think to swap the kegs before assuming that her system was broken, but man it's hard not to feel like a bit of an asshole when presenting that invoice for 30 minutes of work.
Apparently I have a call lined up next week that's a 9-10 hour round trip drive for a 1-2 hour job.
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