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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1105 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for March 26, 2025

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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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March BJJ Update: Promotion Day Blues

So after class Tuesday was promotion day at the gym. It was cute for the comp-team teenager who got his blue belt, and a couple other guys were excited to get whatever the stripe is that comes right before your belt promotion. I had no problem clapping for everyone. But then they got to "FiveHour get up here" and I got my first stripe, a piece of electrical tape wrapped around the white belt. I felt embarrassed and ridiculous, somehow combining a sense of meaninglessness of the participation with the level and still feeling a sense of imposter syndrome or that it was given out of pity because I don't know squat. I know less than squat. Squat and I could go to dinner and Squat could wear an "I'm with stupid" T shirt.

Which is fine whatever I was embarrassed. But then I was surprised the next day, when my friend who I started going to BJJ with, B, called me and said hey congratulations, and sounded genuinely jealous. He said he really felt like he was falling behind last time we had rolled; he was coming off an injury and I was able to dominate position pretty emphatically. B decided that to make more progress, he wanted to start doing private classes in addition to the scheduled classes, and the professor had told him that it was better with two people rather than one, as it is essentially impossible to do BJJ by oneself, so B asked me to join him and we'd book some private classes together. Which, honestly, at the price quoted I don't mind doing maybe once a week, I can pick a time where it makes scheduling easier for me, and it'll probably be good for progress, and I don't mind paying a bit of extra money because I feel like it's been such a good deal so far for me.

I was just so surprised that where I felt like getting the stripe was a participation trophy and mildly embarrassing to even get at 33, B was mildly upset about not getting it. Which he was wrong about anyway: he simply hadn't showed up for class that day, he got it tonight. Just such an odd shift of perspective.

I've made a lot of progress the last few weeks, and I think a big part of it is altering my scheduling to go four days in a row three days off, rather than four days sprinkled through the week. The way the gym structures things, every week every class is devoted to one position or type of move. So half-guard week, armbar week, Judo week, etc. I've noticed that going three days in a row, I start to actually use the moves more, because I'm practicing it in quick succession. Interestingly, BJJ is a very intense workout every time, and I'm noticing physique results, but it doesn't have the same muscle-soreness or necessity of rest days that lifting and rock climbing do for me. I couldn't do the same lift or climb four days in a row without dropping the intensity close by a lot on the second day. Where with BJJ I can roll every day, and while I probably wear down eventually, I feel like if I manage my energy and warmup well that day, I'm fine each day. Picking up soreness or a knock is more idiosyncratic, a matter of getting caught in a bad position and fighting it too long, rather than just pure muscle soreness and weakness with lifting, or the way I need to rest my fingers in between climbing days.

This made me think, along with chatting with @oats_son about kettlebells, about the roll of the 30 Day Challenge in my fitness history. I first started with kettlebells doing the 10,000 swings in 30 days thing, and after that I've never been scared of swings. In law school I did a 30 days of yoga things, and it permanently improved my yoga practice. These brief focused efforts lead to long term improvements! On the other hand, I did Smolov Jr. for Bench and Strict Press over the years, and while I hit PRs after the program, the value didn't hold over for long after.

My biggest frustration remains my limited vocabulary of moves. I don't think there's any way out of it except time. But I hate the feeling of getting mount, as I did last time, and then not having the moves or the confidence in them to go for a sub; or sitting in guard and being good enough to avoid getting swept or subbed, but not good enough to pass, and just wasting time stalling. My defense is progressing faster than my offense.

Hey all, I figured this community would know, but what's up with microdosing? I will start by saying, I've never taken a mood altering substance in my life. I'm an occasional alcohol drinker (1-2x a month maybe) but it was never a habit for me. Mostly all it does is put me to sleep. But I've been so stressed lately and I'm starting to wonder if I'm playing on hard mode when there's an easy answer right there, no prescription needed (I think? Am I right about the THC gummies that you can just like, buy them online?)

I'm just looking for a little something to calm me down a bit at night, help me not be so stressed, get a little more relaxed. But I don't want to be out of it - I still want to keep my wits about me. I don't want to have a bad reaction and have a medical incident. I don't want to take something that would be habit forming, and I have to be able to wake up for work in the morning. Do you think microdosing would be an option for me, and if so, how much dose is a good starter? Or do I just need to get something monitored from a psychiatrist?

You can get CBD-infused green tea from Harney and Sons' Hemp Division, and I'm sure other providers. CBD doesn't seem to have notable cognitive effects, but does take the edge off.

You may also consider talking to your doctor about beta blockers. They focus on the sympathetic nervous system, with minimal if any cognitive effects, and aren't habit-forming. They're essentially an off switch for the physical symptoms of anxiety, from what I've heard and experienced (some people use them for public speaking, dating, etc.), so if that's a major component of your stress they may help.

Beta blockers have mild effects on memory, and do make you very slightly dumber. It's not the biggest deal in the world, but they're also not the first choice for anxiety or someone who wants to be able to relax more.

They've got a slew of other side effects, but I agree that they're not particularly dangerous. I can see the more avant-garde doctor prescribing them like this, with coaxing.

Thanks, was hoping you would comment on this for the medical perspective. I take them a couple times a year for heart stuff, so never really had a chance to notice side effects, and my friends who use them off-label also do it very infrequently.

You're welcome! I'm not the best doctor around, but I have an unusual amount of time to spare for people on the internet. The better ones are probably doing heart surgery or something haha.

Or do I just need to get something monitored from a psychiatrist?

I'm not sure there's much a psychiatrist could prescribe you that fits the bill. Or at least, would be willing to prescribe you. I've never heard of someone being prescribed microdoses of benzos, for example. It might be habit forming, longterm use at therapeutic doses certainly is.

I would have sworn by l-theanine, but I read a recent post that made quite a convincing claim that it can't be responsible for the calming effect of green teas. All I know is that 70% confident that green tea calms me down, especially when I'm jittery from stimulants.

You could try melatonin for sleep, as long as you remember that less is more. 300mcg is what you should be taking, not milligrams.

That's all I can semi-endorse. There are more outré or illegal options, like phenibut, which some people love.

I suggest getting a vape pen with weed oil cartridge and just pulling a small amount and seeing how you feel. Much much easier to control than a gummie. You have to get reasonably high to have trouble waking up the next morning.

I wouldn't do it every night for the rest of your life, but rather with an eye on seeing the sharp contrast between not calm and calm and learning what helps you move that way.

The deal with microdosing is that drug users use a lot of drugs, actually. A safe, therapeutic dosage can be "micro" in comparison to the addicts and wasters who do so much more. Calling it "microdosing" just makes it more hip and trendy.

So: There might indeed by a psychoactive substance you can take a small amount of that would solve your problem, but I wouldn't suggest starting there.

Try different supplements or sleep aids, the kind that are mild enough that you would suspect a placebo if an Instagram ad recommended it to you as a sleep fix. Simply doing some stretches and drinking a mug of hot cocoa might help. L-Theanine is a common sleep supplement; it's a compound in green tea that tends to help people relax. Put in headphones and listen to a relaxing white noise application for a while. Take a melatonin pill. Etc. etc.

I suggest that for two reasons: First, if you don't even drink, then experimenting with anything stronger - even if it is both safe in general and extremely safe at the dose you would actually be taking - bears the risk that you'll feel so anxious about the psychoactive effects that you'll get even more stressed and fail to get to sleep. THC in particular can put you in a loop of having a weird feeling somewhere in your body, which makes you worried, so you focus more on the feeling, which makes it feel weirder, which makes you more worried... and so on. The loop is easy to break, but still too distracting to sleep through.

Second, the gummies and seltzers are expensive. You should try the cheap stuff first. Taking a hot bath with some Epsom salt is very nearly free.

With that said, if you try some options and they still don't work - and if you have, by experimenting, become comfortable enough with performing weird sleep rituals to summon the Sandman that throwing some honest-to-God drugs into the middle of the pentagram no longer feels like a big, scary step - then CBD and THC gummies drinks are legal in some states; in my locale, the THC seltzers are sold at the convenience store one freezer shelf over from the White Claws. You can Google around for a brand and see if they sell or deliver in your state. Note that Amazon does not list these products and will funnel you towards "hemp" products that are literally placebos.

Try something that only has CBD before you try anything that has THC, and if you try one with THC, pick the lowest dose they sell, typically 5 mg. It takes 1-2 hours to kick in, so don't assume it didn't affect you until 3 hours have passed. You are not going to have a medical event or chemical dependency if you follow this advice; at worst, you will feel briefly nauseous. If that happens, drink some water and wait.

I'm about to go to aforementioned local convenience store to stock up. I've found a brand that's not too expensive, with 10mg CBD and 5mg THC, that improves my sleep. It doesn't necessarily give me great sleep, but it prevents tossing-and-turning bad sleep. Before, the occasional night of awful sleep put me in a vicious cycle where I'd need a strong coffee in the morning to function for work, but I was drinking enough caffeine to end up distracted and fatigued anyway, frequently making me stressed all over again, causing another bad night of sleep. Now, when I feel like I'm not set up for restful sleep for whatever reason, the seltzer at night takes the place of the Starbucks in the morning.

Mix yourself a gin and tonic with a lime slice in it.

THC edibles are probably not what you're looking for. Edibles are inherently inconsistent and effects can vary between nothing at all and seeing god and vomiting depending on the particular product, body size, stomach condition, ect.

Going straight into microdosing is stupid. Pick up a normal and legal vice first.

Anyone hate their signature, or is it just me?

Well, hate is a strong word, but I see people penning all kinds of fancy scrawls, while mine is just initials in cursive with a small flourish. Even the other variant on some legal documents is an initial and surname in the same.

This can be convenient. God knows most professions don't need to sign their names nearly as often as medics do.

I suppose I could change it, if I really wanted to. I'm just put off by the mild logistical headaches I might face if someone asks me why existing samples on various documents don't match what I put elsewhere.

I'm just put off by the mild logistical headaches I might face if someone asks me why existing samples on various documents don't match what I put elsewhere

As is the doctor classic, my signature is so bad that nobody can forge it...not even me. It has never caused problems.

I've had a boss insist I start putting initials next to mine, on the paper drug charts. To be fair, he said that to the other doctors too. Fortunately, the facility has just been dragged kicking and screaming into the information age. With wifi working, I can finally prescribe electronically.

paper drug charts

plz no. I thought I had escaped

My signature is merely my name (first, abbreviated middle, last) in ordinary cursive. I personally like how the capital letters look, but it does perhaps take a few seconds longer to write than would be ideal.

My dad is a doctor, and his signature is allegedly his initials but is really just a sort of loopy squiggle that he can write quickly. It's distinctive so it's not like it needs to have legible letters I suppose; my own signature is also pretty much just a squiggly line with a passing resemblance to my name (to me, anyway: according to my fiancée nobody would ever identify the letter parts of the squiggle without me explaining what they are). When I was younger it more closely resembled actual letters but has smoothed/devolved over time. It's probably more consistent now than it ever was when I was trying to actually "write" it versus "drawing" it, if that distinction makes sense. I rather like it, personally. It's satisfying to quickly swoosh it out on a restaurant bill or the like.

How's your handwriting in general? I have never met a practicing doctor with good handwriting -- as best as I can tell that stereotype is very much based in fact. I suspect many doctors begin with a recognizable signature and then it devolves as they get used to writing it faster and faster, the same as their handwriting seems to inevitably deteriorate over time.

My handwriting? Average for a normal person. Good by doctor standards! It's usually clear and legible, if not ornate, but you can tell that by the end of a long day and work it's devolving into something you can interpret as an ECG.

It's probably more consistent now than it ever was when I was trying to actually "write" it versus "drawing" it, if that distinction makes sense. I rather like it, personally. It's satisfying to quickly swoosh it out on a restaurant bill or the like.

Sounds appealing. I'm fond of the aesthetic of whipping out a fountain pen and just going for it haha.

you can tell that by the end of a long day and work it's devolving into something you can interpret as an ECG

Ha! Yeah, give it a few years and I bet you'll be illegibly scribbling with the best of your field.

I'm an engineer but I've noticed my own handwriting deteriorate a bit compared to when I was in school, just from having to write fast to take notes during meetings and site visits. I have to consciously change how I write if I expect someone else to read it now.

I remember my dad making a big deal about me "choosing a signature" the first time I got a debit card or something and had to sign it, saying that it would stick with me for the rest of my life. I've not always liked the one I picked then, but I've made my peace with it and even been complimented once.

Should I develop a nicotine addiction?

For a while now, I've been curious about nicotine. Smoking, of any kind, is something I've always despised: It smells bad, blackens the teeth, has a terrible risk profile, and almost all my experiences with it have been unpleasant (I had a cigar recently, and it cleared the bar of "I'm not hating it"). Nonetheless, I've always been interested in the "good parts" of nicotine, and with its resurgent popularity, it's more available than ever, in several forms: gum, tablet or whatever that thing swedish people use is.

I am, however, slightly worried about giving it a try: I know myself to be quite a compulsive consumer with a few things (most notably food and candy, but also internet forum discussions), and I fear I might develop dependency. Have any of you guys tried it? Did it make you feel noticably different? Was it easy to quit? Any suggestions regarding dosage?

Have any of you guys tried it?

I've been using nicotine pouches for about 3 years.

Did it make you feel noticably different?

When you have a low tolerance you get a head rush and supposedly it helps you focus. I don't know if it really helps with the kind of deep focus you'd want for studying but it certainly keeps you awake and at my kitchen job it does get you into the headspace to manage the 20 things you're paying attention to at once. Practically I should only be using it for these reasons but it feels nice so I've ended up taking it constantly.

Long term downsides: a pouch feels relaxing but they are heightening your baseline level of anxiety in the meantime, a pouch will give you energy but lower your baseline level of motivation.

Was it easy to quit?

Yes, and then no. For the first year I could go off it for a month without noticing anything, once I started tapering off to 4mg pouches from the 11s I had eventually ramped up to I got a taste of the classic nicotine withdrawal symptoms. One of the things a friend reported to me was that you feel amazing while quitting, I also experienced this while tapering off but it was back and forth between that and the bad symptoms.

I do plan to quit because I'd rather take the 20 or so euro a week and go to a nice restaurant instead, once these 4mg cans run out I'll try and find something weaker and failing that just stop altogether.

Any suggestions regarding dosage?

Don't go past 6mg and avoid the temptation to increase the strength as your tolerance goes up. Right now it's getting hard to find even 6s in my local shops, one place told me the weakest they had was 17mg.

Smoking sucks. The first drag is like ten seconds of enjoyment followed by what feels like several minutes of work and wishing it would be over already. I can't imagine getting addicted to it, but also I can't imagine anything more upsetting to be casually addicted to.

Vaping is a little nicer and I would definitely never buy my own nicotine vape pen because I could imagine using it whenever I feel even slightly tired and pulling on it all day long.

Quitting smoking is easy. I've done it fifty times

Smoking on and off for ten years to counter adhd issues and to have an excuse to step outside, sometimes months long gaps between smokes, sometimes chain smoking during particularly important tasks. Never felt anything more than a cranky feeling that lasted a day and constipation when deprived of tobacco for longer than 48 hours.

It still feels worth doing for me but cigarettes are really bad indoors.

I'm sure you've all heard it before but anyone who smokes should switch to vaping, it has like 1/100th of the health consequences for the same benefit.

(Also a bit selfish, I also despise cigarette smoke)

100%. Vaping isn't something I'd recommend people start, but when switching from a cigarette habit, you're doing yourself an enormous favor.

Please don’t. I had to stuff an entire can of Zyn packs into my mouth just to answer your question.

I don't think it's worth it if you already consider yourself to have an "addictive personality", so to speak. It definitely feels good, but once you start getting cravings that pretty much cancels it out, in my opinion. My now-fiancée and I both got into vaping for a couple years or so during college and, honestly, only decided to quit when our state banned all the non-tobacco flavors of vape cartridges and it became too much of a pain to support the habit. I found it surprisingly easy to quit given the reputation (it was kind of unpleasant for a week or so but then I felt back to normal) but she had an absolute bitch of a time, with physical withdrawal symptoms that went on for months. I'll still take a hit off a friend's vape or share a cigarette at a party once in a blue moon -- again it really is a nice feeling, especially in a party environment where you're talking to people and already a little tipsy -- but she's convinced (probably rightly) that if she tried it again at all it would kickstart the addiction all over again. So if you already think you're susceptible to that kind of thing, I think it's pretty much a guarantee that you'll end up with a proper addiction/dependency -- which in my view makes the juice very much not worth the squeeze.

I started vaping, on a rainy night when I was stuck outside my Airbnb in London. My ex had cancer, so we spent the wait reading through the literature and finally convinced ourselves that the harms were minimal, compared to cigarettes at the very least. Putting anything but virgin air in your lungs has some downsides.

That being said, I mildly regret developing a nicotine dependence. When I was forced to stop cold-turkey, it was best described as a male version of PMSing or roid-rage.

The upsides? It gives you something to do when hanging out with smokers. It gives me a small boost when I run away to the toilets for a quick puff at work. Nicotine buzzes are fun.

On the balance, I think it's better not to start. I think I read too much Gwern.

What about weight loss? Just about the only hot 30 year old women I know all smoke. Rhea Seehorn smokes in Better Call Saul and look at her.

The fact that you are (justifiably) a fan of Better Rim Kim doesn’t justify your filthy addiction.

I don't think even heavy use of my vape appreciably diminished my appetite. I certainly didn't lose any weight because of it. Thinking about the people I know who smoke or vape, they're more likely to be obese than not.

If you're that keen on losing weight, then you can source Chinese semaglutide as dried peptides for the same expense and save yourself the addiction.

Wow. I'm not keen on losing weight - I want to lose like 10 pounds but that's about it - but is illegal Chinese semaglutide any cheaper than the real stuff? I know some people that take it, and one paid for it at the start of the year and had to pay the whole deductible until it got covered, and it was painful. A prescription has to be $2k, at least...

Scott has a recent post up about it.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-ozempocalypse-is-nigh

It doesn't take much effort or knowledge to reconstitute it with bacteriostatic water or inject it. I presume you could take it orally too, but I'm not 100% sure about that.

It seems to be way cheaper, and probably safe unless you look at extremely shady sources. I'd do it, if I felt like I needed ozempic, but I also have the option of visiting India and getting it at about $100 for a month's supply.

There's no good part. Not really. Once you're used to it, all you're doing is alleviating your want for it, and removing the negative effects from not having it. There's no real positive effect at that point. Just an unhealthy, expensive habit.

Have any of you guys tried it? Did it make you feel noticably different? Was it easy to quit? Any suggestions regarding dosage?

I've long been an occasional cigar or drunk-cigarette smoker, like a couple times a year. I never felt any compulsion to smoke regularly. Last year I tried Zyns. I quite like them. They deliver a pleasant buzz and burst of energy when doing something, give a little hint of taste to stimulate me without calories or the gallon of diet coke or green tea I'd drink on a long drive, they're totally unobtrusive when walking around, and there's not really any gross residue. I use them a couple times a week, and rarely more than one a day. I've never gotten a craving or a headache on a day I don't use them.

But I perceive that I have a non-addictive personality when it comes to substances (less so when it comes to other things). I just don't ever really feel the urge to use weed or alcohol or nicotine. So Your Mileage May Very Very Much Vary.

I smoke cigars, generally about once a week when the weather is nice during the summer. The nicotine is a pleasant part of the experience and that usage pattern does not cause any apparent compulsion to consume more. I probably wouldn't bother with a product that was just nicotine without the tobacco, but I'm also just not much of a drug guy in general.

Over the past year, I have witnessed the slow extinction of fat people in the upper-middle class. They were always rare, at least in PMC social circles in major global cities like London and NYC, but there were always a few here and there, and there has been a significant and noticeable decline since the arrival of Ozempic. This is near-universally true among women and (formerly) obese men; pot-bellied men who are 20 or 30 pounds overweight continue not to care in many cases, although even their numbers have shrunk considerably.

In the medium term, I wonder what the social consequences will be. Since the explosion of obesity from the early-mid 1970s, classical notions of beauty have been complemented by what I guess you could call the “butterface”, someone facially unfortunate or mediocre (mid) but who has a somewhat more attractive - by virtue of not being fat, usually - body. In 1950, being skinny with an ugly face put you in the bottom quartile of hotness. In 2020, it probably put you around the middle, maybe even somewhat above average in the fattest places. Now, the value declines again, and the face card returns to its position on top.

Since the explosion of obesity from the early-mid 1970s, classical notions of beauty have been complemented by what I guess you could call the “butterface”, someone facially unfortunate or mediocre (mid) but who has a somewhat more attractive - by virtue of not being fat, usually - body. In 1950, being skinny with an ugly face put you in the bottom quartile of hotness. In 2020, it probably put you around the middle, maybe even somewhat above average in the fattest places. Now, the value declines again, and the face card returns to its position on top.

I don't think this concept is exclusive to the modern obesity epidemic, or that it will end with the Ozempic era. The concept of the butterface, a woman with a great rack and an ugly face, exists in earlier men's writing, but it's a crass concept that only a real horndog male would talk about, and up until recently that wasn't the kind of stuff that was typically written down, and if it was written down it wasn't the type of stuff that typically survived. Certainly if you read Playboy issues from the 50s and 60s the idea of a woman with great ass tits and a mediocre face comes up pretty often, typically as a desirable temporary partner but less marriageable.

Especially given the variable impact that weight loss will have on breasts, the varying adequacy of surgical substitution, and the known tendency of women to go too far with it, and the general degradation and crassness of modern culture, guys are still going to talk about butterfaces.

Was that really I case in the middle/upper middle class though when people are pair bonding? People who were fat before their mid twenties/thirties or their first pregnancy was very rare ime, maybe 1/25 tops, and then we're counting mere overweightedness, obesity was at least less than half of that. I remember in my middle school there was the one obese guy everyone knew because he was obese and we were like 1000 students. In my university class there was one in two hundred that was fat. Going around campus almost no one was fat.

I'd wager that childhood/youth (over)weight problems is very, very weighted towards the lower working class and underclass (although this might be different in America, I don't know) and becomes relatively common as people enter middle age, with some people who were normal weight in their twenties swelling up like balloons, but at that point they're already in long-term relationships and most have kids.

Well, my job as a tax accountant continues to depress the shit out of me and I want to complain about it. Still burned out, still exhausted, the works. Can't bring myself to concentrate or focus on anything for a particularly long period of time. Pretty sure I'm making more mistakes and taking longer than I otherwise would.

During the month I had to rescue a client running a failing business who couldn't pay some of their accumulated tax debts and had a history of defaults on their monthly payment plans meant to pay off that debt, last time I called the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) they had previously denied the client another payment plan leaving them effectively stranded with no feasible way to pay off the debt in short order. The tax office contacted us regarding possible legal action during the month and I had to handle the negotiations with the ATO, eventually I got them to establish a new payment plan for the client and even managed to negotiate a fairly low monthly payment instalment.

How do you bargain with the tax office when they hold all the cards? The answer is that you don't have to; you only have to bargain with the tax office representative on the other end of the phone. I called to negotiate a payment plan at 4:00 PM, they picked up at 4:20 PM, and at that point they were very intent on handling my call and not stretching the entire affair beyond close of business. I had some other strategies up my sleeve to deploy if necessary, for example if they pushed back I was gonna say “sorry let me retrieve that for you” every time they asked for info, and then leave them in silence for 5 minutes so I could prolong the call way beyond 5:00 PM. But they agreed to my terms much more willingly than I was expecting.

In my firm we have a monthly wrap-up presentation where we can nominate people who performed well during the month for a token firm award. Guess how many nominations I got for establishing a payment plan for the firm's single most debt-riddled client? Zero. It's not a very serious thing, the "award" offers no material benefits, but it would be nice to have any kind of reminder that my efforts were appreciated every now and then. Welp, just a signal to try even less hard next time.

Right now I've got a trip to Vietnam planned in the second half of April. This is the only thing I'm looking forward to at the moment.

If you want some comedy (I like to laugh at my problems and I'm less in a mode of "active despair" and more "This place is a fucking joke, so I might as well laugh at it.), here are some highlights from my last month of the beer service technician life:

We're in week four of a fleetwide maintenance freeze. I'm driving 5K miles a month. It's been about 12K (pretty much all highway) miles since I last got an oil change, not like the engine is going to seize tomorrow but really not how one should treat a $30K truck. I did inspire a companywide "Hey, check your oil" message after a week of complaining that my truck was over a quart low on oil, asking for permission to top it off. I don't know if they forgot to pay the fleet maintenance bill or if the company is too broke to pay it, but it's not reassuring, and if this goes on long enough it's a race between one of my tires showing cords and the timing chain starting to get noisy. I'm going to laugh if the solution to the tire problem (right front tire is wearing very unevenly and the inner part is pretty much bald) is just to swap it with the spare (It is a full-size spare, so this would work.).

On a related note, apparently my district has the highest rate of unpaid invoices in the company, so we're going to have our line cleaners start badgering locations about unpaid invoices (Isn't this what our accounting department gets paid to do?). I got sent on a call to a place (to work on a 23 year old glycol chiller that's begging for death and gather details for a quote on a new chiller that will almost certainly be turned down) that just got current on an invoice from two years ago. Shockingly, they didn't have checks on site after being told they'd have to pay by check, so it looks like I'll be driving by tomorrow to collect (and probably hear about how said chiller isn't cooling sufficiently after having told the customer that calling an HVAC is most likely throwing good money after bad on it; playing bill collector at an ethnic restaurant with ESL staff is super fun).

We're really pushing it on some of these calls. We're charging full-price for preventative maintenances on keg boxes (These don't really have anything to "maintain" aside from cleaning the condenser coils and this practice was described as "ripping people off" by our CFO. Did I mention that I'm out of coil cleaner? I might get some more next week and was told to make due without it in the meantime instead of stopping at a store and buying some.). I drove 2.5 hours and charged a bar $180 ($65 for the part) to replace a shank on a keg box, really to replace the spacer (that we don't have in stock) that had cracked. I understand needing to charge a markup and labor, but this part can be ordered online for $20 and replaced in 15 slow-moving minutes. Needless to say, the customer was not amused (I was apparently the third person sent to fix this.) and paid up but asked that I express her displeasure to my boss.

I drove 10 hours round trip to install two shanks only to find that the parts I was sent with didn't fit. Why we ordered shanks 10.5 inches long (and waited months for said parts to be custom made) to replace parts ~2 inches long, I don't know. I drove six hours round trip to install a nitro infusion box because our install technician did a sufficiently shit job with a surly attitude on a previous install that the customer asked the we send anyone else. I drove eight hours round trip (complete with the CEO himself badgering my superiors asking for my ETA; would've been nice to have known the urgency of the situation or even what exactly I was supposed to be working on without having to call my supervisor and ask, and thank God it was a reset button because I didn't have the condenser fan I was sent to check on hand and/or would've felt like a total jackass telling the customer "I don't know why your compressor isn't turning on; call an HVAC tech.") to press a reset button (high pressure tripped out on the compressor of a glycol chiller). I all but wasted four days doing almost nothing (not that we had many calls to run anyway, and my boss didn't have access to our list of outstanding PMs until halfway through the month) waiting on a chiller to show up because we screwed up getting it shipped. These screwups, low call volume, and our huge service area make for a lot of one-call days and mostly two call days (or three easy, low-value calls), which makes it impossible for me to actually hit 40 hours a week, let alone the overtime I was promised. For example, today I was supposed to drive 2.5 hours to my first call, .5 hours from that location to the second call (actually reasonable!), 2 hours to the third call, and then 2 hours home (The third call canceled, so I was spared that in favor of a PM nearby. Too bad it was going to be the money-making call of the three.). This is not great when all three calls wind up being one hour, low-profit jobs.

On the bright side, I actually managed to catch my boss off the record at the bar and we had a relatively honest conversation (We both have about the same tenure in our current positions.) about things. She expressed mounting frustration with me repeatedly getting sent to undo install's fuckups (I don't care, but it's got to be screwing with her numbers, as is having to scrounge for blatant make-work for lack of calls or access to the PM list.), inventory (or lack thereof; we had to punt a job for another week because we don't have the materials needed to do it, and had to split a job a job with another company because we didn't have a secondary gas regulator in stock) issues, and constant issues with line cleaners' personal vehicle reimbursement (chronically being paid out late and/or less than promised) causing endless drama. She fessed up that she and her immediate superior really were told when I was recruited to the company that said reimbursement was going to be a lot better than it wound up being, that multiple friends of hers that she'd referred to the company had been "screwed" by this, and that she and her boss had been made to look dishonest. Apparently whoever was in charge of rolling out the vehicle reimbursement had the ratio of company owned vehicles to employee owned vehicles backwards (70/30 in favor of company vehicles when the actual ratio was 30/70) such that the company was blindsided by the expense of reimbursing line cleaners for using their vehicles (Before covid every employee got a company car, but they had to sell off most of them to survive the shutdown.).

Thanks for complaining. I am exposed to way too any influencers and beautiful people online having the time of their lives getting paid to take photos of themselves, spend money, and be hot. Granted much of this is as fake as the porn industry, but it's hard to remember than when you're sitting in a cubicle working on Excel spreadsheets.

I am an engineering manager working for a renewable energy construction company and I have utter dread every time I go into the office. COVID was actually a godsend for me as it changed my working pattern from being 8AM to 5PM every day in office (with a horrendous commute) to 2 or three days in the office per week and no one checking what time I show up. It is so much more tolerable being able to work from home the majority of the time. But those days in the office, I experience so much anxiety and negative feelings it's almost physically painful. It's not so much that I dislike the work (though I do), but the fact I'm held in that office with boring-ass engineers sitting behind a computer all day long. Even typing this out increases my heart rate.

Anyway, you have my solidarity.

I'm one of those boring ass engineers (also in infra) sitting behind a computer all day, but I've come to quite like my job, and I think I'd honestly rather do this than be most of those influencers.

Their lives look pretty hellish, waking up every morning to perform hedonism for an invisible audience. They have no community, no source of meaning. I think I'd go insane about a month after the hedonic treadmill kicked in. Compare that to my job which is interesting enough and very concretely useful to my society. To be fair, I think I'd go crazy doing one of those ultra-abstract tech gigs or OP's accounting job, and it helps I get to go commission the stuff I designed in the field every few months, so I'm not always in the office.

There are definitely people with better lives than mine, but I'm mostly glad they exist and look up to them as inspirations. They tend to also be clearly smarter and harder-working than me. Part of me is glad I'm in the middle of the hierarchy; it seems lonely at the top.

Maybe this is all cope, but it gets me up in the morning. I'm glad you could ditch the commute and I hope your job gets better.

It's not a very serious thing, the "award" offers no material benefits, but it would be nice to have any kind of reminder that my efforts were appreciated every now and then. Welp, just a signal to try even less hard next time.

External validation is important but often forgotten - however you can try and focus on the good you did though. You helped out that client no? Quite a bit in fact. You did good in the world. How many people can say that about the job they do?

A pat on the back from your job is certainly satisfying but you just did something to help someone. That's amazing!

Use that to motivate you.

I strongly agree with this. The key to satisfaction in life is to not attach too much importance to external validation. External validation is nice, but it may or may not happen based on various factors. Instead do a good job at something because you take pride in it and know you did the right thing.

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