The vendors like you to buy a new phone every year so that they can get more money from you.

When they advertise that “only our latest product has smart thingy, or picture erase, or circle to search”, they’re really telling you that they are trying to find a reason for you to throw perfectly good hardware away so that you can spend more money.

If the software lasts that long, and it’s doing what you need, there’s no reason you have to buy a new phone each year.

Every time you keep your phone a bit longer instead of buying a new one, you’re reducing the waste that goes to landfill (let’s be honest, most people throw their obsolete electronics literally in the trash rather than direct them to approved recycling and disposal).

Friends, family, and lovers dying before you.

Being completely unaware of anyone else:

• Standing in doorways, using your phone or having a conversation
• Talking loudly when inappropriate, when I’m in pain at the doctors, I don’t want to hear about your roses
• leaving your shopping trolley blocking the aisle sideways in the supermarket while looking for your stuff
• driving down the middle of the road so everyone else has to pull over, when there’s plenty of room for two cars to pass
• stopping in the middle of the road without indicating, while: looking for your destination, or having a conversation, or deciding what day it is
• riding your delivery bike down the footpath at high speed weaving between pedestrians

As Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is other people”.

Nobody noticed “Be prepared to take a sefie” !?

I was having lunch in the break room on the 23rd floor, vaguely watching the world go by. Two blocks away, a car drove up to the top level of a parking garage, a bunch of guys got out, and cut through the chain link fence separating the garage building from the roof of the building next door. “Well, that’s unusual behaviour “, I thought, and kept watching. When they moved over to that roof and started to break in to the rooftop door, I realised that it was the bank down the street. Called the cops and gave them a running commentary. Eventually when they showed up I got to see the tussle between the cops and the bad guys on the roof. Felt like a tv show.

Here we go ...

I was in class in high school, and I found a pen under the desk. Not an ordinary cheap plastic throwaway pen, it was one of those expensive metal pens that telescoped together to pop in and out, with gold trim and enamel cloisonne all along the barrel, the sort that you would give someone for an expensive birthday present. Eager to do the right thing, I put my hand up and told Mr Schulz, asked if I should take it to the lost-and-found at the front office. "No," said Mr Schulz, "give it to me and I'll keep it in my desk here". It occurred to me that he uncharitably thought that I was going to get "lost" on the way there or back, instead of sitting in his lesson; I thought that he would hand it in to the front office on my behalf.

The policy at school was that if no-one collected an item from the lost-and-found, you could go and claim it. So a few weeks later, when I asked at the front office, I was surprised that the pen hadn't been handed in. I asked Mr Schulz about it, and he took the pen out of his drawer, and used his Swiss Army Knife to etch my name into it, saying that I might as well keep it, because no-one had claimed it.

Of course, within a few days one of the other boys saw me using it, and decided that I had stolen it from him. Before I could find Mr Schulz to get him to verify my version of events, he and several of his friends caught me in the corridor between lessons and beat me black and blue. Two black eyes, and so many bruises that I couldn't walk properly or stand up straight for weeks. My parents said "You must have done something to deserve it", took no action against the school, and made me go back to school the next day anyway.

I was summoned to the deputy headmaster's office. He told me that since I had stolen this pen from the other boy and put my name on it to make sure everyone thought it was mine, I was a disgrace to the school and would be put on detention (picking up litter before and after school, and at lunchtime, no canteen privileges, no excursions) for the rest of the year. I protested my innocence, so Mr Schulz was summoned, he promptly denied all knowledge and involvement, and straight up called me a liar.

Word had got around to all the teachers; by hearsay they also all decided that I was a thief and a liar, and gave me extra work to punish me, on top of my regular homework. I was now doing homework from the moment I got home until way past midnight, and in the mornings at 6am when my parents woke me up until 8:30 when I had to ride my bike to school.

I pretty much gave up on schoolwork, because if the teachers were going to lie, there was no way to know if what they were teaching was the truth, and if I asked questions about the problems I was having, especially in maths and physics, I was told to stop disrupting the class, because they had decided without evidence that I was a "juvenile delinquent" and not worth helping.

I had several serious bicycle accidents riding to and from school during this time, and I'm absolutely certain that it was because I fell asleep from pure exhaustion. I still have scars from those accidents, and I'll always remember how I got them.

I left school at the earliest opportunity, left my parents and lived on the streets for a few years, and thanks to a charity helping street kids, got an apprenticeship and a place to live. A few years after that, I sort-of-almost reconciled with my parents, who still believed the teacher's version of events, because "all teachers are good, honest, respectable people".

Throughout my own children's education, I always had anxiety attacks when I had to take them to school, or go to school for parent-teacher meetings etc, even though they attended a different school and we now live several states away.

That was over forty years ago, and I still feel like Mr Schulz both derailed my education, and ruined my plans for further education.

"School days are the best days of your life" -- I think not.

Turnwise and widdershins

Just give them a $10 Uber Eats card!

That’s it!? That’s the entire article? The list of authors is longer than the text! Did they write one sentence each and call it done?

The philosophy of Bill S Preston, Esquire, and Ted “Theodore” Logan:

“Be excellent to each other”

It’s really not that difficult to do the right thing, be an upstanding citizen, and contribute to a decent society.

I thought I couldn’t remember how to throw a boomerang, but then it came back to me.

Gave up smoking 25 years ago. Diagnosed with incurable blood cancer 5 years ago. After two stem cell (bone marrow) transplants, three years of chemotherapy, and a year of immunotherapy, I’ve been told I’m in full remission — no evidence of disease — and I’m not expected to relapse.

Look after yourself while you’re young and fit and still have a chance to keep healthy.

I have incurable cancer (multiple myeloma), I’ll be surprised if I make it that far.

People who actually care about pronouns will tell you theirs.

I keep getting letters/bills/credit cards from banks, insurance, all sorts, for people who used to live here but moved away more than five years ago. I was sending them back with Not at this address / Return to sender written on them, but they’re still arriving.

Once I started writing Deceased - Return to sender, I stopped getting letters for people who no longer live here.

AITA? Could this be my fault?

Why do we even have graveyards? Embalming chemicals leach out and poison water tables, carbon footprint is horrendous, land is wasted for superstitious nonsense. Just cremate and scatter the ashes.

https://slate.com/technology/2022/10/cemeteries-drinking-tap-water-pollution-aquifers-dead-bodies.html , among others.

There’s no way to send feedback, or to log a fault with the machine, so the store operators have to deal with every single exception manually, over and over, instead of getting the thing fixed.

• “Place your bags in bagging area” (ok, done)
• “Unexpected item in bagging area” (How can it be unexpected, you just told me to put my bags there. Operator logs in and clears fault)
• (remove bags) “item removed from bagging area” (so you want me to put my bags there, but you don’t, but you do. Operator logs in and clears fault)
• “We couldn’t scan the last item” (yes you could, it’s on the screen there. But if I take it back and scan it again, I get “item removed” and then it won’t scan it again. Operator logs in and clears fault)
• “unexpected item in bagging area (again)”. (So I successfully scanned the thing, but you didn’t expect me to put it in the bagging area? Where should it put it instead? Operator logged in and clears fault)
• “have you forgotten to scan something?” (No, that’s my walking stick and the extra bags I brought that I didn’t actually need after all. Operator logs in and clears fault)

Does anyone actually test these things before installing them at the stores? Does anyone review the faults to see how to improve the scanning and item recognition? Are you really creating a better customer experience by having half a dozen customers holding up the line while waiting for the operator to come and clear a fault?

“Be excellent to each other”.

Show some compassion, be a bro, care about other people. Maybe we can make society a bit better; one person, one act of kindness, at a time.

Writing. Being able to record facts, thoughts, and stories that can be (mostly) read thousands of miles away and thousands of years later changed civilisation.

Set an alarm in your clock app, repeat forever

• What’s brown and sticky?
• A stick

Over thirty years ago, I told a friend of a friend “Australians come from Australia, Romanians come from Romania, therefore Canadians come from Canadia”. She’s been calling it “Canadia” for thirty years.

We’ve been together for ten years now, and she’s just found out that it’s not called “Canadia”. Boy am I in trouble.

1. Get a carbon monoxide detector
2. I should have broken both arms when I was a teenager
3. Poop knife

I don’t work at the moment, but here is a list of stuff I’m glad to be away from:

• That guy over there that grunts and coughs and clears his throat every 37 seconds.
• Having ten minute standup meetings every day, that take at least 45 minutes every day and could have been replaced by looking at the status page in the wiki.
• That other guy over there that raises his voice and yells and carries on every time he is on the phone, completely unaware that his phone has a microphone, and that anyone else exists
• People who eat stinky stuff for lunch at their desk, chewing with their mouth open while watching the football at full volume. Go and use the lunch room, you inconsiderate fuck.
• my boss over in the next cubicle who yells out someone’s name, expecting them to be there, and then yells a series of instructions whether they are there or not. I’m trying to think, can’t you just get up and walk all the way over to another cubicle to talk at a reasonable volume, like a normal person?
• The woman that just started, sitting in the next cubicle, that reeks of foul perfume. I know when she arrives and leaves by the smog cloud, the revolting stench that follows her around the office, and the trail of people vomiting and struggling to breathe after she goes past. I tried to do the right thing and talk to her and she conveniently can’t speak English, unaware that I can hear her on the phone speaking flawlessly.

Strip clubs?

• Jesus was supposed to return
• The world was supposed to end

What about the manufacturers of knives, screwdrivers, automobiles, hammers? Yes, firearms are made to be used to kill, where the others aren’t, but the intention to kill comes from the user.

Being treated for cancer in hospital (in remission now, thank you) during COVID lockdowns gave me lots of time to reflect on my life. Realised that probably I was the asshole all these years; and also came to the realisation that I’m autistic and socially awkward. Reading David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs helped me to understand all the corporate games and garbage that I’d been part of for most of my career.

When I think about my life, it’s divided into pre-cancer diagnosis, selfish workaholic and part of corporate life; and post-cancer remission, unemployed, living off my savings, kinder to the people and the world, but unable to find a job that resonates with the new me.

Oh no! anyway…

One time, we were given six month’s wages plus a month’s wages for each year we had worked there (I had been there 12 years). The company paid for career counseling, resume training, self awareness (similar to Myers Briggs only it was useful), use of an office space and computers and printers to hunt for jobs.

Another time, we were told that our entire IT department wasn’t important enough to keep and our jobs had been outsourced to India. But they still wanted us to stay for four weeks and train our replacements. Bitch, if I’m not important enough to keep, then I’m not important enough to train anyone. I collected my stuff and walked out that day.

Yes, I’ve been having trouble concentrating on reading, and understanding written text, ever since I started chemotherapy. They tell me the brain fog could last between four and ten years.

I’m also reading that some long COVID sufferers are having similar effects. I’ve managed to avoid COVID so far, hoping that I won’t get anything that makes the brain fog worse.

“Are you awake?”

She looks like one of those rap guys girlfriends

Chemotherapy absolutely changed my life, does that count?

The front fell off.

Thirty years ago, I told a friend that Australians come from Australia, Romanians come from Romania, and Canadians come from Canadia. She called it Canadia for thirty years.

We’ve been together for ten years and she’s only just found out that it’s actually called Canada. Boy am I in trouble.

Here are some useful Australian phrases:

• Flat out like a lizard drinking (working hard)
• we’re not here to fuck spiders (you’re wasting time, get on with the work)
• 40¢ short of a shout (not quite right in the head)
• How’d you be? (Are you well?)
• Living the dream (I am well, thank you)
• See you when I’m looking at you (goodbye)

Seriously? She almost vomited because the photos didn’t match? Give me a fucking break!