AngryDeuce

I’d have to look at my bill(s) but long story short, every time I visit the doctor, I get billed by two seemingly separate entities for merely visiting them. Everything else they do is a separate line item on their respective bills. So if it’s not a copay, what is it? A visit fee? All I know is I either pay it or I get harassed incessantly so I pay it.

Definitely. Like I think a lot of people forget that the older generation of games, like the 8bit era especially, were arcade ports that were designed to eat quarters and not really modified much when moved to console. That was the main reason it was like, “here’s your three lives to get through the next 15 levels and when you’re out go fuck yourself start over loool”.

I was an 80s kid and have tons of nostalgia for the time and the games even but to put it simply, there were not many games back then that you were getting more than a couple hours out of unless you were getting your shit pushed in constantly due to the artificial difficulty designed to suck up those quarters at the arcade. Even games like the original Legend of Zelda, if you know what to do ahead of time youre only talking a few hours of actual content. For platformers it was far less…Ninja Gaiden, a brutally difficult game…turn on invincibility and you can speed run that shit in like what, 20 minutes?

And not to toot my own horn but there would be games I paid $50 for that Id have done in an afternoon and then what? Nothing, play again I guess. Which sometimes was worthwhile, other times not so much.

Even later the ethos was still there, just instead of the quarter stealing mechanic, it was the “dont let them finish it in a rental period” mechanic…they wanted people to buy, not rent.

But, I do definitely miss the simplicity. No fuckin achievement chasing bullshit, no fucking unlocks, no dlc…they couldnt as easily release 40% of a game and lock the remaining 60% behind season passes and shit.

And of course having the whole game be dependent on multi-player and an active community for it to worth a shit beyond the first 60 daya. How many full price AAA games out there that lasted a few mere months befoee the server was a ghost town and nothing to do in the single player game.

Cest la vie lol

God on the PC end of things youd get like a literal book with some games. Keyboard overlays for controls, posters, all sorts of fun shit.

My bills literally list them as separate line items, theres the clinic copay, then the doctor copay.

Occasionally I even get two separate bills, one from the hospital, one from the Dr. Guessing their practice is the source of the one and the hospital system is the other?

Either way its fuckin annoying to be paying out of pocket 30+ bucks only to be told the equivalent of “gee i dunno take Tylenol I guess”.

Oh, you see an actual doctor? I haven’t seen an actual doctor in the last like 3 years, always just a physicians assistant or other nurse.

Still get charged the dr copay though, funny how that works.

I wouldnt be surprised if the doctor is an AI construct and theyre just running my symptoms through whatever insurance company provided AI bullshit at this point.

Wonder if she’s going to end up committing suicide via 2 or 3 rounds to the back of her skull…

The best part is there was literally an MS service outage just this afternoon. Email was seemingly flowing but admin portal was fucked and returned nothing but “service unavailable”.

“Id love to, you know, land on the moon, but unfortunately it can’t verify my license with the server so most of the functionality is locked out. Did you guys forget to pay the sub again this month?”

Well said.

I dont hate my job. I hate the fact that my job sucks because everything we do is first and foremost a monetary transaction that is being governed by the principle of minimum investment for maximum productivity, all so a handful of people at the pinnacle of the organization chart can make more money annually than their entire entry-level workforce combined. They could take a fraction of that money and hire enough people that it wouldn’t be a constant fuckin grind but they won’t because why own 4 houses when you could own 5, or 6?

The world’s billionaires, roughly 3500 people, hold $20 Trillion in combined assets. Split evenly among the world population, that would be enough to give every single person on the planet nearly $2500. Doesn’t sound like much until you consider that there are currently 8.3 billion people on the planet. Each one of those billionaires corresponds to roughly 2.4 million people. The population of Houston, TX per single billionaire.

The average lifetime earnings of someone in the US is 1.85 million dollars today. Someone with just 1 billion dollars has the equivalent of 540 lifetimes of earnings. Elon Musk is currently worth 823 billion dollars. 444,420 lifetimes worth of earnings. One person.

Its not the job that sucks. Its the fact that I have to be miserable doing it that sucks, and all so a small handful of people can amass more wealth than some entire countries GDP.

My problem is if im not bed by say, 930, I might as well just plan on getting 4 hours of sleep before work because im going to be up until 1 in the morning at the very least.

This “second wind” shit is for the birds. I dont want this wind. I want to sleep!

I thought this was a common thing lol

I’ve been ordering twice as many fries as I actually want because after 15 years of marriage I goddamn well know that despite her saying she doesn’t want any fries she’s going to eat half my fries lol

So did he know his judo well?

I skip the juice, but coffee plus a cigarette is pretty much laxative in my experience lol

Only positive thing he ever contributed to the world.

Its a shame more of the people today that emulate him don’t commit fully and do the same thing, and just spare us all the bullshit suffering, before it inevitably finds itself there anyway, which it will…it always does eventually. Their way is not sustainable.

They’re like the randoms I get playing chess online that refuse to lay down their fucking King when a mate is inevitable. They’ll even say as much in the game chat. Like for fucks sake, can we not?

Just because people don’t have the energy for your bullshit doesn’t mean they are neurodivergent.

Uh, actually, it kinda does mean that, because the vast majority of people aren’t so exhausted by responding to “Hey, hows it going?” with a normal, human response that they not only completely opt out of doing it but then go on the internet and complain about how unfair it is that they’re expected to behave in line with what is defined as ‘the norm’.

Here’s the questions you need to ask yourself: Why do I feel like being asked to engage with a person that is asking a normal question is equivalent to being forced to engage with someone that is treating me poorly? Why am I seemingly unable to separate the two, and conflate participating in social niceties with being abused? Why is the social equivalent of a papercut and a shotgun blast to the face the same in my eyes, and why do both generate a similar response?

But whatever you do, if you can’t handle being expected to respond to “hey hows it going?” with some variation of “not bad, you?”, for the love of Christ, please don’t willingly seek out employment where a key facet of the job is doing just that, or at the very least if you do, save the blinking and acting like Im inconveniencing you for asking a normal-ass question like “Is this the line to pay?” If you can’t even handle that, that is not at all the fault of the person on the other side of the dialog.

Oh, believe me, I know that’s not just a GenZ thing. I’ve worked with people that were in their 60s that would pull the same sort of shit. I think it’s human nature to react negatively to being asked to perform an annoying task, and there are many shades of gray in whether the task itself is justifiable or not. Where I differ though is that in my own experience, so long as a request was reasonable, even if the request itself sucked, I didn’t refuse to do the thing, or at least, knew that if I refused to do the thing that it might have negative consequences on my continued employment.

I’m not a slave driver…believe me, I am very selective with delegating and like I said, I have literally never once in my life, not ever, asked someone to do something that I haven’t done myself and know intimately what it entails. I’ll delegate the task and even help them along by giving them guidance on the most efficient way to complete it…way more than I ever got, that’s for damn sure; where Im at now had a real sink or swim mentality before I came along and was able to shape things more constructively when it came to developing our new hires and that’s reflected in the changes in our turnover over those years.

But anyway, getting back to the point, it’s not just a GenZ thing, but it is something I’ve noticed at a much higher percentage in our younger interns and entry level employees then the years pre-Covid. Everyone is different, but that weird sense that they can have their cake and eat it, too…they can just opt out of doing what’s expected of them and still somehow expect to not have any consequences for doing that…that’s the thing that I see more and more as time goes on among the fresh hires where Im at. The surprisedpikachu when they’re getting talked to about the fact that they’ve rolled in a minimum of 20 minutes late every day this week with no explanation and that’s not okay. Being accused of being unreasonable for talking to them about it in the first place, like I’m out of line with the expectation. That’s the attitude that bothers me, and it’s more common then I’ve ever seen it before.

Never said that. I worked retail for twenty years, dude. I went back to college in my mid 30s.

I know what the job is. I know what the expectations are. You need to examine why you consider both “Hey, can you help me find something?” and “You’re worthless to me and I don’t care about you” as equivalent in your mind, because that is the shit people are complaining about.

Nobody is telling retail employees they need to take abuse. What we’re telling retail employees is, being asked to assist a customer in itself does not constitute abuse, so please, hold the ire when I come to the customer service desk, the place that exists for that explicit purpose, and ask a simple question. That is literally what you are being paid to do.

I trust them to not be as bad as the MAGA types. That’s why it’s the lesser of two evils. I know that they’re evil fucks in their own way, believe me.

I want a third choice, I truly do. I’ve long gotten behind third party candidates, and pulled their lever at the voting booth. I voted for Nader in 2000. I participate in the primaries. But at the end of the day, if my candidate of choice doesn’t get nominated, I’m not going to abstain in the general if the choice is between the soulless vampire democrat and the Christofascist MAGAt that is running on a platform of making homosexuality punishable by death. I doubt there is even a majority of people voting for that democrat thinking they’re the next FDR, they just know that by not pulling that handle, they’re possibly going to give the Christofascist the win. We’re choosing the devil we can live with versus the devil we can’t.

Unfortunately, until we somehow get legal mechanisms in place that codify the basic human rights of the people the MAGAts are targeting in these fucking purges (that’s basically what they are), and solidify the ability of the government to make it literally impossible for this kind of shit to happen going forward, this is what it boils down to. I want election reform, I want ranked choice voting, I want the level of representation to be adjusted so that the number of reps in congress isn’t hard locked so that we can have more abilities for niche candidates to achieve the office and break the hold these two parties have, I want publicly funded elections, I want strict rules regarding the media as concerns elections. I have a feeling you and I both have a very similar set of values and ideas as to what constitutes a functional democracy.

All Im trying to say is, don’t take people voting for democrats as endorsement of their bullshit. It’s not that, believe me, it is not that. It’s just the only other realistic alternative, the MAGAt, is so, so much worse, that we have no choice but to hold our nose and do whatever we need to do to prevent that asshole from getting into office…even if that is voting for the lesser of two evils.

That’s what blows my mind with that specific argument…that people hesitate before just talking because it’s considerate. I appreciate it when Im in the middle of composing an email and the person standing at the door to my office gives me a second to finish the sentence Im writing. Im sure the people that are standing behind the counter have similarly been doing something that requires concentration and appreciated that someone gave them a minute to get to a stopping point before taking their attention away from it.

How the blue fuck that could ever be interpreted as “stupid” or “annoying” is completely beyond my understanding. Or how we’re just waiting for someone to say “Oh hi” or “Ill be right with you” or “Can I help you with something?” before interrupting their work is somehow, in itself, worthy of being treated the same as if you just came in dropping F bombs screaming at them.

So I guess that’s the disconnect for me…how they literally cannot see the difference between a bog-standard customer service type of interaction and someone legitimately being an asshole to them. To them, they are both equivalent. Anything that involves them interacting with someone they don’t feel like interacting with is some sort of slight or imposition. It’s totally fine to be that way in your personal life, but not when you’re standing at the fucking information kiosk at the hospital, being paid to work at the information kiosk at the hospital, where your job is…wait for it…providing information to people that come to you at the fucking hospital.

To a degree, I do agree with you. However, if you are of the legal age where you are even allowed to hold a job, period, you shouldn’t have to be trained on how to interact with human beings. That training should have happened long before you came to us looking for a job. If they’re even hired in the first place, they must have demonstrated that they are capable of having a conversation or else they wouldn’t have been brought on.

I mean really that’s the whole reason we do the interview…we don’t give a shit about their technical skills really, because that’s all stuff they will be trained on. What we give a shit about is that they’re capable of interacting with other people in a professional manner. If someone is sitting for an interview and just blinks at us whenever we ask them a question about their application, they’re not going to be offered a job. So its pretty clear that for the interview, at least, they demonstrated that they have that base skill or else I wouldn’t be training them in the first place.

So then why the fuck is it that all those skills they demonstrated they have during the interview evaporate the minute they’re on the payroll? Like do I really have to train someone that if the phone rings at their desk, they need to answer it? That if they receive a direct email from someone, they need to respond to it? That if someone asks them a question, they need to answer, and not just stare at them?

I can teach people the technical shit all day long, and literally do it all day long. But I should not have to teach them that a ringing telephone needs to be answered, especially if the job they were hired to do was, in part, answering the fucking phone. And there are people out there that still think that I should have to do that, or worse, that Im the jerk for expecting it in the first place. Just such a fuckin clown show all around.