The Not Happy Thread

I just want to "like" this little bit, sorry you've got problems, from one who has his own

 

They are long standing problems @Iain. I deal with them pretty well ordinarily. It's just when my impulse control appears to be getting the better of me, it's a bit scary. Sorry for yours too. We all have our crosses to bear.

 

When I got to work I went over to the sort and started sorting out various boxes and then sliding them to the scanner person so they can put them in the containers associated with the city they're being sent to. About an hour and a half in the sort we started to get too many boxes coming our way. Me and the guys to the left and right of me fought to keep up as the belt kept pouring more and more boxes our way (keep in mind that not all of the boxes were ours so we had to look out for our own and let the others roll down the belt). Half of the boxes were either really fucking big or heavy as fuck so we had to struggle flip them over as fast as possible to find the sticker saying if they were ours or not and in doing so made us miss the other smaller boxes. The boxes we did find we placed on the slope. Soon the slope itself was overflowing with boxes we slid down to it so we had to resort to throwing them on top of each other so they didn’t fall back onto the belt and mess up the flow of the other handlers down the line. My scanner person kept getting on my fucking case because the boxes kept interrupting her as she was scanning the ones closest to her. I was pissed because I had no other fucking choice and she failed to understand that. Then one of the higher ups next to us cursed out some other higher up because she and the other scanner people were being overloaded with the boxes. It pissed me off a bit because being there for a while and dealing with her fucking attitude sucks and when she wasn't working her narcissism irked the living shit out of me. After a while when we got the boxes in order it was a less lot hectic, but I was still pissed. I only worked there for 3 weeks and I'm getting tired of the job already.

 

Ohhhhh, gosh. That sounds like an I Love Lucy episode from hell. With a demonic laugh track. Do they have a lot of turnover at that company?

EDIT: Write it up. With dialogue and characters and all the rest of it. Make a short story or a flash fiction piece out of it. Write it up.

 

Another rejection. Damn! I spent 3 days writing that article

 

Annoying that it wasn't accepted. Phooey. So what happens now? Can you edit it and submit it somewhere else?

 

It's the lean month of summer, when they cut back hours at my part time retail job, school hasn't started up yet (so I have no sub teaching work), and I've used up my cash reserves from the spring. I'm way short for paying my mortgage, but since my stepfather died, my mom can't help me with it. Then last night after work, it was dark and raining and I overcompensated trying to avoid hitting the median on the left turn coming out of the shopping center. I hit another car in the right hand lane instead. She might or might not turn it in--- she only has a scratch in her driver's side door--- but my right front fender is dented and I can't get my passenger side door open. The guy at my garage tells me it has to operate so I can pass state inspection. And my inspection is due by the end of this month. There is no money (or credit) to pay the insurance deductible. None.



I'm feeling very existential about this. As in, if I were a different sort of person who wasn't so easily screwed over, I would still have a decent-paying professional job and I could meet my obligations like a responsible human being.

 

It's FedEx so yes.

 

LOL. A lady at church was telling me the other day that I should quit my job at the Big Blue Box Store and go work for our local FedEx branch instead. Great benefits, she said, and "There's a lot of room for advancement and higher pay, because there's so much turnover." Uh, you think maybe they have all that turnover for a reason?

I would much rather be a full time teacher, or architect, or whatever than work at the BBBS. But it sounds like employment heaven compared to what you face at FedEx.

 

There's me and two other rookies. We've been at the job for a month and we're already looking for other jobs because the hours suck (3am-8am), it's too far away (well for me at least) and they dump too much work on you in that short amount of time.

 

I lament when people claim moral superiority over people who don't fit with their views, demonize them as much as possible, and blame them for everything wrong with society. It's one thing to disagree with others after you've genuinely tried to understand why they think what they think and genuinely sought the aspects of rationality in them. It's another to say these people are just too stupid, too biased, or too uneducated to understand why you are right and they are wrong. It's a ridiculous self-delusion people take into thinking they know the objective solution to normative questions and if others truly understood a specific set of information as well as they do, then the others will obviously reach the same answer that they did. They ignore the total effects of the environment on their views, readily willing to admit that their environment has affected what they have seen versus what others have seen, but not willing to allow that their environment also affected how they interpreted each thing.

The saddest truth about when people act like this isn't that these people are detracting from their ability to think logically; the saddest truth is that these people don't genuinely care about the others they're supposedly trying to help. They only care about making the world better for themselves and others like them (i.e. the superior group), and what they ideally want is for the inferior people to become copies of themselves. They are exhibiting a different form of the same bullshit that they condemn the inferior group for holding. Their form of bullshit may be more palatable than the bullshit from the ones they condemn, but they're still peddlers of shit nonetheless.

I'm certainly not arguing for everyone to stop holding views on things, but I am arguing that everybody should give themselves a reminder every now and then of the subjectivity of their views and of the absolute necessity of genuinely looking for the aspects of rationality in opposing viewpoints. Holding views shouldn't be about each individual believing their view is objectively the best given the set of information they know; it should be about each individual believing their view is the best for him/herself to hold (not necessarily best for others) given the set of information they know.

 

You're wong.

 

Just watched YouTube videos about North Korea for sheer curiosity.

I'm now horrified and depressed. =(

 

A high school classmate of mine is in prison, and he belongs there. Like a loose tooth, however, every so often I google his name, and check the state prison records to see that he's still alive.

We were friends once.

He pleaded guilty to statutory rape after being caught having a sexual relationship with one of his students at the high school where he taught.

As is right and proper, rape shield laws have hidden the name of his victim, but one always hopes that she was able to grow up, get whatever help that she needed, and lead a normal life.

The last time I searched his name, at the bottom, it said "Searches related to [name redacted]" and listed results with a young woman's name, about the right age, that link to her obituary.

 

That's...wow...

Jesus, I don't even know what to say here. o___o

 

Lord have mercy.

 

Well, I just had a horrific dream where some drunken redneck tried to murder his baby son (named Obi-Wan Kenobi, for some reason) by strapping him in this full body-sized contraption on a tree so he'd die from the elements, all while the son screamed for help. No one came.

 

This is silly. Some things are subjective but many things are objective. A policy that helps 1% and hurts 99% is not good for the majority. If you support that policy, and you're part of the 99% that doesn't benefit from it, you're making a mistake. Plain and simple. People can be wrong. Not everything is subjective. That's why we administer exams.

 

MAYDAY! MAYDAY!! MAYDAY!!! ANXIETY CAREENING OUT OF CONTROL!! IT'S SPIRALING INTO THE STRATOSPHERE, ALL COMMUNICATIONS LOST!!! OH THE HUMANITY!!!!

 

The Fall semester starts tomorrow, and yesterday I downloaded and was reading the syllabus for one of my classes... and something caught my eye, the grading scale. The professor of the course, who also happens to be the head of the Criminal Justice program for all the Eastern Kentucky regional campuses, is using a grading scale like I've never seen before.

GRADING SCALE

A = 100-95%

B = 94- 85%

C = 84-75%

D = 74-65%

F = below 65%

A *95%*!!!!!!!!!! to get an A? Keep in mind this is a 388 course, that is also one of the core curriculum courses for the major, and considered one of the most difficult courses because it is listed as "writing intensive."

A 95%%%% I'm not the type of person to just let something get to me and stew inside, so I sent him a message asking why he was making it so difficult to get an A in the course. His response was that he has always been that way and he expects a lot from his students. Now keep in mind this is the same counselor that once told me NOT to take courses with certain professors because they would be GPA killers. Yet here he is doing the exact same thing. I also wrote him a story about something that happened at the end of the Spring semester.

This is a true story:

Basically I was told I could either just deal with the grading system, take the course online from a different professor, which is more expensive and more difficult because you don't get to actually get to meet the professor, or drive over an hour each way each day of class from where I live, to the main campus.

What do you guys think about the situation? Have you ever heard of a college professor having a grading scale like that?

 

That's...professional courtesy demands that I say "unusual." I'm surprised that your school allows professors to set their own percentage levels for specific letter grades. The uni I work at (and I only teach lower level required courses) allows us to set our percentages within the syllabus, for example Homework is 30% of your grade, Quizzes 25 percent, etc, but at the end of the semester we simply submit the percentage of possible points each student earned, and the school handles the rest. I could tweak my syllabus to make a course easier or harder to get a good score in by adjusting the weighting. For example, I grade homework as complete, partial, or not submitted, while written assignments are individually graded. Weighting homework heavier makes the course "easier", while weighting written assignments heavier makes the course "harder" to get a good grade in, even if the material is the same.

Have you thought of speaking to the Dean of the department? I had to do that once in college when a professor refused to give us the grading scale. Not a great option, but it might be worth a try.

 

You probably aren't going to believe me when I say this, given that Eastern Kentucky is a fairly large state funded university, but the Dean of the Criminal Justice department is... his brother.

 

I just have to say that having depersonalization episodes is the most terrifying and frustrating thing in the world. Specially when you have a deadline the following day. I just hope sleep makes it all better

 

Ouch. Dunno then, good luck?

 

I'm kicking myself for deciding to buy GTA:V on my X-Box One game store when I could've spent that money buying the DLCS for Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.

THEN I HAD THE EXCELLENT IDEA TO UNINSTALL EVERYTHING TO FREE UP SPACE!!! SO NOW I HAVE TO REINSTALL THEM BACK IN AND HOPE I DIDN'T LOSE MY SAVE FILES!!!

I am a complete, utter, idiot of catastrophic levels.