Carl Cravens @CarlCravens@mastodon.xyz

Realized today that when I make hiring decisions, I am changing the course of people's lives.

Should I be watching out for the TVA? I might be making alternate time-lines. 😨

Funny how Amazon Prime gets more expensive and Amazon gets more and more lax about their 2-day delivery... they used to give me a credit when my 2-day package was late. Now they're just, "Meh, maybe tomorrow or the next day."

"Out for delivery" and then "sorry" is most common when they use their own drivers. Underpay contract drivers who don't belong to a union and quality of service goes down. Who would have thunk it!?

(No blame to those poor drivers in these conditions, though.)

Confused my server by asking for a hot fudge malt. Then asked for a black and white, and the person behind the order taker knew what I wanted. But everyone around here calls it a shake, even if it has malt powder in it, leaving me to wonder if I'm getting what I wanted. I did, and it is good.

I realized this morning, it wasn't so much _him_ as the period in my life it reminded me of. The time before my parents divorced, before he started feeling threatened, before he started picking at me with little insults, and hit me when he thought I was going to hit him. The time in my life that I associate with him and traditional shaving was the time I felt safe with him and my family life felt secure. Before it all fell apart.
2/2

My dad and I didn't get along well starting in my teenage years. Years later I understood it was because he felt threatened by his adopted child surpassing him. He had to keep me in my place, keep me from getting uppity.
So then it baffled me why the images and smells of traditional shaving, shaving cream, aftershave, would make me think so fondly of him.
1/2

This is where I miss my new keyboard having a 10-key... when I want to pick up a paper in my left hand and type numbers on my right. It always surprised me at work how many people don't miss the 10-key because they never learned to use it, even slowly. I did a 10-key trainer for temp work in my 20's and got reasonably fast at it, and it still feels really natural to me.

"A new Windows experience brings you closer to the people and things you love."

Sorry, Microsoft, this is not what I look for in an operating system. I just need you to run some apps of my choosing. (Primarily games, as I do everything else on Linux, which has no pretensions of being more than an operating system.)

I mean, I gotta admit, I was never very good at competitive games, and now in my 50's my reflexes are trash... there's a noticeable lag between "I see that" and "I need to click to block that". I find myself going, "WTF, why didn't I catch that!?"

Nothing like a 7-game losing streak in your most recent favorite competitive game to kind of put you off of playing ranked. :|
The lower I get, the less people cooperate, and pre-made teams are more likely to beat us. It's a vicious cycle. If I play with my kid, we play in Gold/Platinum and win games, and I sometimes get MVP... so I know it's not just me.

One of the interesting things about the days of video game arcades was so little control over what games you had access to. Visiting an arcade in the next town over was a big deal, because they had different games than the convenience stores in my small town. I remember when I first encountered The Dragon's Lair, at a huge arcade while on vacation, plus all the other older games that I'd never seen. Sometimes there was a feeling of "play all I can now, because who knows when I'll see it next."

So funny to order from a tiny part-time business, and get a formal packing slip that calls out SKUs and they're all single-digit numbers.

SKU: 3

So far in my razor blade show-down, Astra and Voskhod are the top contenders... coincidence that they're both Russian-made? Astra is a sub-label of Gillette, but Voskhod is Rapira, and half the printing on the package is in Cyrillic.

Voskhod (Восхо́д) means "dawn" or "ascent" and was the name of the first multi-manned space missions. Is it coincidence that Astra has a similar space-themed name?

Listening to disco on vinyl and writing employee reviews with a cat in my lap, like you do.

"There will be stickers provided that you can wear to share your current level of comfort."

Oh, yeah. "Stressed by a crowded work space, please take your conversation to a meeting room." "Uncomfortable in large meetings where I have to compete to be heard." "Lunch is my quiet-time, please don't be offended if I decline your invitation today."

These are the stickers I need.

So one company posted their guidelines about reopening the office, and the first bit is:

"Start with empathy: Everyone will have different levels of comfort being among other people in the office..."

And it occurs to me this is good advice _all the time_, regardless whether we think the office will make us sick. Some of us find working in a crowded, potentially noisy office stressful and draining, and people who find the office invigorating need to understand that.