Category Archives: Work

Cooking

Domestic Goddess, Food, Recipes

In which there are things I’ve cooked. (Or baked! I guess baking is a different category.)

I cook a lot, for a variety of reasons. Eating out is expensive. I live in the middle of nowhere and can only go out to eat if he (and his car) are home. I’ve become an experienced cook and it’s enjoyable. I feel vaguely guilty about the massive amounts of Doordash I had while living in Uptown (as in, I was personally a major contributor to the immanent collapse of restaurant culture and the rise of the shitty gig economy). There’s nowhere to get what I want to eat so I have to make it myself. And so on.

Anyway, I cook a lot! Here’s a bunch of stuff from the past week or so. A lot of it is bread-based because now I always have bread dough in my fridge!

Here’s dal makhani and naan:

The dal makhani was made in the Instant Pot and I sort of winged it, after reading about three different recipes, based on the ingredients I had on hand. It has a fuckton of Kashmiri red chili powder in it but is somehow rich rather than spicy-hot?

Here’s kachumber with masala eggs (sorta followed that recipe but not really), papadam, and chai:

Here’s a French carrot soup, potage crécy:

And a brie sandwich to eat with it because I fucking love a brie sandwich on good baguette:

And pizzas. Three kinds of pizzas! On homemade dough!

Red: tomato sauce, ricotta, white mushrooms, aged gouda, dried oregano, red pepper flakes
Bianca: olive oil, flake salt, sliced garlic, ricotta, parm-reg, fresh thyme, black pepper

(I’m going to try the bianca with marinated artichoke hearts and post-bake dollops of garlicky tomato sauce next. It’ll be epic!)

And this one, which I made only because I had all the ingredients and did not expect to enjoy but freakin’ LOVED:

Brie: apple, brie, honey, slivered almonds, fresh thyme

(Himself was going to make himself a green olive and hamburger pizza, too, but never got around to it.)

Here’s boule with fromage blanc, olive oil, and black pepper — a new favorite snack:

So much so I incorporated it into my Sunday brunch:

Buttered eggs, tomato and mushrooms, baguette with fromage blanc, cafe au lait.

(The cheesemaker at work says he knows how to make fromage blanc, so hopefully now that I know I love it I’ll be able to talk him into making it from time to time!)

I eat well, supremely well, buuuuut mostly by myself. My better half is in a junk food phase these days, and eats a lot of delicious pre-prepared garbage (frozen stuff like burritos, tots, and chicken wings, boxed mac ‘n’ cheese, ramen, shit like that) and, like, a ton of bacon sandwiches.

Half the time he refuses to eat what I’ve cooked, but I’m pretty sure I did a similar thing when I was his age, like, Fuck it, I’m an adult, and I’m going to eat what I want and not what I SHOULD. I mean, he did eat some of the pizzas and the carrot soup; it’s not like he’s not getting any vegetables (plus he says he eats salads at work most of the time because they’re preferable to whatever’s on the hot table). In other words, there’s a lot of stuff in the freezer lately because I get bored of it before it’s gone!

The complete lack of Mexican food in this post can be read as implying that I ate lunch at Patty’s a couple times last week, because that’s what actually happened!

Bread Baking

Domestic Goddess, Recipes

In which it’s the #breadin5 recipe!

Okay. So. There are cheeses that need to be enjoyed with good bread. Not the crap from the Safeway bakery, but good bread. What they call artisan bread now, what used to be rustic peasant bread.

Bread you can only get from fancy bakeries now.

I got too spoiled with those Salty Tart baguettes at my last job, okay? Those baguettes were a revelation. I mean, there is no better way to eat a gooey, creamy, funky French brie than with a real baguette. We don’t have gooey, creamy, funky French bries, really, but we do have some brie and a bunch of other cheeses that would benefit from good bread.

Anyway, now I live in rural Oregon and we don’t have a fancy bakery. We have a Safeway, and their bread is pretty, and well-displayed in the store, and it all tastes exactly the same and the crust and crumb are too soft and too bland and it’s just depressing.

So, maybe it’s time for me to do that refrigerator bread thing. Yeah. Maybe. It was all the rage awhile back and maybe now I have the experience to understand it.

Yesterday I made this recipe. Sorta. What I did was:

3 cups 100F tap water
1 packet yeast
2 teaspoons salt
6-1/2 cups (2 pounds) flour

I used about 5 cups of King Arthur Unbleached All Purpose and about one cup of atta (Indian whole wheat flour, which I bought for roti/chapati).

Mixed it in my largest mixing bowl with the wire handle of one of my spatulas, covered it with plastic wrap, and left it in the oven (with the light on) for two hours to rise. It got huge.

Moved it to the fridge until it was well chilled (maybe 4 hours or so?), and then made a pizza with it.

I generally hate doughy pizzas and always prefer a thinner crust, but this dough is GOOD.

(The pizza was made with leftover garlic butter from an artichoke I ate, store-bought Parmesan Reggiano tomato sauce, a vanishingly rare (as in it’s no longer being made and there’s not much in existence) goat milk gouda I got from work, red pepper, white onion, and fresh spinach. It was fucking fantastic.)

Today I made a boule.

The dough broke when I lifted it out of the bowl, so I shaped the loaf out of two pieces. The piece on the inside exploded through the scores!

Oven spring for the win!

In the oven was a cast iron griddle and a stainless steel bowl. When pre-heated, put the loaf on parchment paper on the griddle, poured hot tap into the bowl for steam.

Also misted the inside of the oven with a spray bottle of water four or five times during baking, which probably took around 40 minutes or so, for additional moisture.

The crust is fantastic, crispy and delicate. The crumb is soft and chewy. Next time I’ll let the loaf sit on the counter for 90 minutes, get bigger holes in the crumb.

The recipe is supposed to make four 1-pound loaves, so there’s probably enough dough left for two or three baguettes. Might bake those up this afternoon and then mix another batch of dough!

Or might let the dough sit and develop in the fridge for a few days first.

Anyway, this dough is cool. With some in the fridge, you can have any bread you want in very little time–a pizza, a boule, a baguette, flatbread, focaccia, dinner rolls, whatever.

—
Here’s the mother recipe for this fridge method.

And here’s the original book:

On Working in the Cheese Industry

Work

In which my job is SO fantastic, and I truly enjoy it. (What a blessing, to not hate one’s job!)

Last year, I worked in a cheese shop in Minneapolis.

It carried hundreds of domestic and European cheeses, and it was really fun. I learned a ton about cheeses and cured meats, my palate evolved, and I even took online cheese classes.

I got into cheese, you might say. (It’s so much more pleasant than taking calls for Comcast, or slaving for Home Depot.)

Anyway, we’ve moved across the country, and now I work in a creamery.

I work in an actual creamery for a man who actually makes cheeses. It’s so cool! There are about three tons of cheese in the store at any given time, and many of them are truly wonderful. The coffee cheddar, the aged Tipsy Jersey, the cider jack, the ricotta salata–!

And he’s letting me expand the front end, the retail cheese shop: I’ve ordered goat and soft cheeses, as well as crackers and a couple cured meats–

Which means: we can now do cheese trays! For the holidays!

The ‘exotic’ stuff (bries, and goat cheeses, and prosciutto) won’t be here until next week, but the trays themselves arrived and we’ve already started. Just LOOK at this beauty:

(The salami is Italian, but the cheeses are all ours, and the almonds are Californian!)

I very much hope to help turn the place into THE one-stop cheese shop in the region; even though it’s a bit out of the way we’re still in wine country and on the tourism maps, and we’ll be able to do amazing high end stuff with mostly local, artisan cheeses and soft and goat cheeses and cured meats. And nuts, fruits, local mustards, local honey, local wine vinegar made from local wine…

Much of what I do at work is typically done, these days, by machines: cutting, packaging, and labeling the cheeses we produce for retail sale; but I’m abjectly grateful to have such a job that hasn’t been replaced by mechanization.

What a machine can’t do is be a cheesemonger: one of the funnest experiences is selling a cheese tray to someone who says, when you ask what they want included, “Oh, I trust your experience and knowledge, please choose for me!”

I’m going to join the American Cheese Society in 2020 and am working toward becoming a CCP, basically a certified cheesemonger, the year after.

Because I’m in my 50’s and need a hobby, I guess? One with certifications? Because I’m originally from IT, and what’s a job if you can’t sit a test?

I love cheese.

A Proper Kitchen Table

Blurbs, Domestic Goddess

In which it’s perfect and I love it so much!

We got a kitchen table (from an old BMI co-worker of mine, who offered it via Instagram when I posted we’d gotten this house to rent and needed furniture — thanks, Mike!) and it’s in the kitchen now and it’s exactly the right size and shape and it’s so great.

Like, I couldn’t have gone out looking and found a table more exactly what should be in this kitchen. It fits the space perfectly. It’s sturdy and rectangular and comfortable and not too tall.

This kitchen is ideal. I don’t know if I’ve ever liked a kitchen as much as I like this one, even if the fridge is in a sort of weird spot. There are windows, and soon there will be a washer and dryer (thanks, aunt Sue!), and there’s tons of counter space and tons of cupboards and it’s both big and cozy, and there’s a dishwasher!

And over the table is a bank of daylight ceiling lights, so it’ll be a perfect place to read and write or watercolor or knead bread or mend or sew, even at night.

I ate Sunday brunch (pot of tea, oven roasted potatoes, and a broccoli & cheddar fritatta) at the table today! With place mats and dishes and everything! Hurrah!

The table is used and worn, but I fucking love it, exactly as it is. It’s like it was made to be in this house!

The only problem with this house is that it’s too great. Next time we move will be a disappointment no matter what, but hopefully it won’t be for years.

Gardening

Domestic Goddess, Food

In which I’m already planning next year’s tomatoes!

While there is a back yard on the west side of the house so enormous it could support an absolutely giant garden, there’s also a huge shade tree back there, and tall fences, so I’m not really sure about sunlight.

Plus, to put a garden in the back, I’d have to do a lot of work, from rock picking to soil improvement to renting a tiller, and to be honest I just don’t have that level of interest when all I want are a few tomatoes and some fresh herbs.

There are already raised beds out front, plenty big enough to grow food in, so that’s what I’m going to do! They’re on the east side, but I think they’ll get plenty of sun, at least in the morning, even with the big tree in the front yard.

Right now, the raised beds are in shadow, but it’s late October. I think in the summer they’d be getting some sunlight this time of day, even if indirect, through the tree.

So I’ve been reading up on container gardening. Apparently I want to compost and mulch the beds about this time of year, so the soil can improve over the winter. Hopefully next weekend I can run to Ace or Home Depot and grab a few bags of each. Might also stab the dirt some to loosen and aerate it.

I’d like to find some sort of shrubby tomato breeds, maybe something called cherry cascade, and maybe one each of Better Boy and roma, too. Also edible flowers like nasturtiums and violas, some lettuces that can be harvested leaf by leaf, like endive, maybe a pole bean plant, and then fill it out with herbs: parsley and mint for tabbouli, cilantro for Mexican and Indian dishes, and basil and oregano for Italian. Perhaps some lemon verbena or thyme, too.

Just enough to be fun and interesting without becoming a misery to maintain. If it gets enough light!

zone: 7a

Okay, everything’s just getting weird now

Admissions, Health, Work

In which I vent about the strange side effects of surviving for five decades.

I’ve been unusually healthy most of my life, I think.

Always felt robust and fine the majority of the time, barely even noticed my body. Had one surgery, wisdom teeth out, and a root canal. A ganglion cyst on my left wrist that cleared up on its own, as they do. No major broken bones or ER visits or in-patient hospital stays, or anything, really, beyond colds and flus. Have never had a regular GP my entire adult life.

I’ve felt truly fucking miserable, yes, but save the puke-inducing pain of a prolapsing uterine tumor it was always the mental pain of panic/anxiety rather than genuine physical malfunction.

Well, now my whole body is turning strange and foreign!

I have actual pain, low-level and fairly frequent: feet, knees, hips, and back. Usually from strain or extra activity, but sometimes just because I slept or moved weird. My hands have ached since I started banging them around at the cheese shop, and now I find it hard to squat during a 6 or 7 hour shift because it actually hurts to stand back up.

My hands and lower legs swell, especially at work (but also in a fairly predictable way throughout my cycle these past few years), and I now wear compression socks.

Today I walked home from work just past four o’clock — it’s a five minute walk, about two blocks — and, even though it’s mid-September, it’s 91F and humid and very sunny. The side of my body that was both sunward and exposed/not covered by my dress is burnt. Burnt! In five, six minutes! My left forearm and the outside of my left hand, and my neck and upper shoulder on the left side are red and hot and sunburned!

I mean, I do have very oily skin, and I’d just been working food service for seven hours so I’d been perspiring and was additionally covered with mist and damp from doing dishes, but damn! I used to tan; had to be out for hours to burn.

The other day I thought I had had an allergic reaction to some cucumber-aloe facial mist, but now I wonder if it might have been a reaction to the sun? I sat in the sun outside the coffee shop to write in my notebook, and was dark red everywhere the mist — and the sun — had been when I got home. (I rinsed off in cool water and the red cleared away, but now I’m not so sure it was the mist. I really don’t want to develop allergies; they sound like a pain in the ass.)

Aging is so, so strange. Total lesson in non-attachment, having one’s reliable, rarely-changing body come up with new and strange ways of being. I remember the first time my lower legs and ankles decided to swell up toward the end of my cycle (it was in my early 40’s), how freaked out and distressed I was at the idea that Something Was Very Wrong; now I’m used to it, more or less, I guess, but it doesn’t look particularly attractive.

And now instant sun burns? Really?! What the hell.

I’m also slowing down! I’d rather get up earlier and plod through my getting-ready-for-work process than haul ass through it, and I never thought my Type A ass would ever turn into such a person. And at work, well, now I’m glad I’ve always been focused on efficiency because I need that efficiency more than ever now. I find it hard to really rush, at least in a sustained way. (Most of my cheese shop co-workers are older folks, thank God, because I don’t think I could keep up with a bunch of 20-somethings anymore, and MAN is it fucking weird to say that.)

Being lazy and maybe working a bit slower than one should or could: that’s a decision. Now, my very best rush, when making sandwiches, for example, is not what it used to be, even if I do have a big cup of coffee in me. I have a hard time hauling ass like I used to, because I end up dropping shit or being messy and also I don’t really have the energy or ability to fully do so like I once did.

Then there’s also the questions of genes — how much of my experience of aging is just how this body is programmed to age — versus the decisions I’ve made: everything from vegetarianism to never being particularly physically active to partying to smoking for 31 years. Like, if I’d eaten a different diet and worked out, and never gone to Dead shows on LSD, would I still have these cankles? I’ll never know, since this body is the one I live in and there’s no control body to compare it to. But I do wonder, though.

Anyway, I don’t think I’m dying or anything, but I’m more aware of the body than I’ve ever been because it does stuff now, stuff it never used to. It reacts to the world in sudden and mildly alarming ways! It swells up, gets tired, aches, gets varicose veins (!), gurgles, and wakes up four times a night for no fucking reason at all. I think I’m getting a mole on the back of my left hand (?!), and probably age spots. My skin is thin and odd. My right eyelid sags. I might need a dermatologist for possible nascent skin tags on my throat. I may be too thin-skinned to do dishes at work without gloves; I suspect it can no longer tolerate the industrial soap, sanitizer, and bleach.

It’s just weird, getting older. That’s my whole screed: it’s just weird.

In short, I’ll be turning 50 in two weeks, and I totally feel it!

Update: So I’ve put a wet cloth on my burnt neck and after an hour and a half in the air conditioning the red’s nearly gone?

New job! And a UTI.

Health, Work

In which I was able to quit a job I very much did not enjoy and replace it with one that involves CHEESE.

I applied to, like, between 17 and 22 jobs over about a month’s time.

Two declined via email; none of the others even responded, save I think one that sent a “we received your application” message. One called me back for an interview. One.

Luckily, the one job I interviewed for hired me on the spot, so now I have a lovely P/T job right here in the neighborhood! It’s a one-block walk to work! The pay’s the same as the last job, nobody screams at me, and I get to taste yummy cheeses.

I work in a cheese shop inside a big liquor store. We make and sell sandwiches, sell cheeses and a few meats, jarred things like marinara, honey, salsas, bulk olive oil and balsamic vinegar, sweets, crackers, chips, olives, dolmas, pâtés, pastas, martini shakers, bottle stoppers, and baguettes. It’s a really fun little shop featuring a lot of local items — the sandwich breads and baguettes are baked a block away, and there are multiple Minnesota cheeses — plus a bunch of imported European treats.

My job involves customer service, sandwich-making, dishes, cashiering, sweeping and mopping, slicing meats and cheeses, weighing things and putting stickers on them, and keeping cold case temperature logs.

It’s so much better than taking calls for Comcast! Nobody yells at me! I get to eat cheese! I get sandwiches half off when I’m on the clock, and an employee discount on booze!

It’s so great. And I totally need the physical activity, so I basically just look at is as paid enforced exercise with some free socializing thrown in.

Plus: cheese tasting!

All the people I’ve worked with so far are lovely, the work is hard but not that hard (it’s not endless, cascading, unsolvable systemic customer service failures, but my feet do hurt), and I think my training is coming along well. Mostly I just need to memorize the sandwich recipes so I can make them more quickly without having to refer to the directions.

Oh, and tips! Not much, got about twenty bucks my first week, but it effectively made the pay rate a skosh higher than my previous job where people screamed at me half the time and all the employee-facing policies were hostile.

So: whoo! New job!

Yay!

In unrelated news, I went to Planned Parenthood on Monday for a UTI I think I’ve had for a month or more. The last time I had one I didn’t even know until the nurse called and demanded to know why I hadn’t told her I had a UTI two days before a surgery, so I guess my symptoms are typically mild? The dip was negative (they sent my sample off for culturing), but they gave me some pills anyway which I picked up across the street at Cub. I read the insert when I got home and was too freaked out to take them for two days because WHAT IF I’M THE ONE WHO GETS THE POTENTIAL SIDE-EFFECTS. (Anxiety is so stupid sometimes. Also, the last time I had a UTI was when I had that uterine fibroid, so I’m half convinced I’ve got another one, because ANXIETY IS SO STUPID SOMETIMES.)

Took my first two doses today, and believe I’m already feeling better, but I also think my period just started, so that’s another layer of feeling weird to confuse the symptoms. Who knows. Twenty-three day cycle, egad.

Aging while female is really no joke, no, not at all.

Depressed about work.

Soapbox, Work

In which I bitch about the job market.

I work for a distributed call center. (Yes, I’m white trash like that. Ye gods.)

A year ago, I moved off phones into a chat pilot, which was great. They made us take three chats at a time for awhile, which was fucking insane, but chats are chats and not calls.

Well, it’s been cancelled.

No more chat pilot. Finis. (Actually, it’s been turned into a proper department, so that’s why the pilot is over, but the contract to work it was given to another call center in Mumbai.) So, tonight, I was moved back, by my call center employer, to inbound phones.

It fucking SUCKED.

Taking calls for Giant Cable Company’s home security product is rough:

– One guy was a dick to me because he failed to pay his bill and got disconnected. This was somehow my fault.
– Another only responded to 40% of the things I said, and was unintelligible when he did respond (because the mic on his phone was garbage). He grunted and panted a lot. I was not able to solve his issue and he refused a tech visit.
– Another claimed slow internet (that diagnostics did not support; I think the real issue was a virus-infested laptop). Did the troubleshooting, issue not resolved, offered to send a tech. Caller was enraged that there weren’t any tech appointment times she liked, took it out on me.
– Another person was pissed because an install appointment had been moved for no apparent reason, which I completely understand. My department doesn’t handle installation appointments. Customer demanded a call back from the appropriate department the next day. Well, I can’t schedule callbacks from any department, not even my own. Sorry for the frustration. (You’d think they’d build a tool for that, but no: customers can schedule callbacks on the website, but it’s automated and just throws them into the goddamned queue with everyone else. It’s a raging insult, but hey, that’s corporate American customer service for you.)

I’m nice to people. I listen and empathize. I mirror. I try. I have very little ego left about any of it and don’t really take it personally when people are mad, but there’s so little I can actually do to help. I get paid (very little) to be ineffectual, replaceable, and to get yelled at. That’s how my job is designed. And it’s disappointing and frustrating for me. I used to be a fucking sysadmin. I had root on boxen, FFS!

I don’t have any authority. I don’t know the why or how. The company is too big, too broken, and too greedy. I am a cog; I am replaceable. Anybody who can sit in a chair can do my job. Turnover is fantastically high and the job is designed to take any warm body. I am expected to have no expertise.

The job itself is hostile: by the time my extension rings, the customer is already pissed off about navigating the IVR, authenticating, and long hold time. Tools don’t really work, I can only support some things and not others.

I have to say “I don’t know” a lot (but I’m not supposed to because the Quality Assurance document says “take ownership” right on it). Volume is always really high, because that’s how call centers work: they have historical call volume for this half hour on this day for the past decade, and never over-schedule employees. The majority of items tracked by metrics are hostile to customers and employees both (the shorter the calls, the better? really?) but are measured anyway and treated as real data.

You can’t say “deliver world-class service” and “keep your calls as short as possible” and mean both.

There’s almost nothing that isn’t terribly, terribly broken.

I do get to work from home, braless and shoeless, with no commute. But I also get shit on by both sides: tools that don’t work, problems I cannot solve, angry callers rightly frustrated by standard corporate American bullshit.

Obviously they told me chat was going away, so I’ve been job hunting. (Turned out it went away in 4-6 weeks rather than 4-6 months, but they did tell me, damn them to hell.) One place turned me down, twice, no idea why. Three others didn’t even acknowledge receipt of my application. A few national work-from-home places that say they hire in Minnesota have no Minnesota positions available, likely due to a minimum wage hike (expected in four years, if I understand it correctly).

I live in Uptown, so there’s work in the neighborhood but it’s mostly food service. I applied at a deli and a coffee shop; neither replied. I’d never get a front-of-house job because I’m no longer young and hot, don’t even want to bake pizzas, I haven’t waitressed in decades, and the office jobs want young, enthusiastic, hard-working college kids to work shit hours for ten bucks an hour, or people with obscure licenses.

I’m feeling like shit about it. I hate my job and want a better one, but work, as I’ve been saying for years and years, is awful. Low pay, awful hours, and this horrific expectation of total devotion to the job on the employee’s part, with nothing whatsoever in return from the employer! Random scheduling, uncomfortable environments, no bennies, no holidays, no hope of promotion. You’re just supposed to bust your ass and say thank you for the abuse. It’s a shitshow.

I don’t want to get abused by angry callers five nights a week. I don’t want to apologize for shit that shouldn’t be broken in the first place. I don’t want to pretend my audits aren’t ridiculous, nor do I want to pretend enthusiasm for a shitty, hostile position that has never given me a raise or a holiday off.

But I also don’t want to get an equally shitty other job, with a commute. Working from home means you don’t have to spend a dozen hours every week getting ready, dressed (fully suited up in wintertime just to step outside), walking, bussing, and walking, just to get to and from work. Working from home means you have half as much laundry. My work-from-home job is awful, but it’s at home. I can forgo makeup. I can not wash my hair for a week. I can wear what I slept in.

I want a job where they appreciate me for being useful, intelligent, dependable, and friendly. I’d like to work efficiently, do well at it, and feel decent about it. I’d like to make more than ten bucks an hour. I’d like my schedule to be the same every week, or get a decent amount of warning when it changes; I’d like to get holidays off. I’d like to do this work in a reasonably comfortable environment, with, like, climate control. I’d like to be able to walk there, or take a single bus. I’d like to have tools that work, I’d like to be able to actually solve problems or produce measurable output. And then I’d like to go home and not think about work until it’s time to go back again the next day.

How the fuck is that unreasonable?

And yet, it is. If you’ve read job descriptions for non-specialist work in the past ten years, apparently it is.

(What I would give to have my old U-B job back! It was part-time, I had a desk, it was 5 blocks from home, decent pay, and I got most major holidays off!)

Customer service is still weird af.

Soapbox, Weather, Whining, Work

In which I STILL don’t understand how people can know so little about the services they use.

If you were the majority of Floridian customers I assisted during my shift at work this evening, you’ve just been through a massive 500-year storm that destroyed tons of shit, you either don’t have power or you’re running a generator, and you’re astonished that you can’t watch TV.

You don’t have power! Why in the fuck do you think your cable and internet should work? Irma was one of the strongest storms in recorded history. It did at least eighteen billion in insured losses damage (not counting crop losses or flood insurance), infrastructure is destroyed, farms are destroyed (Irma took almost half of the citrus crop in some areas), you had to fucking evacuate, and you can’t believe you didn’t return home to functioning internet?

Really?! YOUR CELL PHONE’S OBVIOUSLY WORKING, AND THAT’S A GODDAMNED TECHNOLOGICAL MIRACLE CONSIDERING THE CIRCUMSTANCES, but you’re mad anyway?

I have compassion for you, I do. It must have been and must still be incredibly stressful. But being a dick to customer service reps because you haven’t had internet for four days is just weird. Shit’s broken, my people, important shit, and if your neighbors down the block have cable and you don’t, well, I’m sorry. Life’s not always fair. Go watch TV at their house.

Multiple customers told me it was absolutely unacceptable for an outage to last four days. They demanded refunds, threatened to cancel (which, please, if you could get service from anybody else you’d already have it, and we both know it). It was a 500-year storm! Read a book, be glad you’re alive, and chill the fuck out! There are innumerable people out there working day and night to restore power, internet, cable. It takes time!

One customer admitted she had no power at home and was charging her cell phone at the corner store, but still freaked out about not having wifi in her house. It blew my mind. EVEN IF there wasn’t an outage and WE WERE DELIVERING INTERNET TO YOUR HOME, sweetie, IT WON’T WORK IF YOUR ROUTER ISN’T GETTING POWER. How can you not know that?

Furthermore, how can you not realize that if your house doesn’t have electricity, the node providing your cable probably doesn’t, either? Sure, installations like that have generators, but they only run if you can get to them to put fuel in them. If gas or the generators themselves aren’t accessible, they’ll go down. The network is vast, interdependent, and complicated, and service crews can’t even start working on them until cleared to do so by authorities. Internet service doesn’t just fall out of the sky, for fuck’s sake. Power outages, destroyed equipment, line cuts: there are tons of them because A MASSIVE GODDAMNED ACT OF GOD JUST ROLLED THROUGH.

I’m sorry your kids are driving you nuts without screens to occupy them, and I’m sure it’s a bitch, but your internet and cable will be restored when it’s restored. You need to back the fuck off the ignorant attitude and be glad you’re all still alive with homes to return to. It’s not like your provider somehow fucked up; it was an act of God. And at least your cell phone still works. You may be going over your data plan, but at least you’re online.

#googlemanifesto

Soapbox, Web

In which a man suggests that women and men are, in fact, different. And gets fired for it.

Isn’t there evidence that males tend to cluster, intellectually, more toward genius or idiocy, whereas females tend to cluster toward average?

If so, this means that while there are, of course, both genius and idiot women, it also means that, all things being equal, any woman dealing with any man will likely not be dealing with an equal. It is more likely that he will be either smarter or dumber than she is, which explains a lot of our cultural noises about men being stupid and women being evil, or vice versa, or whatever.

If you’re a man interacting with a woman, she will probably be either your intellectual superior or your inferior, statistically, because you are less likely to be average than she is. Your odds of finding a woman exactly as smart as yourself are low, because you’re probably either an idiot, or, if you’re lucky, a genius. And if you happen to be average, well, good for you, unless she’s an outlier.

In essence, the #googlemanifesto dude is probably writing somewhat above the intellectual capacity of a lot of females. Which explains much of the enraged backlash: they’re mainly responding to key words.

Luckily, intelligence alone isn’t that big of a deal. It’s just one facet of any human being; there’s a great deal more going on, and much of it much more important.

I do denigrate his cost efficiency model. Many things should be done because they’re right, and not because they increase income. Using money as the go-to proof of efficacy is as ridiculous as expecting everything to be nice and feel good. Success can be measured by a variety of benchmarks, not just efficiency-as-measured-by-sales. Psychological well-being, for example, or longevity, or generosity.

http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320

Look! They call it an “anti-diversity screed”! Because it suggests that males and females are biologically non-identical!

Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems.

OMG are boys and girls different, measurably and demonstrably so?!