Random thing you loathe right now.

Toes. All of them.

David Suchet was the perfect Poirot. It is known.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

I've been tearing through all the Hercule Poirot books lately. I'm currently on Murder in Mesopotamia.

Okay, this book was my first Poirot disappointment. The big reveal at the end is just too absurd.

I'm really getting tired of the administrative BS at work.

Right now, there's a development that needs to be done and we're arguing on which spec it goes. I'm thinking "You know, I could not care less whether it goes on 558 or 912, so put it wherever you want, I'm going to have to build it regardless".

What I do care about is that it is due for like tomorrow, and yet it's not in the spec yet. So, dear functional analyst, I can already tell you it's not going to be done until late next week at the earliest.

Edit: Holy crap, seasonal depression hits hard this year! I know why, and I expected it, but still...

trichy wrote:

I got in a car accident today. I was going through a stop sign, and another driver wasn't paying attention and hit my driver's side door. No one was hurt, and his car is fine, but there's a big dent in my door now. I asked him for his insurance, and he admitted he didn't have any. I told him I understood, but I needed to call the cops so I could get a police report for the insurance. He got really nervous, and told me that he's undocumented.

So now, I could either tell him to get lost, and eat the cost of the damage (because my insurance won't file a claim without another driver's insurance info or a police report, and it's not worth risking lying about how it happened), or I can risk involving the police, which could be catastrophic for this guy. I don't know if he was telling the truth, or if he was scamming me. Ultimately, I told him to go ahead and go. I gave him my number, and he said he'd reach out and make it right, but I have no idea if he's going to do that.

I'm upset. I'm pissed at the reality that calling the cops could have destroyed his life, and that leaves me holding the bag. I don't know what to do, but I'm pretty sure I'm screwed.

I know this is supposed to be the loathe thread, but I wanted to follow up on this. Yesterday afternoon, the dude texted me, asking for my address. An hour later, he showed up, and handed me cash that completely covered the cost of the repairs. He also gave me the name of a body shop run by a friend of his, who has offered to do the repairs for cost. I tried to give him back the rest of the money, but he refused. He brought his wife and 8-year-old daughter, and all three thanked me profusely for not calling the cops.

There's still some good stuff out there, everyone. Once the repairs are done, I'm going to donate anything left to a local nonprofit that provides legal services for undocumented residents.

I'm so happy. Thank you for the update, trichy. Faith in humanity - all around in that situation - restored for today. I needed that.

That's a beautiful end to the story. Thanks, trichy!

Great news, trichy!

Most people are good, at heart. Especially when family is involved. Changing that perception is perhaps the most insidious damage that Republicans have done to popular thought.

F**K YEAH!!! This is a victory. You’ve just made my Friday!

Do you think you might take things a step further and try to befriend the family?

2020 needed this story, thank you so much Trichy.

Man, it's tough to believe that Sean Connery passed away. 2020 really is really trying to finish strong.

Wow, Trichy. That's really good to read.

Trichy - thank you so much for sharing all of that story.
If you do make a donation PM me and I’ll match it with a similar organization here.

Coldstream wrote:

Man, it's tough to believe that Sean Connery passed away. 2020 really is really trying to finish strong.

Then again, he was 90 years and was an outspoken domestic abuser.

Eleima wrote:
Coldstream wrote:

Man, it's tough to believe that Sean Connery passed away. 2020 really is really trying to finish strong.

Then again, he was 90 years and was an outspoken domestic abuser.

And brought happiness to millions as an actor, established educational charities and donated substantial sums to hundreds of others, and represented his country around the world after rising from a working-class background. So how does that all balance out? I don't require a purity test to see if someone qualifies to be mourned after their passing.

Coldstream wrote:
Eleima wrote:
Coldstream wrote:

Man, it's tough to believe that Sean Connery passed away. 2020 really is really trying to finish strong.

Then again, he was 90 years and was an outspoken domestic abuser.

And brought happiness to millions as an actor, established educational charities and donated substantial sums to hundreds of others, and represented his country around the world after rising from a working-class background. So how does that all balance out? I don't require a purity test to see if someone qualifies to be mourned after their passing.

Mourned absolutely, beatified no. Which is what I'm seeing on the media, several newscasters have raved on about how sexy he was and that he was the perfect man.

Life would be easier if people were just one thing. If Connery were just the sweet anecdotes about his behavior on set, or his film career, or his charity work, or his insistence the value of men beating their wives. He wasn't just any one of those things.

There's an impetus when someone points at one part of a person for others to point at the other parts as a counterbalance. This is especially true when someone points out something unflattering or when the person in question has just died.

And when the unflattering thing—as in this case, or as in the case of Kobe Bryant earlier this year—involves a man who abused or assaulted women, it usually gets dismissed as "performative wokeness" or "virtue signaling": people eager to show off their morals or their politics by piling on a dead celebrity. But for people, especially women, who are survivors of sexual assault or domestic abuse, it's a macro version of a personal experience they're already familiar with: the tendency for our society to quickly and easily forgive men for what they do to women.

Survivors have watched as their schools, their workplaces, their churches, their friends, and even their own families have forgiven the men who beat and raped them because those men were good dads or hard workers, or they had respectable jobs like teacher or pastor or doctor, or they were simply affable, likeable men who were fun to be around. Trouble is, abusers are very rarely universally awful people without redeeming qualities or without accomplishments. No one is just one thing.

We've all watched the abusers in our communities be forgiven and embraced whether they showed any contrition for their actions or not. And when I saw "we" here, I don't mean survivors of abuse and assault. I mean that it's something everyone has seen. It's endemic to our culture. We do to for celebrities and common folk alike.

Clocky nailed it yet again. As a DV survivor, I will never apologize for speaking out. And every time we're told not to speak out when a person dies, I'll remind everyone that people don't listen to us when they're alive either.

Eleima wrote:

Clocky nailed it yet again. As a DV survivor, I will never apologize for speaking out. And every time we're told not to speak out when a person dies, I'll remind everyone that people don't listen to us when they're alive either.

Yeah. I’m very thankful to have Clocky here with us.

On Connery:
I did a google search to see if he ever recanted or apologized for being a proponent of domestic violence and found... NOTHING. Connery had more than 30 years to say something about it and the best I could find is an attempt from Connery to sidestep the issue. So F**K that guy.

Aw, that's a shame. Just bad luck.

I’m so f*cking uptight right now that I can’t even enjoy playing video games.

I hear you Rawk, loud, clear, and with resonance.

Same here.

Pair of simple programming problems. Should have taken an hour or two tops. It's currently day 2.

I had a boss who ran his programmers that way. He had so many people quit under him, he ended up back in academia after trashing his reputation in business. And he never understood why it had happened... One of the worst managers I've ever seen. Decent programmer, but total maniac when people solved problems in ways he didn't foresee, or understand. He was constantly making people rewrite functioning code. Bizarre.

Robear wrote:

I had a boss who ran his programmers that way. He had so many people quit under him, he ended up back in academia after trashing his reputation in business. And he never understood why it had happened... One of the worst managers I've ever seen. Decent programmer, but total maniac when people solved problems in ways he didn't foresee, or understand. He was constantly making people rewrite functioning code. Bizarre.

Sounds like your typical person who builds their identity around being the smartest person in the room suddenly ending up somewhere where they aren't, and taking it badly.

Yeah. He had me go on an install trip when I had a bad cold and sinus infection, so I was wiped, but we did the job ahead of schedule. On the last day, I had finished my work, no one else needed me, so I broke out a book for an hour or so (flat fee job, not hourly). The customer wrote me a special mention in their report for working in spite of my obvious exhaustion and discomfort. My manager then showcased that in his after action report as an example of our team’s selflessness, and I think I got a gift card.

A year later, he resigned, and while he was burning his last few days before terminal leave, a guy who didn’t like me cooked up a plan to get him to write me up and fire me for reading that book. He actually wrote it all up and called me in to sign off on it, while sternly lecturing me. I walked out, printed out his submitted report from the same trip, which made me look like a hero, and asked him how he was going to correlate the two when my lawyer spoke with the company lawyers about unlawful termination. (You can fire someone for just about any reason, except that if you demonstrably *lie* about it, on paper, that someone is going to get a chunk of cash in return.) He went beet red, told me to leave and went to visit his boss, who could be heard laughing through a closed door a few moments later. He came out still steaming, and she reassured me that she had the situation in hand.

Not very bright, indeed. I looked him up after he had made a few fast jumps in business jobs, and gone back to a college, and his student reviews were *awesomely* bad.

I made it 91 days without a cigarette. Then I smoked 4 packs in 5 days. I loathe that I was weak and gave in to temptation. But god damn it, I LOVED every single one of those cigarettes. I'm very tempted to walk over to my local store and buy another pack today. With everything going on in my life, I feel like it's OK that I'm weak on this. But, I know how much my wife HATES it when I smoke. We'll see how the rest of today plays out, but given that I have overseas meetings late into the night tonight, I'm going to bet that those meetings are taken outside, pacing back and forth, with a cigarette in my hand.