start a victory garden and ration your IRRATIONALLY ANGRY feelings, part 3

metering signals

1) TWO CARS PER GREEN PER LANE apparently this is beyond our human capabilities. I just... how hard is it to just FUCKING GO

2) Metering warning signal is flashing so everyone slows down and or stops on the approach to find a LIGHT THAT IS PERMANENTLY GREEN jfc ugh

People who are super into performing how reverent and touched they are by the WTC memorial who were a thousand miles away at the time and think NYC is a vile pit of sin & corruption anyway except for this one spot which is Holy Ground.

Heh, along the same line I got really mad when people tried to defend those kids on a school trip from another state who sang the national anthem at the memorial and the security guards shut them down.

in orbit, I have spent some time tracing and examining that complex of attitudes and I think I have an insight.

You're right that yr GOD BLESS THE USA doodz hate both New York and Washington. But I believe the reasoning goes that Al Qaeda just wanted to attack America herself via American symbols, and NY/DC serve as American symbols. In MAGAmind, NY and DC are not part of "real America," but they also assume that Al-Q types don't know that. So Al-Q attacking unAmerican places is effectively the same, to them, as attacking Real American places.

(Not to make anything All About Me but: then as now I live in Arlington Va. I was a mile and a half from the Pentagon on that particular morning, saw the smoke rising from my apartment window, etc. It's never been useful or interesting to point out to people that it's in Virginia and not in D.C., but whatevs.)

That seems reasonable but I don't think it's even that complicated: the ppl in question are distant relatives of mine and their friends on fb, all basically Calvinist, a worldview that is unavoidable in West MI even if you don't go to a Calvinist church specifically; I think it's something in the water. They love authority figures and order, so as long as they can imagine that the victims and "heroes"/emergency responders were predominantly white, male, straight or straight-acting (in contrast to other things NYC is known for) and gainfully employed, then their deaths are sanctified and take on almost the significance of religious observance. (One person said, "I was impressed at how well the memorials are respected and protected by security. They were stopping people who leaned or sat on them." -- really Beverly? It's literally carved out of stone, I think it can survive being leaned on.)

those kids on a school trip from another state who sang the national anthem at the memorial and the security guards shut them down.

Ha!

Reminds me of this tweet:

why are people like this pic.twitter.com/zGTywNjJ6d

— KT NELSON (@KrangTNelson) July 21, 2018

WHY ARE PEOPLE LIKE THIS???

lol, all this time I thought Mission BBQ was Catholic-themed.

gabriels oBBQ

I thought Mission BBQ was a san francisco thing.

As bad as black rifle coffee customers.

Liner notes to compilations where the tracklist order and the sequence in which the songs are discussed doesn't line up.

I am irrationally angry about all of the well-publicized bans on plastic straws. Screw all of that. It is fake self-congratulatory action that doesn’t address the problem of coffee shop waste

You know what’s bad about coffee shops?

Plastic cups
Coffee growing
Coffee transportation
Coffee roasting
Plastic lids
Dairy production
Sugar production
Everything to do with chocolate
Espresso machines
Air conditioning
Low Employee wages
Lack of benefits
Keeping employees at less than full-time hours
Parking lots
Industrial cleaners

... but go the hell ahead and sign a petition because you saved half a gram of plastic at no inconvenience to anyone.

new dn

It's the "feel good" activism of the year!

-- Rex Reed --

I have no idea what's going on in the office today, but my two coworkers are having serious issues shutting the fuck up. Yes, it's Friday. Yes, it's payday. Great. We all work for the same company, so we're all aware that tomorrow is a day off and we now have a lot more extra money than we did yesterday.

STOP. FUCKING. TALKING. ABOUT IT.

Just stop fucking talking altogether. Shut the fuck up. Nothing that is being said —even things relating to the job— is necessary by any stretch of the imagination.

And so loud. Fuck sake.

My immediate cubicle neighbor went off to me some weeks ago about they can't handle me playing music from my computer speakers, even really mellow stuff (mostly classical and jazz) at a very low volume. So, I was accommodating and I don't play music when they're around. Seriously thinking about just putting on John Coltrane Om at not a high volume, but a noticeable one, when they get back from their lunch break.

https://media.makeameme.org/created/They-said-I-yx4kpg.jpg

I used to listen to one earbud while at work.

I just don't get the obvious hypocrisy. This person may not like music (what a fucking weirdo), that's fine.

But to turn around and just basically have a borderline yelling conversation with someone else is just incredibly oblivious; on the cusp of stupidity.

At a previous job, a coworker was playing techno pretty quietly on his computer, and it didn't bother anyone. Except for the boss. He said to the guy, "You're not allowed to listen to music at work! Only I'M allowed to listen to music at work!" whereupon he played a Jimmy Buffett CD on his boombox at full blast. This was in a tech support call center, and none of us could hear the callers, so we all had to put people on hold until our boss had finished his bizarre little tantrum.

i wouldn't want a colleague playing music in the office at all.

if people are being too loud while im trying to concentrate on something i have a quiet word in their ear about it (this rarely happens to me because i am good at tuning out chatter)

yeah, I find it hard to concentrated w/ music

I would go fucking nuts if a co-worker were playing music at any volume, no matter how quiet. Use headphones for gods's sake

do you all work in a kiosk or something

No music on the speakers, but definitely no endless chatterboxxing either.

I don't think the constant yammering would bother me if they weren't being so carelessly loud.

Playing music without headphones at work anywhere other than a private office with the door shut seems obviously incorrect to me.

ime you can adjust the volume knob and the sound won't travel so far

My experience differs.

Barely audible sounds are worse than actually audible sounds so cranking it down doesn’t help

Personally if I am not choosing the music I don't want to hear it. I don't care whether the player believes it is "mellow." It could be Yanni or Slayer or Coltrane or Vivaldi; I don't want to hear it unless I've chosen to hear it.

I don't think I've had an office space where playing music on speakers would be at all acceptable for like... 16 years

and that was when we had what now seems like insanely tall cubicle walls (in one building, I didn't realize there were windows along one wall until they reconfigured the cubes because I hadn't walked all the way to the end). and there were still some actual offices with doors. and the white noise machines were cranked up way too high, so if someone was talking ten feet over I wouldn't even hear them

now I'm mildly irritated because I can hear all the conversation over the wall from me, but I can at least throw on headphones. however, I wasn't wearing them the last couple weeks and I now know all about a dude in the next aisle's quest to buy a dishwasher

...white noise machines!? :|

yeah? they're not necessarily white noise, but every office building I've ever worked in has had some sort of electronic device doing sound masking, usually installed in the ceiling. you don't really notice it, and a lot of people think it's just noise from the air handling system if they don't know

talkimgs good.music isnt

My office space is huge, has high ceilings and there’s hundreds of people in it

All you hear is indecipherable background chatter and teams celebrating “wins”

yeah? they're not necessarily white noise, but every office building I've ever worked in has had some sort of electronic device doing sound masking, usually installed in the ceiling. you don't really notice it, and a lot of people think it's just noise from the air handling system if they don't know

That's also how they bombard you with subliminal messages to keep you docile iirc.

BEHAVE

OBEY

CONSUME

SUBMIT

Just received post from the building society dated 28th April...

they're not necessarily white noise, but every office building I've ever worked in has had some sort of electronic device doing sound masking, usually installed in the ceiling.

Huh. I suppose it is possible such a thing exists, and I've assumed it as aircon.

i have never heard of this before & it’s weirding me the fuck out tbh

I've mentioned my loud as fuck open office before, not just here but also t my company president. I got a new desk by the window away from everyone, so that's why I haven't been on the "hat your coworkers" read as much anymore.

But the boss did bring up white noise machines. Said he had been at some utility company headquarters where they had 'em. "You don't even notice that they're on," he told me. And frankly, I had no response to that.

I hat this iPad, btw.

i am

not sure

that every workplace in america is running noise interference

https://cambridgesound.com/learn/sound-masking-101/

the more you know

At my last office they were too cheap to install a real system so we just had interns walking around going WHHCHSCHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I've mostly worked in open plan offices (playing peekaboo over monitors) or had to share my office with someone else. The last one I worked in was so deathly quiet that you could hear people chewing, stomachs rumbling. I felt weird about opening a bag of chips. I hated it.

I worked with a woman who kept the radio on all day to an FM station. Some people complained but I didn't mind. I don't think I would have ever heard a lot of top 40 music in my life otherwise. Another woman kept a fan on for the white noise.

When the current temperature displayed on a weather website/app falls outside of their predicted range of temperatures for the day. Definitely 'I' but probably only 'A' because it reminds me of people who very confidently double down when they're demonstrably wrong.