Rants

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I want to rant here, but I'll feel bad for expressing myself.

I am getting tired of the flashing ads on the WP. Gee, I have extreme sensory issues anyway, and I don't need that stuff flashing at me. Is this an experiment or something?

I have also gotten tired of the half naked people ads for weight loss or muscle building or whatever they were. I get tired of all this body conscious stuff. It's like we are all supposed to want to be a buff dude or model or something.

Well, I feel better I think.

I fear you may be driving behind and/or near me.

What is wrong with the world today?
I go to the grocery store's magazine aisle:
Over 30 copies of car magazines
At least 7 copies of home and garden
I'd say 20-30 DIFFERENT gossip magazines
National Geographic: one
Discovery: zero
Scientific American: zero
Could the people who stock Park&Shop PLEASE get their priorities straight?

Sadly, the store's buyers have to cater to the tastes of the bastard public, rather than to those of the handful of intelligent customers who frequent the store.

Q: What is wrong with the world today?
A: The world is full of stupid people, silly.

But if I come in and buy those three magazines, that's a bit more money for the store. Seriously, I just want my magazines. But I can't tell managment because I'm living in Hong Kong now, and I don't speak anything but English. Oh, and every single one of the above magazines was in English, FYI.
Stupid store. I'm going to have to get them shipped from London or the US, I guess.

in australia there are 2 major supermarket chains.
one os "coles" and the other is "woolworths".
"woolworths" is the biggest.

my local supermarket is a "woolworths" one. it has snuffed out all it's local competition by selling it's comparable goods at a price that is unsustainable for their competitors to match, and the competitors go out of business.
like the butcher has been driven out and the baker has been too. they went broke to try and compete with the ridiculous prices that woolworths was selling identical products for ( woolworths could easily fund the losses) , and now we have only woolworths there selling bread rolls with big empty bubbles in them. woolworths raised the prices of those competitor products to above normal as soon as the competitors quit.

i was enraged today when i bought 6 bread rolls from woolworths and i was going to make a hamburger.
as the frying patty was nearing readiness, i tried to cut a bread roll, and it just imploded. there was no real bread inside the roll. there was some giant bubble of gas trapped in the roll when it was cooked and it displaced all the bready content.
so i discarded that roll and got another one and found it was the same, and i found all 6 bread rolls to be almost empty of substance. they all had giant bubbles in them and i think that woolworths has designed a bread roll making process where the yeast bubbles are exceptionally large, so they can save money. and i can not go to the baker next door any more to get acceptable bread rolls.

Baking's not very difficult. I'm a cooking and baking novice, and yet I helped my now-ex bf turn out several batches of more-than-decent homemade bagels and bread, which were far superior to anything store-bought that we'd sampled up to that point. If you want quality baked goods, you may have to make them yourself.

^^ Get a bread maker! My cousin has one. It is almost like magic. Measure the right amount of water and flour, insert into bread maker, work the controls, wait a few hours, and you get a loaf of hot home made bread!

I eat wheat free most of the time, so I have no choice but to buy everything at Whole Foods, Trader Joe's etc... A loaf of gluten free bread is $5 I think. I miss egg bread! And real pastries instead of rice-flour ones. And spaghetti!

Rant: It is midnight on a Sunday. I'm going to bed now. And in about 9 hours I shall enter a realm of a social experiment gone awry. A world where the privileged have doors and the rest work in little cubes. A reality where the social connections and not competence decide promotions and raises. Universe in which budgets for crucial projects are kept on a short leash, but there's always money for new office furniture for those with an important-sounding title printed on their business cards. A world where decisions are based on perception and not reality. An environment where the competent work for the incompetent, and where compliance breeds mediocrity, and where fresh ideas are discouraged. A world in which they do shoot the messengers.

This world is also sometimes called "the office".

i could not ne bothered to make bread regularly, but thanks for the suggestion.
also, i have bought bread rolls from woolworths since my last post in this thread, and they were acceptable.
so i decided to buy a six pack of bread rolls every day (i eat 2 and feed the rest to the animals and birds (6 rolls costs only $1.80)) and chart the acceptability of the rolls in a calendar to see if there is any pattern to the "big bubble bun" days.
if i find a pattern, i will cause trouble.
i will cease the inspection after 4 weeks.
i am already sick of eating bread rolls, and my animals should not be given too much bread, so i throw a lot of buns away (after cutting them open).
i am just curious as to whether woolworths has some hidden strategy to make extra money from empty bubble filled "rolls" in any discernible pattern.

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i let a tarantula stay on one of my walls for 4 days.
i was going to catch it with a cup and a cardboard sheet to throw it outside, but my spine would not let me do it. i fear spiders extremely.

it did not move and stayed very still and i thought "if you start walking around then i am going to have to catch you"
it stayed where it was, and i felt sorry for it that i was so unfriendly toward it.

it was in the same place the next day and the day after that, and i wondered whether it was getting dehydrated.
i felt quite sorry for it, and very much contemplated catching it and freeing it outside because i knew that it would never find it's own way outside.

i still could not bring myself to try to bang a cup on the wall over it(partly because i may have squashed it if it moved suddenly, and mostly because i imagined it rapidly mounting the outside of the cup and running up my arm.

but i still was worried about the fact it had had nothing to eat or drink for days.

i dissolved some sugar in water, and loaded up my water pistol with it, and gently squirted the wall above where it was so it dribbled down to it's mouth.

then i forgot about it for a few hours and when i went to see how it was doing ................ it was gone!! !
now i am back to being anxious about where it could be.
i am going to check my bed thoroughly before i lie in it.

i really hope it went outside.

it has a life of it's own that it must live and i never want to see it again.

Earlier this morning I was sitting here watching an episode of Farscape. Soon, friends of my grandmother start showing up for their monthly pseudo-study of some 2000 year old desert scribblings (AKA The Bible), and suddenly my name is being called. I HATE being interrupted when I'm trying to focus. My grandmother has a hearing problem so everyone has to be loud. So I yell back "I'M WATCHING A SHOW!" and I still get a "what?"

Finally, I go in there just to get it over with. She wanted me to meet some new person in the group. I really didn't care about who she was. I just wanted to leave. She asked me if I was an Aries since I was quite obviously annoyed. (How being an Aries has anything to do with that is beyond me). I said no, I'm Gemini. Then she said, "well, I guess I'd have to do your horoscope to find out why you're in a bad mood." I told her, "I'm just highly irritated." So then she decides that giving me a hug would make me feel better. Wrong...WRONG..WRONG!! Ugh. I escaped as quickly as possible after that.

I thought that I'd call my mother to vent about it, but I should have known she'd take something personally, and then allude to me being self-centered. "You always want people to think about your feelings, but you need to consider other people's, too." So, I ended up having a meltdown on the phone with my mom. HELLOOO.. I'm the one with the autism. I am not in control of that.

She NEVER sympathizes with how I feel and then insists that I need to be more sensitive. I told her this is why I don't talk about anything, and why I never bothered to explain anything to anyone. I avoided all discussion because I knew that I'd be called a bunch of derogatory things that I am not intentionally being.

I thought that maybe now that I have a diagnosis of AS that I could finally get some understanding. NOPE. You'd think that your own family would take the time to research something that their son or grandson has in order to understand why they're weird, or reclusive, or anxious. My mother doesn't like to read, and my grandmother can't comprehend anything. I love them both, but I'm so f*****g glad I'm leaving here.

I stormed out of church today.

To begin with, I am the church organist. And because of that, the organ is my responsibility. When I became the organist in 2003, I was using a Hammond from 1979---and it had some issues. I related those issues to the church turning the heat off in the winter between services and turning the air-conditioning off in the summer between services. That is hard on these organs, and the piano. But they never listened to me, so we kept having to get it fixed. Finally, we bought a newer organ last year. These organs are not supposed to be moved more than is necessary for fear of knocking off a connection. Last Christmas season the minister asked for all the strong men to stay after church so they could move the organ and piano since a show choir was coming in that evening. I told them "No." Then I left a note on the organ, "Do not move organ!" They didn't move it. But this type of thing goes on frequently at my church. Already, a piece of wood has been chipped on both the organ and the piano due to carelessness.

Anyway---today:

I walk in to church to practice early this morning, and the wires connecting the organ to the speakers against the wall have been moved underneath the stage. That is fine, but they should've contacted me so that I could guide them into doing it properly. So, wouldn't you know it, the wires weren't put in correctly and there is all of this noise coming out of them intermittenly. Finally, before the service, I got most of the noise quieted down enough that I felt it would be ok---but---after a few measures into my prelude---crackle, pop, crackle...! !! I stopped playing, turned the organ off, and I turned to the congregation and said, "Someone moved the speaker wires under the stage and now look!...The organ is making noise...Sorry!" I got up, yanked the electric plug-ins out of the wall, gathered all my books, and stormed out of the sanctuary.

The man who did this apologized to my parents for doing this. And the minister apologized too. I am 45 years old and you would think that that man and the minister would've consulted me and told me they did this. I went back to the church after the service to inspect the speakers and the speaker cables. They were crossed in a way that I believe has damaged the mixer (the mixer and speakers are my personal property---not the churches). So I have to bring in another speaker system (again my own) and hook it up and rebalance everything. The man and minister made it known that they would never do this again---that I will always be consulted in the future.

Maybe I am making this too big of a deal, but gee...I can't stand people thinking they're making things better when they're making them worse. The Hammond was ruined in part due to their lack of care, and it originally cost around $30,000. Now, they are jeopardizing another expensive organ---a Rodgers.

Ok...I feel better...I think.

I think you should advise the folks in question that they need to reimburse you for the damaged mixer...

This is a 2-parter.

First, to glider18: I wish I could offer advice, but all I can offer is commiseration. I've had several experiences where I offered advice or counsel on some matter that I had some experience or expertise with. The party asking the advice decided to do it their way instead of mine, resulting in a messed up situation. Of course, they come to me to fix it, which I do. And it could've saved time and money if they had just done as I suggested.

Second, my own personal rant. I feel like I am in a career black hole. My job title is investigator. But guess what? I hardly do any investigating at all! Sure, I work a case once in a while, but they're always the same. They tell me to think outside the box to generate cases. So I do. I come up with some novel approaches to conduct investigations, based on my training, experience, and knowledge of how the business's operations work. Every single idea gets shot down. So I'm left with doing things the way they're always done. And they jump on me because I'm not generating cases. Despite the fact they have me working as a supervisor/trainer, database administrator, and statistician in addition to being an investigator, as well as handling administrative tasks for another department! There are only two pluses, I have skills to put on a resume and, should the business go south, I have pretty good job security. It's not a lot of solace, though. There are forks in my road, but every option requires an SUV and all I have is a moped.

Thus endeth the rant.

Thank you SINister---I agree about the reimbursement. They'll probably give me a $5 WalMart giftcard for my damages.

Thank you DarrylZero---I understand with advice on this, you have had similar situations here too. As for your career, you are in the same situation in a way that I am in. My school asked me to switch from English to the gifted program because, as they said, "You can think outside the box." After taking this position, I am finding that the district seems to like things the way they have always been done...so thinking outside the box is difficult to do when those constraints are put upon us. Your situation sounds frustrating because of all the ideas you have that would work. I wish I knew an answer to these things, but this can be a frustrating world. Now I am dreading choir practice Wednesday because everyone will be coming up, "Ohh, we're so sorry...anything we can do?" I will be thinking, "It's your doing that screwed it up." Well...I feel better again .

Thanks for responding, it really does help---it helps to be able to share experiences and see that many of us go through these frustrating things.