Obviously the parallel shitters are going to make everyone long for the days when it was only serial.
I am going to be cringing for this entire thread.
I've never worked retail, but I'm guessing it isn't all mental illness. There are people who live to abuse others and retail workers can't usually fight back effectively.
Oh yeah, the shit smearers were a semi-regular occurrence when I worked at Kinko's in the early '90s. Mercifully, that was my last retail environment job.
I worked at McDonald's back in the 80s. I had to do restroom cleaning but I never saw anything like that.
It doesn't feel much the same at all to me. People aren't back in the office around here and that's a big difference. My days aren't nearly as packed as they were before.
For work related reasons, I have just learned that the name for when you can't poop but aren't just regular constipated is "defaecation disorder." I'm assuming the diphthong is because the British discovered it.
I never came across this in my (short) time working in shops, but it happened a couple of times in my old office. An all-staff email came round saying, pretty much verbatim, "could whoever is jamming coat hangers down the ladies' toilet and smearing shit on the cubicle walls please not" and there was this wave of appalled silence that swept across the office as everyone looked round at their female colleagues and wondered "is it her?" and all the women desperately tried to register "I am as shocked and disgusted as you are and certainly had no idea this was happening, it must have been one of the others".
You have to meet people half way. Maybe allow the hangers to focus on the smearing.
I don't think I've been in a thrift store except as a volunteer. We cleaned a charity thrift store after hours. The husband of the woman who ran it had the most fantastic collection of old man golf pants, the kind with little animals or boats woven in.
Most of the best second-hand bookshops in Heroinopolis are charity shops. I've found some great stuff.
At least in California, the sort of motel you could once count on for a basic breakfast buffet with cereal, toast, scrambled eggs, waffle maker no longer has it, presumably because it's just too much bother to bring back. It's not a top tragedy of the decade but it is an extra annoyance when traveling with kids.
That is super annoying. The hotel breakfasts were still available in Las Cruces and El Paso when Jammies drove the kids to and from Phoenix over Spring Break, if that's any consolation.
I always wondered how clean the waffle maker was.
The scrambled eggs are sometimes fine, but the omelet-patty things are uniformly horrible.
Anyway, last summer the hotels in Lincoln had all that breakfast stuff as usual.
There is a local chain of grocery stores in my area that had been open 24/7 before the pandemic, but they've since started closing at 10pm. The McDonald's restaurants that used to be open after midnight now close at 11pm or sooner. And plenty of other restaurants that had been open 7 days a week are now closed Tuesday and Wednesday or Monday and Tuesday.
I'd guess that staff shortages are to blame. It's a drag being a night owl in a town where even fewer places are now open after 11pm. Maybe things will change this summer.
The shorter hours is a big change here too. I'm not thrilled about it, but I take it as proof that super-convenient hours depended on having a labor force that could not afford to say 'no' to anything.
Now I'm wondering if the grocery store near me that stopped being open 24 hours a day (which they did years before covid) didn't stop because of a pooper.
The office-worker life is permanently changed. Looks like I'm going to be in the office T,W,Th and can be at home or the office the other two days. Which I might do in the summer, because the climate control there is way better. My wife is only going to be in the office one day a week, and they're doing a miserable hot-desking thing, with zero storage of personal items at the office. So while we won't be home all day every day like the past two years, we also definitely aren't reverting to the Before Times commute and work patterns.
We'll never go back to where people spend most of their time in the office.
18, 19: I think it's not just that you needed workers who couldn't say no, but that it was essentially an abundance mindset--the marginal cost of the extra hours was low enough that they'd operate even if it wasn't super-profitable. Now it's hard enough being fully staffed during core hours, so you're not open any longer than you need to in order to reach your customers. I see a lot more businesses that are open exactly 8 or 9 hours--not exactly everyone working one single shift (because of open/close work), but 50% of staff working (say) 9:30-6:00* and 50% working 9:00-6:30.
*including lunch break
they're doing a miserable hot-desking thing
I do wonder how long some of these shitty compromises will persist. I mean, I get that hot-desking was already a thing, but people mostly hated it and it ended up pretty rare*. But companies now have huge incentives to do it, and employees who are only in-office 1 or 2 days a week might put up with it.
I still say that in-person collegiality is a genuinely good thing that improves quality of work and quality of work-life, but enough people prefer the convenience of remote work that 22 is correct, and it might actually lead to a less productive economy (even though there are of course upsides to remote work).
*I don't think it stuck outside of tech at all; not sure how widespread it was within tech pre-2020
FWIW, I've been fulltime in person since August.
I feel like I'm not allowed to complain (at least at home) since Jammies started teaching high school.
It is really hard, because I LOVE complaining.
29: Unfortunately, during these confusing times, we need to tamp down on complaining for the public good.
I don't understand why I can't hire any good complainers. I'm willing to pay $9/hour but no one wants to work anymore.
This sounds like a perfect fit for me. Hell, I'll do it for $8 with some extra grumbling about pay thrown in for free.
Are you sure? I'm expecting a bad attitude, every day. Keep a floppy upper lip. None of this namby-pamby old stoic farmer bullshit.
Caviller seeks malcontent for grumbling, pettifoggery. No Welsh need apply.
I think there's been a huge rise in anti-social behavior, but that might be colored by the fact that I think refusing to get vaccinated (without a medical reason) is anti-social. It's not nearly the same level of anti-social as pooping in a dressing room, but not everyone in America has the kind of knees and ankles that make it easy to void where prohibited. Driving seems to have gotten much worse, especially the kind of aggressive driving that kill pedestrians, cyclists, and electric death-scooter riders. And that's not even counting when the dirt bike and ATV riders swarm the city streets.
I can't tell if that last line is in jest or not.
Nope. They go in a mass so they can't really be arrested without great danger to everyone else.
I agree with Moby in 19 and JRoth in 23 on the worker staffing issues.
I'm seeing the same driving issues as Moby mentions in 39. I have really mixed emotions, because it's so clearly a major safety issue, and yet enforcement (when it happens) is always disproportionately targeting young people of color.
If the city would actually invest properly in rec centers and sports programs as it was mostly doing before the pandemic, that would help, even if not completely. I cannot fathom why a lame-duck mayor with gobs of federal Covid relief $ can't do better. It's a huge disappointment, though not as disappointing as the same-old, same-old approach to gun violence. SIGH.
In happier news, my company is being really thoughtful about a return to office. We're required to be there for one 3-day period each month that is devoted to in-person collaborative team planning meetings and the like. We're emphatically NOT supposed to use the time for Zoom or stuff we can easily do from home.
We just had the first one and it was great. An unbelievable pleasure to connect with colleagues I haven't seen in two years and meet new ones hired during the pandemic, and we really DID do work we couldn't have easily done on video.
enforcement (when it happens) is always disproportionately targeting young people of color
IME camera enforcement would help this a lot, but clearly rich white people complain about it too much. I wish we had more of it. My only ticket in decades was from a camera briefly installed on a stroad, and I STILL drive more carefully there because of it.
Office returns, hotdesking -- hotdesking is so annoying but working in a coffeeshop isn't, odd.
Work from home being the norm is a big change and not likely to change back, at least not in my region/industry. Other than that it's hard to judge just because of personal changes that happened to coincide with it but weren't directly caused by it, namely a big reorganization at work and a new school for the kid.
If it were legal to key the cars of delivery drivers that double park on two lane, heavily traveled roads, the outcome would probably be a disaster. So obviously we'd need to test it by giving me alone that ability.
I may or may not have just picked up a few sandwiches and had an issue.
It seems like it will increase the loneliness and alienation that people ascribe to modern life if a lot of jobs are permanently remote.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm not spending enough time with other people, but other times I just laugh to myself about the new "Slow Children Playing" sign they put up by the local school.
It'snot as funny as the old "Slow Children At Play" sign that used to be on my block when I was growing up. And it's addressing a real problem because of the aforementioned bad driving compounded by what is probably a covid-related addition to the usual inattention high school students apply to tasks that involve not dying.
My office has a happy hour in 2 weeks, for the first time in 2 years. I'm looking forward to it even though there might be only one person there I've ever met in person, and her, only once. I'm not looking forward to how it's further from home than before, though.
Speaking of going all weird and isolated, does a 500 square foot log cabin built by the CCC and lacking indoor plumbing count as a "summer house"?
It's hard to get more indoor a plumbing than an outhouse. It's all right there.
The seat cover is another door so it's out of doors after the drop.
I have one task I do that has to be done in person at work but otherwise my 3 days a week in the office generally consist of 3-6 hours of meetings online. The groups of people I work most closely with are around 50% remote after many people became officially full-time remote during the pandemic. Our group was maybe 25% remote before the pandemic.*
I'm now trying to go full-time remote too. I was planning on moving away anyway, whether or not I became remote in my current position.
*Other parts of the org are basically 100% in office and have been back to that since vaccines and boosters became available.
It seems like it will increase the loneliness and alienation that people ascribe to modern life if a lot of jobs are permanently remote.
When I go into the office on Fridays, there aren't enough people on my side of the floor to regularly cause the motion-sensors to turn on the lights, and my desk isn't close enough to the sensors for me to turn them on with a simple hand wave. So I sit in the shade of the indoors, in silence, until it's time to drive home alone.
That's more or less my experience Mondays and Fridays in the office. We typically get 6-8 people on a building floor meant to accommodate 60. The vibe is very much "the world ended, no one told us, we few survivors are still writing web apps as if it mattered."
Because many people are always remote and none of the fancy new A/V equipment in the office has been configured such that anyone can use it, it's much harder to do meetings in the office than from home.
I did just grab a nice external monitor that had been reserved via Post-It for someone who quit months ago.
Imagine a world where covid has mutated and killed 99.9% of humanity, leaving only the vaccinated and boosted who have jobs that don't require human interaction. The survivors huddle in small groups writing apps to send to each other or caption pictures of the surviving cats.
I'm probably going to start going back to the office next week. No one else will be there, which is the point. The only problem is the bathroom, which is shared with the whole floor. It has zero ventilation (but it does have a built in ashtray by the urinals). It's not on an external wall, but I think they could cut a way to the elevator shaft.
43.last is great. I'm surprised 3 days/month is sufficient, but it's the right approach regardless.
AIMHMHB, I've been on the board of the local birthing center for a dozen years, finally cycling off this year. I was board president for '20 and '21, which kind of sucked--all these new board members I haven't gotten to know at all, and in fact the ones I really had any relationship with are mostly gone by now.
Anyway, I bring this up because November was our board retreat, and the committee in charge suggested (finally) doing it in person. The rapidity with which people refused turned me off utterly. It piggybacked with a previous discussion in which my least favorite board member* cited "privacy" for why we couldn't have a discussion about board vaccination--after we (and she) had voted to fire any unvaccinated staff, including non-clinical. WTF?
So now I'm almost completely checked out and read the internet during the Zoom board meetings. Prior to this, I was dreading leaving the board, which I'm (obviously) super-committed to. Now I'll leave without a glance back. Oh fucking well.
*I've never really had one before. She just rubs me the wrong way on every level.
It has zero ventilation
Totally, emphatically illegal. Also, you just run a duct through the ceiling to an exhaust riser or, failing that, an exterior wall. And you need louvers in the door to pull in office air to replace the exhausted air.
A properly sized continuously-operating exhaust fan turns over all the air in a bathroom about once every 10 minutes. That's probably a little scant these days.
Maybe there is a vent and I can't see it? It seems to retain smells for a really long time though.
Decent office space in Oakland was in short supply for so long, I think building owners got used to getting away with anything and still keeping the rent coming. Even before Covid, I was hoping the new construction would force some improvement.
It seems like it will increase the loneliness and alienation that people ascribe to modern life if a lot of jobs are permanently remote.
If the saved commute time went back to the workers instead of to extended working hours, we could HANG OUT WITH OUR NEIGHBORS. Parklet improvements, regular walk-and-coffee mornings, PTA meetings that fix things, hobbies in the garage with the door up for guests.
Hahaha, I kill myself, sorry. But we could.
Plus also, is anyone looking at whether the totally online culture that some software projects ran on managed to spread any best practices into suddenly totally online office culture? My sweetie's many-timezones group within a big company seems to get a lot of mileage out of non-work mailing groups that have regular times for particular in-jokes, like, they share "Dad jokes" on Fridays, and I think doggerel comes out on Mondays. Lots of them were fairly mirrorshades to start with though.
My son's place of work has been doing a few days each week in the office scheme. We had a family game night last night (via zoom) and he reported having cold-like symptoms and about half his office testing positive, but his home tests had been negative. But this AM he has tested positive. He lives in the Free Republic of Greater Bernieville which has been having a small but significant uptick in case rate of late. He is only mildly unwell so far, but feels badly that he was on a group ski trip on Saturday (before he had symptoms).
I have a sick colleague too. Fortunately, I have not been in the same room as him since June. He's testing negative, but his wife and kids are positive.
Some colleagues have tested positive recently but the couple cases I know about were positive tests after travel. I blame spring break.