What perfectly normal thing can't you be around anymore due to something you experienced?

Yes? Although I should back up and say that for retail, those are holiday hours. My normal hours were like....16 per week, tops, and that's all that was available in the area. Because as long as my total hours per week are kept just barely under 40, I don't get to have healthcare!

....So we just played russian roulette with the bills and I had to quit when the stress combined with simply not eating began to impact my health at work. Being unemployed did not improve the situation.

I don't know if you're aware that full-time often goes to 60-80hrs+ per week, but that works out to about the same. I've only very recently persuaded a roommate to stop pulling all-nighters on a salary. They were literally going all last week surviving on naps, but eventually admitted that they almost never actually hit the cash bonuses they were aiming for having dangled in front of them anyway. So hopefully I can keep them to that.

These are extremely common tactics, as is any job from a temp service having an employment policy that resembles a revolving door, wherein no matter how hard you go, they are going to fire you just shy of a month or two, after which they would have legally had to hire you and give you super gross things like benefits.

By the time the French revolted, their peasants were eating grass to survive. Most of us are still at least eating food for humans. We're probably going to ride this to collapse.

My last job before my current one, I would routinely work 20 hour shifts, with 4 hours off, followed by a 20 hour shift. Normally would do that 4 days, followed by 4-5 normal 12 hour shifts with a 12 hour turn around.

Security jobs can really suck.

"It's only Monday, Mr. Mom"? Yeah, that was probably back when I was in middle school. It was a super popular song on our preferred station in the morning. Have not heard it since. Still remember half the chorus.

I would like to point out that forcing prisoners to listen to a single song over and over for hours is a form of torture used by the CIA. And also commiserate, because that same boss forbade anyone touching the radio whether she was there or not on pain of termination. She really, really liked country.

For a breather (this was before I worked there), she brought in her very own CD to play over the holidays instead of relying on the stations, I guess because they possibly didn't have an xmas lineup? This was acceptable on paper, but then she left for the day, the tape got stuck on The Little Drummer Boy, and nobody was allowed to touch it.

The coworker telling me this attested to having listened to The Little Drummer Boy 27 times in a row, on the edge of derangement. This is ok to do to a person, because they are a US retail worker and not a terrorist.

I make watermelon steak when I get tired of eating it raw. Its just grilled/pan-roasted watermelons that have been sliced into planks and rubbed with a marinade. The texture changes and feels a bit meaty & chewy, so its not watermelony at all.

Here's an easy recipe for anyone interested : https://insanelyeasyrecipes.com/watermelon-steak/

I had an ex whose mom used to do that to him with Sprite. Drove me crazy. I wonder if your experiences are both due to a misunderstanding about sodas in general. In truth, eating ginger settles your stomach, so sipping ginger ale actually is a valid treatment for stomach upset. It's why it's so popular on planes.

They may have experienced this themselves and assumed it was the carbonation component that helped, so now they're using stuff like pepsi as a medicine.

@EthanolParty

It’s hard to explain if you haven’t seen it, because academic topics and education have so much that’s good about them, and I’m probably not well placed to explain as it’s kinda raw for me still. But I’ll theow some ranting dot points out there.

1. The emphasis on assessment and running undergraduate programs like factories evidently detracts from the educational quality. Even the way topics are broken up into chunks and prerequisites to maximise efficiency can be quite artificial and hamper the ability to emphasise important fundamentals of a topic. In the end there’s a lot of focus from students and academics on winning or administering the gamified assessment system to memorise things forgotten in a few weeks and the deep insights and skills that can be learnt get pushed aside. In short, undergrad education has become an industrial complex.
2. The whole place is run by a pyramid scheme prestige cabal, albeit politely so, where everyone is or is supposed to feel very privileged to just be working in the building, because of the amazing things there and to have passed the great assessment game well enough to be allowed in. Culture problems or systemic problems just can’t be addressed. Problematic people can get away with a lot because they are senior. Whole groups or departments can have a quiet toxicity that no one does anything about, including warning or helping younger students naive to such problems, because, going through the game of and pain of the process is how you earn your position and so academics are literally personally incentivised to not make things too easy for students.
3. As a graduate research student, you are often chasing prestige and are young and eager to prove yourself. Truth is you’re likely canon fodder for the system. No one really cares about your education. Some ahead of you a few years will see you as competition. And as it’s a pyramid scheme, the vast majority don’t make it into the castle, so they’re right you are competition. But not in who’s smarter or more creative, but who stands out more or gets to work on the right project or gets lucky with the right discovery. The whole assessment mentality of finding the right people gets noxious when you start using fuzzy things like success in research as a young researcher. But the thing is a lot of research work, at least in science, depends on graduate students as a labour force to get things done. An unpaid young and eager to prove themselves labour force that will most likely never make it into academia (sound familiar?)
4. All of the above extends into the practice of research and academia itself. Academic compete for grants in a system often called “the lottery”. They’re on a treadmill to publish more and more papers instead of actually making sure their research is correct and they’re finding the truth. Ask any researcher how much they trust any paper they’ve looked deeply into. Truth is a lot research is done problematically. And then the publication system is it’s own gamified assessment system, where other researchers judge whether a paper is worthy of publication, which sounds good, except academics are overworked with research needing to publish their own papers and reviewing others papers is unpaid, and so they often make passing superficial judgments sometimes based on prejudices or impressions. What’s more, papers get published in journals which have grades in terms of “quality” which is based on the impression that the papers in those journals are impactful without really waiting to see if they turn out to be true over time.

I’ll stop ranting there and just say that much of the above may not be at all unique outside academia. But in combination with the use of students eager to prove themselves and the ideals of truth of science etc, it can all look pretty vile once you see it from the inside.

That was my dad’s favorite song. Really I don’t listen to Christmas music because it reminds me of when I had parents and extended family.

Both this and 'you are my sunshine' just instantly flip an emotional switch for me, I don't know why they make me want to cry but they just do

As a gigging musician, I play the Little Drummer Boy challenge every year. Perhaps you would enjoy it!

https://littledrummerboychallenge.com/about/official-ldbc-reporting-form/