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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I have lots of stomach issues and can’t eat a lot of foods, which means I mostly eat the same few things over and over. One of the few things I can have reading out is a particular local restaurant’s chicken strips, and I’d get them for lunch a couple times a month. They’ve raised their prices twice in the last 6 months, and what used to be 6-8 strips for$6 is now 5 chicken strips - just the chicken, no fries or other sides - for $10. If I’m feeling masochistic, I’ll get myself and my father each one of their chef salads. Two of those are now $27. They are a very, very popular place and usually crazy busy, but since that last hike I’ve noticed the parking lot at lunchtime is often half empty. This is not a wealthy area, people can’t afford these prices. They are going to greed themselves right out of business.

    They’ve also lost every single long-time employee they had. And when I say long, I mean 15, 20 years working there. I watched most of them grow up, get married and have families. Every. Single. One. is gone, and I’ve seen most of them at other restaurants now. Their staff is now different every time I go in there, and service sucks and orders are frequently wrong. My work stopped ordering food from there for meetings because of it. Greed, greed, greed, with a healthy dose of apparent staff mistreatment. Story of the world at large nowadays.



  • OP, check out the websites about grants ISPs are getting to put fiber in rural areas and see if your area is on the list somewhere (I would try and link you to some, but I’m on mobile and for some reason I have a hell of a time finding those sites while on mobile). You can see below what I’ve had to deal with for about 20 years, until my area finally got covered by one of those grants a few months ago. I am super rural - like, I am literally surrounded by nationally protected forest and nothing else; it’snot a place I thought would ever be included in those grant locations. It was, though, and I now have Gigabyte internet with no cap, with VOIP, for $74.98 a month. If I’m not using WiFi, I get an actual gig of download speed. If I’m on wifi, it’s usually between 600-900MB.

    Up until recently, we paid Centurylink about $150 a month for two lines into the house. Each line maxed out at 0.75MB download speed and 0.23 MB upload speed. We needed two lines to even be able to function. Almost 20 years of this, with no other options besides Hughesnet. We tried them for a little while; their equipment cost a fortune, it was about$150 a month, the speed was nearly as bad and they had a 200MB A MONTH CAP. We had to turn off images for websites in order to not go over the cap. Previous to 2004, I lived in a very rural part of NY. We had high speed internet for $69 a month, no cap. I can’t remember the speed, but I remember that it took 3 minutes to download a full sized movie. 20 YEARS AGO the internet was better, and cheaper!



  • I also hate it when it has a name that is a super common word or phrase. Our last 3 records management prograns at work have been like this, and their help fires are terrible to non existent. Good like trying to search the internet for information on the software with those common names. Even adding terms relevant to what the software does, didn’t help much.

    (Apologies if this is terribly typed, I’ve got an impending migraine aura that stayed right as I hit reply and have lost a good chunk of my vision. I can’t see most of what I’m saying.)




  • Yep. First thing to do is run a vacuum over them. Even the tiniest bit of dust can make them cranky and chirpy. If that doesn’t work and you don’t know how old they are, pop them off the ceiling and look at the back for a manufacture date. In general, smoke detectors (even without the ten year battery) have a life span of about 10 years. If they’ve hit that milestone, it’s a good chance they are beeping because they are old and they should be replaced. Next would be a call to the PITA management about them. If you get no love from management, look up what fire department covers your address; many departments will go out to check your detectors if you can’t get them to stop beeping and your landlord is being a butt. If your department is a volunteer one, it may be next to impossible to get ahold of them as there will probably not be anyone at the station to answer phones. For volunteer departments in my area, you need to call the county fire marshal / emergency management office in order to get hooked up with the volunteer department as they have the personal contact numbers for the volunteer chiefs, so I would try that (or the equivalent for your area). If it’s a career fire department, you should be able to call them directly. Even if they are out of the station, if it’s normal business hours and you call their HQ, they likely have a business office that will answer.