BookWoman56

It’s been a while since I hired anyone, and I had forgotten just how painful the interview process can be for both sides. I know there’s always going to be at least one candidate who sounds fine on paper but then comes across as mediocre during the interview. But FFS, if you’ve been asked to provide an example of when you were able to come up with an improvement to your team’s processes, don’t spend 5 minutes bitching and moaning about how you had this great idea but TPTB were simply too stupid to recognize its value. Okay, you just demonstrated that you are both unable to argue convincingly for an improvement and to avoid sounding like a sore loser.

@ParadoxLost, I had never heard of the German smear finish for brick, so I googled it. The images looked pretty bad to me; I’d have thought they were fireplaces where the mortar and brick had decayed so much they needed to be replaced. Why not just leave your brick as is until such time as you find an alternative that you really love and feel confident about?

My general experience is that the kids who are annoying as fuck have parents who are even more annoying as fuck; it's just that the parents have often learned to hide it a bit better in public. The kids have not yet internalized that it's easier to get away with being a complete jerk in certain settings as opposed to others.

Given the way your mother has treated you in the past, and the vicious verbal attacks she's just handed you, I'd change "a long time" to "never." Seriously. Your mother as described is sucking the life force out of you, all while offering nothing but verbal and emotional abuse. I know it's tough to break the bond, but I'd be calling your brother and telling him you're done, and he can notify you when she dies. From everything you've said, your mother is a toxic person who is not ever going to treat you with any respect or affection, so why torture yourself by continuing to go visit her just to get more abuse heaped on you? Focus on what you need both personally and professionally, and stop letting your mother destroy your peace of mind. If you can't bring yourself to cut ties completely, at least consider limiting your visits to something more reasonable, like once every 6 months and only for a weekend. IIRC, your brother is there in the same town with her, and it makes much more sense for him to be the one to deal with whatever her real needs are, instead of you being an emotional punching bag for her. With my own mother, I've reached the point of just accepting reality. She's mostly recovered from her surgery and hospital stay, but has lost some mobility that I'm not sure is going to come back. Her dementia has now been documented and is increasing. There are still periods when she is lucid but those are getting shorter and occurring less frequently. So at this point I really think the best thing that can happen is that she just dies in her sleep, whether that happens next month or two years from now. Her quality of life is deteriorating because of the dementia, and I suspect that if she lives another year, she's going to have trouble knowing who any family members are. One interesting thing did come out of the last visit by my older sister (the one who is useful and has her life together). We began talking about some things from our childhood and adolescence, and she has pretty much confirmed something I've long suspected. My younger sister has always pointedly been my mother's favorite; this is something that's been commented on by numerous people over the years. And I often wondered if there was some specific reason for that. Based on a conversation that my older sister overheard when she was fairly young, we're both now about 99% certain that my younger sister is the result of an affair that my mother had with someone, and that my father decided to not break up the family because of not wanting the scandal and so forth. It's definitely making me view their marriage in a different light.

@BuyMoreAndSave, I regard you reaching the point of having no more fucks to give as progress. You can't control the behavior of your family members, but you can create and enforce some boundaries so that there's minimal contact with dysfunctional and toxic people, regardless of whether they are family. If your brother becomes homeless and ends up committing suicide, that's on him; you offered help at one point and he isn't willing to meet some fairly simply conditions for receiving help. In addition, having just gotten rid of your MIL, you and your husband need some time without another ongoing crisis situation to get back into a more or less normal life and see how that works for your own relationship. All that said, from your various posts it sounds as if you have spent a lot of your life being manipulated by other people. Some of that was out of your control when you were younger, but you are old enough now to understand a critical part of being an adult: People can manipulate you emotionally and so forth only if you let them. You're not going to be able to stop people from trying to manipulate you, and all you can change is your own response to their attempts, by shutting them down with a flat refusal to play their game. When I was in my teens, I sometimes allowed myself to be manipulated by other people and eventually read a book on becoming more assertive. I no longer remember the exact phrase, but the underlying meaning of something in that book was that if you behave like a doormat, then you need to expect people to walk all over you. It was a harsh wake-up call for me, but changing my approach to other people's attempts to control my life allowed me to take control of my own life.

I also think that it's too easy for people raised in more or less normal circumstances to look at her situation as if she must be punished for violating legal and societal norms that were really just not part of her environment. She was raised in a setting where lying, cheating, and manipulating people was not just normal but actively encouraged. She apparently had minimal contact with people other than her mother, and somehow I don't see her mother instilling what we might think of as typical moral standards in Gypsy. So I don't think she can "admit" that she's guilty of manipulating her BF into killing her mother because she can't conceive of manipulation as something wrong. That is, she might technically know that having her mother killed was wrong but on a gut level, all she may have been aware of is that her mother was torturing her and holding her captive, and that she would do whatever it took to escape. Will she manipulate others for the rest of her life? Probably so, but I doubt she has the capacity at present to distinguish why manipulation in some instances is perceived as okay (such as putting pressure on someone to take a job or go to a certain school because you think it's the right choice for that person) and yet in others it's wrong, such as convincing people your daughter can't walk when she in fact can. In Gypsy's case, had she not taken action, it's quite possible her mother would have eventually killed her either by design or by accident, because her fake illnesses and so forth she claimed Gypsy had kept escalating. Her mother wanted attention, benefits, and to be regarded as a martyr, and what's more apt to get those things than having a daughter who tragically didn't survive to adulthood? I don't generally condone violence, but IMO her mother got exactly what she deserved and the world is a better place without her in it.

As a parent and consumer, I fail to understand why people feel compelled to drag their kids to the grocery store anyway. I was a single parent essentially from day one with my daughter, and there were times when nobody was available to watch her while I went to the store, but I made damn sure I went at non-peak hours and didn't engage in getting her to "help" me check out. If I had multiple kids and a spouse, there's no way in hell I would have taken the kids with me to shop on a regular basis. I recognize that there's value in getting your kids to understand appropriate behavior in grocery stores and so forth, so I understand taking one or possibly two kids at a time for a short trip to introduce them to how the grocery store excursion works. I taught my daughter very early that while she was free to request anything in the store that she wanted, many times the answer was going to be that we weren't getting that item today. This approach resulted in her not ever having a single meltdown in a store over wanting to get something that I wasn't going to buy. (I generally blame the parents, though, for doing things like dragging a tired toddler into Walmart late at night past rows and rows of toys and expecting the toddler not to lose its composure.) But why do both parents need to go to the store and take four kids along? Can't they come up with a comprehensive shopping list before going to the store, so there's no need for input by every single family member? I blame the concept of forced family togetherness for this stupid idea that everything has to be done as a family unit. FFS, there are some things it's better to do alone as a parent or with only one child, in addition to having some consideration for other shoppers.

I do have neighbors around the corner who seem to entertain at least every other weekend, but they added a covered deck to their original back porch, and use that area for entertaining. I can usually hear their music while all that’s going on, but it’s always a weekend and never extremely late, so I don’t care. Not sure why the HGTV designers rarely suggest this type of solution.

This is excellent advice. I recommend to anyone that it’s best to update your resume at least once a year, and adjust items as your major responsibilities shift and you acquire new skills. Also, don’t fall into the trap of thinking you must have a one-size-fits-all resume. Try to figure out a couple of different positions you might be interested in, and create one version of your resume that aligns with one position, and a second version that aligns with the other position. For example, I have a resume that focuses on my tech writing skills/experience, one that focuses on my instructional design skills/experience, and a third one for teaching college writing courses. The tech writing resume is my primary one, but the others are useful if I decide to apply for other jobs. I will say that as someone in the middle of hiring a new employee, I rejected probably a third of the applicants because their resumes focused on other responsibilities they had, with only occasional mention of the responsibilities and skills related to the job they were applying for.

I don’t want to defend Mitchell, because I think GWTW is mostly overly sentimental trash, but at the time it was written, and in the time it was set, most people in this part of western civilization didn’t think there was such a thing as marital rape. Fundamentally, once a woman was married, her husband could use her sexually any way he wanted, and her own family members would likely have told her it was her duty to accept whatever he did. I fully understand the anger with how this was portrayed, but I also have to keep in mind a criticism of historical fiction that I have heard many times, about how disconcerting it is to read a book set in the 18th or 19th century, and to encounter modern day sensibilities. So my own reaction when reading something like this is to feel anger on behalf of the victimized character, but be glad I am not living in a setting where treating a wife like a piece of property is still the norm.

Exactly. The episode that I saw treated the divorce and former spouse in a very matter-of-fact way. No bashing, just readiness to move on and relief that there’s no need to make compromises on what the person wants. IIRC, the only negative remark had to do with a big recliner the husband had used to sit in while the wife was cooking and so forth, and while it was obvious she resented his sense of entitlement, the focus was much more on creating her own space to her own specifications. This episode came off as uplifting, not depressing. Marriages end, and people need to adjust. I’d be much more depressed or concerned by a show about a divorced spouse who insisted on keeping everything the way it was while the former spouse was still there.

That's inherent in the structure of any of these shows. They're not going to show the viewers a bunch of properties, then have the client make a bid on it, only to be outbid or something and have no property to show off at the end. But given that David's clients have already got a contract on a property or have already taken possession of it, he does make an effort to show properties that the clients might have been interested in if they were still actively looking. The show essentially recreates the search the clients went through, just refreshing the alternatives they considered. Especially given the underlying structure of the show, I'm appreciative that David typically shows other properties that the clients might find appealing based on their stated preferences, rather than having the house already under contract/bought, plus two other properties that are in the same price range but reflect David's own personal preferences. I spent a brief period many years ago working for a firm of realtors. My experience was that potential buyers would come in with their wish list, and the realtor would generally go along with those wishes in terms of number of bedrooms and so forth, but then proceed to show the potential buyer the realtor's own listings that had been on the market the longest. Those listings would more or less match what the client was looking for, but the realtor often didn't make the effort to find the "ideal" home for the buyer, and in my experience at least, often pushed the buyer to look at homes that were either at the very top end of their budget or exceeded it. I suspect things have changed a good bit, with the advent of Zillow and similar sites, along with many more buyers getting prequalified and knowing exactly what their budget is, but I suspect there are still realtors out there pushing properties less because they think those are ideal for the buyer and more because they're older listings that the realtor wants off the books. Finally, I appreciate that David makes the attempt to include houses have some visual interest, knowing those houses are for the viewers' benefit. I've seen some features that I like and that I would probably include on my own wish list, but also some features that I realized are definite non-starters for me. Similarly, he's quick to point out that some surface items can be changed quickly and inexpensively, such as wall colors.

The finale for the Sex and the City tv show is the first one I recall pissing me off so much that I refuse to watch reruns or the movies that came afterward. As much as Candace Bushnell’s writing style grated, the fundamental truth in that book was that Big and Carrie (very dysfunctional relationship) were not going to end up together. The first edition of the book was slightly ambiguous on this point at the end, but clearly pointed to that resolution. I think after the show started, Bushnell realized the show was going to go down a different path. In any event, she wrote a second edition of the book, in which she blatantly stated that Big was happily married and Carrie was happily single. Yet the show indulged in something that drives me nuts: spend season after season showing how dysfunctional and toxic a relationship is, break up the couple, only to reunite them in the finale and expect the entire audience to cheer for the couple. Hell to the no. Either have the decency to stick to the spirit of the source material, or else write your own story and your own characters.

White Doctor, the Survivor of the Future. The hell? Am I supposed to be Doctor Who?

I’ve complained before about how long the job application, interview, and hiring process takes from the perspective of an applicant. Now it’s time to kvetch from the other side. I am currently working with HR to hire a new tech writer, to take over most of what I was doing prior my recent promotion. It took close to 3 weeks just to get the job posted, which to me seems excessive. But it was posted and applications came in, and I have already skimmed all the resumes to identify my top picks. However, I have to wait for HR to review all the apps and forward me their top picks; the recruiter has already flagged my picks to ensure they make it through. It will take HR a couple of weeks to review all of them. Meanwhile, HR also has to approve the writing prompt I plan to use to obtain a writing sample from anyone who makes it to the interview stage. At this rate, it will probably be at least 2 weeks before I can schedule interviews, so this is dragging on a bit. Finally, I have to rant about some of the applicants. First, if you have a referral from a current employee and you are similarly qualified as a couple of other top candidates, yes, that referral might tip the scales in your favor. But when you have minimal relevant work experience, such as several years of project mgmt experience during which you were responsible for writing a few reports and project plans (as stated on your resume), that referral isn’t going to overcome the lack of direct experience. Second, don’t bother to apply if you don’t meet even the basic job requirements. When a job posting says 5 years of experience is required, WTF is up with applying when you have only 2 years of any work experience at all? Not to mention, describing your work experience as the “ability to write XYZ”? The ability to perform a job function is not the same as having actually performed it.

No, you can't change what has already occurred. What you can change is what happens in the future and how you respond to events. Your husband has in the past let his concerns for his mother override his concerns for your well-being and for the health of your marriage. Your mother sabotaged your attempts to be independent; your MIL sabotaged your husband's attempts to be independent, in addition to those things she did directly to you. Again, those things have already happened and you can't change them. But once your MIL is in another apartment, you need to ask yourself what kind of life you want, and whether being with a husband who seems resigned to being a captive of his mother's manipulation is in fact the life you want for yourself. If it's not, then either your husband needs to change or you need to do something to create a life that is what you desire, not a life that other people inflict upon you.

I want a big-ass kitchen so I have room to cook, but I also want an even bigger living room and a separate formal dining room. These people who insist they love to entertain and want a completely open floor plan puzzle me. I rarely entertain, but when I do, I don’t want my guests watching me cook or looking into a kitchen cluttered with debris from cooking. Nor do I want to cook everything ahead of time and then frantically clean up the kitchen just before guests arrive.

Today my pet peeve is with auto repair shops. I just got a repair estimate on my car that was hit by a careless driver last week. There’s very minor damage to the fender and front bumper; the car drives fine but the driver’s door won’t open because of the damage to the fender. One-third of the estimated repair cost is for paint and paint labor. I tell the estimator that the car is a 2007 model, with ~125K miles, and that I don’t care about paint or the aesthetics. He responds by insisting that the front bumper panel that needs to be replaced will be black, and must be painted silver to match the rest of the car. WTF? The insurance company is paying me directly, not paying the repair shop. If I choose not to waste time and money on painting what amounts to trim, why should the repair shop care, other than just wanting the extra money for the paint job. I could understand if it was a safety issue, but the paint is not going to make any difference whatsoever to the way the car functions. So I will be looking around for another repair shop that will listen to what I actually want repaired.

I endorse @Bastet's suggestion that this is essentially the only option that makes sense. Only, maybe this time around, set a longer time period for you not to contact her or to respond to her attempts to call you. Plain and simple, your mother manipulates you and seems to enjoy doing it. I am also reluctant to recommend cutting someone out of your life, but here's the deal: Your mother's behavior is toxic, and it's not going to change. You can't control what she does or says; you can control only how you respond to her actions and words. Stop letting her dictate how you live your life. Tell her it's your life, on your terms, and you're not talking to her again until she stops making demands of you that she has no right to make. You've got way too much chaos and pressure on you in both your personal and professional life. You seem to have not too many options at work. So at least in your personal life, you need to exert some control over your life. If she refuses to seek treatment for her hands, that's on her, not you. As for the ongoing suggestion that she wants to live with you, from my own experience with a mother who is much less toxic and demanding, do not let that happen. Even with a fairly good relationship with my mother, I have felt imprisoned ever since I chose to move her in with me, when there were not many options available. She doesn't try to control or interfere with most of my life, but she is a constant presence with a fuckton of needs, and at times I'm exhausted with being her primary caregiver. So even with the craziness of her being in the hospital and now the nursing facility, it's been a relief on many levels to have other people being responsible for her meals, meds, etc. In your situation, focus on what you need, not what other people want from you. If nothing else, make a list of small goals that you can attain for yourself, such as turning off your phone for an entire day on the weekend so nobody (mother, brother, work, whatever) can disturb you. Try to inject some positive things into a token free day per week: read, cook, relax, whatever makes you feel good. I'm not trying to be yet another voice telling you what to do, but I do speak from experience when I say that you can drive yourself and let yourself be driven this hard only so long before something breaks, and that something could well be you.

The past month has been insanely chaotic. My 90-year-old mother went into the hospital roughly a month ago, with a tiny cut to her thumb that became seriously infected, requiring surgery to her thumb, palm of her hand, and forearm. About 2 weeks later she was discharged and home for a few days, before developing blood clots in her lungs and legs, which ultimately resulted in another procedure because one of the clots was causing cardiac problems. She was in ICU for several days because her blood pressure kept dropping to ridiculously low levels. Reached the point where I called my older sister to come here to help me assess the situation, and we contacted the other siblings to alert them that we had no way to predict exactly what would happen, but things were serious. My mother finally stabilized enough to go to a skilled nursing facility, but my sister and I both thought she would very possibly not make it through the next week. Instead, her stubbornness has kicked in and she is now hellbent on getting out of the facility ASAP. Which will involve setting up home health care to continue physical therapy for her hand, etc., which had already started during the few days she was at home between hospital stays. A few days ago, the facility informed me that Medicare will pay full cost there for only 20 days, and if I want to extend the stay after that, there will be a $170/day co-pay, and that she would probably not qualify for the type of Medicaid that covers their facility. So it looks like when she hits the 20 days, she will be discharged to my home, and we will rely on a combo of home health care and another sibling who can be here for a couple of weeks to help out. I will be looking into various options, once I have some time that doesn’t need to be spent on other urgent things. All of this is happening when I got a promotion at work literally the day after the initial hospital stay began. And I’m thrilled about the promotion, but it means having to do my previous job plus learn a lot of other responsibilities and perform those. So until I can hire someone to do what I used to do, I’m essentially doing 2 jobs. More than ready for things to get back to normal. Finally, a few days ago, dumb-ass driver in a left turn only lane proceeded to go straight and hit me, while I was turning left from the “go straight or turn left” lane, and it will not be until the end of this week until I can even get an estimate on the repairs needed. Meanwhile, I can’t open the driver’s side door. ETA: Also, my mother turns 91 in a couple of weeks, so various family members from out of town will be visiting then.

Graphic sex scenes don’t bother me, but I dumped the series for two reasons both related to the romantic aspects. First is that while I can tolerate mysteries with a small side order of romance, I have zero use for romance novels with a small side order of mystery, which is what the series had become. Second is the ongoing romance with Joe? (no longer sure of his name), when it’s clear they’re not compatible for more than 15 minutes at a time. In one of the books, Ranger points out that Stephanie and Joe are constantly breaking up with each other, despite there being no real obstacles to them being together, and that pattern of breaking up all the time indicates an underlying problem. And I can’t help feeling that despite the inherent truth of that observation, the series is going to end with them married, because marriage solves all relationship problems. So I refuse to invest any more time in the series.

I had always heard those particular lyrics correctly, and assumed Clapton was referring to the reputation cocaine has for getting people to blurt out their unfiltered (and sometimes brutally honest) thoughts. I spent roughly 1985-1990 in the Miami area, and was at way too many parties where I was the only person there not using coke. I believe the song is from a little earlier in the 80s, though. From my own observations, I would say that while it’s not “truth serum,” cocaine does frequently result in people sharing information about themselves very rapidly, that they would otherwise not reveal. It’s less that people are unable to lie, and more that they can’t stop themselves from blurting out truths.

Agreed. Those idiots also need to consider what image their actions are creating not only for themselves, but possibly for their employers in some cases. Years ago, I was working to design an orientation course for new executives at a large financial services company. One of the components had to do with actions such as you described. That is, a senior executive had gotten into a shouting match with another customer who was ahead of him/her in line at a department store, insisting that his/her purchase should be handled first because it was for more stuff. Then the exec went off on the sales clerk for not complying with the request. (This was a Christmas season purchase, when the stores were already crowded.) The thing is, this executive was involved in a lot of high profile activities in the community, and a few people recognized the executive. Word spread through social media that an exec from company ABC had made a scene at the department store, and the executive got reprimanded for behaving like an ass in public and making the company look bad as well. Now, I generally feel that what someone does in private should have no effect on that person's job. But in this case, these execs were being compensated at a pretty high level and part of their official job description/responsibility was to represent the company in a positive manner when in public. So for our training, we used this example to highlight how the new execs needed to think about how they behaved in public settings.

Right now I'm on the other side of that coin. I am not someone who's ever going to make a scene in a store or restaurant, or loudly declare that I will never shop there again. I just make a mental note that the specific store/restaurant goes on my "Do not patronize for at least 6 months" list. It takes a lot to get me to that point of being pissed off enough to avoid a store/restaurant, but occasionally the employees at a location will push me to that extreme. Last week, for example, I went to a restaurant I hadn't gone to in several months. It was late afternoon, but well before the dinner crowd, so there were maybe 5-6 tables of customers and 3 wait staff. At the end of the meal, I considered leaving a note for the wait staff and/or manager, but decided instead to just pay the bill and leave without offering feedback to anyone. If I had written that note, it would have said: Dear wait staff, if you expect to get a tip at all, much less a generous tip, then here's some advice. When you drop off the food at a table, don't do it like you are running a race and leave before making sure the customers have what they need, including the critical component of silverware with which to eat the food that in no way can be considered finger food. Make the effort to check back with the table a couple of minutes after delivering the food to make sure they have everything they need, such as ketchup for fries, syrup for pancakes, etc. Don't disappear for 25 minutes on a smoke break and show back up only when you assume the customer is finished and ready for the check. When going to other tables, look around to see if one of your tables or any other table is trying to flag down you or one of your colleagues. Furthermore, if a customer who is not at one of your assigned tables comes to you and politely says, "Excuse me, could I get some silverware?" don't sigh loudly and act as if you're doing the customer an enormous favor by providing the bare minimum needed to eat the meal. I decided not to ask to talk to the manager or fill out one of the stupid comment cards simply because if it was just one member of the wait staff who sucked, I could blame it on that one person being a crappy employee. But when you've got an entire restaurant of staff who seem to feel that waiting on customers is interfering with their main activity of chatting with each other and going for smoke breaks, then the manager either doesn't give a flying fuck about the quality of service or is so oblivious to what's going on in the restaurant as to be completely ineffective.

I haven't watched this yet, but intend to both because I find it fascinating and also because I used to have a passing acquaintance with the widow of one of the engineers who was sent into Chernobyl afterwards to assist with the cleanup. He lived for about 10 years or so following that assignment, long enough for them to move to the U.S. and get settled in. She taught at the local Jewish private academy and was extremely nice. I don't remember precisely what her husband died of, other than it was related to either heart or lung problems, but she stated those health problems arose from his work at Chernobyl and she was bitter that his death would not be counted in the official death toll, but not in the slightest bit surprised by that decision by the Russian government.