BookWoman56

All this talk of bad managers, bad project planning, and impossible expectations has reminded me of the short video The Expert, which is simultaneously hysterically funny and terrifying as all too representative of real-world project meetings. I'd like to say that their parody is OTT, but it's not that far from reality.

While I've frequently had to work in a cubicle, most of the time it's been in areas with little noise. But prior to switching positions with the same employer about 6 months ago, I was stuck in a cube surrounded by people who handled complaints and thus were on the phone all day with irate customers. As a tech writer, I am frequently working on documents that are hundreds of pages long, and it is damn near impossible to concentrate and keep focused on the internal consistency of a long document when there are constant loud conversations going on around you. My new manager did something I wish more managers did. She had never had a tech writer before and initially was thinking the tech writer would need to be in the same office that she is. Almost half the team is on one side of the country, and the rest are mostly on the other side, with a couple of people working remotely. But she talked to a few other groups who had tech writers and learned that generally, tech writers are very introverted and need quiet, and many of us work better in isolation. So when I applied, I had indicated on my app that I would prefer a full-time telecommute, and she approved that request with no discussion. So in that case at least, she very much did take my needs and work preferences into account.

I can see both sides of the remote help desk issue. If you have a hardware problem (components not plugged in, printer doing weird stuff, etc.,) then yes, it makes more sense to rely on the local techs. I work for a huge company (250,000+ employees) so obviously our help desk is going to be remote, and there are undoubtedly some small offices where there is no onsite tech support. Roughly 6 months ago, I began working 100% remotely, so onsite tech support does not exist for me either. But 99% of the time that I've called the help desk, it's been an issue they could resolve by taking over my computer. It's generally been things such as an automatic system upgrade resulted in changing software version 19 to version 20, but because a specific program I use is compatible only with 19 and not with 20, they have to downgrade me back to version 19. That said, though, to me it makes sense to route all calls/requests through a central line, who can determine whether a local tech is needed or not, and track the issues. We can use a chat function with the help desk, and then if it's an issue that is not an easy fix, they initiate a phone call and take over the computer. I'd guess that part of the reason for a centralized help desk is to track what types of issues are occurring and to see if there is a particular group or individual who is having higher than average problems, and if so, figure out what is causing the issue. A different pet peeve, though, is incompetent employees who hang on by switching departments on an ongoing basis. There is one person in my group whose work is consistently late, who frequently does not understand what he is supposed to do (often because he has not bothered to do the prep work or paid attention to discussions), and whose work, once submitted, often has to be redone by someone else because it's crap. Everyone in our group knows he's incompetent; it's at the point that project managers will escalate it if he is assigned as the sole resource for something. I was shocked to learn the guy has been with the company for 5 years, although he's only been in our group for about 9 months. Evidently he coasted for a couple of years in one position, transferred to another group for a couple of years, and then transferred to our group. It seems to be one of those cases where previous managers didn't ding him on appraisals as much as they should have because he indicated he would be transferring out, thereby eliminating the need for the manager to give a low performance rating, develop a plan to improve performance, and then document the hell out of his sub-par performance. So I guess in this case, the pet peeve is not just for the incompetent employee but the manager who fails to document inadequate work. The end result is that on paper, he looks like someone who would be a good addition to a group but in reality is a drain because other group members have to do not only their own work but most of his as well.

Much of what bugged me about Ron Weasley was his whinging about being poor. And I realize it sucks to be poor, especially when you are attending school with rich kids who mock you. But the other Weasley kids were just as poor, and they for the most part did something about it by working hard. Bill and Charlie had already left home after finding jobs. Percy, despite being pompous and condescending at times, did work hard to have high grades so he could find a good job after Hogwarts. Fred and George obviously didn't excel in the classroom, but had a strong sense of entrepreneurship and poured their energy into creating the items that ultimately were sold in their joke shop. Ginny is more of a cipher, but nothing in her character indicated she was going to wallow in self-pity about being poor. OTOH, Ron bitched and moaned about being poor, put minimal effort into his classes, and showed no signs of having any initiative the way Fred and George did. I hate the moment when the trio goes to the joke shop and Ron scoops up a load of goods, expecting that he won't have to pay for them. I am generally meh on Molly Weasley but agree that overall, the family seemed realistic because of their flaws. With Arthur, it wasn't just that he was an absent father; he also seemed to undermine Molly and act like one of the kids at times, urging them not to let Molly find out about what they had done. In re-reading the series quickly over the last couple of weeks, I find Harry a lot less sympathetic than I did the first time around. Once he got to Hogwarts, he was very curious about his father, but I cannot recall a single instance of him asking anyone, such as professors, Hagrid, Sirius or Lupin, what his mother was like. I can fanwank that lack of curiosity as being a byproduct of setting up the big reveal regarding Snape's love for Lily, but it does seem odd that he never once asked anyone about who her friends were, her personality, etc. It also baffled me that he blamed Snape for Sirius's death. The entire time Snape was attempting to teach him occlumency, Harry put virtually no effort into practicing the way Snape had told him. Snape and others warned him that Voldemort could try to plant false ideas and visions in his head, and yet Harry still did not try very hard to get better at keeping Voldemort out of his head. And while Snape should have kept tutoring Harry even after the incident with the pensieve, I can't blame Snape for being furious with Harry; that was a serious invasion of privacy. Given Harry's lack of effort with occlumency, I'm not sure that even if Snape had continued the lessons, it would have done any good. So after being warned that Voldemort could trick him with false visions, Harry still takes his friends with him into a trap, resulting in his friends being injured and necessitating a rescue attempt that got Sirius killed. Although Bellatrix was directly responsible for that death, I find Harry at least indirectly responsible for it. Yet his reaction is to be angry at Snape, with very little consideration of his own culpability in that event. I still like Harry overall, but his flaws seem a bit more pronounced after binge-reading the series.

Although I agree that the value of a full-time homemaker should not be calculated by taking all the various job roles that would be paid jobs in the workplace and adding them up as if it should be the sum of 5 or 6 full-time employees, if you had to replace a full-time homemaker with paid employees, it wouldn't be cheap either. Much of the push to set a value on a homemaker role comes from all the years when it was perceived as having no value. During my first marriage, after my husband and I had a baby, the life insurance agents began calling and one came over. He played a video showing how the father of a family dies and then the mother has to find a job to support them. And of course, because mom has a job now, the kids drop out of school and become juvenile delinquents. The agent then gave us the sales pitch of how my husband needed to take out a life insurance policy to prevent that horrible fate from happening to me and our child. Then the following conversation occurred: Me: What level of life insurance should I have? Agent: Oh, we don't usually insure wives. You don't contribute anything financially. Me: What about the possible costs of child care and housecleaning, etc. if I died? Agent: Oh, another family member like a grandmother or aunt could fulfill those responsibilities until your husband would remarry. Although I guess it wouldn't hurt to have you insured for $10,000 or so, in case it takes a while to find someone else. Me: Seriously? At the time, my husband was in his first real job out of college and not making any huge amount of money. It would have been damn near impossible for him to pay for full-time childcare. For the other things I did, such as housecleaning, laundry, paying bills, etc., yes, he could have assumed those responsibilities himself, but doing so in addition to his regular job would have left him no time to spend with our child. So while I disagree that the value of a homemaker should be 6 full-time salaries combined, there is significant value to it. Although I haven't been a homemaker in over 20 years, for a while I was a single parent who had to pay for full-time childcare while I was at work and then also had to take care of the other homemaker responsibilities after getting home from work. It was exhausting and expensive. I hate the stereotype of housewives having nothing to do except sit on the couch, watch TV, and eat candy.

I don't really think any of the characters is served well by this kind of episode. And from my perspective, that's been true for all too many episodes over the last few seasons. There's way too much unsub, way too little profiling, and uneven use of characters. One of the things that drew me to the show originally was the ensemble cast, with each profiler having specific skills and strengths, as well as weaknesses. Nowadays, not so much. Generally in any episode over the last couple of years, and this one was no exception, you could take almost any line of dialogue from character A and give it to character B, and there would be no way to tell which character it was originally intended for, with the possible exception of Garcia's lines, because apparently the sky will fall if there's an episode in which she doesn't bitch and moan about how squicked out she is by the photos/details of a crime. I have no issue with the occasional episode where one profiler is much more prominently used than the others, provided it's not all the time and almost always the same profiler. But this episode felt clunky, and the writers in general seem to have lost the knack of making the profilers, the case, and the unsub interesting all in the same episode. I can still vividly recall some of the episodes, including specific lines of dialogue, from season one or two, even when I haven't seen them for a while. With this one, within a week or two at most, I will have forgotten everything about it. There was just zero spark of interest there. It reminds me of when I will occasionally read a book that makes no impact on me, and then pick it up a couple of years later and realize halfway through it that yes, I have read it before. The episode was just completely forgettable.

I'd add Topanga Lawrence from Boy Meets World to the list of characters who transformed not in a good way. She started out as a quirky, intelligent, free-spirited, interesting girl and devolved into a conformist, stereotypical female teen focused on her appearance and being popular, not interesting and completely interchangeable with virtually every other female teen on TV.

There were a few things about Molly that bugged, but I have wondered if she became that way after years of living with her husband, who seemed good-natured but pretty ineffectual. Tricking out a Muggle car with various magical functions seems a bit risky, especially given his job. It's possible she became increasingly screechy over time as she watched him do similarly stupid things. However, I'll go one further in UOs about HP characters. I think Ron is pretty much the worst friend ever. His role in the first book seemed to be exposition fairy, to give Harry some insight into how the wizarding world worked. He seemed fairly useless after that. But to me he became increasingly unlikable as the series went on. He was an asshat to Harry in the GoF book, refusing to believe Harry (who was supposed to be his best friend) when Harry said he had not put his name into consideration for the championship competition. In one of the later books, he essentially calls his sister a slut because she has had more than one boyfriend, at an age where it's common for teen couples to break up after a month or two and find new BF/GFs. But the final straw was in DH, when the trio is on the run from the Death Eaters et al, hiding in the middle of nowhere. They are supposed to be on a mission to destroy the horcruxes so they can prevent Voldemort from rising to complete power again. It's a dangerous situation. But Ron bails on Harry and Hermione because he misses his mommy's cooking. So, first off, Ron, if you don't like Hermione's cooking, then try cooking your own damn food. Second, if you're tired of depending on food from the forest, then figure out a way to go into a Muggle town and buy some supplies, using the Muggle money that Hermione brought along. Somewhere in that scene where Ron is getting ready to desert his two BFFs there's a sentence where Harry looks at Ron as if he is seeing the real Ron for the first time ever. And I agreed. Ron was a lazy, unmotivated brat who constantly tried to use Hermione's homework because he couldn't be bothered to do his own, and had very few redeeming qualities. The fact that he would leave Harry and Hermione, knowing how dangerous the situation was, seems like one of those moments in a friendship that you can't recover from. So, even though I knew it was coming, the epilogue in DH where it is revealed that Ron and Hermione are married made me cringe. I remember reading that and thinking, after being married to Ron for 15 or 20 years, Hermione is going to turn into Molly Weasley just out of pure exasperation at his bumbling ineptitude.

Thanks, everyone, for the well wishes. The cat is fine. No cast, but a metal plate was inserted to stabilize the leg because it was broken in two places, and the incision is closed with staples that have to be removed in 10 days. However, the staff there were astonished because less than 12 hours after the surgery, she managed to start climbing the wall of her cage, like a monkey. She is chilled out on some serious pain meds, but alert when awake and the recovery seems to be going well so far. Even after a good night's sleep, I still cannot understand why anyone with sense would choose to bring the entire family to the emergency vet. As noted, you have injured and distressed pets, along with humans who are worried about their pets and in some cases, verging on hysteria. There were some pets with severe injuries brought in while I was there, and the parents seemed oblivious to the fact that their kids were seeing all of that. Of course, I think oblivious is the key word here.

Some time back I had ranted about people who bring their entire families to the grocery store, clogging up the aisles with small children while having family discussions about which brand of cereal to buy. This week I've experienced a variation of that issue in a different venue. Earlier this week, my cat managed to get outside and I did not immediately realize it. She was hit by a car and her leg was broken, so a trip to the emergency animal hospital ensued. The surgery was successful and last night I went to the animal hospital to discuss post-op care with the vet and decide if the cat was ready to come home. Understand, while this clinic does routine veterinary procedures such as vaccinations, spaying and neutering, etc., it is an emergency hospital. So yes, this is the place people bring their pets that have been hit by a car, injured in a fight with another animal, or bitten by a rattlesnake, etc. It is fairly common to see someone bringing in a bloody, injured animal or one that is clearly in some other kind of distress. Yet, every time I have been there, the lobby has been filled with people who for reasons I cannot in any way understand, have brought their entire families with them. One fairly typical family last night consisted of both parents plus four kids, ranging from an infant to maybe 9 or 10 years old. Because of the extraneous family members, no seats were available for most of the time I was in the lobby. (They had a lot of emergencies last night, so the wait was longer than normal.) A lobby in an animal hospital is not in any way kid-friendly, so there were no games or toys to distract them. Kids were running around, randomly pushing buttons on the pet treat vending machines. On top of that, as noted earlier, this is a trauma center, so periodically people were bringing in their injured pets through the lobby, in full view of the various kids. As with the idea of taking kids to the grocery store, I can understand a single parent having no real choice but to take along a child to the store, doctor appointment, etc. But what is wrong with people, that they somehow think going to an emergency room (human or animal) should be a family excursion? Did it not occur to them that maybe the better solution would be for one parent to take the pet to the hospital, or go to pick up the pet, and have the kids stay at home with the other parent? Aside from using up all the available seats in the lobby and adding to the noise level, they were exposing their kids to some pretty gruesome sights. What the hell? At times, I feel like Ripley in Aliens: Did IQs just drop sharply?

This one is going to be a bit weird for me, as I am related to Newt Knight (obviously several generations apart and not a direct descendant). The prospect is amusing in some ways because growing up in MS, my grandparents and great-grandparents were of the opinion that we should not mention being related to him, because of the shame!!! I'm glad it looks to be done well, because it's a fascinating story.

Even though Rickman was technically too old to play Snape, he sold the hell out of the entire role and I cannot imagine anyone else playing Snape. I always thought they softened Snape a bit in the movies to make the character a bit more ambiguous. In the books, OTOH, it felt like at least the first few were variations on the theme of "bad stuff is happening at Hogwarts; Harry is convinced Snape is responsible for it; it turns out to be someone else." Two of my favorite scenes ever are when Snape uses his body to shield the trio from the werewolf in PoA, and then the scene (in GoF?) where he straightens out the cuffs of his shirt prior to whacking Harry and Ron. In the films overall, the adult actors were generally very solid and offset the inexperience of some of the younger actors. Jason Isaacs was wonderful as Lucius Malfoy. I have very fond memories of Robert Pattinson in GoF in his pre-Twilight days. Julie Walters played Molly Weasley exactly as I'd imagined her from the books. For the trio, though, they were all awkward in the first movie but Rupert Grint to me seemed the weak link in acting. It was like he had two expressions: scared and bored. Admittedly, I found Ron to be tolerable in the first couple of books, where his function seemed primarily to be exposition fairy to explain the wizarding world to Harry. But as the series went on, he became a very crappy friend. I hated the way he made fun of Hermione for studying, but would have been perfectly willing to copy her homework because he couldn't be bothered to do his own work. The way he treated Harry in GoF made me dislike him, and the final straw was in DH, when the trio are camping in the middle of nowhere trying to survive, and Ron deserts Harry and Hermione to run home to mommy's cooking, because he can't deal with the same physical discomforts that Harry and Hermione are enduring. I'm currently re-reading the books and find I dislike Ron even more than the first time through. Over the course of the movies, I thought both Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson improved but Rupert never seemed to rise above adequate. He wasn't horrible, but nothing about his performances stood out in a good way for me. I thought the twins who played Fred and George were way more engaging; I could actually envision people wanting to be friends with them. I hated the epilogue in the books and movie that showed everybody paired up. I really don't care who Harry ended up with, but I can't stand the idea of Hermione being with Ron. Ginny was just a nonentity in the movies, whereas Luna Lovegood displayed compassionate quirkiness.

Like others, I was a casual fan of David Bowie; recognized his genius while liking some but not all of his songs. I saw him in The Man Who Fell to Earth and thought he was brilliant in that role. Alan Rickman's death, though, has been a punch in the gut. There are all the iconic roles others have mentioned, but I also have to give some love for his performance in Something the Lord Made, which made me pay attention to a part of medical history I knew nothing about. Finally, though, it's been heartbreaking to read all the tributes from his fellow actors, but the tribute that has moved me the most and revealed more about what Rickman was like as an individual is by a non-celeb friend of his, located here. The world has lost not just a great actor but a great person.

I finally got around to watching this, or at least most of it. I couldn't force myself to watch the last 15 minutes because by that time my willing suspension of disbelief had vanished. Unless there was some big reveal in the last 15 minutes, the show seriously wants me to believe that the motivation for the unsub was that as a child, he encountered some random old person with wrinkles, who was blunt enough to tell him that if you live long enough, wrinkles will happen to you too? So the moral of this episode is never let your kids see someone old, because otherwise craziness happens. Aside from that, the episode did not make me feel anything other than frustration about the victims. Who is stupid enough to have a first date with someone at night at a deserted cemetery? How would a request for that meeting place not set off alarms for the woman? While I don't hang out with a ton of people that age, the people I do know in the age bracket have all had it drilled into them that on a first date, you meet in a public place, with good lighting and other people around. Hell, people my age (i.e., old as dirt) know that you meet in a public place for the first date. The older couple didn't appeal to me either. Yes, it sucks that you waited most of your life to do things you really wanted to do, and now that you finally retired, your wife is terminally ill. However, when someone who is apparently an orderly or assistant of some sort at a medical facility knocks on your door and offers you a miracle cure that involves blood transfusions being performed at your home, again, how does that not raise alarms? Other things that bugged: as soon as I saw the aquarium, I knew that at some point the unsub would smash it in anger and frustration. Also, the reveal that the unsub insisted the area was magical because of the legend around the fountain of youth seemed a bit lame. The plot felt very formulaic and most of the profilers were blandly interchangeable props. My issues with this episode aren't based on who was there and who wasn't, but that the episode was essentially deep-fried stupidity. The kitty blouse that the former medical experimentation club member wore, though, was awesome.

For the women who are married with kids already, it's that there is no real decision with consequences, including possible regret. They almost always decide they do want the pregnancy to continue, but then they don't have to deal with the complications that a pregnancy would bring, because they turn out not to be really pregnant. And I have no issue with there being conflict, but would prefer that conflict take place prior to the actual decision. So, for example, a woman has an unexpected pregnancy and feels conflicted about whether to continue or terminate the pregnancy. I'm fine with that, because it's a decision that many women would struggle with. But once she's made her decision, then I do think that most of the time, she should stick to that decision, including possible regrets no matter what her choice is. What narrative purpose does it serve to have her be conflicted about the decision, make the decision, and then change her mind that could not be just as well served by having her be conflicted and then making a decision that she sticks with? In addition, while in the very few instances where a character does choose to have an abortion, it's common to show the character regretting that choice, you almost never see the reverse, where a character who contemplated an abortion but then changed her mind, later is shown to regret the choice to continue the pregnancy. Ultimately, I resent the unplanned pregnancy/possible abortion scenario being used as a litmus test for whether a female character ultimately chooses her career over having a family (meaning she's a cold heartless bitch) or instead considers an abortion but changes her mind because deep down, she really is a nurturing person who just needs someone to love. I will freely admit this is a hot-button topic for me. I am alive today because when I was much younger, I was able to terminate a pregnancy that occurred while I was being treated for a very serious illness, and was told that in all likelihood, continuing the pregnancy would result in my death. And I am grateful that I was able to make the right choice for me, so that I survived the illness and was later able to carry a pregnancy to term. But with the way that abortion is currently treated on U.S. TV, I have no doubt that if my situation were to be fictionalized for a TV show, the TV version of me would elect instead to ignore the medical advice and proceed with the pregnancy, with the end result of both TV me and the baby surviving against the odds or TV me dying but it being presented that I was this brave, wonderful person who chose to sacrifice my own life to bring another life into the world.

CoStar, from my perspective, at least, the problem isn't that any one individual character changes her mind. Some women decide immediately they want to continue the pregnancy; some women think about it for a few days and then make a decision; some women immediately decide they want to end the pregnancy; and yes, some women decide to have an abortion and then change their mind. The problem is when the default response is to have the woman decide x, and then change her mind at the last minute and decide y. For starters, no matter what the situation, that kind of vacillation implies that women really don't know what they want. When you apply that last-minute change of plans to the scenario of an unwanted pregnancy, and you do so on a pretty consistent basis, the implication is that women are making the decision to continue or terminate a pregnancy almost on a whim. That fairly consistent portrayal of the decision process around whether to have an abortion just doesn't match reality, as noted by the article about the demographics of women who have abortions. So while I don't object to the idea of an individual character first deciding to have an abortion but later changing her mind, it bothers me that such a large proportion of unwanted pregnancy storylines on TV use this resolution. To give a different example, let's say one male character on a show is offered a significant promotion that will entail a lot of travel away from his family. He accepts the promotion but his spouse and children express disappointment that he will be gone so much, and then he decides at the last minute that he doesn't want to spend that much time away from his spouse and children. That one character's decision is not a problem. But if roughly 50% of the time, male characters who receive the same offer first accept and then decline the promotion, again, the constant vacillation implies that men don't know what they want, that they have to be reminded of how important it is to spend time with their families, etc. Meantime, the males who do accept the promotion are portrayed as career-focused guys who don't have the time or desire for much family interaction. Over time, the perception becomes that if you are a male who cares about his family, you'll turn down that promotion. So whether the issue is a woman contemplating an abortion or a male being presented as an inept husband who can't boil water, it's less the individual character that is a problem and more the trend. If there were a diverse range of scenarios being presented for women who have unwanted pregnancies, I think this would be less of an issue. Meantime, though, the dichotomy that is presented via TV is that for the most part, only two types of women have to decide about an abortion: single women who are too young or too career-focused to want a child, and previously childless women who "need" to learn to love someone other than themselves. For female characters who are already married with children, the abortion decision seems to be resolved 99% of the time by it either being a false alarm or else menopause, in which the woman thinks about ending the pregnancy, decides that she really does want another child despite the physical and financial stress it would cause, and then she and her husband are disappointed that there is not a pregnancy after all.

I'm so used to the scenario of a woman having an unexpected pregnancy, considering an abortion, and then ultimately deciding that she wants to have the baby instead, that I would be in shock to see the situation play out differently. It seems as if many tv writers want to reference that the woman has a choice, but abortions are for other women, not the characters in the show. I literally cannot remember the last time I saw a show that featured a woman going through with an abortion. I do remember an episode of Sex and the City in which Miranda considers having an abortion, only to change her mind at the last minute, but two major characters indicated they had previously had an abortion.

This reminds me of something columnist and author Dave Barry said about why he gave up working in a regular office, which was that he got tired of trying to teach people to quit writing sentences such as "Enclosed please find the enclosed enclosures." I guess the redundancy disease remains uncured.

This weekend I encountered a pet peeve I had almost forgotten existed: couples who engage in nonstop squabbling in public. I'm not talking a major fight about an urgent issue; this was just one petty issue after another. Neither of the two people came off as anything other than drama queens who desperately need to be the center of attention. The result was everybody in their vicinity being first uncomfortable, then annoyed, then bored with the ongoing drama. Note to couple: Nobody cares about your minor relationship issues. If you want to argue in private, go for it. In public, though, suck it up because the rest of us do not find your nonsense entertaining. Unless you are able to raise your minor arguments to the artistic level of George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, nobody wants to listen to the soundtrack of your toxic relationship.

I still read Anne Perry, although not as frequently as I used to, because her writing intrigues me. As for having an abused woman in many of the books, given the setting of the books, that's hardly surprising. At that time, married women had essentially no rights and their husbands could engage in abuse of them without much fear of reprisal; as for women with no social position or women who were prostitutes, there was even less chance of justice. So I'm not taken aback that a few fictional characters turn out to be asshats who abused women. One thing I think Perry does quite well is convey the damage that is done in a family or group of friends when there has been a murder and the individuals suspect each other; even if it turns out the murderer is not a family member or friend, it's hard to go back from the realization that you could in fact imagine your spouse, sibling, BFF or someone you know committing a murder. At the risk of a very unpopular opinion, it doesn't bother me at all that she participated in a murder when she was a young teen. She did her time, and at least she's writing about something she knows about. I used to read Faye Kellerman, but quit cold turkey because of something in one of her series. A male detective has his love interest in a car with him and sees someone suspicious (IIRC, a murder suspect or something of that nature). The situation has the potential for danger and he hops out of the car to go catch the suspect. But before doing so, he handcuffs his love interest to the steering wheel of his car, so she won't get any ideas about leaving the car and helping him, thereby putting herself in danger. That was the point at which I said to myself, Are you fucking kidding me? For starters, he has no right to restrain her and the idea that she's not supposed to think for herself does not sit well for me in any circumstances. But secondly, if the confrontation with the suspect had gone down differently and the suspect killed or injured the detective, the love interest now has no way to escape the situation because, you know, handcuffed to the steering wheel. I read far enough after that to see that the love interest does not throttle him when he gets back, and instead continues the relationship with him, before throwing the book away.

Based on comments I'd heard about J K Rowling's The Casual Vacancy, I expected to dislike it, but instead liked it quite a bit, although I could see where other readers might not. For people familiar with the HP universe but not this book, if you imagine an entire small village populated by the Dursleys and their ilk, that's the setting. Watching these generally unpleasant people interact with each other over a brief political campaign was entertaining, and the book reminded me in odd ways of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, in the sense that Miss Marple never deluded herself about just how ugly the characters in small villages could be. There was one minor plot point that I thought was a bit forced , but the motivation was established well and rang true. The ending had some tragic elements that seemed to be the almost inevitable culmination of actions up to that point, as opposed to some random events that were there for shock value. Finally, the book had a certain amount of social commentary and attitudes that seemed very on point, while not being preachy.

As both a technical writer and instructor of college writing classes, I share the pain of the grammar and spelling mistakes that are common in the workplace and in classrooms. Online I relax my standards because it's generally a fairly casual setting, but the "should of" abomination makes me cringe no matter where I see it. The lack of basic grammar skills is even more disturbing when the offender is someone who should know better. My former pseudo-boss had a job title of technical writer, and yet the man literally did not know the difference between a complete sentence and a fragment. My former real boss was also one of those who frequently declared that using correct grammar and spelling was not important; hence his hiring of the pseudo-boss as lead tech writer based on qualifications that had nothing to do with writing skills (the specific skill set the manager prized most was "do exactly as I tell you, no matter how stupid it is, and don't ask inconvenient questions"). As I've mentioned before, the manager was very religious and very conservative, not to mention a racist bigot. He did not approve of me because I am an atheist and of a colleague because she is Jewish, and liked to boast about how morally superior he was and shove his religious views down everybody's throat at work. So imagine my delight when there was some sort of screw-up for which he was responsible, and he sent an email to our entire team, copying his manager and a couple of managers up the corporate ladder, explaining the situation and concluding with the statement, "Please bare with me as I do ABC." I could not resist the temptation to reply and say, "You just more or less asked the entire team to get naked with you. I'm thinking that was not your intended meaning."

The flip side to that is the interaction also allows the person with kids to see how you will be with the kids and how you will deal with the ex. My first husband and I divorced when our son was around 2, at a time when I had gone back to college to finish my undergrad degree and then was planning to start grad school immediately. My ex already had his degree and a job, and was in a much better position to take care of our son, so we agreed he would have primary custody. There was zero drama; in fact, the attorney who handled the divorce told us he wished every couple was as calm, rational and polite to each other as we were. A couple of years later, my ex moved because of a job transfer and asked me to come stay with our son and also house-sit because he had to travel for a couple of weeks. The woman he was dating at the time absolutely refused to even meet me, saying that she knew she would hate me because I had given up the marriage to him, which she desperately wanted. She was so OTT about it that a few weeks later, he ended the relationship with her, commenting that as the mother of our son, I would be interacting with him and our son on a pretty regular basis, and he didn't want to deal with the drama of her refusing to meet me and the likelihood of her being bitchy to me if we did meet. It wasn't like we were still actively involved with each other; we lived 200 miles apart and at that point, I was limited to picking up my son for visits and then dropping him off, with maybe 20 minutes total face time with each other during pick-up/drop-off. So she came across as BSC jealous over nothing. To bring this back around to online dating, yes, it's easier via online dating to filter out people who have kids. But whether with kids or without, seeing how the person interacts with other people, including former lovers, is a big indicator of how he/she will ultimately treat you. If he describes every former GF as a raging bitch, then no matter how nice he seems to you right now, sooner or later, you will be yet another in his list of raging bitches who treated him badly while he was in no way to blame for the end of the relationship. Similarly, if he is impatient with his own kids and loses his temper with them on a regular basis, that should be a big red flag.

Forumfish, I am just down the road from you in San Antonio. My current provider is Grande, and as noted, they have great customer service, easily accessible 24/7 and both the service reps and techs have unfailingly been polite and helpful. The equipment, though, has its issues. Had problems with the primary modem for a while, in that it was almost impossible to get internet signal upstairs and even downstairs the signal was prone to disappear for hours at a time. I had called a few times, they reset something on their end without an actual service call a couple of times, but the improvement was marginal. A few months ago, when I got permission to begin telecommuting full-time, I had to call them again because I can't lose my internet connection for hours at a time while I am working. The tech came out, looked at the modem, and flatly said they had made the mistake of buying that particular model only to have ongoing problems with it, and so were phasing it out and replacing it with a different brand. He replaced it, gave me his cell number to call if I had any issues with it in the next day or two following installation, and most of the issues were resolved. I was impressed that he admitted the overall issue with the brand of modem; generally, other providers have just said the particular unit must be old or defective, etc. The mini-tivo they tried to install for an additional TV was the same issue; they have apparently had problems with many of the units and are looking into an alternative. When I lived across town, my provider was Time Warner. I generally had no major problems with the equipment, but trying to get in touch with them for anything, from setting up service to changing service to discontinuing service, was an exercise in frustration and futility. They had farmed out their customer service work for setting up service to a vendor. So when setting up service, I called what was listed as the TW number and was handed over to this vendor to get my info, etc., Vendor, more or less representing themselves as a part/division of TW, collected the upfront installation charge from me, paid with my debit card. This vendor proceeded to charge my debit card roughly $10 a month for close to a year, until I noticed it (yes, my own damn fault for not paying attention but it's easy to miss a small transaction like that) and called them, and was informed that I was paying that amount for them to be the go-between if I needed service from TW; when I called TW directly (after wading through the roughly gazillion phone numbers they had listed), they said they knew nothing about any arrangement like that. In addition to that part of it, the installation appointment and then subsequent service call appointments were invariably fucked up. On the phone, you are told "day X and time range A-C." You arrange to take that time off from work for that specific day, or in my case, to work from home that day. Then the "reminder" call comes and informs you that the scheduled appointment is instead "day Z and time range D-F." Then half the time the tech was a no-show and at the end of the day designated for the tech to be there, an automated call would come saying that oops, we need to reschedule for day Y. Fortunately, my manager understood the situation (the appointment confusion was a standing joke among my colleagues, most of whom had similar experiences), but people in a less flexible job would have lost a couple of half-days of work at a minimum for no good reason. ETA: I also prefer the chat function instead of calling, but it was not an option when I was first setting up service in my previous location. I will be relocating to Houston next year and don't yet know which cable provider will be the default for whatever neighborhood I land in. For the Grande techs, when they came out last week to install the mini-tivo, I had recently moved my large tv into a new entertainment center and not gotten around to hooking all the cables back between it and the regular tivo box. Tech saw that it was not connected and volunteered to do it for me, even though it wasn't necessary for him to do so to install the mini-tivo. I just wish the equipment performance matched the level of customer service.

My new pet peeve has to do with cable providers, but it's a two-part peeve. First, I have no idea what it is like in other areas, but where I live (large city in TX), in theory there are several cable providers. In reality, there is only one because the two national cable providers and one regional cable provider have divided up the city into separate domains. So, where I used to live, national cable provider A was the only available option. National cable provider B would send me junk mail regularly asking me to use their service, but when I would call them or try to order their services online, the response was always "Sorry, we don't serve your specific neighborhood." OK, then, why do you keep sending me junk mail saying that you do serve my neighborhood? A little over a year ago, I moved across town and my only option is regional cable provider. (Yes, in theory there is also the option of having a dish, but that requires logistical nonsense that I don't want to deal with.) It annoys me to no end that there is no real choice in providers. I can have my pick of cell phone providers in the same neighborhood and choose the one that best fits my needs, so why should cable services be any different? Instead, I have to choose a package that is not exactly what I want, and costs more than it should because there is no competition between providers to acquire and maintain their customer base. The second part of the peeve has to do with the overall quality of cable providers. The national provider I used previously had crappy customer service but the equipment was usually solid. The regional provider I currently use has very good customer service but their equipment tends to be glitchy. So, today a tech spent 2 hours trying to get a mini-tivo box to work (after a previous tech had spent another couple of hours the other day with no success), at which point he admitted, yeah, these mini-boxes just have problems, and at my request, he used a regular tivo box instead of the glitch-prone mini version. Both techs were very nice and polite, both explained what the issue was instead of trying to BS their way out of it, but the fact remains that the equipment has been problematic (had to have a modem replaced a few months ago because of performance glitches). Why is it seemingly impossible to get both good customer service and decent equipment? This shouldn't be an either/or situation.