BookWoman56

I agree with the advice to not make a big deal of her birthday. Maybe an Uber gift card for $20? Not entirely sure how those work, but presumably she wouldn’t be able to cash it in and could instead use it for commuting expenses for her new job, which is a desirable thing. Yes, your daughter is being ungrateful, selfish, and entitled. But with the exception of the drug use, quite possibly there’s nothing wrong with her that five years of having to support herself won’t cure. Many people go through similar stages of being self-centered jerks at this age and come out of it as reasonable adults. That said, her father is doing her no favors by enabling this behavior. From things you’ve said previously, my guess is that doing so is some kind of vengeful action on his part; that is, he’s tolerating and possibly encouraging this behavior because he knows it upsets you. Eventually he should get tired of it. Maybe when he does, she will learn to rely on herself rather than expecting everyone else to cater to her whims. In the meantime, focus on things to make yourself happy. It’s possible that your daughter may turn her life around, but it’s possible she will continue to make bad choices. You did provide her with a grounded life and structure while she was growing up, and now she’s of an age where she has to choose her own path.

This drives me nuts. Per TV shows, I must either be overly involved in my siblings’, parents’ and/or children’s lives (to the point that I practically live with them, despite their ages) or I must hate one or more of them. There’s very rarely the real-life dynamic of getting along fine with one sibling and not really caring for another sibling. Nor is there the option to recognize that your parents did a somewhat good job of raising you, but if they weren’t your parents, you would have zero interest in them and quite possibly dislike them, but not hate them.

@magicdog, it’s very possible you just caught your colleague at a breaking point and he blurted out what he was thinking without stopping to consider how it would sound. I don’t know his situation but can offer my own as an example. My work life for the past 3 months has consisted primarily of people saying, “I know you’re really busy with project ABC, but I desperately need help on project XYZ, which is seriously behind schedule,” and then proceeding to throw the bulk of their project over the wall at me. I have worked late nights, weekends, and holidays to the point where I am ready to scream at the next person who brings up some non critical work item. The fact that I haven’t actually yelled at or been short with someone is only because I work remotely and so don’t encounter any colleagues in person. I would like to think I have enough self control to refrain from doing what your colleague did, but anyone can reach a breaking point where they just want to be left the hell alone on work matters, and even the slightest question can be too much to handle.

There is a special place in the hell I don’t believe in for people who set up work meetings for first thing in the morning, with essentially no notice. I normally start work at 8:30, give or take 5 minutes. I always check my calendar just before I log off for the day, just to make sure I don’t have any early meetings that might require me to start work a little earlier than normal. Yesterday I was last online for work around 10pm, and my first meeting for today was scheduled for 11:30am. This morning I logged in right at 8:30, to discover I was supposed to be in a meeting with someone who had sent the meeting invite at 6:30am today. This person then proceeded to be in a snit because I was “late” for her meeting. On top of that, the reason we’re meeting at all is because this person needs to be bailed out on a project for which she and her colleagues are seriously behind schedule. Fortunately most of the people I work with are not like this, but this behavior is typical of this person. I have talked to my manager about the situation as a whole, and post-project there will be some serious discussion about how this particular person and team need to get their shit together.

My general advice for a cover letter and interview is to focus as much as possible on how your skills and experience align with the new position, and how you can provide a benefit to them. If they ask why you are looking, spin it as you are ready to take on new challenges. This may sound cynical, but hiring managers do not give a flying fuck about what the new job will do for you; they care about what you can do for them. When they ask why you’re in the job market, all they care about is that you not bash your current or previous employer and that you don’t reveal yourself to be job-shopping for what they perceive as non-legit reasons (boredom, tension with colleagues, etc.). What may seem to you as neutral comments about your current situation can be perceived the wrong way. For example, when I recently hired someone, we had a panel interview. My preferred candidate mentioned that one reason she was looking was that she had been in a senior role, with another senior person and a junior person. The other senior person retired and the junior person was out on an extended medical leave, but management had decided to switch the open senior position to a different role entirely, and not to bring in a contract person for the junior role out on a leave of at least 6 months. I appreciated her candor but had to defend her to the other interviewers, who interpreted her comments as bashing her manager. So, I had to remind them that she did not in fact criticize her manager but instead stated that as a result of the situation, she was now the sole person handling the workload that had previously been divided among 3 people. I did hire this candidate and she’s doing great, but at least one of the other interviewers would have dropped her from consideration just because of those remarks.

I will echo the “No, you’re not an asshole for thinking this other teacher is an asshole” reaction. I no longer teach, but taught as an adjunct occasionally until a couple of years ago. The expectation for any teacher or tutor is that you use any required materials and supplement those as needed with your own materials. If you’re not willing to do that, then don’t take the job. I have shared bits and pieces of my own materials with colleagues on request. But these were instructors who also shared resources with me. I can think of only one occasion when a colleague made a large-scale request like you received, and that was someone who was asked on an emergency basis to teach a course she’d never taught before, which started 2 days later. Also, we were all working for the same university, teaching and tutoring students enrolled in that university. With your colleague, if she had shared she was going to be tutoring a non-district student in this particular course/topic, and you volunteered to share your materials, that would have been one thing. But for her to presume on you to just hand over materials you’ve spent years and years developing? No way. She can do her own work, which she’s getting paid for, rather than coasting by using your work.

There are also people who are terrified of dogs, who might have the same reaction to having a service dog on the same flight, but I think the need of the person with a service animal outweighs the possibility of a passenger having a phobia or extreme anxiety about a service animal. I no longer fly at all, but would have no problem with any service animal. But if somehow I did need to fly and another passenger had a snake as an emotional support pet? Hell to the no. I had to take Xanax just to watch Snakes on a Plane.

@Petunia13, I would never be nasty to wait staff. I rarely give a bad tip (less than 20%) unless the service is horrible. But it does annoy me when I go to a restaurant during off hours, which is my preference as I dislike crowds, and the service is outrageously slow. I don’t expect a waiter to be there immediately if that waiter has a lot of tables. But FFS, if I am sitting there for 30 minutes, there’s only 3 occupied tables, and the two waiters are standing just outside the kitchen doing nothing but talking to each other, and I have not yet even been acknowledged by one of them, much less had my order taken, that’s the point at which I will walk out. It doesn’t bother me if wait staff are legitimately too busy to get to me as quickly as I would like, but I am unlikely to feel good about wait staff who can’t be bothered to wait on me because they are too busy socializing with each other.

@Scout Finch, a colleague gave me that mug a couple of years ago, because she knew how much time I was spending correcting grammar errors. I work from home, though, so I don’t have to worry about any of my other colleagues being offended by it. Of course, these are people who frequently claim to be “flushing out” the details of their project plans.

In retrospect, I find a lot of the YA books I read as a pre-teen or adolescent very preachy and much too directed at convincing girls that having sex one time would almost always result in pregnancy, saying absolutely nothing about the pros of using contraception, and implying to girls that even unplanned and unwanted pregnancies would ultimately lead them to end up in a marriage earlier than planned but a happy one. The two that come to mind are Too Bad About the Haines Girl and Mr. and Mrs. BoJo Jones. In the first one, a high school student gets pregnant, almost has an abortion (illegal at that time) but refuses because of the unsanitary conditions, and ultimately tells her parents that she's pregnant. They of course are completely supportive and understanding. In the second one, the girl gets pregnant and marries her BF, but their child dies when it is born prematurely. Everybody's parents then want them to separate and pursue their original plans of attending college, but they decide they really do love each other and end up in college housing for married students, poor but happy. And it's not that the books were completely unrealistic; there were arguments and hurt feelings, and concerns about money and crushed dreams. But I think about the people I knew who did get pregnant in high school and got married, and their reality was often quite different. There were parents who were horrified and threw their daughters out of the home, or forced them to go to homes for unwed mothers, or insisted on having a pro forma marriage with the father so the child wouldn't be illegitimate. There were parents who were convinced that the girl had gotten pregnant deliberately to trap their son, and harassed the girl. There were couples who got married because of an unplanned pregnancy and were divorced within a couple of years. I can think of exactly one girl from my high school whose path seemed to mirror what was in these books, and the last time I saw her she had two toddlers by age 20 and not the slightest expectation of ever having a paying job, when prior to the accidental pregnancy she'd been considered very bright and definitely planned on going to college. Who knows, maybe 5 years down the road she decided to get her GED or something and go to college, but I'll never forget the look on her face when I saw her last. She was looking at her two kids and she obviously loved them, but there was more than a hint of being resigned to a life quite different from what she'd envisioned just a few years prior to that. I know there are books now that give a more realistic and diverse view of sexuality in high school kids, the problems with marrying solely because of a pregnancy, emotionally abusive parents, and so forth; I also know that the books I read reflected some societal attitudes of that period. But I can't help feeling that with those books, and so many similarly themed books (don't go steady with someone because things will get too "serious;" don't be in a hurry to grow up because you should stay a child as long as possible, etc.), the intent was less to explore a character and more to be propaganda.

Not an employment or any kind of lawyer, but could you describe in general what’s going on with your work situation? Maybe some posters here can share similar experiences, point you in the right direction, or at least empathize.

Good, a lot of people mistakenly assume that a resume has to list every single job you’ve had. List your most recent jobs that are relevant. Also, take a look at what kind of jobs you want to apply for, read those job descriptions and requirements, and make sure your resume aligns with the terminology of the desired jobs. Many companies use software to scan resumes, and the software will automatically reject resumes that lack the proper buzzwords. If that means you create a couple of versions of your resume, tailored for different jobs, that’s fine.

@shanndee, until a couple of years ago, I was occasionally teaching business writing online. The textbooks for the course recommended that job applicants limit their resumes to only the last 10 years or so of work experience. Their reasoning was anything older than that would likely be irrelevant. I disagree somewhat with that rationale, but encourage you to remove anything from your resume that indicates you are over 50. No dates on college degrees, etc. Nothing can completely stop an interviewer from noticing your age in a F2F or video interview, but don’t make it easy for a hiring manager to discount you immediately based on the assumption that you’re “too old” for the job.

My mother’s doctor came up with a solution that I hadn’t even seriously considered. Given her advanced vascular disease and a couple of hospitalizations in the last few months, she qualifies for hospice care. Like many others, I thought of hospice care as something that kicks in when someone is only a few weeks or so from dying, but that’s not the case. Yes, she could easily die within the next 6 months but there’s no certainty of that. Anyway, the hospice people came a few days ago, and I am super relieved at all they do. There will be a nurse visit once a week, an aide 3 times a week to help with showers, cleaning her bedroom and bathroom, laundry, etc. Hospice care pays for all critical meds, plus have supplied oxygen even though under normal criteria she didn’t qualify for it. Because hospice care is focused on making the patient comfortable, her oxygen saturation levels don’t have to hit the magic number and she doesn’t have to go to a facility to get a sleep study done. Also, if she falls again, they have a dedicated team available 24/7 to come get her off the floor and assess for injuries. They will send a volunteer over weekly just for socializing, matching up with her interests. Having this will make a huge difference. For anyone else in a similar situation, I encourage you to check with your parent’s (or other family member’s) doctor to see if this is an option. My mother’s doctor commented that many people are resistant to the idea because they think of hospice care as the equivalent of saying that the patient has only a few weeks to live. But that’s not how it really works, and it’s a service that can help prevent or alleviate caregiver burnout. ETA: Medicare pays 100% of the cost for hospice care, so there’s no co-pay or out-of-pocket cost for the service if the patient is covered under Medicare.

My mother’s doctor decided last week that she qualifies for hospice care, given the extent of her vascular disease and that she’s had 2 hospitalizations, followed by a 3-week stay in a skilled nursing facility, followed by being at home with some home health care in the form of physical therapists, all in the last several months. It’s a somewhat convoluted story, but here goes: she barely nicked her left thumb while slicing a tomato. Didn’t mention it to me until a day or two later, at which point I applied antibiotic cream. But sepsis had already set in, which resulted in hospital stay plus surgery on her hand and wrist area because the infection had spread. She was discharged and came home, only to end up back in the hospital for pulmonary embolism plus clots in her legs. That in turn led to the stay in the skilled nursing facility. The hospice care just started, but already I am thrilled by it. No, her doctor doesn’t think she’s dying on an immediate basis. But her health is compromised enough to qualify her for this, which is 100% covered by Medicare. She will get a nurse visit once a week, and a visit by an aide 3 times a week to help her with showering, cleaning up her bedroom and bathroom, grooming, light laundry, etc. While she’s on hospice, they pay for her critical meds (in this case, everything except some cholesterol meds) and have them shipped to my house. They cover any incontinence supplies. To anyone dealing with a similar situation, I urge you to check with your elderly relative’s doctor about whether this is an option. My mother’s doctor flatly said it can be the difference between a caregiver being able to function well and complete burnout. Some patients and caregivers are hesitant to pursue it because they think it means death is imminent, but that’s not the case. ETA: in the event of a fall, which is quite common for elderly people and my mother in particular, I can call them 24/7 and they will send a lift team out to pick her up and check for injuries, at no additional cost.

My first full-term pregnancy occurred during the brief period when the OB doctors in the US decided that women should gain only 18 pounds during pregnancy. This included weighing the woman during each checkup and giving lectures if the weight gain over the preceding month exceeded 2 pounds. Not surprisingly, after a few years the medical recommendation changed to a more reasonable amount, given various problems that occurred with the 18-pound limit. My peeve is members of the healthcare community who jump on the latest bandwagon without asking themselves if a particular practice, etc. is really the best idea for a given patient.

My mother spent almost her entire career working in an upscale (for our relatively small town) ladies clothing store, including selling wedding gowns. She was invariably the top producer in her area, and often the entire store. Her secret: put aside your own preferences and recommend something that the customer will like and also looks good on her. She had numerous customers who would come in and ask her to pick out their new seasonal wardrobe for them. But with some of the entourages I’ve seen on this show, they apparently don’t understand that concept. For that matter, I fail to understand why the bride needs a damn entourage. Find something you like, that looks good on you and is within your budget. It’s not rocket science and doesn’t need a selection committee. Maybe bring along your BFF just as a reality check, but no more than one very trusted friend.

I'm extremely angry with the company that handles the flexible spending account service for my employer. Long story short, they emailed me a few months ago that I had roughly $250 left in my 2018 flexible spending account, and I needed to use it by a certain date in April or forfeit it. The email made no mention of any restrictions on payment types, and even said the money could be used for qualifying expenses incurred during the first 2-3 months in 2019. As it happened, I still had a balance on a hospital bill from late 2018, so I used my FSA Visa card to pay the hospital bill, being careful to pay the exact amount that was in the 2018 account. First of all, it took them close to 2 months to process the claim, and they notified me I needed to submit a receipt (typically an Explanation of Benefits statement from my insurance, which would include all the required information). I did that. Then they notified me they'd rejected the receipt, and almost immediately after that notified me that my FSA card had been suspended. I called their customer service, only to be told that it was rejected because the bill was from 2018, and the FSA card was suspended because I'd used it for an expense during the preceding year. Further discussion took place, I escalated to a supervisor, and was informed that "Yes, we did send you that email telling you to use your remaining 2018 funds, but if you wanted to do that, you shouldn't have used your FSA card and instead have just used our option to pay your provider directly or to pay the bill yourself and then get us to reimburse you. Per the IRS rules, blah blah blah." I read the original email to the supervisor, pointing out to her that nowhere in the email did it specify that I couldn't use the FSA card and that in fact it urged me to use those funds asap. Asked her shouldn't they have notified me if there were limitations on how I could use those funds, specifically that I couldn't use the FSA card. And...crickets. Her response was that if I wanted to get my card reactivated, I need to submit receipts for the $250 in qualified expenses for this year, or else send them a check for the $250. And until I do so, the remaining balance I have in the FSA for 2019 isn't accessible. As soon as I have a little bit of free time, I'm going to contact my HR department to complain about this and see if I can get it resolved. If not, I'll have to pay $250 out of pocket so I don't lose the remaining $1200 or so in this year's account. But next year, there's no way in hell I will put a dime into a flexible spending account that is run by this same company.

WTF? It would make more sense (still be rude as hell) if this had been an airport in the US and somebody had told a passenger to learn to speak English, given that the US is pretty large and generally not known for being fluent in more than one language. But for an airport in Europe, where you're going to have passengers from all over Europe (not to mention other continents) and for whom quite possibly the only language many of them might have in common is English, it makes zero sense whatsoever for an airline employee to tell a passenger to learn French. I'm not in any way an expert on language use in Europe, but I follow a few bands from different parts of Europe, and almost all of them use lyrics in English, because that's the language that their German, French, Italian, etc., fans can all understand. Finally, despite whatever the predominant language might be in any country, if you have an international airport, you should expect to encounter international travelers, many of whom will not speak the local language. Hire multilingual staff and FFS train them to treat customers politely.

There’s also the point that it’s entirely possible your mother’s ring wouldn’t fit your nephew’s intended wife. If not, it would have to be re-sized, and there’s a good chance the jeweler would suggest putting the stone into a modern setting. There’s also the possibility that the nephew’s GF might not like the ring at all. Regardless, though, it’s an item that has sentimental meaning for you, and you are well within your rights to decline to give it to someone else. ETA: There's also the possibility that if your nephew did give this engagement ring to his GF and they subsequently got married and then divorced, she might opt to keep the ring and then it would be completely out of your family. Yeah, you'd think someone who knew it was a family piece would give it back to the family, but one never knows what a person will do in that sort of situation.

Right, it’s been a while since I read any of the Aurora Teagarden series, but in general Charlaine Harris doesn’t shy away from her single female characters having a healthy sex drive and having sex both outside of and within marriage. I remember reading somewhere in the last few years that Harris had confirmed that she was raped when she was younger, and I thought at the time that her writing about normal sexual behavior was possibly a coping mechanism for her, and obviously having a lead character in another series who was a rape survivor was more or less therapy.

It’s hard for me to imagine a neat freak and a hoarder staying in a relationship for very long. Sooner or later, the neat freak is going to get tired of the piles and piles of stuff, and/or the hoarder is going to get tired of the neat freak trying to straighten up and throw away junk that the hoarder considers valuable. I’d like to see a follow up 6 months or a year later on that couple, to see if the neat freak has ended the relationship.

No, they most likely wouldn’t have, but IIRC, Dumbledore made it clear at least to Petunia why Harry needed to live with her, to protect him. If the Dursleys had refused to take Harry in because of fear that his presence in their home would have endangered their own child, I would have had a little more sympathy with them. But instead, based on their comments, they treated Harry like an unwelcome guest because they disapproved of his wizard parentage, and regarded having to raise him as a major inconvenience at best and huge burden at worst. If there had been legitimate reasons they couldn’t take care of Harry, no doubt Dumbledore would have made arrangements. For me, a lot of it comes down to this: What kind of people would take out their resentment about being more or less forced by circumstances to take in an infant nephew on that nephew? The way they treated Harry makes them not just bad parents but also pretty despicable human beings. Finally, I would argue that the way they raised Dudley showed they were crap parents, even removing the wizard elements completely.

Right now I’m feeling especially grateful for the existence of the internet, which in the past few days has enabled me to find an AC repair company who would actually come fix my AC within a couple of hours instead of blowing me off for a couple of days. I live in San Antonio, and my 91-year-old mother lives with me. An outside temp of 99 degrees does not mix well with that living situation. Also, I was able to go online yesterday and schedule an alignment for my car for this morning, so the entire process was around an hour, as opposed to the last time that I had an alignment done on a walk-in basis, and was there for several hours. The ability to compare availability, prices, and so forth on my screen and make a choice that way is so much better, to me, than having to make phone calls and take notes.

Agreed. Failure to feed and clothe your child, assuming you are able to do so, makes someone a bad parent, but FFS fulfilling the basic responsibilities of being a parent doesn’t make someone a “good” parent. Characters who use providing food and shelter to their children as their only claim to being good parents annoy me to no end, especially when they have provided little else in terms of emotional and physical support. That’s a large part of what annoyed me so much about the Dursleys in the HP series. Harry was not their own child, but they accepted the charge laid on them to raise their nephew and proceeded to treat him like crap. Yes, he had food, clothing, and shelter, but not an ounce of kindness or compassion.