vinbreau

I started a new job this year. The employer and our manager have made it clear, IF you feel safe coming into an office once the company declares it safe you can. If you are never comfortable ever again with coming in to the office, you won't have to. They have dedicated themselves to what works best for each employee, zero pressure. Nobody on my team is going in it's been decided.

I am way more productive at home. I have ADHD and the distraction of an office environment is too much and makes it hard for me to concentrate. My productivity has never been higher. I don't dread going to work, I get paid enough that I do not need to find a better place. And I have been a remote worker since 2011 and never, ever want to go back to work in an office.

Reminds me of an old adage I heard in high school: If you take the frogs out of the environment, you don't have the same environment minus frogs, you have an entirely new ecosystem.

I reconnected with an old friend from childhood a few years ago. I knew he was politically opposite from me so I kept politics out of our conversations... do you know how hard that is? It's hard enough that it requires effort, effort that he noted. He accused me of being closed off and never saying what I really wanted to. I made it clear we should not go there.

He told me that several years ago watching the news made him physically ill and his GP told him to avoid news. His health improved. In 2016 he admitted to me he does not watch any news, read any news, but he believes in voting. I asked him how he could vote if he hasn't educated himself on the candidates. How a person like me who thinks you either eat politics or it eats you, sees an uninformed voter, proudly ignorant of the candidates, but voting with his gut, what am I supposed to say? This deeply offended him. He then accused me of living in a bubble despite the fact I read news from all over and he reads none.

I asked him how should educated voters feel about gut-feeling voters with uneducated opinions? I think his response was "Fuck off". We do not talk anymore because any subject he brought up that had any hint of politics to it was an empty conversation. I would bring up things related to the subject and he would default to making jokes. Serious conversation was beyond him.

Tone deaf, dumb, and blind. He eventually said he found all women of my wife's race "unattractive" and then could not understand why I was upset at him. Ex-Navy man, ex-Nuclear Engineer, ex-friend.

I worked in a bookstore in the '90s and there was a fantastic series of books, for authors, about how poisons worked, how it is like to die in certain situations, all kinds of dark stuff that was designed to help Crime Fiction writers help in areas they normally would not know enough about. Now imagine looking that stuff up on the internet for writing a book.

My daughter started Kindergarten and we're doing remote learning. She' almost 5 years old and can work a computer for the things she needs. But she can't work a zoom meeting. So I am a teacher's asst. from 8am until 2:30 pm. It's exhausting and sometimes I take a 2 hour nap afterward. It's hard on her because until a few weeks ago she would wake up, come into my office with me and watch shows on a laptop, maybe play some Minecraft. Now I wake her up instead, and prep her for school, which is in the same office she used to have fun in. She has been adjusting slowly, but it has not been without breakdowns on all our parts.

I work from home and have a disabled wife plus a 5 year old doing remote learning. I never leave the house except for needed things. Losing social media would isolate me even more.

Just last week I received an email from a manager saying "Never do (this), especially with US customers."

Three days after that email I ran into (this) situation and emailed him asking what I am to do. He said frustratingly that I should do (this) since it wasn't a US customer.

I emailed him both his quotes, the ones that said never do (this) and the one that said, of course, you should do (this). I pointed out that was confusing. He said it was my fault for being confused and to email him when I am.

Middle management is often desperately trying to justify their job by creating purposeful confusion. I swear he's trying to trip me up looking for reasons to put marks on my record.

Or they were conditioned to this as the normal state. I grew up in a home with three TVs: living room, parent's bedroom, my bedroom. The TV in the living room was on 24 hours a day. It only went off if we left the house. My father was an insomniac and so it stayed on all night too.

The one in their bedroom was on most of the time. It usually only went off at night when my father moved to the couch in the living room to let my mother sleep.

For years after I moved out I had to have a TV on at all times or else the place I was in felt empty and too quiet. When I realized this about myself I cut cable out of my life and can barely stand the TV now. When we visit my mom, it's always on, and it's always on FOX. My father sat in front of it every day until he died of dementia. My mother can't break the habit now. Even when we visit she keeps it on and occasionally watches it instead of engaging with us and is making it very hard to visit.

You must not own capital then. If you had they would have worked hard to help you. If you had been a big box store showing the footage to the police they would have helped. But as an individual, they are not there for you.

It's been about 20 years now. No idea what ever happened to him sadly.

I've lost three friends over the years to psychotic episodes or schizophrenic breakdowns so I've seen several examples of what happens to people and it all comes down to financial means. The friend born to a wealthy family had a safety net to fall back on. Same for the friend born to a very religious family.

As for the friend from a poor family, it was horrible to watch what everyone involved had to go through. He was a happily married man in his mid 20's. Decided to go off his meds and not tell anyone. It didn't help that he had never told us about his mental illness, but that was his choice. He snapped, left his wife and vanished for a while. When he was brought home his parents could not keep him in their house as he was prone to threaten violence. He even threatened me once during this period. Since they had no insurance they could not house him at a facility. The only thing they could do was pay for him to live in a motel, one within their abilities which meant the cheapest motel they could find, one known for drug users. My friend had previously had a problem with drugs, had to go to court mandated Narcotics Anonymous, even had a mentor to help him. Despite having cleaned up for over 10 years, here he was in a motel full of drug dealers and users while in the midst of a psychotic breakdown.

The last time I ever saw him he was having a fit in a field near a mall. I stopped to help him, he was in a fugue state thinking he was in World War 3. he smelled of urine and his clothes were a mess. I drove him to a local YMCA because I had no idea what else to do. They told me there was nothing they could do, but agreed to take him in for the day and see if they could clean him up. Knowing he was prone to violent behavior I figured that wouldn't work out.

I never saw him again. A friend of five years just evaporated. But what I saw is that if you are poor and have a mental breakdown, and your family has no means to help you, you are screwed and have no choice but to live on the street.

This is why I left work in advertising. I could see the levels of psychological manipulation 30 years ago and knew with the future of data mining it was only going to get worse. There is nothing ethical about advertising. It's all about what you can get away with. Look at the history of subliminal advertising, though it never got so bad as to have laws enacted when the public became interested in it they realized the game was up and abandoned it.

The industry is full of tiny little battering rams like subliminal advertising. Each attempt yields success or failure, rinse and repeat. The refinement at this point is unfathomable.

I dated a vegetarian many years ago. It was my first exposure to that lifestyle. She was not against me eating meat even in front of her. She didn't politicize her choice, it was for her health and nothing more. Luckily some fast food places serve salads and so on trips across country we could stop at those places where I could eat a burger and she could eat a salad. Alternately I would go with her to a local Austin burger joint that had a vegetarian night on Wednesdays. I would eat and enjoy a veggie burger with her. We both were willing to meet each other half way.

options like a veggie burger at Burger King give options to people like her. Not every vegetarian is a vegan who makes all meals political. Burger King serving a veggie burger doesn't have to be political. Not every vegetarian surrounds themselves with only other vegetarians.

I do this. I learned a long time ago that past-me could be quite an asshole even to future-me. Thinking in this context allows me to assess the now and try to be a better past-me while in the present. I consider how future-me will react and adjust my actions accordingly.