If travel time and cost doesn’t matter, I would always pick Hawaii over Florida any time of year. If travel time matters, then I’d look at the Caribbean before Florida for anyone on the East coast. Florida would be my last choice if I needed to keep things cheaper.
I would do a search for job listings that would be the jobs you would be applying for if you chose to leave your job or were laid off. Do the job descriptions list the certifications you are thinking about getting? If so, it might be worth pursuing, especially if you can get your current employer to pay for it.
For example, almost every project manager job lists PMP certification. If you are currently a PM and don’t have it, you might want it just in case you get laid off to improve your chances of getting a new job. Otherwise, you might be up against 10 other candidates with just as much experience, but 3 of them have a cert and you don’t even get a screening interview.
At my old company we would ban customers that were repeatedly abusive to customer service agents. Agents had the right to hang up on customers that were being abusive and if the same customer kept getting reported, eventually they would receive a letter from the legal department telling them to stop. If it continued, they would get banned.
I remember one guy was so bad that a director got the phone system to automatically route any calls from him to his mobile line and put him in his phone book. He would very politely greet him by name as soon as he picked up the call to make it clear that he wasn’t ever going to get through to anyone else.
At a prior employer, we noticed that there were many customers getting essentially free service ($100-200 per month) by calling customer service hundreds of times per month and asking for credits for all sorts of things. They were generally very nice and just picked up $5-10 credits until their service was free. Beyond the free service, they were costing the company the expense of the service calls.
We started routing all of them to a small group of agents and flagged the accounts so the agents would deny them pretty much every time. It was kind of funny because we didn’t tell them anything changed, but you could see that some of them noticed because they started asking which call center they were talking to. They would immediately hang up and call back over and over and just keep going back to the same place. Eventually most of them gave up.
Note: nobody here would/should feel sorry for this particular company, but I still thought it was funny to see these scammers get mad that we caught on to the scam.
Worst book I’ve quit is Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. What a horrible book!
Worst I’ve finished is Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, immediately followed by Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I’ll throw in a special mention for The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby. All terrible books that I finished only because they were required reading in school.
So, is nvidia the cisco of this cycle?
When I was in the office, always metal. At home I’m more likely to listen to classical, but still metal if I need to be totally focused.
I put on music, preferably with full coverage noise canceling headphones to block as much outside stimulus as I can. Depending on the mood, I might put on something soothing (listening to Sean Townsend on YouTube right now) or I might go with metal.
If you are in US K-12 education and have a diagnosed condition (depression, anxiety, autism, etc.), you can have your parents request a 504 plan with the school. This requires the school to make reasonable accommodations for someone with a disability or illness that makes it difficult to be successful otherwise. When my daughter was suffering with anxiety and panic attacks, we worked with the administrators to setup safe places where she could go to calm down. The teachers were required to let her go any time she needed a break from the classroom.
I got my lawnmower about 9 years ago secondhand and have never done any maintenance on it. I’m pretty sure that’s how you’re supposed to do it.
Same, I actually use a french press and then pour the coffee into the insulated carafe from my dead coffee machine to keep it hot until I finish it.
I’ve noticed this with my kids’ schools. Many kids are open about who they are - LGBT+, neurodivergent, mental illnesses, etc. - and people are generally accepting of that. When I was a kid, people were bullied relentlessly for showing any form of difference from “normal”. It makes me happy to hear them talk about things like that like its no big deal…because it shouldn’t be.
This site usually has some good stories worth checking out.
I recently took a voluntary lay off from my job after almost 20 years with the company. I found out my dept was going to be reorganized and I was not very happy about the direction things were going, so I put myself on the severance list. I had been planning to look for a new role this year anyway, though I originally thought I would be looking for something in the same company.
It has been a couple of months now and I’m getting fewer interviews than I expected. I still have plenty of time to find something, so I’m not too worried yet, but I do question if I made a bad decision. Of course, I expect more layoffs within the next year, so it was reasonably likely that I would have been laid off eventually anyway.
Last year’s reorg for my dept, they broke into two rounds, the first round mostly got rid of supervisors and managers and kept more analysts than were needed long-term to get through all the work changes. Then, in December, they came back and laid off the extra staff. They knew that was the plan when everything was announced in April. They actually discussed telling people up front so they would have 8 months notice + severance, but decided not to at the last minute. I’m guessing they were worried those people would leave or not work hard enough through the transition.
Long before Covid, the company I worked for started trialing work from home for some call center agents. They had a whole list of requirements for an acceptable work from home space: dedicated work area with a desk, locking file drawer (why??? I don’t know), first aid kit, fire extinguisher, etc. Someone would actually go out to physically inspect the space to make sure every box was checked.
My guess is someone from legal wrote up the requirements from a workplace safety standpoint. They probably could have just had the employee sign a statement agreeing that they met all of the requirements, but someone in the middle got overzealous about their role. During Covid, everyone got sent home permanently without any regard to any of those rules, so clearly they weren’t that important in the first place.
My answers below, but for your current issue, put in a complaint with the FCC or email the CEO of the company directly. Most major companies have a process to resolve issues that normal agents can’t access if you can get to the right level. Emailing the CEO works with many companies, but telecom companies are sensitive to FCC oversight and would rather fix your issue than deal with the FCC.
Yes, the agent agreed with me that the company owed me money, but told me they couldn’t do anything about it. I told them I understood, but please put in a ticket to someone that could do something about it. They just kept telling me they couldn’t help until I got mad. They eventually relented and put in a ticket, which was then denied without reason a month later. I resolved the issue by circumventing the call center entirely and getting directly to an escalation team similar to what I recommended above.
Any fitness physique you see on Instagram (male or female) took a ton of effort to achieve (and possibly some pharmaceutical or surgical assistance). You can pick any routine in the world and you are not at risk of looking like that unless you are really dedicated to it.
Research your professional value and have the courage to go after it if you are not being paid what you are worth.
I worked 17 years for the same company. I was promoted 4 times during those years and received a few extra pay increases along the way, but I was underpaid as soon as I took the first promotion and the gap increased with each additional promotion. I probably walked away from more than $100k in lifetime earnings, plus interest, by sticking with the company.
I should have changed companies at least once and probably twice. You don’t have to be on a promotion path to run into this. It could be you were underpaid on day 1, but you needed the job or you didn’t have experience. That’s fine, but once you have the experience and have proven yourself, find out what the market rate is for your role and ask for it, be ready to show your research. If you don’t get it, start applying for other jobs.
Don’t be afraid to talk to your peers about salary. If you are making less, you know there is a gap you can go after (just don’t name your coworker when you ask for more, do market research and make it impersonal/just business). If you are making more, pass this advice on to your coworker.
If you are being paid fairly for the work you are doing, but know you can do more, start looking into what it takes to make a move. For example, you might be the best fast food or retail worker the world has ever had, but the job only pays so much. What else might you be good at? You could look for training in a trade or try to find an entry level role in a company that has a wider set of tasks available that offers a growth path.
I agree with a lot of the comments here about saving and investing and keeping expenses down, but growing your earnings is typically easier than shrinking your rent. It still isn’t easy though, especially if you need to relocate to earn more.
I have the Wahl MC3 color-coded set. Apparently they still make the same model and for just a little bit more than I paid for it (on Amazon).
Hair clippers. I bought a set at Target for about $30 about 16-17 years ago after several bad haircuts in a row from the various chain barbers. I just have a simple men’s cut and figured I probably wouldn’t do worse than them and could always shave it off and call it a learning experience if I messed things up too badly.
It definitely took time to get decent at trimming the back and I had to have my wife help me sometimes while I got the hang of it, but at $20+ per haircut every 4-5 weeks, I figure I’ve saved almost $4k so far and it still works. I saved even more if my alternative was to pay up for a better salon to do the work.
The way I’ve seen it, it appears to primarily be used by the various British and former British colonies, including the US. For these groups, anyone from outside the colonies living in “our” territory is an immigrant (who is certainly a lower class!). However, if we choose to reside in another country, we are not immigrants, we are “expats”.
Not everyone uses this term, but those that do frequently congregate in English speaking enclaves and make no attempt to integrate into their new home. They often see the locals as a sort of servant class, particularly because they probably came with enough money or income to make them wealthy by local standards.
As you might imagine, people with this attitude are probably not very popular with locals.