Thedonaldgrad.

I’m sure people will say “they can’t do that!” lol. They can do anything they like with nobody to stop them.

Well, I was WFH at the time and they didn’t give me anything to do so it was effectively that anyway. And really they had given me almost no work to do for the four months prior to that - which of course is why I was not even the least bit surprised by the layoff. My severance was to the penny exactly what I would have gotten from unemployment, so it effectively meant I got unemployment benefits without having to pretend to look for work. Also, they randomly sent me a check for $6K that I have no idea what for (not PTO or sick time compensation) and I used it to buy a school bus. So overall I can’t really hate them too much. Years later I found out my mother had thought I was working for Sysco (the food supply conglomerate) instead of Cisco.

I worked briefly for Cisco because they acquired my company (a much smaller competitor) to help eliminate competition. The only good thing I can say about them is they gave me (and everybody else from this smaller company) two months’ notice of the layoff and didn’t have us escorted out of the building or anything.

“… so we can be sure to avoid ever actually implementing them.”

I’m a school bus driver and most of my colleagues (and me for that matter) are either already collecting Social Security and Medicare or working towards that in a few years. They are also mostly trumpers and love what is currently happening. They are certain the republicans won’t cut SS or medicare because then 70 million people would be marching on Washington - which is pretty laughable coming from people that have trouble climbing into their buses in the morning.

My fear is that the Muskovites will keep these benefits in place for their supporters and cut them off for democrats, something they could easily do with their control over information technology and social media.

Damn, I wish I’d thought of that back then.

I used to be a mobile developer (mainly Windows CE, Android and iOS) but once in 2010 I got put onto a project producing a TV-guide-like app for Blackberry. I was absolutely blown away by how fucking awful the developer tools were. Even during the development phase, an app had to be fully signed before it could be deployed to a device and tested and the signing servers were almost always down or operating under a severe delay. Even worse was that the framework code was divided up into umpteen billion different modules, each of which had to be separately signed, so the more modules you made use of the longer your app took to be signed (I often found myself writing custom functions that should logically have been handled by the framework, just to avoid the inclusion of one more module). Some days, even a one-line change to your code took 30 to 40 minutes to get onto your device - or else it was impossible because the signing servers were completely down. They did have emulators but they were worse than the physical devices and everything still had to be signed anyway. I just got in the habit of making hours of changes and then deploying while I went to lunch and testing everything afterwards; definitely not a programming best practice but the only way to make it work.

The built-in UI tools were horrible and there wasn’t anything that could be used for a TV guide, so I ended up having to do literally everything with Graphics primitives - although that was actually the fun part of the project. The most annoying thing was the 16-bit graphics, which probably made a bit of sense in 2003 but certainly not in 2010. And of course Blackberry was crashing and dying at that point anyway, so my work was pretty much useless.

The scroll wheel was awesome, though. It allowed for a super-precise UI controlling aspect that just isn’t possible with touchscreens.

How could you miss “MeinSpace”?

Yeah. Generally, brown is more expensive than white, organic is more expensive than non-organic, free-range is more expensive than caged etc. The current situation has rendered everything fucking expensive, though.

I have a coworker who keeps about 250 chickens at her house and sells the brown eggs for $5 a dozen. Meanwhile, a dozen white eggs at Shop-Rite are $10.

Thoo Faith

Not exactly the same, but I once attended a work call when I was staying with my Dad after he had a knee replacement. He had decided to “tough it out” and not take painkillers, and during the call he started screaming “kill me! oh god kill me!” because of the pain, quite loud enough to be heard by everyone on the call. My boss said “it’s OK, ChickenLady, this call isn’t that important. Go ahead and kill your father.”