I sometimes wonder after the unusually high number of “British people try X food for the first time and are blown away” videos.

Then I started watching Great British Bake-Off, and it’s clear there’s some damn good food somewhere over there. The number of times I’ve envied Sue Perkins her taste testing job is extreme.

The pain is real. It’s almost impressive when someone takes the effort to bag in an inconvenient order just to get the bread on the bottom.

Yesterday I was buying groceries and, having been a grocery store cashier before, I faced the UPCs towards him to make it easier. He picked up each item individually and checked every other surface before finding the UPC on every single time.

I wanted to grab him and shake him by the shoulders yelling “This was supposed to be easy for you!”

My job just sent out an email saying to use the “corporate version” of chatGPT for work. I was stunned that feeding our incredibly sensitive documents to an LLM wasn’t a fireable offense.

I think that’s one of the things that bothered me most. My manager was standing right there about 30 feet away, but the customers were directing all of their anger at me, by choice. One would think a rational person would understand where to direct that anger, but I’m increasingly convinced every year that rational people don’t exist.

I remember checking groceries at frankly unprecedented speed while being a polite as possible, but one guy started yelling names at me from five or so people back. I decided to ignore him and continue serving my current customer with a smile and he yelled “Stop smiling!”. This was so shocking to me that I looked at the other customers in line to share a “Can you believe this guy?” moment to find them all nodding along in angry agreement.

I didn’t even need that job. I’m so angry at my naive younger self for not quitting on the spot and making sure all of them knew exactly why.

if they didn’t have self checkout, they’d need more checkout people

They would certainly need more checkout people, but speaking from grocery cashier experience they wouldn’t necessarily have them. I remember my manager’s indifference as I was the only one to show up on Thanksgiving and there were literally 30 people in my line.

I was once told “Now I never want to hear about a raise again.” like the sub-inflation raise was enough to cover the rest of my time there and the three years of no raises preceding it.

“Do you mind if I include this in my book?”

One time a friend and I (both in IT at the time) tried absolutely everything to fix a bizarre computer problem, then he told me to literally pull the hard drive completely out if the case and sit unplugged overnight before putting it back in. For some reason that worked, even though unplugging everything and plugging it right back in did nothing. Asked him why and he said “No idea, I was desperate.”

I saw a road sign the other day with a very detailed horse on it, and it distracted me for a second thinking “What the hell is up with that sign? Are there wild horses here? Is there a horse crossing up ahead? We’re in the middle of the city!” So I almost missed the woman leading a horse out into the road from behind a dense bush right behind the sign, not checking for traffic at all.

Probably would have been safer without the sign.

Interesting, I guess in 1994 it would make sense to redraw the guy instead of copying the asset over in Illustrator like you would present day.

Is this AI generated, or is my radar off?