Month: March 2019

Is anyone ever happy?

This post could have so many different titles.  I considered naming it Whine, whine, whine!, or It’s always somebody else’s fault. That would have been appropriate, too.  It’s a never-ending trend anymore, everybody else is an incompetent idiot… hey, maybe somebody should blog about that.  Might be onto something here.  What’dya think?

So here’s the story:  Yesterday morning (Saturday) I’m in line at the bank to make a deposit.  Only went in to cash in some coins that I’d been tossing in a jar and you have to do that business inside.  I get in line behind some guy slightly older than me and he’s wearing a John Deere hat.  After a couple minutes another guy comes in… older, long scraggly beard, overalls, dirty hat, possibly one of Jed Clampett’s kin… who also reeked of cigarette smoke.

The two obviously knew each other as they called each other by name, and apparently this was the second place they ran into each other.  Well, they begin talking, I’m standing in between trying to appear uninterested but listening, and their conversation for the next 10-ish minutes goes something like this…

  • The credit union we’re in has gone downhill lately… especially since “that lady” took over… now it’s run more like a bank… yada yada yada.
  • The bank doesn’t have tellers, they only have “cubicles”… “All those people right there are ‘cubicles’.”… which I took to mean people who normally worked in cubicles during the week.
  • The city is incompetent… too many potholes… no one knows how to run a city… and on and on and on.
  • Some lady friend of theirs has been paralyzed from the waist down for nine months because the doctors are idiots and don’t know what they’re doing… then it comes out that she was suffering the effects of e-coli (they think) and she had been ignoring sharp pains for several weeks until someone finally made her go get checked.  Something settled into her spine, or something like that… but it was the idiot doctor’s fault.  <eye roll>
  • Jed Clampett Part Two is out of work and can’t find anything… he’s had three manufacturing jobs since 1973, but now they’ve all gone away and that’s all he knows and he can’t find one.  (I so wanted to say, “Wasn’t Donald Trump supposed to take care of that?, but I didn’t.)  Which leads us to…
  • Social security, both for JDPT and the partially paralyzed lady who has been denied disability.  To be fair, this was a legit point about people being denied the first time as SOP then having to apply again
  • Back to the credit union… he could do an electronic transfer one way, but not the other… more incompetence…

It was about this time that we reached the front of the line where the telle… er, umm, ‘cubicle’… asked me for ID to make a cash deposit, which of course annoyed me.

Anyone else noticed a theme here?  No matter what or who, literally everything in the world was sub-par and was somebody else’s fault.  Is this what we have degenerated to?

By Annoyances, Disbelief, ObservationsLeave a Comment

Rant: Are you honestly surprised?

Shocked… yes, shocked I am!

Oh noes, a somewhat serious subject:  Outrage over the education scandal du jour where some wealthy parents paid money to get their kids in select colleges and universities.  Sometimes BIG money, no less, upwards of $100,000.

Ok, I’m going to go out on a limb here and speculate that, the more money spent, the dumber the kid.

But, I digress.  (I do a lot of that, digressing.)  Anyway, everyone is all up in arms.  There’s outrage… OUTRAGE, I tell ya!  How could this have happened?  This is an unethical and moral perversion of the purity of higher education!  (Don’t laugh.)  Academia is above this.  (Stop laughing.)  I’m shocked… shocked, I tell ya!

😐

Seriously… honestly… are you really naive enough to believe this is somehow new?  After your check clears for the bridge, I have a special nugget of information for you… write this down:  People cheat!

Not everyone, of course, but enough to make it common.  And people with money cheat no less than the average person, they only do it at a higher level, hence the current scandal.  Generally, though, rich people can buy their way out of it, but this one was just too much.

Anyway, again, another little nugget:  People are greedy.

Inconceivable, I know, but it happens.  Why do you think the cost of higher education has kept pace with the availability of easy money, i.e. student loans?

Long story short, it’s ok to be disapproving, but any outrage on your part is either insincere or naive.

I’m kind of curious how this one will play out.  I’m expecting it to be eclipsed by the next outrageous scandal within two months… if that long.

By Disbelief, Observations, RantOne Comment

Stop… no go… wait… what?

The downtown where I work has had some recent street reconfigurations. Things like changing one-ways to two-ways, eliminating some traffic lights in favor of 4-way stops, adding barrier arms at railroad crossings, and so on. And for the most part I think pretty much all of these are great. I think they enhance access and the flow of traffic. So, you ask, what is there to complain about on a grumpy blog?

Iowa drivers.

Yes, you people, Iowa native drivers. These improvements have been in place for well over a year. Plenty of time to adjust. And if you’re new to the area you don’t know about the old. Bottom line: No excuses.

Yet I can’t count the number of times where I almost t-boned someone who crossed my street where I didn’t have a stop sign. (There used to be one, but not anymore.) This happened as recently as this past Monday. Then, I get down to the next street, where I do have a stop sign but the cross street does not, and TWO people, one in each direction, stop where there is no sign to do so. One of them just sat there and even waved to me to go.

😐 (<— my favorite emoji on this blog, apparently)

“Iowa nice” does not work well on the roads. Please, I implore you to be just a little aggressive (and competent). Traffic overall will flow much easier if you just do it… and pay attention to signs and stuff. I feel like a “GO” sign at some of these intersections would help greatly. Seems some people need to be told.

By Disbelief, DrivingLeave a Comment