Stochastic Contemplations.

[MarkAndre]

I’m not sure how a thumbs up will be taken on a job resignation post. There was a song, by David Alan Coe I believe.

[MissS]

I was wondering when this would happen. I'm surprised that you stayed with them this long.

Congrats on the new job!

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

Wandering Black Bear Pays Visit To Mt. Horeb, WI https://madison.com/news/local/wanderin ... -top-story

13 Time World Champion Green Bay Packer officials recommend a surefire deterrent to area residents: Install goal posts...

The Gotch

[worth1]

Unanswered emails.
Won't answer the phone.
Won't answer a text.
Customers complaining about the same thing.
Their excuse is they are busy.
Can't get parts due to red tape.
Having to make excuses to the GC about this.
GC being told all parts are on job site which is an out right lie.
Jobs being billed complete way over percentage of what they really are.
Sprinkler department is in same boat and are down to skeleton crew because everyone quit.
Getting asked by GC where I'm at on a particular part of job.
I have to tell them I haven't started because I don't have the people.
What can we do they asked.
Call the office I said.
They don't return my calls or answer emails they tell me back.
I'm literally embarrassed every day about this and tired of making excuses for them.
They keep under selling jobs and they keep losing money and they keep saying it's our fault.
And our job to fix it.

[worth1]

Been watching a video about the difference in the drinking age in Germany compared to the US.

I was raised up more with a German attitude towards drinking instead of the American attitude.

[rxkeith]

sometimes i amaze myself.

one of my techs will be going to vegas soon for a vacation, he and some friends of his.
the vegas experience has come up in conversation a few times. today, he brought up
the bacchanal buffet. he asked me to guess how many square feet the buffet area was.
i thought about it for a couple seconds, and said 25,000 sq ft. he looked at me in startled
disbelief. that is exactly how large the place is, he said. how did i know that? had i been there?
nope, never been there. i didn't even know of place. i just thought of a number that sounded
good and 25,000 was it.


keith

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

While running along Milward Drive yesterday, I found a Painted Turtle baby ('bout the size of a quarter) likely left over from last summer's crop, hatched from the warm sun, and walking along the street gutter on near that red arrow on the map https://www.google.com/maps/place/Milwa ... 2F1tjtjvt5.

Its only chance would have been to fall into a drainage pipe ~ 100 yards/91 meters west, because there was no way it'd make it up over the ~11"/25cm tall curb and then through 150 yards/135 meters of tall grass to make it to Odana Pond.

I save these li'l guys a lot during hatching season, but every now and again, I find one in this stead at this time of year.

As we neared the pond its li'l head and neck extended in anticipation. Once deposited, it took to the water like a pro.

The Gotch

[worth1]

I ran across a baby snapping turtle in a creek one time.
It was about 2 inches across.
It was just as mean as the grownups.
Baby alligators hatch ready to bite also.
Just the other day I saved a baby brown snake hatchling.
At first I thought it was a millipede.
We also have poisonous coral snakes in the woods at my place.

[karstopography]

I have my bulb onions out on the concrete picnic table under the umbrella curing. I went over yesterday to look at them, out from under the table slivers the biggest Texas rat snake in existence. Never saw it until it made its move. Some sort of noise like a getting punched in the gut came from my mouth. It’s hard not to make a noise when a big snake surprises you.

The meanest lizard in existence is a Texas Alligator lizard. I’ve seen exactly one somewhere out west of Austin in the Edwards Plateau/Texas Hill Country. I does look like a young alligator and is ferocious if any attempt is made to touch it. Has a prehensile tail like a new world monkey.

Porcupines are out there also. Dogs often learn the hard way what it means to mess with a porcupine. I found a trove of porcupine quills out under a ponderosa pine in New Mexico, but have lost track of them. The Native Americans used the quills to beautiful results in clothing and such. Elk ivory also adorned Native American clothing and tools. My one harvested elk had one ivory made into a ring by a maker in Alamosa, CO. I asked at a local convenience store up in the Alamosa Valley who can turn these ivories into a ring. “Take a left at the next light, drive 3 miles, another left, second trailer on the right” kind of deals.

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

In addition to Mother's Day, it's National Dance Like A Chicken Day (https://nationaldaycalendar.com/nationa ... 20lifetime.)

The Gotch

[worth1]

Did you know the reason Italians don't eat a lot of chicken?
We're talking farm chickens not industrial chickens.
I don't even know if they have industrial chickens in Europe.

[rxkeith]

must not be the sicilians.
they eat chicken.
my mom tells of the time her father, and older sister bought a live chicken from the market,
probably eastern market in detroit, and on the ride home on the trolley car, the chicken got loose.
grandpa was chasing it all over the trolley car trying to catch it. my aunt wanted to disappear out of
embarrassment.

no, i don't know.

keith

[rxkeith]

finlandia university has graduated their last class. they are shutting down after 126 years.
the college was known as suomi college for over a hundred years. someone decided the school
needed a new image, and changed the name. the college was a victim of low student body, and
overwhelming debt. the general consensus is the board made too many bad decisions that didn't
pan out. the school was the only college in the states that was started by finnish americans. it
began as a lutheran seminary (suomi) synod, and evolved into a liberal arts school.
there is a lot of history there. some of my wifes relatives attended the school. we are sorry to
see the school go.

on another note. the retail pharmacy environment is becoming a harder and harder place to work.
there is a pharmacy chain, three letters compose its name. i called three different stores coast to coast,
and in between last week for script transfers for returning snow birds. one place, it took three days to get
a live person on the phone. that pharmacy should have a staff of five. they are working with two people. the
phone is just not something they can get to. they are so over whelmed. another store is 24 hours. they fill a 1000
scripts per day. that is crazy nuts busy. they have no pharmacist overlap. i used to work a store doing half that volume
with overlap, and my head would be spinning by the end of the day. i called their corporate office to express my concern.
that aint no way to work.


keith

[Sue_CT]

My mother uses that pharmacy locally and has said she cannot get a pharmacist on the phone ever. When she said something about it recently they seemed affronted and said they answer every call. Maybe they have hired people since she gave up trying. I have tried to get her to change, but she is 82 and change isn't something she is very comfortable with any more. Oh well. The entire medical field is like that. It is awful. The worse it gets the more people leave, which subsequently makes it worse yet.

[MissS]

Corporate America's big business is ruining the way things were. We have corporate farming, pharmacy, medical care and the list goes on. I have yet to see one industry that was improved by big business take overs.

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

@rxkeith; my Churning Rapids-dwelling BIL is (was?) a Finlandia University Design Engineering Professor.

The Gotch

[karstopography]

We had a local pharmacy with a local pharmacist we knew and liked, but for whatever reason it was impossible for her to make a living after years in the business struggling with making a profit with the pharmacy so she shut it down. We went over to another local pharmacy and so far so good, but there seems to be less and less local pharmacies. I don’t like the three letter national chain pharmacy for various reasons in town even though I like and know the store manager. My folks use the other major national chain and I pick up their meds at times there. It’s always a sweat shop in there with the volume of walk-ins and the traffic in the drive thru. There’s been times that pharmacy has been shut down for lack of staff. Or meds that aren’t available.

In othernews, My son had his knee cap completely displaced in an idiotic, pointless thing young people evidently do. A former coworker of my son’s, a young woman , slipped up behind my son and kicked the back of his leg behind the knee, completely and very visibly dislocating his kneecap distally about 3”. Paramedics came and put the patella back into place, but my son’s knee now lacks stability. He’s due to leave for a study abroad opportunity next week.

He called the major clinical care provider here locally to see if something could be done to improve the knee function and stability, they had an appointment for this week, but for reasons still unknown couldn’t get his insurance to enter into their system. He went round and round with them, getting transferred on the phone, no one picks up, voicemails, yada, making calls to his insurance confirming the information, then calls back to the major regional clinical provider finally getting another person within their system that actually understood how to input the number, insurance was set, but by that time the appointment this week was lost and next available was in June. June is too late.

Luckily, we Found a orthopedic surgeon we knew that would fit us in this week, got a much better and appropriate brace than the University clinic gave him and he should be good to go overseas, albeit, somewhat hobbled by the idiot that hurt his knee.

I agree there’s major issues with corporate America and I’d say it’s even bigger than that.

[worth1]

There's capitalism and then there's just flat out taking over an industry piece by piece.
I saw this coming back in the early 80's when everything started to fail.
Farmers getting so deep in debt they would never get out.
And the banks were more than happy to give out loans knowing good and well they wouldn't get paid back just so they could foreclose.

Anything before the 90's you could get a job with an address transportation and a home phone.
Many of us could fix that transportation ourselves.

I had this discussion with my neighbor last night.
He was talking about wages and the cost of living.
Trashing younger people.
We didn't agree and I said that the wages haven't kept up with the cost of living and I explained to him why.

He honestly forgot all you needed to get by back then was the gumption to learn how to do things like fix your car and so on.
Now you have to have so many things to get and keep a job it's rediculas.
Plus all the stuff you don't really need that's out there.


Then the company I worked for bought into a couple of programs that we had to install on our phones.
Everyday you would get hit with more tasks to complete.
Some were an hour long and you had to complete them.
I asked when am I supposed to have time to do all this.
You can do it at home.
But I only get 2 hours of my time at home.
You can do them on the weekends.
But I'm off the clock.
Well you're just going to have to figure out a way to do it on your own time.
Seriously an hourly employee has to continue company business after they are off the clock?
If you complained about it you were pointed out as someone that didn't care about the company.

That clock was on our phones too
We had to be in the geofence to clock in and out.
Some guys got automatically clocked out while on the job.
Plus you had to point the phone towards you so it could take a picture of you.
Countless emails texting and answering the phone all day.
You were required to answer the phone up until 7:00PM.
But they never answered the phone.
Said they were busy.
Never answered emails.
Said they didn't have time to read them all.
Never answered a text.
If you were lucky they would get back with you days later after it was too late.
I proved this to my customer because he was complaining to me about them not ever calling back.
I called the same people and they didn't answer.
I showed him all the emails they didn't answer as well as my texts they didn't answer.
I was so embarrassed I didn't know what to do.
I've known this guy for years.
Where's your crew?
I don't have one all I have is kids.
This crap went on for years one mud hole after another.
I couldn't sleep at night.

[Sue_CT]

Requiring hourly employees to work off the clock is illegal, Worth, always has been in my lifetime. All you need is a complaint to the state labor board. You could probably do it anonymously. If no one does, then they get away with it. They came in to my hospital I was working at 35 years ago and made them pay lots of back wages. Stupid people actually kept a record of how many hours of time they worked and they were given "comp time" instead of pay. All that time had to paid at time and a half.

[Kurt]

Beer is less expensive than water.Here a tall boy 16 oz.Bud,Busch at a buc at gas stations.A bottle of reg Dasani Water at 10 oz.with the fancy squirt top 1.25.Go figure?My favorite hops now are judged by alcohol content.You can get 6.7 to4.0 content.Most brands of beer it seems are or less than H2O prices.