What Really Grinds Your Gears?

[Rustpot]

yeah, I'd never go there HAHA !!!


true...

here in Houston nobody without at least 15/16 years experience is running the engineering department...

I work for an EPC Contractor - provide Engineer, Procurement and Construction Services to big name clients such as Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, etc.....

waaaaay too much on the line to let a kid run a department...in this situation, the term "kid" means anyone under 40 years o age...

you can run a department around here working for a private engineering firm, but all the engineers around here make good money working for contractors, because that's where all the money, hours and mega projects are....

Yeah, a firm like that needs a PE. Which is an engineering title like MD, PhD. Takes a while to get your PE as you need one to get one, but I know some friends who have theirs.

But the work I do isn't lives on the line type of stuff. But I work for a company that does <$10mil/year and the current plan is to take all of the dispersed roles filled by sales, engineering, purchasing, etc and reshuffle the work load into something that makes more sense for the skillsets we have. So the loose plan for me is to have a few guys working support for design and production, but run all of the new system setup, sizing, calculation, load, field evaluation, and selection through me. Which is both awesome and sucks. I've been working balls to the wall for months. And every week I get a new set of responsibilities or another project to juggle.

 

[kronin323]

Well, there's the Peter Principle - people are eventually promoted to their level of incompetence...

 

[kronin323]

Though I typically read all of a thread's history before posting on it, this particular one I didn't, when I first posted here way back when. So I'm sure this has been covered before, but I still gotta rant.

Idiot drivers. There's lots of things that grind my gears about idiot drivers, most notably PASS ON THE LEFT / SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT, PEOPLE!!!! IT DOESN'T SAY "BELOW SPEED LIMIT KEEP RIGHT"', IT SAYS "SLOWER" - THAT'S A RELATIVE TERM!!! But for this post I want to rant about...

UNPROTECTED LEFT TURNS!!!

Why is it so dang hard for so many people to do it correctly? You enter the intersection. When you have an opening or the light changes, you turn. Easy peasy.

"But I can't enter the intersection until I have space to make the turn, right? Because what will happen if the light changes first? I'll be stuck there, unable to move, with all these big scary cars honking at me! And then I'll wet my pants! And they're my last clean pair! Boo-hoo, boo-hoo! I just don't know what to dooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo..."

1. The law states that you may legally enter an intersection if the light's green, or yellow if you're not accelerating (though only one car at a time).

2. The law also states that when you get a green light, you must first YIELD TO ANY EXISTING TRAFFIC IN THE INTERSECTION. Meaning IF THE LIGHT CHANGES, THE PEOPLE WHO JUST GOT A GREEN LIGHT MUST YIELD THE RIGHT OF WAY TO YOU. I mean, what do you think, people are just going to mow you down because the light turned green? If that were legal, running down panhandlers wouldn't be a crime, it'd be a sport...

But no, they sit there calmly behind the line playing pocket pool, then the light turns red and they wait through another cycle. And traffic backs up behind them. Proper execution of an unprotected left turn guarantees at least one car will get through each unprotected cycle. For each person who doesn't do it right, that backs up the lane one more car length. Which eventually turns into however many more cycles it eventually takes to process a busy period. Making traffic that much worse. And the worse traffic is, the more dangerous it is. LEARN HOW TO MAKE AN UNPROTECTED LEFT TURN; YOU'RE KILLING PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!

And then there's the special breed of idiot who enters the intersection while it's green, but when the light changes, they try to BACK UP BEHIND THE LINE AGAIN! With a line of cars already behind them...

 

[i am rich]

You mad bro?

 

[kronin323]

You mad bro?

Haha - no, just ranting a little bit....

 

[i am rich]

Haha - no, just ranting a little bit....

I know just teasing.

 

[i am rich]

Rich's turn. Walks up to the podium and clears throat.

2005 when I first surfed thru the Oakley website. I was able to see the items that are discontinued today. Like medusa, scaled cars, x metals, magnesiums, frogskins and everything that we all wish was still available. I did not purchase any of them thinking it was a forever production. It was only last year that I found out that everything I saw that I had the chance to buy was now gone.

There are nights that I am having nightmares. Medusa haunting me asking me "Why did you not buy me?" I wake up in the middle of the night screaming "NOOOO!!!!". I wake up drenched in cold sweat, my wife asking me if I am ok. Anyway. I can't continue any longer.

I am rich and I think I might be suffering from post traumatic oakley disorder.

Lol

 

[kronin323]

Child abuse. It comes in many forms, but in this case I'm talking about physical abuse.

Though I never met him, my grandfather was an angry man. Under the excuse of "punishment", he abused my father and uncle. My father talked about him rarely, but when he did, they were not good stories...

So my father grew up to be an angry man. And, under the excuse of "punishment", he abused me. He wasn't as bad as his father was, but it was enough. And I grew up to be an angry man.

It gets to the point where you don't even realize how angry you are all the time anymore. It just feels normal. Despite my own experience, if I had fathered a child while I was in my 20s, looking back I'm ashamed to admit that I believe I would have raised him to be an angry man, too.

But I didn't. Instead, one day some events made me realize how angry I was all the time. And I realized I was tired of being angry. So I changed my life. It wasn't easy or quick, and it's not about suppressing anger; it's about changing your attitude and outlook so you don't get angry much in the first place. Don't sweat the small stuff. Happiness is a choice.

And the people who really know me now find me to be one of the coolest heads they know. And when I had my first child at 38, I was no longer an angry man.

Spanking and all that is now a big no-no, but an in-depth study found that corporal punishment itself isn't bad; it's how it's used. It doesn't damage a child when it's predefined, of a reasonable amount, consequences spelled out in advance, and the system followed consistently. And coolly. But when it's done out of anger, when you make up the punishment in the heat of the moment, it's not punishment, it's abuse.

But personally I'm going the entire non-corporal route. Time-outs and all that. No yelling (The Wife does enough of that for both of us...) But a few weeks ago I had to put The Kid in timeout just before bedtime. The rule is one minute for every year of age, and if they leave timeout before it's over, calmly put them back then restart the clock. The Kid normally only gets up once or twice, if at all.

This time, though, she kept fussing and leaving timeout. One time when I went to put her back, she backed from me with a look of fear, shaking her head and saying "no". It broke my heart. I had a flashback to when I was a kid, when it was time for a whippin' and I decided not to meekly comply but to resist and try to get away. The attempt ended with me pinned on my back with a knee on my throat. While my mother just stood there and watched helplessly.

When I saw that look on The Kid's face, I just wanted to give up and drop the timeout. But I had to be consistent. So I calmly picked her up and put her back in timeout. And eventually she got through it.

When I put her to bed that night, after I made up my nightly "Once upon a time" story, I asked her, "Are you mad at Daddy?"

"No."

"Do you love Daddy?"

Smile. "Yes."

And that feels good.



[In case there's any question, there's nothing tongue-in-cheek about this post.]

 

[kronin323]

Rich's turn. Walks up to the podium and clears throat.

2005 when I first surfed thru the Oakley website. I was able to see the items that are discontinued today. Like medusa, scaled cars, x metals, magnesiums, frogskins and everything that we all wish was still available. I did not purchase any of them thinking it was a forever production. It was only last year that I found out that everything I saw that I had the chance to buy was now gone.

There are nights that I am having nightmares. Medusa haunting me asking me "Why did you not buy me?" I wake up in the middle of the night screaming "NOOOO!!!!". I wake up drenched in cold sweat, my wife asking me if I am ok. Anyway. I can't continue any longer.

I am rich and I think I might be suffering from post traumatic oakley disorder.

Lol

Sorry to follow your fine, entertaining post with my serious downer; you slipped yours in while I was still writing / proofing mine...

 

[i am rich]

Sorry to follow your fine, entertaining post with my serious downer; you slipped yours in while I was still writing / proofing mine...

Ooops sorry. Thought stepped off the podium. My bad. Won't happen again.