Things that shouldn't piss you off, but do.

^bah humbug...

TX, you ever had a brisket from SRF?

That's dark. I like it. But, no.

Also, no. But it would explain a lot about him if true. And the parents.

I love brisket, but somehow literally nobody outside of Texas knows how to smoke it. The entire WORLD. It's the oak partially, but wtf is going on in the world.

Do I have a right to be pissed about ATMs? Might be less annoying to learn Spanish than continue to answer THE SAME ****ING QUESTION EVERY TIME I USE THE ATM

suppose it takes one to know one, and i'm related to many
of both the okie and bakersfield type on both sides

for some, the last um becomes translated into youme sounds after being e'd before a period
don't quote me on that

not sure if this counts but I cannot stand the "move over" law (if someone is pulled over on thruway the cars on in right lane have to move to middle lane). I was on way home from a bday party last night and someone was pulled over. Let the chaos ensue.

The cars in right lane should simply slow down. Merging is stupid.

People making that stupid heart gesture with their hands on their chest to other people

the term 'senior' in job titles

oh that's a good one

remember my first real foray into that I was in SF for work and part of that was to liaise with a PR firm we'd hired - this was young rick's first real foray into the office world (worked construction up through college, then poker, then journalism

they ask me what my schedule is, i let them know what times i'm available, we agree to meet on a thursday afternoon but they also want to take me out to lunch on wed if that works - i agree, at the lunch i meet two girls who are senior account executives in their mid 20s. i'm thinking wow that's pretty imressive they rose so high at such a young age

fastforward to when i go to their office, i knew it was a boutique firm, but had no idea it was only about 20 people, those girls are very clearly at the very bottom of the totem pole - they are the ones who answer the door and deal with mail going in and out and not even present at my official meeting - basically the only two left out of the meeting room because someone had to answer the phones and handle deliveries and any random popins etc

years later i'm given control of a new department, over the course of about 6 months i interview and hire almost a dozen new employees to work in that department - nearly every single one of them requested senior be added to their title after receiving a job offer - they were not asking to be more senior than their colleagues or anything they just wanted a better sounding job on their business card - but it became a problem because then those who didn't make the request were now "junior" and you'd even see them using that as leverage during disagreements "i think we should follow my plan because i'm the senior xyz and you aren't" at which point i just promoted all of them to senior

Haven't watched much in recent years, but The Daily Show used to do a good job mocking this.

The brokerage firm I worked at 20 years every account manager was a vice president because it sounds cool.

Edit: Looking at their website everyone is now just a representative. Looks like they did a reset at some point.

i think it makes sense though, had i never done the office tour or they weren't such a small firm i would have thought that they were assigning high level people to manage our account day to days

i can see how adding vp to the title is a way to get the same effect where clients feel special without making it too obvious by going to the super common senior method

in asia, everyone i knew who was in client facing roles needed to buy an expensive watch (and not a knockoff) to wear whenever they met with clients to signal to the client that it was a successful business and they were dealing with a serious person

it even went so far that they'd even switch their brand of cigarettes just for when meeting clients (china has a huge discreprancy in cig prices going from 50 cents a pack to $500 so they would need to get something in the higher end of at least $10 a pack because they wouldn't want to be seen smoking a $2 pack

i smoked back then - was never interacting with clients, but once was at a conference with the ceo (who didn't smoke), when we were waiting for our car to pick us up and take us back i was smoking and he recoiled in horror to see i was still smoking my normal brand (basically all the foreigners smoke the same brand which is super common, very light (some cigs there have very strong flavors), and quite cheap at about $1 a pack) and he told me he was extremely disappointed that i would care so little for my appearance as to not buy more expensive cigarettes on that day

again, it was more so because everyone does that, they think you still did and that's "your version of premium" much like we can all wear wrinkled shirts at home, even perhaps at the office, but someone who goes to an industry conference wearing a wrinkled shirt will make a lot of very bad first impressions - even from those who themselves wore a wrinkled shirt the day before

i've also seen it a little with enterprise facing startups in the west where they needed to raise a lot of money they didn't necessarily need and could have operated without but Cisco and Walmart wouldn't even consider using a startup vendor that didn't raise at least 10 million in capital simply because it would be disastrous for them to change up things across their entire organization to make use of the service this startup offered only to see the startup fail in 2 years and then they need to make another massive change back to the old system

crossing the chasm talks about that as well, it's one thing to go to state farm and tell them "I've invented the best voip phone service in the world, you'll be able to cut your telecomm costs for call centers and office lines by 50% using our product and everyone will be more efficient as well" which is far less compelling than saying the same thing but with the addition of "and we've partnered with google to provide the fiber support and cisco to provide spare parts and physical maintenance"

Almost forgot. My first job in CO was during the dot-com boom. Most tech companies were trying to prove they were hi p& cool.

As part of that, they let us choose our own titles. I was the Overseer of Arcane Systems.

Of course, I was also a geek and never met with the public. Don't remember how the sales people were titles.

My wife has "senior" in her job title. The title is also about 15 words long. But most people refer to her as "Stephen's* Fixer" so that's a little better.

*Stephen is the CFO.

I like fixer. I'm going to have to put fixer in my title.

Fixed that for you.

And undertitle here!

Using 'real foray' twice in the same sentence. Journalism?

perhaps that's one of many reasons it didn't stick 😀

Hey, I have senior in my title. I really am the senior engineer though. Both in age (50s) and 26 years on the job.

Pisses me off too. I never introduce myself with that title.

I feel quite sorry for all you poor folks who are merely citizens.

It took a couple seconds. Made the joke even better!

oh damn, i didn't even catch it the first time but mark forced me to think about it again