Cat.

On the flip side, the ukulele community is so open and friendly, helped me stick with a hobby I sucked at to begin with, and now I’ve released actual music!

Rupert and the Frog Song. Three terrifying stories. It was a Thursday night… I was working late…

I came in via the support track, my advice would be to gather generalist skills like writing documents, editing spreadsheets, maintaining databases, etc. Once you get your foot in the door with that, grind hard to master all the systems a company uses, and keep expanding that software portfolio. Also look at automation software like Zapier that can bridge the gap between them (make them talk to each other). Operations is a great stepping stone from support, and there will always be a need for the person keeping it all going.

I am, I don’t leave my house.

Every manager Hannah I’ve ever met has been deeply troubled and unable to not make that everyone else’s issue. Only manager ones though, regular Hannahs seem to be immune.

Don’t @ me, stats don’t lie Hannah.

Absolutely. AI is really good at single tasks of specific types. For example, it’s great for organizing your emails, or creating filler content for a website, or helping suggest responses for customer support people. And sure, it did an amazing job creating code for a Google spreadsheet so I could easily scrape radio websites for their competitions and win festival tickets for the seventh year in a row. But in all these things it’s incredibly one dimensional, and still needs a human to guide it. People come to my demo calls thinking that AI agents are fully possible and capable. Nope, not yet.

This is why I’ve sided with the enemy and my career involves educating people on how to build AI automation.

This isn’t going to help you now, but get a job where you’re the only US employee and everyone else’s EOD is 11am.

Also, can people add a quick blurb about these communities so we know what they’re about?

Ohhh really? I have one too, figured it was just a neat decoration on my camera shelf now. Maybe I’ll dust it off and use it again!

Only left the house to help my neighbor look for her escaped cat. It turned out to be in their basement. The cat gets it.

They’re a lot of fun if you can get the film. Some company reverse engineered it and then went out of business, but I think there are still options if you’re willing to pay $2 a photo.

Sometimes just being asked is enough.

Fuck, that sounds like a ridiculous amount of shite. Hopefully life balances out just up ahead.

Put 3 frozen chicken breasts in the instant pot, add 1 cup chicken stock, sachet of taco seasoning, half a cup of salsa, and a tin of kidney beans, pressure cook for 17 mins, break up the chicken and mix back in, serve with sour cream and grated cheese. Amazing.

Cookies! He’s not interested in salmon, ham, cheese, tuna, or any of the usual things. But you have a chocolate chip cookie and he’s in your face until you give him some. He’s not allowed the chocolate, and I don’t think that’s what he wants, he just loves the sweet beige American diet.

Thanks friend, some wise words there.

The main toxic boss got ‘laid off’ shortly after I brought up the issues with management, so things have improved since then. And Zoloft made me realize I had an underlying issue with a lot of things, so I guess it was the push I needed.

I am at one and it’s incredibly toxic. I got diagnosed with generalized anxiety after a year here and I regularly have mood swings. But the money is good and I work from home, so I’ve got that going for me.

When I moved from the UK to the US I left a fairly nice job paying £30k a year (this was back in the 2000s) and had to start again from the bottom. I earned $6 an hour, and my then bf and I sublet an apartment for $600 p/m (he was on a grad school salary that worked out to $9 an hour). We bought discount food items and everything was thrifted, we didn’t save anything, and we went nowhere and did nothing. I have a memory of us buying a sandwich from the gas station as a treat and making it last all weekend (tbf it was like a footlong sub).

Fast forward to now, we have a combined income that puts us in the top 10% of the country. We own a house, luckily got in before prices went insane, so our mortgage is actually less than our sublet was (adjusted for inflation). We still thrift and buy reduced meats from the supermarket, we travel more but because our jobs pay for it, we do eat out a lot more but I still cook most weeknights.

We’re better off now by a long shot, but we’re still careful with our money, and have crafted some neat tricks to make sure we don’t spend beyond our means. If we bought all the new clothes, groceries, cars, and vacations like the movies suggest is normal for a middle class couple, we’d go broke quickly. Also, having zero kids helps massively.

Sometimes I look at what we’ve achieved and what our net income is, and it’s wild to me that people survive on less. Sure, we enjoy things now vs. sticking to essentials at all times, but it’s wild that people are expected to live an entire life just getting by on the basics. What’s the point of having community, taxes, and law if you still live paycheck to paycheck, surviving just to work and sleep?