averagedrunk
I was an insufferable ass. I was too cool for everything. I was counter-culture, but that got too cool so I became counter-counter-culture. When that was too cool I basically just booked myself down to one niche interest.
I missed out on so much actually cool shit because I was so insufferable.
I watched the man who decided to “just discipline” me lose his wife, his job, and his entire life. It wasn’t even his fault but as awful as it sounds it felt pretty fucking good watching his life crumble after the way he acted. The man paddled me every day for a year and laughed about it. Made fun of me in front of adults. My “disciplinary plan” was one lick with the paddle for each late assignment over the year. So if something was late by a day in October, I was getting hit for it in May. I was 13.
More than once I’ve thought of going to where he works now in one of my nicer suits to spit on him in front of his coworkers. He wasn’t the reason for my depression, anxiety, and all of the other things that were wrong with me. But he did contribute to my poor mental health.
They say the best revenge is living well. It’s working alright for me these days. And he’s no longer in a position to do that to anyone else so I won’t go spit on him today.
I’m too drunk to read the whole thing, but I have an anecdote that is related.
Years and years ago one of my customers was a city. They had SCADA systems to control and monitor the city water. Originally there was no way to access the Internet from the control machines and no way to access those machines from the Internet.
Well, they got a new boss at the water department and he wants to check it from home. He’d been told that’s a bad idea repeatedly. Eventually my boss got some folks at the city to sign a document saying we don’t recommend it and they accept the risks and I get him remote access.
Time moves on several months and suddenly half the city has no water. Anyone care to guess why? Anyone care to guess who the city tried to blame? Because that person and the MSP they worked for would have been fucked if not for a nice waiver showing that we said this would happen.
ADHD combination type and used to battle depression with anhedonia every single day. I wasn’t sad, I was uninterested and couldn’t feel pleasure. I haven’t beaten it but I’m in control these days.
It’s an exhausting feedback loop. The less I did because I just couldn’t get myself together enough to do anything the worse I felt. The worse I felt, the less I was able to do.
I see you, friend.
In some cases you’d be right. In others, since the city didn’t plan for it, there would be massive extra traffic in a lot of places because people can’t turn right on red. We’re not talking about an extra 3 minutes at a light. We’re talking about a lane that is usually semi-steadily moving coming to a standstill multiplied by however many lights allow that in the city. So either millions of people in cities like Houston, New York, LA, and Chicago need to leave half an hour earlier (adding 130 hours a year to their commute) or be late.
A lot of that could be solved by not forcing people who don’t need to be in an office back into the office, put in proper bicycle lanes, and redesigning city centers as places to eat, walk, experience a city, and live rather than just office buildings. But the last one is a little ambitious on the short term scale.
Edit: and transit. I fucking forgot transit because it’s so garbage here that I never remember it’s a thing.
Zork. The original graphics were garbage.