At my old company we would ban customers that were repeatedly abusive to customer service agents. Agents had the right to hang up on customers that were being abusive and if the same customer kept getting reported, eventually they would receive a letter from the legal department telling them to stop. If it continued, they would get banned.

I remember one guy was so bad that a director got the phone system to automatically route any calls from him to his mobile line and put him in his phone book. He would very politely greet him by name as soon as he picked up the call to make it clear that he wasn’t ever going to get through to anyone else.

At a prior employer, we noticed that there were many customers getting essentially free service ($100-200 per month) by calling customer service hundreds of times per month and asking for credits for all sorts of things. They were generally very nice and just picked up $5-10 credits until their service was free. Beyond the free service, they were costing the company the expense of the service calls.

We started routing all of them to a small group of agents and flagged the accounts so the agents would deny them pretty much every time. It was kind of funny because we didn’t tell them anything changed, but you could see that some of them noticed because they started asking which call center they were talking to. They would immediately hang up and call back over and over and just keep going back to the same place. Eventually most of them gave up.

Note: nobody here would/should feel sorry for this particular company, but I still thought it was funny to see these scammers get mad that we caught on to the scam.

Worst book I’ve quit is Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. What a horrible book!

Worst I’ve finished is Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, immediately followed by Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I’ll throw in a special mention for The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby. All terrible books that I finished only because they were required reading in school.

Its an OK game. I got it on sale and don’t regret the time spent playing it, but the controls are awkward and there wasn’t much nuance to the story. There appear to be lots of potential story-line elements based on your decisions, but it was too slow and cumbersome to be worth a replay for me.

By comparison, I quit Heavy Rain pretty early, I seem to recall walking around yelling for my child for an extended period of time and that was the last I ever played it. IMO, Detroit is a much better game than that.

It looks like Steam has it on sale for $12 at the moment, which is less than I paid for it. I played it one time through for 12 hours, so $1 per hour of entertainment isn’t terrible. Not a glowing endorsement, I guess.

Thanks, I’m guessing the benefit of subscribing is to create that persistent relationship. The free version from MS that I’m using times out after a while. I definitely get the problem of it making up experience for me when it encounters something in a job description that isn’t referenced anywhere in my info. Honestly, I’d probably get more interviews if I just let it make up stuff, but I’m guessing that might become a problem for me later. :)

I interviewed for a job recently and asked why the position was vacant. They said the previous person died. I didn’t have the courage to ask if the death was work-related though.

Can you share a bit about how you used it? I’ve used Copilot a bit to try the same thing, but it makes so many errors that I spend too much time editing and fixing them. Also, after running quite a few cover letters, I found that the text was repetitive and unnatural in a way that made it really obvious that it was an LLM writing the letter and not a person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_citizen_movement

Morons who think their country’s laws don’t apply to them.

I’m definitely in agreement now, it just took me a bit longer to get over the shift in social norms.

Great points on the horrible quality of sound in these places. I was referring more to the selection of music, but playing it at low quality certainly makes it worse. My kids joke that the grocery store is where old pop songs go to die.

I used to judge people for going about their daily lives with headphones on (like shopping) as being antisocial. In the last few years, I’ve come to realize they were just quicker to realize how annoying our society is and I’m increasingly likely to join them.

Recently I went to a mall and visited all the department stores. One of them had a guy playing a piano live and my first thought was “how quaint”. Then, as I sat and waited for my wife to try things on it struck me that I wasn’t hearing horrible music played over speakers - the piano was really nice. Why can’t places go back to playing relaxing music like that (even recorded)?

I once had to post a position that was specifically made for my employee, but my recruiter was awesome. I told her there was no possibility I would pick anyone else, so she suggested I make the requirements hyper specific. So, I met with my employee and we worked up a list of 10-20 things that she had done in her career and put them all in as requirements to qualify.

I received no other “qualified” applicants, so I only had to interview the one. My next meeting with her I said, “this is your official interview, do you have any questions for me?” She said “no” and I congratulated her on being selected for the role.

Same. I have a fence that’s barely still standing now that I removed the ivy. I’ve been pulling it and spraying it for several years now. I know I’ll never win, but I’m doing my best to keep it in check. The most painful part is when I go to garden centers and see it for sale. It makes me want to cry.

Wish listed! Also bought Be a Rock, I look forward to being a rock later tonight, it sounds fantastic!

When I was in the office, always metal. At home I’m more likely to listen to classical, but still metal if I need to be totally focused.

I put on music, preferably with full coverage noise canceling headphones to block as much outside stimulus as I can. Depending on the mood, I might put on something soothing (listening to Sean Townsend on YouTube right now) or I might go with metal.

If you are in US K-12 education and have a diagnosed condition (depression, anxiety, autism, etc.), you can have your parents request a 504 plan with the school. This requires the school to make reasonable accommodations for someone with a disability or illness that makes it difficult to be successful otherwise. When my daughter was suffering with anxiety and panic attacks, we worked with the administrators to setup safe places where she could go to calm down. The teachers were required to let her go any time she needed a break from the classroom.

I can definitely ID 2 mosses: long moss and short moss.

To some degree you can get use Glassdoor with the help of the element zapper from ublock origin. What you can circumvent is pretty limited, but you can at least get a bit of information without jumping through all their hoops.

What that said, I would not put a ton of trust in the reviews section. As people have mentioned, companies can get bad reviews removed, but also most happy employees aren’t taking the time to go submit a review. I use it more to see salary ranges for job titles, both generally and at specific companies. Even that is subject to how honest users are about their title and salary, but employees have much less access to that kind of info compared to employers, so I have to take what I can get.

Another vote for the cake.

In my experience, most men wearing business casual dress very poorly. I typically see ill-fitting khakis, boxy shoes, and a polo shirt (frequently a polyester golf shirt). Companies that have moved to casual dress (jeans) have done the world a favor by letting these poor guys wear jeans and sneakers (still the polos though…).