Category: Annoyances

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This might be inconvenient

News report this morning says that Rite Aid is closing a ton more stores.

Looks like the local one to me is finally on the list. I’d been suspecting it was doomed for a while now. I feel sorry for the employees, they’ve been working so hard to keep the store viable.

I suppose that CVS or Walgreens might purchase the building. Both appear to be involved in some kind of negotiations regarding the liquidation of Rite Aid’s holdings.

The building itself is new, and they have a drive through pharmacy. That might make the facility and location appealing to one or the other. I’d hope for Walgreens over CVS. I don’t much like CVS and can’t really say why that is, other than their stores always seem dirty.

The Rite Aid location hasn’t had looting issues, it’s in an out of the way community that was mostly immune to the ravages of the “Summer of Love”. But they have been dealing with increased shoplifting over the past few years. This is evidenced by certain items being locked up behind plexiglass. Axe products for example seem to require security. Why, I’m not sure other than the target demographic for the Axe brand is teens and younger adults.

I’ll take a wait and see approach and hope the place isn’t closed entirely. That would mean the closest pharmacy would be 18 – 20 miles away.

Not a super big deal, but it would mean that I’d be picking up prescriptions and shopping for groceries elsewhere. I rarely make a trip for a single item.

For example, I’ll get a haircut while the dog is being groomed. If, God forbid I need something from Walmart, I’ll walk across the lot from the groomer to that store. I really hate Walmarts. If I recall correctly, there’s a Walgreens a few miles from the groomer and there’s also a Stater Brothers or Ralphs in the same plaza. 

It probably won’t inconvenience me much but I’m likely to put off picking up pharmacy items so that one trip serves all my needs instead of driving all over hells half acre to pick up one item at a time.

It also means that shopping lists will become more important than they are now. There are a lot of elderly folks in the local area that depend on the Rite Aid and they’re not that mobile. 

For that matter, I don’t want to have to deal with them being on the road (swerving on & off the pavement, is more likely,) while I’m trying to get from point a to b.

The town the groomer is located in, reportedly already has the worst drivers in California, adding elderly people to that mix will result in a greater number of accidents. I suspect at least part of the issue is that you can get a contact high sitting at a traffic light.

(Yes, I know. People aren’t supposed to be smoking pot while driving. Guess what? They do. We have open container laws in California but smoking dope is a-okay.)

I haven’t been in a Walgreens in ages, so I don’t know what their stores are like these days. I’ve considered them several times over the past 4 years. Because shopping there with an Apple Card used to get you 3% cash back. Trouble was, that the 3% ended up being 0% by the time I added the distance to and from the Walgreens. 

Now it looks like health insurance will have me paying nothing for my one prescription. So I wouldn’t get the 3% when I need the next refill in any case.

Story of my life! 

Come to think of it, I wonder if this new fangled medical insurance covers massage? I’ll have to check, I’m not holding my breath. But it might be on the list of things they cover once a month.

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What is wrong with companies these days?

Company A publishes an ad for a position.

Prospect B replies to that ad.

Months later

Company A sends email to Prospect B, “Are you still interested? If so, Respond ‘Yes’”

Prospect B responds “Yes”

Company A sends email containing several pages of screening questions to be filled out in essay format.

I found the instructions telling.

Use acronyms only after you’ve explained them.
Use correct spelling and grammar.

Really? They had to specify the blindingly obvious?

Neither parties have actually spoken to each other, human to human.

Next will be a phone preinterview

Then a Zoom meeting and attendant group interview. 

Then there will be no word at all for another few weeks or months, because the candidates are hung up in committee. A Committee it should be noted that is  made up of people who will likely never set foot in the Engineering wing of the corporation, (if they even know where it is).

Just when Prospect B has forgotten about it, Company A will reach out with additional questions from the group interview.

This is what passes for “Efficiency”.

God I miss the old days! 

This shit was so simple and direct. By step three, Prospect B had been interviewed by the hiring manager, a decision had been made, offer letter was in the mail, (as were “Thanks but no thanks letters”,) and the hired candidate already had their company access badge.

Here we are in 2025, communications at the speed of light, more email pumps across the ‘net in a minute than “Snail Mail” in a week.

We have cheap, to the point of being almost free, global telephone & video conferencing on a scale that was only the fevered dream of futurists 20 years ago and we have “Leading Edge” companies (because all companies are “Leading Edge” right?), being hobbled by…

Human Resources? Lawyers? Fear of hurting someone’s feelings?

This process should be faster, not slower.

Additionally, because of so many bogus headhunting agencies play similar games I’m always wondering if I’ve got some kind of scammer phishing for information.

So I’m perhaps unduly cautious and suspicious.

In on-line dating, the scams are played out exactly like this too.

“Hey.”
Hello
“You’re really good looking.”
Thank you
“Do you work out?”
Yes
“At a Gym”
Yeah, one here in town.
“What’s it called?
Gold’s 
“Really? That’s my gym too.”
Nice, maybe I’ll see you there sometime
“What city you live in?”
Northeast LA

It’s after 30 more inane messages. You find, the person has no car, can’t afford their rent, and wants you to pay for a Gold’s membership but would prefer a premium Equinox gym package that includes monthly massages & pedicures. Then they send you a “Picture” of themselves which is clearly a well known (possibly deceased,) porn star, and ask you to Venmo them “just a little” cash to keep their phone on.

When you say “Thanks but no Thanks” they get nasty and report you to the moderation council of the dating app and you’re under investigation for not being “inclusive” in your dating preferences. At this point you can infer this person is making their living scamming people on various dating apps.

Job seeking at its basic level isn’t very different from dating.

One difference is that in technology, typically the best folks have zero patience for bullshit. Hmm, that might not be a good example. 

I can speak from personal experience when I say the best technology people I’ve ever worked with, had difficulty connecting with other people. They didn’t understand social niceties, and were very easily bored or confused by human behavior. They felt that the reason a company should hire them was self evident based on their resumes and the choice was obviously clear.

A company hired them for their abilities, to fill a particular need, and that was literally all that mattered. They preferred the ultimate meritocracy, in fact they thrived in environments where feelings had no place. It was simply a matter of getting the job done.

I very much lean toward that same philosophy in working environment. I had an advantage in that I had just enough comprehension of normal humans, that I could be an interface between people who didn’t do emotion or feelings, and those who were a bundle of contradictory impulses, desires, goals, manipulation, and feelings.

My function was to provide a window into how normal humans interact with machines and software, test software, and represent Engineering / Development / QA in meetings with people, my less socially adapted colleagues considered rabid chimpanzees.

After particularly difficult meetings with normal humans, it was bliss to return to emotionless labs where all that was required of me, was to analyze binary logic. Something worked or it didn’t, there were no shades of grey.

Reporting a defect to a really good developer had zero emotional charge. It simply was a fact and the developer would accept it as such, perhaps ask clarifying questions, then put it on their “To-Do” list as a high priority to fix after they were done with the feature they were currently implementing.

Most of the developers I worked with, appreciated my ability to stand in with the “Normies” for them. Equally, they understood that dealing with the cacophony of “Normie” feelings and demands in meetings was exhausting and could intuit my status with a glance. They kindly let me be after meetings until I’d recharged in the protected and rarified energy of the engineering labs.

Engineers and developers aren’t ignorant of emotional cues, they simply don’t live every waking moment in emotional discord. They’ll come across as not caring. That’s not strictly true. They care, but are choosy about what and who they invest their time in.

They’ll generally protect one of their own or someone like me. It’s not about friendship, or Machiavellian plans. Protection is extended because persons A or B serve a vital function. Clean, impersonal, simple, direct… Binary.

corporate party.jpgAs HR departments have become more interested in psychology, employee engagement & happiness, they’ve alienated developers and people like myself who lean more toward a non-human mindset.

HR departments hate engineering departments. HR feels unappreciated when they create a party atmosphere for a company event, they have streamers, balloons, BBQ, and give out little trinket awards. They expect everyone to enjoy over amplified music in a corporate parking lot and they call this “Team Building”.

Engineers and Developers see it this way. Parking is not possible in our usual spot. Will be late to the morning status meeting. Free food > food in lunch bag. Cold packs in lunch bag will not last the entire day. Alternate cold storage will be required, lunch bag will serve as dinner tonight. 11:30 HR function, most of development pod will file out, grab free food & drink, then return to desks where there is adequate seating and temperature is optimal, plastic Chinese awards insignificant. Suboptimal music playing in parking lot = distraction, headphones required. Metallica playlist available. Fourth order equations for project must be programmed in C or Assembly to be effective. Consult with Alan to determine which path is likely to produce best outcome.

When the “Team Building” event begins, HR expects, and I’ve seen in some cases, demands, (HR really likes to use the word “Mandatory”), that all employees remain in the designated “Party Area”. Their “logic” is to promote interaction between all departments.

The reality, is that the engineers and developers congregate with each other, plates and drinks in hand conversing about the daily work, project issues, and do not interact with other departments. It’s not that they’re trying to be antisocial, it’s just that “rabid chimpanzees” aren’t that interesting.

Often the software QA group forms a protective picket line between the “Normies” and the Engineering / Development staff. It’s sort of a QA thing, we like our Engineering / Development colleagues and know them well enough to understand social interactions may not be comfortable or pleasant for many of them. We’re tribal and protect our own.

QA & Engineering / Development interact well with each other, but are “strange ducks” in comparison to the rest of the departments. Sales people often try to breech the QA picket line in an attempt to gain future product development knowledge that they can sell as “current product” to enhance their sales numbers for the month.

Most, if not all, are intercepted by QA and distracted with questions about the latest sports teams or how their children from various wives are doing in various sports.

Obligatory “Time Present” value expires, Engineering / Development / QA refills plates and drinks then retreats to Optimal seating and temperature inside their labs.

HR is disappointed that engineering was not engaged, but consoles themselves with handing out reward trinkets to Sales/Marketing and Executive staff.

HR is incapable of evaluating contributions from Engineering / Development / QA. Quantifiable metrics are esoteric and without a dollar value HR is unable to relate an award trinket to ephemeral concepts.

HR then begins planning next company event with further goal to force Engineering / Development / QA to participate.

In this, HR utterly fails to understand that Engineers / Developers / QA are completely different creatures. We’re the kind of people that figure out how to build atomic weapons not because we want to blow shit up or for wars. We do it, because it’s interesting and we’re curious if we can actually make it work.

As a side note, we’re also the people that are often guided by a principal loosely attributed to Robert Oppenheimer & Albert Einstein: “Yes, we can do this thing… But should we? Can we be sure that this won’t be misused or cause irreparable harm?“

I’ve been at companies where HR mandated, (there’s that word again,) Engineering / Development / QA participation at 2 or 3 consecutive corporate functions. Typically by the fourth mandated function,(It is mandatory that all employees attend,) the Engineering / Development / QA department leaves the corporate campus 1/2 hour before the scheduled event.

During the mandated corporate event, Engineering / Development / QA are all at  the local microbrewery enjoying beer, food, camaraderie, and discussing resume refreshes because the company has come to appear more interested in “cross department team building” than giving them raises greater than 1% or actual completion of new products or projects.

It does not go un-noticed by Engineering / Development / QA that they’re driving shitbox cars while Sales / Marketing / HR are driving new Porsche’s, Teslas, Corvettes, Mercedes, BMW, or Range Rovers, and wearing 125K Patek Phillippe watches.

Which leads back to job searches

Company A publishes an ad for a position.

Prospect B replies to that ad.

Months later

Company A sends email to Prospect B, “Are you still interested? If so, Respond ‘Yes’”

Prospect B responds “Yes”

Company A sends email containing several pages of screening questions to be filled out in essay format.

And you wonder why, many Engineers / Developers / QA people are somewhat antisocial.

Well, I must now apply my time to answering essay questions. I wonder if I could get an AI to do it? Perhaps I could, but should I? Sure! I don’t see any irreparable harm…

Update: AI was useful. Essay test completed and sent. I chose to provide “Seed” concepts to the AI I was using, then allow it to create a high scoring draft answer. I took the draft and reworked it into my own method of speaking accepting that the score would drop a point or two. My hope is if a human ever reads the document they’ll recognize a real person was behind it.

I’ve added the completed document to a new “Boilerplate” document for future use. I suspect that no human eyes will ever read the document I submitted. I’m betting that an AI will evaluate the document, score it for completeness, spelling, and grammar, then pass those scores to another ATS AI which will compare the scores to other applicant scores then place my application in a queue ranked by score and limited in number.

Whoever created these ATS systems and their associated AIs didn’t fully understand the concept “Yes, we can do this thing… But should we? Can we be sure that this won’t be misused or cause irreparable harm?“

Sigh…

When did we become so sterile?

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More Systems Gone

So my Starling hub updated today. That means that it no longer supports my legacy Nest login. 

Because I’m adamantly opposed to being forced to link my house to Google, I’ve retired the Starling. 

The practical upshot is that my Nest devices are no longer linked to HomeKit.  Now I have to use the Nest Application to control the thermostat, and the remaining Nest Protect is no longer accessible to HomeKit.

This was going to happen anyway in October. It’s just a few months ahead of schedule. 

It’s weird, it feels like the house is dying around me. That’s not a good feeling and adds to a bit of depression.

I’ve decided no more smart devices until, and unless, I’ve either got a new home or a job where I’m staying here in this house.

If it’s the former, I’ll probably be in an apartment and smart thermostats or smoke alarms will be provided that I can’t change out. If it’s the latter, then whatever may come, I’m avoiding Google products from here on out.

It’s a pity, the Starling was a cool idea. It linked Nest/Google devices to HomeKit functionality. It was one of those things that was neat and just worked. Until today.

It’s a pity, I’m fairly certain that I’m not the only person that doesn’t appreciate Google being so damn intrusive.

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Oh goody! Google is at it again!

I knew it was coming. I just didn’t think they’d move this quickly.

According to an email today, and it was confirmed in the news Google is discontinuing support for Gen 1 and Gen 2 Nest Thermostats. 

At first thought, I was like no big deal, then I read further into the email and found that not only are they no longer updating the internal software, they’e also going to be killing remote access to the unit.

Basically, my smart machine is going to get just as dumb as a regular thermostat but will retain scheduling ability. 

This sucks!

No more ability to control the house temperature if I’m away. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it’s really nice in winter to have the house in the 50s when I’m away, then tell Siri to warm the house up to something comfortable before I actually get there.

If you’ve got a regular schedule that can be programmed. If you don’t have a regular schedule then you come home to a freezing house and crank the thermostat to warm it up quick.

With either the preprogrammed schedule, or the remote commands, the temp is increased in shorter bursts over a longer time. It’s a bit more balanced and efficient.

I knew Google was going to do this. To their credit they have discounted their newest version of the machine but I’m not interested. Yes It’s a nice machine, expensive, but given how Google is behaving and that they want me to have a full Google account instead of the old Nest account I’m not inclined to get deeper into Google.

What I want is an ecosystem that just talks to HomeKit and does so locally between devices inside the house. I don’t really like even low level stuff like house controls bouncing all over the internet. I was willing to put up with HomeKit, and Google so long as the Thermostat and the Protect smoke were providing what I believe to be a reasonable level of integrated protection.

The night of the fire, the A/C did kick on and distributed the smoke throughout the house. It also fanned the fire. 

But with Google’s recent moves,

I’ve been looking at alternatives.

Regardless of my remaining in this house or not, it’s a good point to disconnect from Google. My Thermostat will get dumb in October. I’ve got until then to make some kind of decision.

Trouble is, most of the smart thermostats want an account, and in some cases they want you to have a paid monthly or yearly subscription. 

That makes me rethink the whole smart thermostat idea. The Nest thermostat saved me money over the years, and while it was under Nest’s control didn’t cost anything beyond the cost of the unit and giving some of my information to Nest via their app.

This new situation may cancel the savings of any potential unit. It might also be a sign that for me, going forward simplicity is the best path.

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Always in the middle of the night!!!!

The second, of three, Nest Protect smoke alarms reached end of life.

I swear, I think smoke detectors in general are more of a pain in the ass than they’re worth. (I say that as someone who had a house burn down!)

I also have come to believe that the damn things are somehow built to sense sundown, then wait 6 hours before starting their bitching about low battery or malfunctions.

That’s only when they’re not going off because someone took a hot shower, or a bit of toast got overdone.

There’s nothing quite like being naked on a stepladder in the middle of the night trying to get one of these nuisance devices off the damn ceiling to shut it the hell up!

The modern machines all seem to have CO detectors in them and it’s the damn CO detector that goes out first. But rather than being able to tell the stupid machine, “Yes I get it, the CO detector is malfunctioning. There is another unit that is still functioning so stop chirping every 60 seconds and let us get some sleep…”

Nope! It’s gotta be taken care of right then. Like you’re going to be able to run out to the local hardware store at 2am and buy a replacement.

The Protects were literally the best of these nuisance machines. I’ve had these for 10 years and they have legitimately reached end of life. I’m not too annoyed, other than now I have to replace them with whatever bullshit machines are on the market today.

That’s thanks to Google’s masterful decision to keep fucking over Nest, (who they purchased a while back and have systematically destroyed.) Trust me, however much you hate Google, (and there are numerous reasons beside what they did to Nest,) it’s not enough.

I’ve hated smoke alarms since at least 1982. I had one in an apartment that pissed me off so much, (again at 3 am), that I leapt off the floor, snatched the damn thing from the ceiling and disemboweled it on the spot.

The Protect units were purchased after, at random, any one, of the three units installed in my house by the builder, started going off at random intervals for absolutely no reason. Always sometime between 1 and 3 am. (Not good if you’ve actually been in a house fire and are perhaps a little twitchy about fire!)

Those stupid machines were so bad we couldn’t use the stove in the kitchen without having the sliding doors and all the windows in the house open. Even then, it was 50/50 that they’d start that horrific screeching, reporting a fire that didn’t exist. This was only slightly more annoying than the smoke detectors in the previous house that burned, never raising a peep, even as they were consumed by fire.

But take too hot a shower… Then once again there you were, naked, throwing doors and windows open to make the damn things shut the hell up!

The Protects, solved most of those problems. I’m not looking forward to going back to the shitty overly sensitive machines.

Last night, at least, I knew what was going on. Even half asleep, I got the malfunctioning Protect off the ceiling. Unplugged it from the AC connection, pulled the backup batteries, and left the mess on the kitchen counter.

I don’t remember pulling the batteries, I was on auto pilot. I don’t even remember going back to bed.

From this you might infer that I’m very grumpy when my sleep is disturbed. That is true to a point.

If the source of the disturbance is the dog wanting out at some ungodly hour because he’s not feeling well. I’m totally fine with it. If it’s a child or even an adult that’s waking me for a legitimate reason, I’m not grumpy at all.

But a machine? (Including alarm clocks,) oh hell no! I loose my damn mind. This is especially true of a machine that’s decided to tell me about a low battery every 60 seconds at 4am.

Now my challenge is to strike a balance between price and minimal false alarms in my replacement smoke detectors. Truthfully, if the originally installed units weren’t wired into the house power, (and therefore there weren’t open holes in the ceiling where they were installed,) I’d be removing the mounting rings, spackling the screw holes over, and calling it a day.

What ever POS devices I choose, I take comfort in the high probability that I will not be living with the decision for long.