Tag: Frustration

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Well, my Number is 2 out of 5

2 out of 5 Times for something to work is apparently enough to keep me trying.

There’s a Shell filling station nearby in Phelan.

3 out of 5 times their pay at the pumps systems aren’t working. It’s always the same shit. “We have to reset the pump” Well if you have to reset the pump then why don’t you do it once an hour since apparently this is an ongoing issue.

Nobody knows how hard I work to keep from being an angry bitter old man just like one of my grandfathers, or one neighbor who is literally pissed off more than he is not.

It’s an effort to not go down that road.

I’m a cynic, easily annoyed, easily cranky, and generally don’t like people en mass.

Put all of those things together and it’s a recipe for a supervillain.

Except in my case I don’t have super powers so I’d just be a frustrated un-supervillain. Probably more like Dr. Evil.

I’m really tired of thing after thing, system after system, & service after service failing because people aren’t doing their jobs. What’s even worse about it is that most of these so called “Jobs” don’t require a lot of brain power, they just require that the person does as instructed.

Today, this gas station thing pissed me off perhaps a bit more than usual because they’re sitting there explaining, “We just need to reset the pump. It’ll only take a few minutes. “

I could see their display was flashing red on several pumps. Obviously all of those pumps needed attention.

So why were these idiots saying “Bro” and joking around then chatting with the customers and each other instead of doing their job. OR how about taking the pumps completely offline so they’re non responsive?

That’s what frustrated the hell out of me, The damn thing looked and acted like it was working but then told me that it couldn’t read the card. After 3 tries where I entered the rewards information only to have the transaction declined and waiting a good 20 seconds for the pump to be ready to work again I was really annoyed. It was 100° & I had groceries in the car.

What these idiots were talking about resetting is the pump’s payment processing system. So that annoyed me too. The pump was literally half assed online and was just teasing me. This is the absolute worst kind of malfunction for me. Half working shit that appears to be fully operational.

It’s not just the gas pumps. It’s literally services at every point of my contact with the world today.

I’m astounded just how much has changed in such a short period of time. Just since 2019 everything seems to have gone nuts and nothing is as it was, or stable for that matter.

I wonder if the craziness is a response to the sudden changes. Everyone is struggling to adapt and as a result folks are short tempered and easily provoked.

I hope that things settle soon.

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Ya know… Sometimes I can’t catch a break!

Doing laundry, you’d think would be a straightforward and simple task.

Laundry bottle.jpg.HA!  You’d be WRONG!

In a Rube Goldberg series of events. I found myself reaching down into the abyss behind the washing machine. Why? To retrieve my laundry detergent of course!

How did my laundry detergent end up behind the washing machine? Oh let me tell you a story but you’re not going to believe it. I was standing right there, watched the whole thing, and I couldn’t believe it. Although what I saw lends credence to one of two theories I’ve had for quite some time.

The Theories are: 1, God hates me. 2, we are living in a simulation and there are times when the simulation glitches.

I’d just moved wet clothes to the dryer, put some dirty clothes into the washer, and reached for the laundry soap. It’s a mid sized bottle of liquid and is mostly full so it’s got some weight to it.

Somehow my hand connected with the handle of the bottle, slipped off, knocked the bottle sideways, where it bounced, skidded directly to the back of the washing machine, then righted itself, & slipped like bugs bunny into the impossibly narrow gap between the wall and the washing machine. 

The only thing it didn’t do was make the silly “Zip” noise as it disappeared into the abyss. It did however make a good “Thump” as it hit the floor behind the washer.

I understand kinetics and weird physics. I also understand that all energy degrades toward a zero state. Somehow, the bottle of detergent instead of bleeding energy towards stillness, looked like it was pulling energy from space time in some bizarre way.

I wonder if unbeknownst to me, the odd sock wormhole was open behind the washer or dryer at the time?

For a moment I honestly considered leaving the bottle right where it ended up, and going to the grocery store for a new bottle.

It wasn’t so much laziness as wondering if the bottle was somehow cursed. I decided ironically “Cursed be damned” and set about retrieving the bottle.

Alas, like the T-Rex my arms were too short to just reach the bottle and hoist it up. I was however able to barely get my fingertips around the very top of the bottle, but could not get a good enough grip on the slick plastic to lift the weight. In other words, just enough to tease me.

Reaching into my Primate Heritage I started swearing and looking around for a tool. My Marine & Navy buddies would be proud of my creative use of language to describe anatomical impossibilities.

I’d probably lose some points for swearing like that at an inanimate object. Although, had the bottle winked out of existence I’d have been fine with that too.

After several minutes with a hanger, and a pair of pliers I crawled back on top of the washer. I wedged myself back between the washer and the cabinets above it, only to have to un-wedge myself seconds later because somehow I’d managed to start the wash cycle. 

2nd attempt I discovered that the hanger would have to be folded twice to give me the strength needed for it to life the bottle without bending the hook I’d made to a straight rod.

3rd attempt becoming a contortionist I was able to hook the bottle and lift it about 6 inches, then I discovered that impossibly, the bottle was too thick to be raised any further. There is no way that the darn thing should have been able to fall all the way to the floor in the first place.

Hmmm, “God Hates me, and we live in a glitchy simulation?”

After more creative casting of curses I came upon a plan. The hanger lifting the bottle 6 inches meant that I could get my hand on the handle of the bottle and perhaps snatch that bad boy out of the abyss and back into reality.

But only if I found a way to try the hanger around something. A cabinet handle worked, the scratches on the wood can be repaired. I was successful! My laundry soap is now in this reality again, as is my missing microfiber car washing mitt.

You might have found yourself wondering why I didn’t just pull the washer away from the wall.

Valid point!

Here’s why. To do so, I’d have to remove the doors to the laundry closet, then slide the washer through a narrow opening and possibly I’d have to pull the dryer out too. In other words… 

That would have been at least a 1 hour project, since all 6 hinges on the doors would have to be removed. All I wanted to do was pour the detergent into the washer and press “Start”.

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I think I’ve been going about this all wrong… Story of my life!

What, you might ask?

Well, my answer would be pretty much everything!

It seems that I’ve been giving away my knowledge when I should have been charging for every single bit of useful information that I know.

I’ve confirmed this only recently, but have suspected it for a while now. I chose however to live in denial, comforting myself by believing that what I knew, or had to say was of little to no value.

How did I come to this epiphany? 

That’s a slightly interesting tale. I was looking at starting a podcast. In the course of that investigation I was led to the more important question of how do I monetize a podcast. After all, I’d like to earn some cash…

The easiest ways are to charge a subscription fee, or come up with some advertisers. Okay, that makes sense, but as always the devil is in the details. To monetize, you’ve apparently got to use some payment processor like Stripe, Venmo, or Square. Each of these folks take a % and often they add a flat fee too.

Some transaction processors will charge 2.9%+0.30 per credit card transaction. Wow! I should start a processing center!

If my math is correct that works out to about 0.33 per dollar. Meaning that if you charged a dollar for a subscription you’re only getting  0.67. By the way, that doesn’t account for normal taxation Federal and State which works out to about 30%. So in the end you, the person actually doing the work, end up with about 0.47 of every dollar you make.

But wait! There’s more! A podcast requires specialized hosting services, Figure around $20 a month, So before you’ve gotten your first subscription you’re already in the hole $240 just for a year of podcasting hosting services. It’s better to purchase a year than to pay month to month because that’s about 3% higher.

Some of the podcasting directories which typically are not hosting services may add even more fees. Apple for example might charge 30% if someone subscribes to your podcast via their podcast application. So that immense wealth of 0.47 you’ve made may get whittled down again to 0.17 of every dollar.

That depends on how Apple takes their 30%. I’m assuming they’re going to take it right off the top at 30% per dollar, because… They’re Apple! Then the payment processors may also take their fee on the original transaction amount and so on. I could see a scenario where the person doing to podcasting ends up losing money on subscriptions.

Amazing!

So all these podcasters absolutely have to come up with additional sources of income besides subscriptions and at the same time have to produce content that is entertaining enough that the listener count is pretty high for the podcast to be worth an advertisers time.

Don’t get me wrong, pennies add up, but as the pennies add up, so too do the taxes and fees.

I’m going to keep looking for a combination of systems that net the largest potential amount of $$ in my pocket. Now I know why some of the popular podcasts have commercials for something every 6 minutes.

This made me think, “How long have I been writing my blog?” All that time with no subscriptions, 13 -14 years? I should have been selling advertising space, and figuring a way to create more engagement. I thought it was a labor of love and that people would enjoy it on its own merit. Some have and to those loyal followers you have my profound thanks. 

I realize that Blogging, Podcasting, & Social Media engagement are all potential income streams. Now I begin to understand the difference between me & folks that have been doing these things for a while. They know or believe in their value. For them, engaging in these things are actually a business and they charge for their time one way or another.

I’ve never had that kind of faith in myself, or that what I brought to the table was worth a damn. To some degree, I think that is a function of a career in corporate America. After 20 or 30 years of shitty bosses, policies, and being ground under someone’s heel it’s tough to believe you have any value, especially when you’re thrown away on a whim in layoffs, or when you or your department are pawns between to executives settling old scores.

Corporate America’s mistreatment is not the only reason I never had faith in myself, but they sure helped cement my lack of faith in myself.

This year because of that lack of faith in myself,  I almost terminated my blog and my web hosting entirely. Part of my reasoning  was because instead of charging a reasonable fee for 3 years as they had done in years past the hosting service wanted almost $1000.00.

I’m not going to do that. I renewed for one year and am in the process of comparison shopping for a new web hosting service. The current company I’ve been using for years, maybe 13, has relocated their help services to the Philippines. They’ve made changes to the web control panels and their billing panels which have made the service far more difficult to use, and to top it all off, They’ve decided that I don’t need to see invoices or have the ability to look at past invoices.

So, the cost of my narcissism in terms of cash and annoyance to maintain has exceeded my ego’s ability to justify. That being said, I’ve got an organization that I’ve been providing hosting for, and moving my stuff and theirs would have been a Royal pain in the ass. So I’ll wait until they find a new host and someone to do their web site. I’ve got a year to plan and handle the move.

All of this kind of underscores the fundamental truth.

I have not been valuing myself. I’ve been giving away too much of myself in various forms, for free, for years.

Jerry had it all over me in that regard. He knew what to charge. He was often not charging the full price he could get, but at least he was charging more or less fairly for his services. To be fair, he’d charge more for weddings and he almost never discounted them.

He knew he was going to have to deal with a monster bride or worse, the bride’s mother! He really could take or leave a wedding. He once said that playing funerals was more satisfying because he wasn’t going to hear the deceased bitching & complaining, trying the wheedle a discount after services had been rendered, when it came time to write the check.

I saw him on multiple occasions tell a bride he was refunding the deposit because the whole wedding had become such a pain in his ass the price he was charging was insufficient. He hated outdoor weddings, especially those in the Palm Springs area. Oh, they paid pretty well, but often the bride would expect the musicians to be sitting with their instruments in the blazing sun and gusting wind blowing sheet music all over the place.

Hint to any soon to be brides… Put the musicians under an awning. Acoustic instruments don’t like sitting in scorching sun for hours. They tend to fall out of tune when heated. The musicians are also none too pleased to be sitting in formal attire usually black out in the desert sun. Jerry would say I know that it’s the Bride’s special day, but she doesn’t have to make it literally hell on earth for everyone else.

Jerry was on the verge of putting a clause in wedding contracts that charged for broken harp strings incurred at an outdoor wedding. One of the last Palm Springs weddings he played, due to the heat, humidity, and lack of awning or any shade he broke 9 strings on the big harp.

In addition to him having to remap the music in his head avoiding the notes that he couldn’t play with broken strings, while he was playing, the cost of replacement strings almost wiped out the fee he charged for the wedding.

I wish I’d had more confidence in myself. I could have learned a lot more about putting myself “out there” from Jerry. I tried to handle all the technical stuff and let him be a Musician. Now that he’s gone, I’ve got a lot of technology laying around and I’m wondering if I should sell it, or do I have enough of value to say, that putting the tech to work could turn into a profitable enterprise?

I put together a prototype podcast episode just to see if I could. I liked the result, and the one person I’ve shared it with liked the effort as a first step.

That same person has floated the question of having fun in a podcast in the flavor of the old Mystery Science Theater TV show. That show hearkened back to earlier SciFi shows on Friday Nights or Saturday Afternoons. One of the most famous was “Elvira Mistress of the Dark”

Depending on subject matter, that could be fun to do and perhaps entertaining to listen to.

I’ve got a leg up because I already own the audio tech, so if I push forward into podcasting, the investment would be pretty close to zero. Although the technology for producing voice tracks has become dirt simple and cheap. A lot of the audio gear I have laying around may be overkill now.

There are USB mics that have a shit ton of intelligence built in. If you add some decent audio processing software, it’s as simple as just having a computer, one of these mics and you’re going to produce high quality results by default.

Some of the podcasting hosts have the recording software on the server side of the equation. That means that your computer doesn’t have to be terribly powerful, all it has to be able to do is get the audio stream to the hosting server. Then all the processing is done there. Thinking about that, I suppose you could do a podcast from a dang phone with zero investment in equipment at all.

Jerry and I had been looking into “Smart” Mics. During COVID Jerry was doing a ton of Zoom sessions. He was using a borrowed USB mic to capture the harp music. Eventually, he started using the USB mic all the time because it did a fine job and could be powered by his iPad and / or his computer.

There’s one of those kinds of mics that I’ve considered. I was thinking more toward working from home and knowing that I’d have to deal with conference calls. This particular mic also works on video game consoles. Those were my original use cases. But if I were to find a suitable podcast host, subject matter, and start podcasting too. It might be a win all around.