Having a Bad Day?: Get 'yer Hugs here!!

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

SpongeBob!Coworker got sent to another department to cover for an absence.  

[Darkness Ascendant he/him]

12 hours ago, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

SpongeBob!Coworker got sent to another department to cover for an absence.  

nice! 

[Silverblade5 he/him]

*Clicks*

*Finds out forum I've been part of since middle school is hacked*

*Goes to replacement forum*

*Finds out old members and friends are leaving for good*

*Is sad*

[Yata he/him]

I recived my first Downvote here on the Shard...I feel dirty inside

[Darkness Ascendant he/him]

1 hour ago, Yata said:

I recived my first Downvote here on the Shard...I feel dirty inside

hey! Don't worry! I get downvotes aaaalll the time! And look at me, still pure! Have an upvote if it makes u feel better.

[Quiver he/him]

...my paycheck is two and a half hours light.

I realise that isn't a huge amount in the grand scheme; about £20. But.

I haven't been tallying up my paycheck each week, because I've been trusting my job to do that accurately. I'm going to email them about this one, but now I'm...concerned/annoyed that I might have gotten short changed in the past without realising it.

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

29 minutes ago, Quiver said:

...my paycheck is two and a half hours light.

I realise that isn't a huge amount in the grand scheme; about £20. But.

I haven't been tallying up my paycheck each week, because I've been trusting my job to do that accurately. I'm going to email them about this one, but now I'm...concerned/annoyed that I might have gotten short changed in the past without realising it.

Yeah, sounds like you might be getting shortchanged. 

Do you have any of your old pay stubs? If you do, tally those up, too, and contact your boss about it. If he shrugs it off, that might be your cue to threaten to go to the authorities, because shortchanging employees is, in every country I know of, hella illegal. 

[PantsForSquares he/him]

7 hours ago, Silverblade5 said:

*Clicks*

*Finds out forum I've been part of since middle school is hacked*

*Goes to replacement forum*

*Finds out old members and friends are leaving for good*

*Is sad*

That's really similar to what happened with my internet buddies and I. After some time, people just sort of drift apart - it's one of the problems of being on internet forums. But just because people are leaving the replacement forum, it doesn't mean that you lose contact with them for good. Get some sort of IM service with them (Skype or Steam is how I handle most of them), and just pop in to say hi every now and then. You might not speak with them as often, but it's better than completely losing contact.

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

Aaaannnnnd SpongeBob!Coworker is here today. And he's convinced that it's too hot here in the library and that the only way to cool off is to have a fan running at his feet all day. The notion that he could feel the same chill that leads me to wear a sweater indoors by simply taking off his storming suit jacket has apparently never occurred to him. So here I am. Wearing two cardigans. Because even if my desk weren't right next to his, I'd be able to feel that stupid fan anyway.  

[Delightful]

On 14/10/2016 at 6:21 PM, bleeder said:

Google Classroom is the worst. It's so glitchy, and when my teachers put stuff on there they don't actually notify us. 

Oh, yeah, if any of you guys ever need to sleep I can hook you up with some sleep playlists. 

I can has sleep playlist?

7 hours ago, Dankness Ascendant said:

hey! Don't worry! I get downvotes aaaalll the time! And look at me, still pure! Have an upvote if it makes u feel better.

Yeah, you practically belch rainbows!

1 hour ago, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

Aaaannnnnd SpongeBob!Coworker is here today. And he's convinced that it's too hot here in the library and that the only way to cool off is to have a fan running at his feet all day. The notion that he could feel the same chill that leads me to wear a sweater indoors by simply taking off his storming suit jacket has apparently never occurred to him. So here I am. Wearing two cardigans. Because even if my desk weren't right next to his, I'd be able to feel that stupid fan anyway.  

Have.....have you said anything to him?

[marsoupial they/them]

@Delightful Can you access Spotify?

 

Edited October 15, 2016 by bleeder

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

Quick dog question: What do y'all use for flea and tick treatment? The vet sold me First Shield Trio, and said that it would take about three months to break the life cycle, but the product label claimed it would repel new ones. Well, it's been just over four months, and I've been finding fleas  on Bruce just about every time I take him outside.  Any advice? 

Edited October 15, 2016 by TwiLyghtSansSparkles

[marsoupial they/them]

Just now, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

Quick dog question: What do y'all use for flea and tick treatment? The vet sold me First Shield Trio, and said that it would take about three months to get rid of all of them, but that it would repel new ones. Well, it's been just over four months, and I've been finding fleas  on Bruce just about every time I take him outside.  Any advice? 

Nexgard, and I'd also recommend some treatment shampoo if you're not already using it.

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

33 minutes ago, bleeder said:

Nexgard, and I'd also recommend some treatment shampoo if you're not already using it.

I'm looking at Frontline--a lot of people seem to like it? I'm so frustrated because the vet swore up and down that this treatment was better than anything but could get over the counter, and apparently a fair number of online reviews claim it hurt their pets or doesn't work. Bruce hasn't had any adverse reactions to it, but I'm about ready to burn my apartment down to get rid of these things. Not to mention feeling like I got swindled. 

[marsoupial they/them]

1 minute ago, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

I'm looking at Frontline--a lot of people seem to like it? I'm so frustrated because the vet swore up and down that this treatment was better than anything but could get over the counter, and apparently a fair number of online reviews claim it hurt their pets or doesn't work. Bruce hasn't had any adverse reactions to it, but I'm about ready to burn my apartment down to get rid of these things. Not to mention feeling like I got swindled. 

Frontline Plus is probably a safe bet. After about 5 minutes of hurried-but-thorough internet research, it seems like a good choice.

And if the one you're using now has bad reviews, you can possibly consult your doctor about it (perhaps over the phone if you need results ASAP) and discuss alternative treatments. 

[Mestiv he/him]

5 hours ago, Delightful said:

I can has sleep playlist?

 

 

[Oversleep]

@Mestiv, ah, Cloud Atlas. I've seen it recently and I can't stop listening to neither the Atlas March nor Cloud Atlas Sextet.

[Sunbird she/her]

@TwiLyghtSansSparkles Although I don't have any personal experience with Frontline for dogs, I've found it to be pretty effective for my cats. (They have different formulas for cats and dogs, I believe.)

And if other pet owners are saying the medication the vet recommended is ineffective or worse, harmful, I'd say you're absolutely right to be looking for alternatives. Strangely enough, vets don't always tell you the best thing for your pet.

And now I'm going to go on a bit of a rant about feline diabetes.

Because most inexpensive types of cat food are dry kibble type stuff, where the main ingredients are wheat, corn, or other grains, house cats can get Type II diabetes since they are carnivores and therefore not equipped to process all those carbs. When we discovered that our cat Tiger was diabetic, the vet recommended a diet of specialized high-fiber dry cat food. But my mom did some research on her own and decided to start feeding him a low-carb diet of wet cat food made mostly from real meat. Simply by changing his food, we were able to lower Tiger's blood sugar from over 400 (dangerously high) to slightly under 200 (still high, but not life-threateningly so).

To get his blood glucose the rest of the way into the healthy range, we started giving Tiger insulin shots after meals just like you would for a diabetic person. So during a lot of my high school career, I would come home after school, feed Tiger, test his sugar, and then inject him with an appropriate amount of insulin.

The vet did not like this. She told us we should be giving Tiger the same amount of insulin 4x a day without bothering to test his sugar. In reality, that's a great way to send your kitty into a hypoglycemic coma or even kill him. If you're giving him more insulin than his current blood sugar warrants (and it's impossible to know without a glucose test immediately beforehand), then it'll get dangerously low and he'll crash. And in fact, the same thing can happen with diabetic people who take medications like Metformin to lower their blood sugar if they don't pay careful attention to how the medication affects them personally, since it doesn't work exactly the same for everyone. My grandpa knows a guy whose wife actually DIED from taking too high a dose of Metformin because the doctor was adamant that she needed to take that much.

So yeah. Don't necessarily take the vet's word for it just because they're the vet.

[marsoupial they/them]

Just now, Sunbird said:

The vet did not like this. She told us we should be giving Tiger the same amount of insulin 4x a day without bothering to test his sugar. In reality, that's a great way to send your kitty into a hypoglycemic coma or even kill him. If you're giving him more insulin than his current blood sugar warrants (and it's impossible to know without a glucose test immediately beforehand), then it'll get dangerously low and he'll crash.

As a diabetic, that upsets me just a bit. You wouldn't treat a diabetic human that way, so why treat an animal that way? It's no different. The disease is equally threatening, regardless of type or, uh, species. 

[Sunbird she/her]

@bleeder Exactly. This kind of misinformation can literally cost lives.

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

@Sunbird: Yikes!  That's horrible advice, and I know next to nothing about diabetes in cats or humans. Glad Tiger has a smarter human than that vet. 

So, if I do switch, when should I apply the first treatment—after I buy it, or should I wait until 30 days have passed since I gave Bruce his last treatment with the other brand? 

[Briar King]

I'd wait. Maybe not the full 30 days but atleast 2 1/2 weeks. I'm no vet though

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

2 minutes ago, Briar King said:

I'd wait. Maybe not the full 30 days but atleast 2 1/2 weeks. I'm no vet though

That's what I'd figured—I've read stories of people making their dogs sick with too many flea treatments at once, and I didn't want to do that with Bruce. Although, it's been two weeks already—I gave him his last treatment on the first of the month—so not sure if that makes a difference. 

[Darkness Ascendant he/him]

@Quiver, I seriously think it's time you found a new job. I mean, you deserve a much better job. I know people around my age that earn more than you I'm afraid. Your hours are horrid, they aren't very considerate, and now it appears your getting shortchanged. 

[Aonar he/him]

Okay. Spoilered below is an incoherent rant roughly 3.5 months in the making. It's long. Don't feel obligated to read it. I'm mostly writing it because writing these things out seems to help me deal with them. Please forgive the typos, it was written largely on mobile.

 

Okay. So. I know this I the bad day thread, but I'm going to make it the bad 2 ish months thread for a little while, if that's alright.

So, let's start at the beginning, I guess. This summer, I finally got a job. (Couldn't before, since I couldn't drive on my own, and my mother has Addison's Disease, and frequently isn't up to driving into town each day.) Yay me, right? Well, not exactly. First month and a half, roughly, it was okay. I had more of my own spending money, and while work wasn't great (It was retail at a department store, and the organization for warehouse in my section was abysmally bad.) it was tolerable. (This is roughly the same time I had my confused rant in the relationships thread. Not important now, will come back later.)

So, summer goes about as well as it can, although working full time (44 hours a week; even though I think they're technically supposed to pay overtime past 40 they dont) I had no time to do anything. (And my sister and her two kids were here over the summer, so it was even harder to do things. I like her and my niece and nephew, but there's a fair bit of tension between her and my mum, which made time spent at home awkward, and two kids under 4 are always a handful, regardless of how nice they are. :P)

So while the summer wasn't terrible, in some ways it felt like I didn't have one. Then the school year starts, and things start piling up.

When I was hired, I told my employer up front that I might not be able to continue working through the school year, and they told me that so long as I worked a shift every couple weeks, that would be fine. I wasn't quite sure how they were going to fulfill that promise (they're horribly understaffed; the new management that came in shortly before I started working rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, so most of their old staff quit, and a lot of what remains is unhappy) but I took them at their word, and figured that would be manageable.

However, right as school starts, the service manager at the store quits. This forcibly promotes my original supervisor (the one who told me it was fine if I only worked every couple weeks) to his position, leaving us even further understaffed. So he tells me he has to schedule me for more shifts (3 per week, from the the 1-0.5 we'd talked about) in order to keep things running while they found new employees and trained my new supervisor. Okay, whatever. I was fine with doing that until they got things sorted out. Then, a couple weeks pass, they still don't have people, and my other activities are starting, karate, volleyball, music, etc, and my workload at school is going up. And I'm still working 20+ hours a week. Then, to top things off, I meet my new supervisor. He's another guy from my department, who I've dealt with before, and dislike. He's OCD about everything, extremely passive-aggressive, and convinced that me and the other part time high school student working there are utterly incompetent. Thankfully at least, he was still in training, so the original guy is still making the schedule, and I can get the time off I need for sports and school.

A couple more more weeks pass, and I'm becoming more and more stressed, I'm not getting enough sleep, my schoolwork is slipping, and I'm missing karate and volleyball all over the place and haven't even started really practicing my music, trying to do everything and not really doing anything.

To top it all of, the girl who broke up with me this summer has been spending more and more time with me, to the point where it kind of feels like we're in a relationship again; however, the last time we discussed things (towards the beginning of the school year) we were still just friends, and I'm too much of a coward to ask for clarification again. (All in all, this is a relatively minor stress, but everything adds up.)

Oh, and my dislike of my new supervisor is mutual.

So fast forward to the first week of October. I'm still working more than I'd like to, I've talked the guy who used to be my supervisor and is still making my schedule into giving me time off for volleyball tournaments, and bargained down to two shifts a week. It's better, but still not enough, especially given that I generally end up working 3 shifts anyways to cover for people who are sick or away.

Oh, and in the space of two weeks, I manage to get into two (minor, thank goodness, although they could have been much worse) car accidents, where in my almost two years of driving prior, I've never had one. So that helps.

And now we come to this week. The old supervisor is seriously sick, so the new one has taken over the scheduling. (I was not aware of this.) So two weekends that I had booked off for volleyball I ended up being booked for. Come 5PM yesterday, I missed a call from the new supervisor  (I was playing volleyball and I did not have my phone). Then I got an angry call from the head manager, asking me where I was and why I wasn't at work. When I explained that I wasn't supposed to be scheduled, I was informed that I wouldn't always get time off that I asked for, and I needed to direct scheduling questions to the new supervisor, even though up till now, he wasn't the one doing them. He told me that I had to come in as soon as possible, or not come in at all, and I couldn't expect to keep working there if I couldn't be counted on as a reliable worker (This is the first time anything like this has happened, and it wasn't my fault). I was pissed, but not sure what to do, so I told him I'd come in, got my parents to drive my stuff into town, (I live about 45 mins out) and left halfway through our last game of the day.

So after thinking things over at work, I come to a decision. Storm this. I'd been thinking about quitting prior to this, for reasons that should be obvious from the above, and even if those were worked out, I had no plans of staying with the job for another summer. (It wouldn't be that hard to find something that paid better and had better hours.) 

I wrote a note to my supervisor and the head manager, saying that I would not be in this weekend or next, and as soon as I got home, wrote up a letter of resignation which I emailed to them. 

So now I work my last shift tomorrow, and am utterly free afterwards. Which is so nice. In some ways, I wonder why I didn't do this before, given how much relief I'm feeling. However, at the same time, I get new things to worry about, now. I need roughly 12000 dollars saved for next year, to pay for school (and this is assuming I get at least a few scholarships), and now I no longer have a source of income over the school year. The shift tomorrow is also probably going to suck, seeing how I'm no longer exactly on good terms with most of the management.  

But, c'est la vie. I'm not sure this was the best thing to do, but I'm very frustrated, and don't really feel like I had any better options. Hopefully now I'll be able to get caught up again on the things I need to, and roughly get my life back in order.

 

Edited October 16, 2016 by Aonar Faileas