Humulin, amlodipine, and cetirizine. But how did you know I stopped at the pharmacy after my bank trip?

This made me recall an odd bank related situation that happened to me a few weeks ago, and which I am still a bit perplexed by.

Due to a couple of things coming up, I needed to stock up on some bills of various denominations. Nothing all that crazy, in my opinion, 20 $1 bills, 20 $5 bills, stuff like that, a few hundred dollars at most. Where else do you get bills like that? The bank, I assumed.

When I got up to the teller, I explained that I needed to pull out X amount from my account, and I that I needed specific number of each denomination. She looked at me like I was asking something completely unheard of. She even told me, I don’t think I have the money for that as she shuffled through some drawers.

Eventually she asked another teller who told her she’d have to go to the central terminal (I don’t recall the actual name they used) and make a request for each denomination. So the teller walked across the back of the bank to a computer that looked like it was from the 80s. After about 10 minutes of typing, with multiple people helping her, 2 people came out from a room, walked over to a floor vault and opened it. While one pulled out the cash I requested, the other stood guard. It was surreal. They counted the money twice, the teller counted the money twice, and then finally came back to the counter and gave me the deposit. She seemed to be barely holding back her level of irritation at me.

All that for just a few hundred dollars in cash. It had me really wondering if I was mistaken about the role and services provided by banks and whether I was out of line for asking to receive specific denominations. Was I supposed to leave a tip or something?

Why can’t they just make one universal standard format and then just stick to that in all systems rather than have 400 million random different incompatible file systems running around? Wouldn’t 400 million and 1 be better?

I appreciate you for acknowledging it.

I noticed that you didn’t bother to answer or either acknowledge my question, which makes me think you’re just being a troll. I would actually feel bad if you were legitimately upset by anything I said, for the record, but your responses leave me feeling like you’re just poking for an emotional response.

I’m not certain, either. I think some people are ignorant enough that they would take my statement as a personal insult, which it is absolutely not, in any way shape or form.

It is not a character flaw for someone to not have enough money to handle unpredictable expenses. But it is naive and/or ignorant to consider yourself in “good financial position” if you’re not in good enough shape to afford necessary transportation related expenses like car repairs or acquiring a new vehicle when the old one dies.

While I anticipated snark and/or sarcasm as a response, I feel that it’s totally unwarranted. I’m of the opinion that the amount of money I make is irrelevant here, so I would only ask: Why do you feel that’s relevant?

My statement is not a value judgement on anybody that can’t afford a car repair, so if that’s how you are interpreting what I said, that’s more of a reflection on yourself than on me.

I’d offer up myself but I’m already happily taken.

Not trying to be mean or snarky, but if car trouble is enough to put your “good financial position” in jeopardy, then I’m not sure I agree with you that you’re in a “good” financial position.

Are you single? I’ve got eligible male and female friends of all sexual persuasions that I’d love to introduce you to.

My experience with Pandora’s music recommendation is similar to yours. Pandora’s stations are significantly better at introducing me to new music that I like and playing older music that I prefer than any of the other common music services that I’ve tried. It’s night and day, honestly and makes me wonder why/how Spotify and Apple (among others) can be so terrible at it for so long. Pandora has basically always been great at that one thing.

Well, it’s subversion of the common trope where the giant group of angry bad guys circle round to watch as they each fight the protagonist one-by-one. Like the gargantuan army of White Walkers that suddenly lined up to take on Jon Snow one at a time.

In the biological sciences world, this is known as “you are what you eat”. My impression is that this place has always kinda been the most popular alternative destination for redditors (exes or otherwise).

Purely due to circumstance, the price of eggs became an easy, overly simplified economic indicator, and via massive amounts of misinformation/disinformation, somehow an indicator of the Biden administration’s efficacy. Eggs were essentially the stand-in for all the complicated and politically inconvenient stuff that willfully ignorant folks don’t understand, prefer not to think about, or simply want to deny.

Willfully ignorant people know that grocery prices in general were being affected by inflation, but understanding the causes and recognizing that it was a global phenomenon was not something they were willing to engage in because it was an easy way to demonize and blame Biden.

In my personal experience, when prices spiked last time, these were the people who claimed that eggs were the bulk of their diet because it was the only protein they could afford to eat anymore. That was never true for most, but that’s what they claimed as they lamented how they could no longer afford to eat. They also liked to mention the prices of the highest price tier eggs (name brand, organic, fancy stuff, free range, etc) and try to pass that off as the going rate for eggs, despite the fact that they never bought those “premium” eggs prior to the price hike and that the “cheaper” eggs cost significantly less. Also, now that it’s happening under their preferred presidential administration, suddenly they are much less vocal (almost completely silent) about the price of eggs. But if forced into a discussion about the topic, they suddenly appear to understand and advocate for the idea that it’s caused by factors outside of the president’s control. Funny how that works, huh?

On the flip side, most of the folks who are currently bringing up the egg prices are doing so in a satirical sense (even if it’s covertly satirical), fully aware that Trump isn’t in control of the egg prices. It’s just a good way to further demonstrate his supporters’ own hypocrisy. Also, it’s sort of giving the willfully ignorant people a taste of their own medicine. Probably not terrible effective from that standpoint, but cathartic for the people currently doling it out.

As I recently lamented in another thread, I’ve had to give up on Taco Bell. I’ve given it a couple of tries post-Covid and it’s no longer good, no longer cheap, and no longer fast based on my recent-ish, terrible experiences. I don’t eat at fast food places often, so I definitely don’t claim to be an expert here, but of the fast food places I’ve eaten at in the past 5 or so years, Taco Bell has declined the worst, by far.

Also, I learned how to make my own crunch wraps at home with black jack and hookers. I mean with higher quality ingredients tailored to my and my family’s preferences. It’s not difficult, just a little time consuming. Still not something I’d eat regularly, but nice to have once in awhile now that Taco Bell fails so hard.

Here’s the raw truth, as I understand it. I’m one of the people who has used this phrase. Typically I pull it out when I absolutely lack the ability to explain and verbalize something in a way that the intended audience can understand and accept. Yes, it’s a failing on my part, but also, despite what everyone wants to believe, not everything can be distilled down to a simple easily understandable explanation without losing the message. You’ll probably understand when you get older.

Realistically, it’s not so much a guarantee that you’ll understand the exact nature of what I’m saying when you’re older. It’s more that when you’re older, you’re probably going to be more willing to accept that I have my own perfectly valid reasons, even if I can’t articulate them effectively, that the world is complicated, and sometimes it’s those complicated and difficult to articulate threads that are actually the only things holding everything together. So, when I say you’ll understand when you’re older, I might not mean that in the most literal sense, it’s very likely that I’m speaking more in a metaphorical way.

Software development. I certainly didn’t coin the phrase, but it’s well-known and I agree, pretty fitting even outside of the IT industry.

In my industry, there’s a saying along the lines of “Good, fast, cheap. Pick two.”

I think the fast food industry version is “Good, fast, cheap? No, no. And believe it or not, also no.”

I don’t eat fast food very often, so this is entirely anecdotal. Of the fast food chains I’ve eaten at in recent history, Taco Bell is by far the worst. Against my better judgment, I even broke down and gave them a second chance at a different location thinking maybe my first terrible experience was a fluke. Didn’t work out. Makes me think it’s bad everywhere. Wendy’s has held up the best of the places I’ve eaten. It’s definitely not cheap anymore, fast depends on the location as well as other factors, and good is relative, but overall it hasn’t gone down hill as bad as the others.

Yeah. Only thing is, the “affordable” American made stuff largely consists of crap quality. I made the mistake of insisting on American made stuff when I also didn’t have the budget for premium furniture. I ended up with crappy seating that started breaking in less than a year. The stitching started coming apart in the second year. And by the third year the “genuine” leather was separating and flaking.

They have nothing better to do than store a decade’s worth of password hashes so that every 90 days I have to come up with a completely new password that’s somehow magically different enough from every other password I’ve come up with in the past 10 years and is at least 10 characters from each of the 4 holy categories.