Eagles get the ring. Eagles fly to Mordor. Eagles get shot down because Mordor has the best air defense system in Middle Earth. Sauron has the the ring and throws a Eagle BBQ party to celebrate. The end.
Ongoing diplomacy between Rivendell and the Eagle King about whether the eagles can be used to fly offensively into Mordor or only defensively within “Free Peoples” space, and whether carrying the ring to the Eastern marches of Gondor is proscribed as too provocative.
If my retail experience is any indication, acknowledging customers in this situation is a bad idea. Before you know it, the conversation turns to “I just need one thing!” Or “I promise I’ll be really quick!” and you have to become the asshole to tell them no… Even though the store hours are clearly listed on the front door.
Or if you agree even once, the conversation could easily become “but you did it for me/my friend last time!”
I’ve literally had people sneak into the store using an exit, then act all indignant because I tell them to leave. You give some of these fuckers an inch, they’ll take a mile.
These days I’m usually against the death penalty, and I know it seems a bit harsh to advocate for this… but people entering in an exit door should be absolutely blasted with an Anti Aircraft gun (thanks Kim Jong Un for the idea!). It absolutely rustles my jimmies.
My favorite way out of that situation was to tell them that the registers were automatically shut down at closing. Literally no way to ring up a purchase. It worked most of the time
That’s why there’s the JADE acronym. You never justify, argue, defend, or explain. That makes them think there’s a chance if they just counter every single thing you say.
There’s also a lot of stores with a policy that tills can’t be counted or processed unless everyone is accounted for and all doors locked, if you have to reset that process it can be an extra hour of work.
When I worked at McDonald’s I used to keep the DriveThru headset on after closing while I was doing paper work to tell people “sorry, we’re closed” if they drove up to the speaker board. (Mind you, the building lights and menu board lights are off at this point. Something we call a “clue”.)
That stopped after one too many people screamed “FUCK YOU!” into the speaker board (for us following our posted hours and me politely informing them instead of ignoring them.)
You quickly adopt a policy of “just ignore them and they’ll figure it out.”
They did it for me last time is the bane of all service jobs. I managed a pizza place for years that would sometimes get up to over 200 food products per hour. You could see about the first 20 of them at a time on the screens. There was no way to indicate modifications that weren’t available in the POS. I personally trained every new employee on phones and till.
I would tell them you’re going to talk to a lot of assholes. There will be the person that wants extra cheese on their cheesesticks. You have to tell that person no. You cannot sell anything that can’t be entered into the computer.
Every day during the insane dinner rush I’d either get employees coming over to say hey extra cheese on the cheesesticks on order 215. We’re on order 175. There is no way those cheesesticks are going to get extra cheese.
No time to correct the employee, no time to call the customer back. Or the other which was worse. The customer would escalate the call to me. “They did it for me last time!”
I’m stuck on the phone with this piece of shit and I can’t be firefighting. The fires grow. Sometimes they get so bad we have to stop production to get back on track. This means we get so far behind that I’ll have to stay an extra hour or two to right the ship. For no extra pay. The customers get pissed as the wait and delivery times increase. Escalations to management increase. The whole place is engulfed in flame. Next thing I know I’ve been there for 12 hours for no extra pay.
Wasted my fucking mid 20s to early 30s there. It permanently ruined my mental health. It turned me into an alcoholic.
I could rant endlessly and I have so many stories.
I would be yelling out every 15 minutes or so when it got really bad- “carryout times are now 40 minutes. Delivery times are now an hour and a half.” And the people we had on phones because they were incapable of making food properly are telling customers yeah it’ll be ready in ten minutes. It’ll be there in 30 minutes. I trained them and emphasized in crew meetings that the absolute minimum time if we are completely dead will be 15 minutes for carryout and 45 minutes for delivery. They didn’t care. They worked their 4 hour shift and went home. Can’t blame them for not caring but damn have some empathy for your comrades.
Nurses would regularly call and immediately ask for me. Because they want to place fifteen different orders all for cash. This would fuck everything up and be late at night when I’m half of the kitchen staff. I’m on the phone with them for 10 minutes. 10 minutes at 30% production actually will fuck a restaurant. Not to mention it screwed our ticket average which meant I’d never get a bonus. The driver would get there and they’d hand them a wad of cash. It could have been done in two minutes as one order but they wanted each person’s food to have their name on the box.
I began to dislike nurses at that job. Now I work with them regularly as a hospital installation contractor. Now I hate them. Sorry to the nurses out there who aren’t burned out and care about their patients.
I actually heard this interaction between two nurses the other day that restored some faith-
Nurse A- I can’t find an iPhone charger do you have one?
Nurse B- No I don’t have one and no I don’t know where one is
A- How do you charge your phone then?
B- I don’t have to because I work instead of staring at it all day.
Well, that button probably dates from the late 80s or early 90s, when Apple was comparing Macs to branded IBM PS/2s and such that were sold to schools and enterprises.
And they weren’t wrong, at the time. Those PS/2s were fuckin’ expensive.
apple was never cheaper than their competition, and when IBM got into PCs they were also not even comparable in quality anymore. Reality is that even in the early days apples was also more expensive and they relied on a dedicated fan base to sell their trash, to be fair they sorta earned their reputation in the super early PC space with actually good products but when IBM came in, it had better PCs at lower prices and apple was basically riding on pure brand power. Then they had a few good hits with the ipad and later the iphone (tho the ipad was not as significant at the time as people seem to think it was looking back) and now they have been entirely eclipsed when it comes to phones and are once again reliant on hype and brand recognition.
It is not a unique history by any means but i feel it is especially egregious considering just how shit apple products are and how expensive they are.
At the same time Windows is going down the drain, so if you compare removed to that it definitely has an edge. And that 8GB Air is not that expensive either… And fanboy can tell you it can swap to SSD so fast blah blah…
But if you have the knowledge to use Linux, there are less and less reasons to go even near removed computers…
So, I lived through that time, and I supported computers professionally during that time. I started working at a university help desk in 1989.
It’s easy to go back and look at Apple products and white-box PCs of the era (or quasi-legit clones like Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc) and say, “oh, on specs, the Apples were MASSIVELY overpriced – you can get a much better deal with the PC”.
The problem was that PCs were nowhere near on par, functionally, with Macintosh.
Networking. We were running building-wide Appletalk networks – with TCP/IP gateways – over existing phone wires YEARS before anybody figured out how to get coax or 10base-T installed. We were playing NETWORK GAMES (Bolo, anyone) on Mac in the late 80s.
And when they did… what do you do with networking in DOS? Unless you ran a completely canned network OS (remember Banyan, Novell, etc. ad infinitum?) and canned apps specifically designed to work with it, you were SOL. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were a joke compared to System 7.
I configured PCs and Macs for the freshman class in 1995. For the Mac? You plug the ethernet port in and the OS does the rest. For the PC… find a DOS-compatible packet driver that works with your network card, get it running, then run Trumpet Winsock in Windows 3.1, then… then… it was a goddamned nightmare. We had to have special clinics just to get people’s PCs up and running with a web browser, and even then, there were about 10% of machines we just had to say “nope”. Can’t find a working driver, can’t get anything working right. Your IRQs are busted? Who fuckin’ knows. I ran the “Ethernet Clinic” until the late 90s, when Windows 98 finally properly integrated the TCP/IP layer in the OS.
Useful software on the Mac had a pretty consistent look & feel. On the PC? Even in Windows 3.1, it was all over the map. You might have a Windows native program, you might have a DOS program that launches in a console window, you might have a completely different graphical interface embedded in the software (Delphi apps, anyone?). Games were using DOS into the mid 90s because getting anything working right in Windows 3.1 was a total fuckin crap shoot.
Windows 95 started to fix things, finally. And Windows XP would finally bring an OS with stability comparable to Mac (arguably WIndows 2000 as well, but it was never really offered on non-corporate PCs).
The short version is: that $3000 Mac could do a lot more than that $1800 PC, even if the specs said that the CPU was faster on the PC.
You for got to mention the free and heavily discounted prices to get Mac computers into schools to get kids hooked on them. Which is something they still do to this I think.
There’s a reason why no-one bought IBM PS/2s. They were horrible value for money.
The real competition at the time was the thousands of other brands selling PCs. By that time IBM was plummeting in sales and other companies were selling most of the PCs. That’s where 95% of the market was.
Certainly, but Apple was comparing itself to other computer companies with international reach, not to the white box PCs coming out of the Floppy Wizard store in the strip center.
Avoiding debt is common and easy to understand. The complicated stuff – claiming to be natives, or claiming that the case of the name is not the person, or claiming stuff about no contracts existing, etc. – you gotta study some to understand any of it, and of course there’s no point in learning those details.
That’s like 80% of what being a sovereign citizen is. The other 20% is arguing about the difference between driving and traveling.
Ohh, and years of study and practice with protractors to get the exact right 45.0467 degree angle when writing random words that invalidates contracts.
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