cry me a conundrum

I have a friend I know from when we were both 6. She is the only person living nearby and so she saw me go from walking through limping to wheelchair on a daily basis. I keep her updated on my health even tho we rarely hang out anymore. She was gonna come over yesterday and I had to cancel. She asked if I can’t hang out later that day. When I said i won’t feel better later, that if I feel that bad in the morning later will only get worse she got annoyed and “joked” that I’m just finding excuses. And I was surprised, she knows all about me being disabled after all? So, a bit taken aback, I told her it’s a normal thing for me.

“But you got the diagnosis now, aren’t you better?? I thought you’ll get better now”

Important detail: this is the kind of desk job where there’s no particular need to have a certain amount of people in the office at any given time. She just didn’t like me taking vacation days without advance notice because she thinks the basic principle of vacations is that you should give notice weeks in advance for that.

I told her that my chronic pain strikes without warning, and the number of sick days the company offers isn’t enough, so I have to spend my vacation days as extra sick days, and I don’t like that either.

So, naturally, every meeting she began pressuring me to see a doctor to get cured. I was pressured into disclosing to her a number of details about how I have tried a great many treatments, and that this is likely to be a lifelong problem for me. And anyway, if I’m still getting my work done, and she can’t name any specific problems caused by me using my vacation days like this, what’s the problem?

No, I couldn’t go to HR about this. I was already on thin ice with them after HR gave me some stern warnings not to be so “confrontational” about the CTO’s racism. I eventually had to find a new job.

I think what a lot of people underestimate is just how much road there is in your city. And just how many directions the crew gets pulled.

For our city of around 50k people there are 8 of us.

Also, crack sealing is a wholly temporary measure, meant to slow the break-up of the roads, it’s not a permanent fix.

Roads tend to get closed for months on end because we have to tear the whole thing up, then, depending on the class of road, we either have to hammer-drill into concrete to lay rebar and the pour concrete, or we can get straight to paving. If it’s a road requiring concrete we’re required to wait at least 24 hours for it to set.

So after 2 days we’re finally able to pave. But the city allocates one (two if we’re lucky) 5 ton truck to transport material.

A relatively short paving job requires at a minimum of 60 tons. So that’s 12 trips to the asphalt factory and back. Each ton is around $80.

TL;DR

some other gems from fisk bot

and my personal all-time favourite:

People killed: around three quarters of a million.