u/phillymjs

Dishwasher/busboy at a seafood restaurant a couple blocks from my house. When I cleaned out the drawers in the china cabinet in my dining room last fall, I found a green marble cover notebook where my mom kept records of my earnings. I didn't see a reason to throw it away, so here are some details:

I started on Friday, June 24, 1989. Paid $3.75/hr for the first 10 weeks, then got bumped up to $4.25/hr. Paid in cash, under the table. (The minimum wage in PA in 1989 was $3.35, and it didn't go to $4.25 until 1992.) The owner took good care of his people, I got unexpected "vacation pay" of $50 when I took a week off one summer, and a $75 Christmas bonus is noted on one page.

The running earnings total on the top of every page peters out in April of 1991 at a hair under $7950, even though I didn't quit until I was about to start college in the fall-- unbeknownst to me at the time, my mom's cancer had returned and was busy killing her, so her detailed record keeping stopped.

Being paid with equity in a startup is like being paid with Powerball tickets, except with Powerball tickets you have a better chance at a getting a few bucks.

The loudest we had where the NEC Decwriters.

At my old job, one department printed reports using a 132 column dot matrix printer. That thing was crazy, it sounded like the Nazi Venom minigun from Return to Castle Wolfenstein, including that little “barrels spinning up” sound before it actually started shooting. It was so loud it lived in a sound dampening enclosure that looked and opened like a chest freezer.

Whittenberg's son was on the way to Interstate 95 en route to Headhouse Square. He knew he couldn't get on the highway with a man on the back of his van. Even continuing to drive around on local roads could have risked the suspect's life or put himself and others in danger. He decided to pull over at a bus stop.

"He starts yelling at the guy. They have a verbal back and forth — less than kind words, frankly," Whittenberg said. "And then the guy jumps down and punches him in the face, jumps in the van and takes off. Then he throws the cell phone out of the window."

I'm sorry, but if some nut jumps on the back of your vehicle, clings to it while it's in motion, and then damages it, if you decide to pull over to have a little chat without at least a tire iron in your hand for self defense, you kinda deserve what you get.

How do you know he didn't mean himself?

I just got my first car with a proximity key and pushbutton start in February. I'm finally starting to get used to it, but sometimes my muscle memory moves my hand toward a spot on the column where the key would go instead of toward the button.

Dude just missed getting "Grimey" as a posthumous nickname.

Which is even worse than destroying the tape with the secret of fusion power on it in the first movie.

They kept this somewhat vague in the movie, but I own a copy of the novelization which is also on archive.org. it wasn't fusion power, it was the technical details of a bomb called the Super Flash. From context it was some sort of ultra neutron bomb:

It seemed silly to him to have such a large valise for the one small cassette that it held. But that was the government for you. Bombs. He didn’t know a damn thing about bombs. But his people told him they had one. The Super Flash, they called it. Thermonuclear and clean as a whistle, they could zap out the Ruskies and the Chinks and not leave so much as one particle of radiation in the atmosphere. He was on his way to the Summit Meeting at Hartford to play the information tape to the Russian and Chinese delegations. He’d give them twenty-four hours to surrender or he’d turn the entire eastern world into a giant firestorm. Some would call it extortion, but Harker preferred to think of it as compromise. And compromise was something that John Harker knew a lot about.

Let he/she who never did anything dumb/dangerous when they were a teenager cast the first stone.

They showed it to us in school when I was little. Had to be either 1979 or sometime in the very early 80s. I clearly remember watching it in the school auditorium, it was shown via film projector.

As an adult who's well aware of how problematic it is, I feel conflicted about my lingering fond memories of it that were formed when I was a little kid who knew nothing of slavery or racism, and just saw a kindly old black dude singing songs and telling stories.

being able to compose a well written email/document is the fast track

For my entire career, my emails have been proofread multiple times before sending to ensure clarity and no glaring grammatical or typographical errors. Then I’d get barely coherent replies from the C-suite recipients where spelling, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization are nonexistent.

But those folks were definitely topped by Epstein’s emails, which uniformly look like a cat walked across his keyboard and then stepped on the button of a mouse whose cursor was positioned over the Send button. And that’s after accounting for the hex-encoded stuff sprinkled throughout.

I once drove from Philly to Baltimore for a non-printing printer. The client had assured the service desk guy who took the call that they had power-cycled the printer per his direction and that it didn't help.

I walked in, power-cycled the printer, watched all the spooled documents promptly come pouring out, and walked out. In addition to the travel charges both ways they were already paying, I billed them for an extra hour as an asshole tax.

First: 1994 Pontiac Grand Am GT. I was 20 and just got an inheritance. I bought it, quite literally, off the showroom floor. Had it until 2005, replaced it with a Scion Xa.

Favorite: 2010 Hyundai Genesis Coupe 3.8. My "midlife crisis car." It replaced the Scion. I bought it in 2012 a couple days after my 39th birthday, and drove it until January, when it developed a spun bearing. It's at the curb in front of my house, awaiting its ultimate fate. I loved that car so much I replaced it with another one, a 2016 3.8 Ultimate-- the newest model year I could get (I'm still bitter about Hyundai killing it and turning Genesis into their luxury marque). One in excellent condition with only 45k on the odometer magically appeared at a dealership near me around Christmas time, as if it knew I was going to need it. It was even blue.

If you deleted the waffle, the servers crashed.

"I can excuse racism, rape, pedophilia, shameless grifting, and fomenting an insurrection, but I draw the line at making me pay higher gas prices!"

Obligatory.

RemindMe! 105 days

Ah, school movies. They showed us Old Yeller and The Yearling when I was in grade school. Never seen (or been made to read) Where the Red Fern Grows or Watership Down.

They also showed us Song of the South. When I was a little kid who didn't know what racism was, it was a nice movie with a kindly old black dude telling stories and singing songs. Now I'm an adult who's had to reconcile my fond childhood memories of it with what I know about it now.

I think my favorite school movie was It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Still love it to this day.

Obligatory

deposited the cash little by little over a period of time

That's called "structuring" and if the bank picks up on it, they notify the feds and you've got some 'splainin to do. Even if the cash isn't dirty, you're in some trouble.

If they had left the full scene in, it would have hit even harder.

From an Instagram reel I saw last week:

You asked for it - here's the deleted dialogue from Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

This is the scene that made Steve Martin cry on set. The monologue John Candy delivered that was cut down to just a few lines.

DEL:

"I didn't have much family. Brother in Montana, some cousins. Marie's folks died back to back the year after we married. They were pretty old. She was a late child. We didn't get the chance to have kids. She wanted three - two boys and a girl."

He smiled sadly.

"I number about 300 motels as my home. I sort of attach myself to people from time to time. Like with you. Especially around the holidays. I could take it March, July, in October. I don't mind. It gets hard about this time of year. I've never had much of a chance to be a family man, but it gets really hard.

And you know what it is?"

Neal shakes his head. He's about to cry.

"I don't get to give myself to anybody. It's not the getting I miss. It's the giving.

I sat on that plane and I thought about you being home with your people. And Tuesday night when you were in the shower and I looked at the pictures of your kids, and I thought, man, you got to be the luckiest man to go home and put those little guys on your knee and kiss them.

I'm 39 years old. I never had that and I never will.

I'm sorry about all this. I just kind of lost control this time. Every year since Marie's been gone I got closer and closer to losing it. Usually I head for a church. I can feel like I'm part of something when I'm in a church.

Yep, I’m a heavy sleeper so I used to rely on a clock radio at max volume, but being jarred awake like that would always result in me not feeling rested at all.

Several years ago I set up Home Assistant to gradually brighten my two bedside table lamps so they’d reach max brightness a few minutes before my scheduled wake up time, and that was frequently enough to wake me gently. Getting an Apple Watch that woke me by vibrating and fading in pleasant sounds like birdsong was also an improvement over being blasted awake.

This. Apple is a safe space. AI is increasingly looking like some sort of smoke and mirrors pyramid scheme, with all the companies handing money back and forth like the waterfront interrogation scene in the original Naked Gun. Anybody going all-in on that with serious money should be scouting discarded refrigerator boxes to move into when the house of cards is exposed and comes down.

I got a ticket for the April 7 Philadelphia show, and somehow had the fastest and smoothest ticket buying experience of my life for a high-demand event. Got in the waiting room at 9:30, purchase confirmation email in my inbox by 10:02.

I'm still sitting here kind of in shock, especially reading all these other comments.

They had a waiting room set up for the Philadelphia show I wanted, I got into that at 9:30 with my code. Page auto-reloaded at 10am with the "walking guy" queue animation, but I never saw a number telling me how many people were ahead of me, my turn came very quickly. Had to enter my code again, made my purchase, had the confirmation in my email at 10:02, and at 10:20 got the "Tickets delivered to your account" email.