This Happened

[Ronster]

[Ronster]

I was just ambushed by someone wanting to vent/rant about their coworker. While I like to be informed and understand the complex relationships between people I work with I was really trying to get back to my desk and just be productive. What a twist of fate as I am usually the chatty one.

[akiva]

I might as well not even be in the room; the students would learn the same amount if I weren't there.

I disgust myself with my incompetence.

[Ronster]

Don't believe that.

I am not a psychologist, but I do believe you are far better than that; much better than you realize.

Not saying this is a diagnosis, but something to think about.

[akiva]

I am that bad. I see how the exact same students act in other teachers' classes, and they do much better for the other teachers.

[Eliahad]

Stop it.

If you are not actively trying to better your teaching and classroom management, fine, maybe it's time to start? But that doesn't sound like the you that posts on this board. No, I don't know you, and nor am I actually you, but I have some experience with imposter syndrome and EVERYTHING that you've ever posted on this board is pointing at exactly that.

So stop it. Stop allowing it to overwhelm you. You're going to have bad days, you're going to have days where you can't acknowledge that you are being unfair and unkind to yourself. Those days are going to suck. But they do not define you as a person unless you allow them to do such. I know it's not easy. I know that it takes time. I KNOW that it's hard.

I also know that it's worth trying, and that it does get better. Eventually. A little bit, each day, it adds up, so a month from now you can look back and finally see that maybe the black isn't so black. And a year from now maybe you can see a little twinkle of light...and that's something.

[akiva]

I’ll try.

[Zen]

I don't know if ALL soda machines do this, but the one in our break room at work has this strange feature... it's refrigeration unit is really loud, so you can't help but notice when it's running, which is almost all the time. However, when you dispense a bottle of soda, it shuts off. What? Was that bottle the only one it was keeping cold? The rest are fine! Just that one needed the extra boost!

I expect it has something to do the machine opening the seal on the refrigerated chamber in order to deliver the bottle and not wasting electricity by pumping refrigerated air into the room, but it just seems really odd to have the bottle drop down and... SILENCE!

[Phoebe]

Weird. Like my dad always says, There is a reason for this, rest assured, we just don't know what it is yet!

[Zen]

So... the power company hired a contractor to upgrade the gas lines in our neighborhood. We received a notice about it in the mail a while back, so we pretty much knew it was going to happen. As they started working, it was pretty clear they were making a huge mess of every street they were working on. One day one of the guys asked me if I knew where our sewer clean-out was. I told him that I wasn't sure, but I thought it was on the west side of the house and that I thought our neighbor at the end of the street (there's only one house between ours and the end of the dead-end street we live on) would know for sure since she's lived here longer than we have. She's actually lived here since the houses were built. She and her late husband are the last of the original homeowners in the neighborhood.

A few days later, we had a door hanger on our front door from the contractor telling us that they were going to need to come INTO our house to snake our sewer line in order to map it so they could mark it before they start working on our street. This raised all kinds of red flags for me, so I called the power company to ask them why their contractor was asking to come into our house instead of using the PERFECTLY GOOD underground line marking service that is available, as far as I know, to everyone? They didn't have an answer. They pretty much said they have no control over the contractors and gave me a number and email for the supervisor of the project. Since it was only about fifteen minutes from when they were coming, I didn't bother. So they put their snake with a camera and, I presume, some sort of wireless signal so they could read where it was, into our sewer line and mapped it. This was on Wednesday or Thursday. I don't remember which.

Cut to Friday night... I'm sitting in the basement, either watching TV or playing a game on my phone, don't remember which, and I hear water dripping in the utility room. Now, occasionally, when my wife is taking a bath, the water will go into the overflow of the bathtub and drip down into the basement. It's right above the sump pump pit, so it's not a big deal. But I knew she wasn't in the bath... So I went in and looked... and the thing that was dripping was the bottom of the stand-pipe that our washing machine's hose goes into, which leads to, you guessed it, the sewer line! I checked and, sure enough, there was water right up to the top of the pipe! Wonderful!

So, our best guess is that these idiots did something stupid, like leaving a piece of equipment inside the line. I called the plumber we've been using lately on Saturday and they came out around noon. They offer a sewer clog removal service for a fairly reasonable price (more than $400 less than $500) with a 6-month warranty AND a "complementary" web-camera so we can monitor the line for future problems, in that spot I presume. (They haven't installed the camera yet.) The guy said that it was MUCH harder to break through the blockage that it should have been with the high pressure of the device he uses. (His description of it was "If you use this thing on your arm you'd take off your skin!") So he's thinking that it might not have been a "normal" kind of sewer blockage and suggested that, when the camera is set up, we might be able to see evidence still there that it was caused by the other company and charge them for the whole thing. I like it when somebody is willing to toss another company under the bus because he thinks they did something wrong!

I guess we'll find out after the camera is installed. Then we can have a web-cam of our sewer. What FUN!

[Ronster]

[Phoebe]

OMG, I hope this turns out okay! I have a deep-seated hostility toward gentlemen of the contractor class, developed by bitter experience over many years. On several occasions people have come and claimed they need to do work in the yard or on the outside of the house, on behalf of some utility or other, and that is bad enough. Coming indoors is nearly out of the question. I don't know, they had better make it right for you. You need to post the update! I shouldn't be anxious about your sewer pipe but damn it now I am.

The last two contractors I hired, one screwed up the job and hasn't been heard from since, but it's too much of a pain in the ass to redo it so we are left with a half-assed install forever. The other one did about an hour or two of the work and then was never heard from again, not even to bill us. I don't know what is wrong with people who go into this line of work but I've never met one that I can cope with or get along with. They always think they know better than me and they almost never do, and then they go and screw up your sewer pipe or some other thing and there you are, hosed. I'm sorry for the apparent sexism of the statement but the only contractor who ever showed up and did the work on time without further negative incident was a woman. She was quite the firecracker. We also had a great guy who specialized in tree trimming but I'm not really sure he qualifies as a contractor because he only does trees.

[Zen]

Interesting that you should mention tree trimming... One of the things that the mapping of our sewer line did show was the fact that one of our trees, which has ALWAYS been far too close to the foundation of our house and is probably responsible for the fact that we get water in the basement in that corner on the regular, is also EXTREMELY close to the sewer line. We're thinking that it's probably time for that tree to go... (I'd curse the person who planted it, but it's a maple tree... most likely nobody planted it. It just grew there and nobody bothered to kill it when it grew.)

[Phoebe]

Troubling! You poor sewer pipe! Having a house means a lot of tender feelings about well-flowing sewage and soffits and insulation. But this is why my dad hates yard trees. I have never known anyone else who did, but he had to deal with so many negative tree issues - who can blame him?

[Tahlvin]

My niece was involved in a shooting last night at her place of work. One coworker shot another coworker in the face, right next to my niece. She dropped to the floor and hid next to the victim while the shooter paced back and forth and eventually exchanged shots with the police, so there were bullets going right above where she was hiding. And because she was an eye witness, she then had to go to the police station for interviews, statements, etc. She's physically okay, but mentally she's going to need some help. And she knew both the shooter and the victim.

[akiva]

Oh my god--that's horrifying.

[Ronster]

Yikes!

[Zen]

Wow! That's terrifying!

On a lighter note... an update on sewer cam... it turns out I must have misunderstood the guy who did the original work. It is more of a "they bring a camera and look at the interior of the pipe to see what the problem is so you know what to watch for" kind of thing, even though I thought he said that they leave the camera there...

So, what they found was that our PVC pipe was slightly offset from the cement sewer main. There's enough room for stuff to flow, but the pipe isn't meeting the way it's supposed to. My best guess is that this was caused by the other company putting their camera in and jerking the pipe around, but the root cause is probably the fact that the ground is so freaking saturated with water that the pipe can move in the first place. (The majority of the city of Champaign was once a swamp, pretty much...) He said it doesn't need to be fixed right now, but that he wouldn't doubt that we'll have problems again and if that happens, he'd suggest having the line re-done instead of just a stop-gap measure.

[Mike]

Good news everyone!

So January 1, I tried to book a house for GenCon through VRBO. It got cancelled, and I panicked. The owner gave me huge apologies and worked with me to make other arrangements, but fortunately I saw enough warning signs to make me pause and ask everyone else's opinion. They all agreed that this was suspicious and convinced me to look elsewhere. Once I was out of the immediate situation, I realized they were completely right, but if I had been in this entirely on my own and didn't feel obligated to ask others, I may well have done something stupid in the heat of the moment. I'm not proud of that, but... lesson learned.

Fast forward one week, and suddenly charges appear on my credit card. The owner managed to bill me twice for a reservation that SHE cancelled, for a grand total of $4,600.

Luckily, all transactions went through VRBO, and they have their Book With Confidence Guarantee. It was a very slow process, but they were eventually able to reach the owner, who promptly hung up on them and cut off all contact. VRBO agreed that I qualified for a full refund under the guarantee. We were just in the last stages of signing the papers that would get my money back.

And now today I get a notice from the owner that she has fully refunded all of my cash, followed by a note from VRBO that they arranged for the owner to take care of it, and so they were cancelling the reimbursement payment. Nifty!

I don't really have any other facts, but my best guess is that someone decided she didn't want to go to jail. But you know what? VRBO was going to take care of me either way, so I am grateful. And I always knew it would come out okay, because VRBO has been working with me from day 1, but it's nice to have it done with after almost 2 months of emails.

To wrap up the story, we lucked into a different house for GenCon that is actually cheaper, so in spite of the headache, everyone comes out ahead.

[Ronster]

That goes into the Awesome News category, Mike.