#33581 Why I Hate People and How My Rants Are Likely Your Fault.

Weirdly I feel like the holidays are the times when I get most ranty but also when I'm filled with the most ...niceness? Caring? Generosity? So I guess this means the rant thing is your fault.
Probably. I mean it's certainly not MY fault, doy.

In my newsfeed on GrossBook.

Me: asking a question out of actual ignorance of a subject and wanting to learn.
Other People: THESE ARE NOT JOKING MATTERS I AM SO OFFENDED.

The next day...

The same Other People: WHY YOU GOTTA GET SO OFFENDED BY A GENERATIONAL TERM, HMMM?

Y'all wear me right the fuck out.
Like my kids, only I can't reach you to smack you in the back of the head.

I mean if I had a nickel for every time I said "WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE??" to my computer, I would have a couple socks full of nickels with which to beat you.

And yes, I COULD BE MORE HOSTILE if I wanted to.
I could be calling you out by name. AND Middle Naming you.
You do not want that.

---

AND ANOTHER THING.
This time of the year (well I guess it happens ALL year but it just gets worse in the Holiday Spirit)
everyone's picking on Walmart.
Now you're going to boycott them because the owners and corporate fatcats are getting richer off the backs of their underpaid, welfare-getting employees.
And I TOTALLY feel you. I get it.
I guess what I'm not understanding is the need to focus all your hate for Greedy Corporations on
WalMart in particular.
I KNOW the BigWig richies are getting richer.

But let me lay some enlightenment upon you.

Taking into consideration the cost of living and the economy where *I* live, WalMart is actually one of the better-paying employers.
They are also one of the most inexpensive places to shop, even grocery wise.
For poor people like me, they can actually be a blessing.
So you go ahead and boycott, applause applause for you doing what you need to do,
but me? I'm supporting them locally.

My daughter works for Sam's Club - yep, a WalMart company. She makes twice as much there as she did at a local grocery store for the last 6 years. She gets accumulated PTO, she gets at least three holidays off completely, she got a nice 15lb turkey for Thanksgiving PLUS a bonus on her check and she's only been there 4 months.

You want to talk about boycotting a store for treating their SERIOUSLY underpaid AND undervalued employees like shit? For the Greedy Overlords to get richer off the hardworking backs of the least of the employees? Then I'm boycotting Crest Grocery store.

LOOK HERE: My kid worked for Crest for SIX YEARS. She was hired at $7.50/hour and after 90 days probation, got a raise to $8.00.
FIRST AND ONLY RAISE EVER.
Also? They required EVERY employee to work a minimum half day on EVERY holiday (because they're a 24/7 store).  How many of those holidays got any sort of bonus or holiday pay? ZERO.
One year they did actually get a Christmas bonus, $10 store gift cards that they could use only at Crest.
They don't even have a proper breakroom - they have a meeting/breakroom with a microwave.
No fridge to store stuff.
When the microwave went out, the store manager tried to get the employees to "get up a collection" to get a new one.
I was all WHAT NOPE YOU BETTER NOT! I mean that's what the "miscellaneous" line in your budget is for, buster.
Turns out that at the end of the year, whatever the Store Manager does NOT spend in his miscellaneous budget becomes HIS YEARLY BONUS.
Now THAT, my friends, IS SIMPLE GREED.
They got pizza maybe twice a year as a "thank you."
And if a customer complained on you? IMMEDIATE SUSPENSION.
Doesn't matter what actually happened, the "managers" and supervisors never had your back.
Right before my girl had to have a wisdom tooth pulled, it was so swollen and sore that she could barely talk (but of course she showed up to work), and a customer apparently took offense because she wasn't chattering at him, complained, and she got a 3 day suspension.
She also took ONE sick day in the entire six years - and called in the night before her six am shift to make sure they had time to find someone to cover.
The manager on duty said she should not call in yet, to wait and see how she felt in the morning (this was her 2nd day of feeling ill and she was feverish), and when she said no, she wanted to call in sick NOW, he threatened her with a no call no show.
For the first time ever I had (had, wanted, needed, tomato tomahto) to get involved and called that little powertripping sonofabitch up and told him how things work in the real world and he did not want to get the labor department crawling over their store.
ANYWAY. No loyalty to loyal hardworking employees.
Cheating, money-grubbing greedy store manager.
No raise for SIX YEARS.
Then we she turned in her 2 week notice, the manager she spoke to said, "we accept your full notice" and then promptly took her off the schedule completely starting that day.

If she didn't live at home, there's no possible way she could've survived on just that one job without
also getting food stamps or some other assistance.

All I'm saying is that WalMart may be a really bad guy, but they're not the only one, or even the worst.
It's simply a matter of degree.

HEY, 'TIS THE SEASON FOR THE AIRING OF THE GRIEVANCES.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.

♫♪ Talkin' about my generation ♫♪

The last few days I've had to sit back and laugh as I watch all the "Generation Wars" ramping up, much like the "MommyBlogger Wars" a few years ago.

I can't even keep track of what generation I'm supposed to be, GenX I guess because really that one sounds the coolest so it probably is mine.
Also WTF even is Generation Jones? Because apparently I'm at the tail end of that as well, being born in 1968.

I'm going with JoneX. That's my generation.
If you're cool enough I'll let you use that for yourself but don't hold your breath.

My generation is punk and goth and indie music. It's huge hair and cutout sweatshirt necks. It's layered tank tops and leg warmers and shiny metallic jazzercise tights. It's British Knights and Kaepa tennies with the upside down laces. It's bulky thigh length sweaters over turtlenecks with sweater skirts over long john pants. It's clove cigarettes and Strawberry Hill wine. Culottes and (American style) knickers, prairie blouses, Jams shorts and Jellies shoes. It's fingerless lace gloves and layered tutus over torn fishnets with combat boots. It's poodle perms and big round frames for our glasses, sparkly blue eyeshadow and green mascara, banana clips and feathering combs and those stretchy round plastic comb-like headbands.

We were weird and unique and we liked it that way. I still do.

I mean seriously WE are the only ones who ever learned how to actually program a VCR to videotape multiple soap operas on multiple channels during the day while we were in high school/college classes and then program them to tape movies off HBO, Showtime and Skinemax so we could watch all the movies when we were stuck at home and not out carousing and cruising The Strip with our friends.
WE ALONE could squeeze that fourth movie on that VHS tape by carefully running back the credits to the end of the movie, and starting the next at that SPLIT SECOND after the HBO logo ended at the beginning of the next movie, all using three remote controls for TV, VCR, and cable box.

TOP THAT, YOU ROKU FIRESTICK DVRers with your fancy voice controls!

Also we had the bestworst music. You either love it or you lovehate it, and even the country music was so much better.

I know we all think our own was probably the best (and although I don't really like kids of any age, I find the current group of youngsters/young adults are bright and tolerant and learning to fight for their right to paaaaaartay what's right)... but I mean really, in the grand scheme of Things That Actually Affect Your Really For Real Life...does it matter?

It appears that ALL the generations have some things in common, like the willingness to argue over EVERY. DAMN. STUPID. THING. EVER and also take themselves far too seriously in the broadest generalizations.
Have we just run out of better things about which to argue?
Is this like why Hollywood keeps making the same exact movies over and over, like we truly need YET ANOTHER WHOLE VERSION/GENERATION OF A CHARLIE'S ANGELS MOVIE OMG NO THANK YOU PLEASE!

Some of y'all need to just

SNL Simma Down Now GIF from Snl GIFs

Typical Pitch

After years of bloggers complaining about this very thing, I do not understand why companies still employ people who send this type of pitch:
"Hey 

We just released the fourth issue of *|REDACTED! HOW DO YOU LIKE IT?|* and I thought that you and the readers of *|BLOG|* might find the content interesting."

HEY?! How professional of you! How respectful! How...to show you have no idea who I am! And WTF exactly is *|BLOG|*? You didn't even make an effort to find out the name or URL of my blog. I can't believe that this practice is STILL HAPPENING. Oh yeah, the people who hire these "marketers" and the "marketers" themselves don't bother to even look at our *|Blog|*s, so they probably haven't read all the complaints. I don't care if you wanted me to share or review something I can't live without...I wouldn't do it for this company. I am, however, looking forward to telling them that I wrote about them today.

In which I explain why Twitter is becoming full of suck.

Poor, poor Twitter.

Say, remember when Twitter had fewer users and people weren't posting nothing but links to this and that and the other thing? And hardly ANYONE re-tweeted or used hashtags?

Aaaaaah, the good old days.

Now it's all about Social Media and the Experts and Gurus and Mavens.

What's funny is that all the social media people spend their time sucking up to the other cliquey social media people...
...which is weird to me because one would THINK that, as a social media EXPERT/MAVEN/GURU, the focus would be on drawing in the regular folk. Aren't the non-SM people the ones to whom you need to sell, to relate?

Based on some informal polling of "Regular People ie NON SOCIAL MEDIA PEOPLE", I have discovered some facts:

Nobody likes nothing but retweets.
Nobody likes nothing but LINKS, especially the self-promotion.
The hashtags! OH DEAR LORD, THE HASHTAGS.

Also? THE NUMBERS ARE MEANINGLESS.
I read some "suggestions" from "power tweeters" and laughed my ASS off. According to them, the way to grow your audience/base is to follow everyone and tweet links and do a bunch of retweets that YOU, as an SM person, feel are relevant.

So you get 2 or 3 thousand (or 10 thousand) followers and suddenly you're a "power twitter user".

First of all, that's the most ridiculous term I ever heard.
Secondly... HOW many of those 2/3/10/50 thousand people ever actually read what you have to say? Percentage-wise.
Go check out some of your 2K (or 10K+) followers and see how many people they're following besides you.
How many of your "relevant" links and retweets are actually getting NOTICED by all those thousands of followers?

Exactly.

So unless they spend 24 out of every 24 hours on twitter, the chances that they will A. See most of the stuff you post
or
2. Visit everyone's profile pages to see what's been written
are exactly SLIM and NONE.

I follow just over 500 people and I miss TONS of stuff. If I'm being honest (damn I sounded just like Simon Cowell right then), there are a handful of people whom I summize daily. The rest? I catch when I can.

I'm not saying social media doesn't have a place; nor am I saying that it can't be lucrative.
What I'm saying is that the only people who find social media interesting are OTHER people in social media.
The rest of the world could give a flying hot shit.

Every "SM" person I've run across thinks they have all the answers.
If that were true... I wouldn't be writing this post right now because you have ANNOYED THE EVERLOVIN' CRAP RIGHT OUT OF ME with your retweets and self-promotion and OH I AM A GURU/MAVEN AND I KNOW ALL THE ANSWERS AND HOW TO MAKE IT WORK.

If it were that easy, we'd all be doing it and making a fortune.
Just like Amway. Right?