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Shoot the Wall (A.K.A. The Rant Thread)


Banshee

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Oy, internships... Is it paid, at least?

I had some unpaid 6-month internships during and after college.  The last place was put on a hiring freeze while I was there, but swore up and down that when it was lifted, they would hire me.  When the internship ended, I stayed on as a volunteer.  I waited year after year, and when the hiring freeze was finally lifted, I was encouraged to apply for one of the open positions, and did.  They hired four new people, and none of them were me.  They didn't even offer me an interview.  There were no other positions opening up for the foreseeable future.  I quit the next month.

Moral of the story: Know when to quit.  I have a hard time with this.  I always stay too long, whether it's bad jobs or bad relationships, and end up wasting a lot of time and energy that could have been better spent.  Don't quit too early before you've given it a real effort, but don't let your labor or kindness be exploited either.  Your time has value; invest it wisely.  Don't hinge everything on a promise, especially from a place of work, because in my experience they are rarely honored.

(P.S.  I don't intend to be discouraging, I just want to warn against making the mistakes I made.)

 

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Speaking of internships, I thought this was interesting.  Especially the rate of employment with internship experience vs. without.

 

 

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On ‎8‎/‎26‎/‎2019 at 11:47 AM, Artemis said:

Moral of the story: Know when to quit.  I have a hard time with this.  I always stay too long, whether it's bad jobs or bad relationships, and end up wasting a lot of time and energy that could have been better spent.  Don't quit too early before you've given it a real effort, but don't let your labor or kindness be exploited either.  Your time has value; invest it wisely.  Don't hinge everything on a promise, especially from a place of work, because in my experience they are rarely honored.

Amen and amen. That was a hard lesson for me to learn, too. 

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I'm opposite, I always leave too soon, as soon as I'm able too, which I have never regret, actually.

And I always try to be the one who leave before being left, even for family reunion, I fly out first, I am coward like that. I thought it's less sad, but it's not true.

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  • 2 weeks later...
What sort of work are you learning?  And what comes next, after you complete your internship?

I'm learning what kind of work you do at a factory. As for your second question, I go back to work and then I wait for my job coach to call me to discuss my further options.


Oy, internships... Is it paid, at least? I had some unpaid 6-month internships during and after college.  The last place was put on a hiring freeze while I was there, but swore up and down that when it was lifted, they would hire me.  When the internship ended, I stayed on as a volunteer.  I waited year after year, and when the hiring freeze was finally lifted, I was encouraged to apply for one of the open positions, and did.  They hired four new people, and none of them were me.  They didn't even offer me an interview.  There were no other positions opening up for the foreseeable future.  I quit the next month. Moral of the story: Know when to quit. I have a hard time with this.  I always stay too long, whether it's bad jobs or bad relationships, and end up wasting a lot of time and energy that could have been better spent.  Don't quit too early before you've given it a real effort, but don't let your labor or kindness be exploited either. Your time has value; invest it wisely.  Don't hinge everything on a promise, especially from a place of work, because in my experience they are rarely honored (P.S.  I don't intend to be discouraging, I just want to warn against making the mistakes I made.)
they told me it going to be paid, turns out it wasn't. You can imagine my disappointment and anger when I found out, tomorrow I'm going to complain to my boss and job coach. I'm not going to let this pass, it was three weeks! Three weeks I worked for free at a place I didn't like and where my work was boring!!! You know what they say: hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
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On 9/8/2019 at 4:04 PM, Fantasy Lover said:

they told me it going to be paid, turns out it wasn't. You can imagine my disappointment and anger when I found out, tomorrow I'm going to complain to my boss and job coach.

How did that go?

*****

While browsing the website of a company where I used to work, I found a term that's even worse than "human resources" -- namely "human capital."   :blink:

I mean, "resources" merely implies sources one can count on for assistance, whereas "capital" implies actual ownership!

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No wonder people look at me funny when I say I used to work in "Personnel." :unsure: 

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1 hour ago, Arcadia said:

No wonder people look at me funny when I say I used to work in "Personnel." :unsure: 

"Personnel" was the last reasonable name for that department -- and that was, umm, a few decades ago.  Everything since then has been looking at employees as corporate assets.  Bleh!

 

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How did that go?
Good, I contacted my job coach and she said that she just needed the documents that confirmed that I actually went to that internship. So hopefully I get the money next week, meanwhile I'm working temporarily at a different department, and the new department SUCKS!!!  

 

No wonder people look at me funny when I say I used to work in "Personnel." unsure.png 
when I still went to school people mocked me and my peers because we would just be ordinary receptionists and we had no idea how to do manual labour, some people I swear. 

 

 

 

 

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5 hours ago, Fantasy Lover said:

I contacted my job coach and she said that she just needed the documents that confirmed that I actually went to that internship. So hopefully I get the money next week....

I'm glad to hear that!

5 hours ago, Fantasy Lover said:

the new department SUCKS!!!

An awful lot of jobs do -- which is why they have to pay you.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I used to think public transportation in Germany was great. Well... 

We recently went on our first little trip as a family (husband, toddler, myself). In a fit of environmental consciousness, we decided we would leave the car at home and try to manage entirely without one for the ten days that we would be away from home. 

We got up at 5 in the morning on the first day to get to the next big city on time to catch our long distance train - only to find that the train company had booked us onto one that didn't exist. And we had gotten the tickets at an actual service desk from a real live employee of said company, not online. 

Try to entertain a two-year-old for an hour plus (time until the next train for which we couldn't get seats anymore btw) at a cold train station where there's cigarettes, piss, broken bottles and drunk people everywhere and the only restaurant that's open is a McDonald's that's under construction. Fun, I can tell you. 

On the way home, the train was 40 minutes late and we missed our connection. Same station, same wait, same environment. Hurray. 

Today, I wanted to visit a friend. Got on a train that said it was going to town A that was waiting under the sign for town A - and ended up in town B. Middle of Nowhere. 

I am beginning to understand why it's so hard to get the Germans to stop polluting the air with their cars... 

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I am appalled!  In my own experience (admittedly limited, and many years ago) German train service was utterly exemplary.

But at least you still *have* passenger train service.  A few years ago Alex and I considered taking a trip to Chicago (a couple hundred miles from here) by driving to Indianapolis (nearest big city), taking the train to Chicago, and then using the local commuter rail service.  The first and last parts should have worked fine, but we discovered that there's only one train per day between Indianapolis and Chicago, and it comes thru Indy in the middle of the night.  So we drove instead.

As for botched communications, I once planned to fly to Albany NY on Christmas Day to visit my boyfriend's family (he was driving over a few days earlier).  I made the reservation a couple months ahead of time, and then a few weeks ahead I confirmed my reservation via phone directly with Delta Air Lines (slogan: "Delta is ready when you are").  When the day arrived, I flew to LaGuardia in NYC to make the connection, only to find that not only was there no such continuing flight listed on the monitors, the Delta ticket counter was closed!  Thanks to a very helpful agent at another airline, I was finally able to discover that my supposed flight had been cancelled well before I even made the reservation!  I did get to Albany eventually via a little commuter flight, just in time to drive back home with my boyfriend.

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1 hour ago, Carol the Dabbler said:

I am appalled!  In my own experience (admittedly limited, and many years ago) German train service was utterly exemplary.

But at least you still *have* passenger train service.  A few years ago Alex and I considered taking a trip to Chicago (a couple hundred miles from here) by driving to Indianapolis (nearest big city), taking the train to Chicago, and then using the local commuter rail service.  The first and last parts should have worked fine, but we discovered that there's only one train per day between Indianapolis and Chicago, and it comes thru Indy in the middle of the night.  So we drove instead.

As for botched communications, I once planned to fly to Albany NY on Christmas Day to visit my boyfriend's family (he was driving over a few days earlier).  I made the reservation a couple months ahead of time, and then a few weeks ahead I confirmed my reservation via phone directly with Delta Air Lines (slogan: "Delta is ready when you are").  When the day arrived, I flew to LaGuardia in NYC to make the connection, only to find that not only was there no such continuing flight listed on the monitors, the Delta ticket counter was closed!  Thanks to a very helpful agent at another airline, I was finally able to discover that my supposed flight had been cancelled well before I even made the reservation!  I did get to Albany eventually via a little commuter flight, just in time to drive back home with my boyfriend.

Thanks, Carol. That does actually make me feel better. 

I dare say we're still lucky compared to other places but especially over the past few years, it seems to me like the train system has gone downhill - and fast. 

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Oh… Was a customer to German public transportation from 1990 to 2004. Cannot blame anyone who doesn't want to use it. It's expensive, ineffective and in most of the countryside - practically non-existent.

I'm starting to think the automobile industry is the German equivalent of NRA, when it comes to political influence. They were systematically killing the public infrastructure while pushing car sells. You should hear the present head of the German Ministry of Transportation. He sounds like a car salesman, wanting to solve the problems of cities reaching their traffic capacities by selling… electric cars. We are doomed.

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Egad, folks. No wonder I hate to travel!

To be fair, I've never had any trouble with the trains around here, but I've only taken north-south routes on the very heavily populated East Coast. I'm willing to bet east-west (lots of empty land - fewer riders??) is less reliable.

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I have no idea how un/reliable the passenger service is in these parts, because there's not enough of it to draw any conclusions from.  I think there used to be more.  The first time I traveled to Boston, I took a train, and I recall leaving Indianapolis in the daytime.  I have no idea whether there was more than one train a day to Boston then, but Union Station was still a busy train station, whereas nowadays it's mostly a food court.  There are still trains in around here, but the vast majority are only for freight.

There definitely used to be a light rail system ("the Interurban") in central Indiana, but they tore up the tracks in the late 1930's (ironically just before WWII brought gas rationing, which would have dramatically increased train travel if there'd been any trains left).  But the train companies (who had to build and maintain their own tracks) just couldn't compete with the bus companies (who used roads built and maintained by the government).  Plus the auto industry apparently pulled some shenanigans (as depicted in Who Framed Roger Rabbit).

I must say I love the train service in the UK.  You can go just about anywhere via train, at just about any time of day (and in cases where there isn't a train, there's bus service).  It isn't particularly cheap (but neither is owning/renting a car).

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Yeah, I'd love to be able to ride the trains more, but I don't really have a reason to go most of the places they go. 

However, they did recently establish direct service between my town and the city where my brother lives, yay! There's only one trip per day, it's at night, and  travel time is about the same … but it's so nice to let someone else do the driving! I'm definitely using it from now on. Otherwise it's a four hour drive that I don't often feel like making.

11 hours ago, Carol the Dabbler said:

but Union Station was still a busy train station, whereas nowadays it's mostly a food court.

Do you mean Union Station in DC? It's retail in the building upstairs, but if you go down into the bowels where the tracks are, it's still a very busy rail station. It's cool.

I don't think there is a Union Station in Boston (?) The couple times I went, I went into, I think, South Station. (There's also North and Back Bay.) Same deal … the station itself was mostly retail, I can't remember where the trains were. Not underground like in DC, though, I don't think. It seemed busy to me, but this was about 15 years ago.

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3 hours ago, Arcadia said:

Do you mean Union Station in DC?

Nope, Indianapolis, where I got on the train.  The lovely old concourse, which used to be ticket windows and such, has been uhh, remodeled to accommodate restaurant stalls, like the mall food courts.  I understand there are still some trains coming through downstairs, but it's not a real train station any more, it's just a place where a few trains stop now and then.

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On 10/4/2019 at 4:35 PM, T.o.b.y said:

I used to think public transportation in Germany was great. Well... 

We recently went on our first little trip as a family (husband, toddler, myself). In a fit of environmental consciousness, we decided we would leave the car at home and try to manage entirely without one for the ten days that we would be away from home. 

We got up at 5 in the morning on the first day to get to the next big city on time to catch our long distance train - only to find that the train company had booked us onto one that didn't exist. And we had gotten the tickets at an actual service desk from a real live employee of said company, not online. 

Try to entertain a two-year-old for an hour plus (time until the next train for which we couldn't get seats anymore btw) at a cold train station where there's cigarettes, piss, broken bottles and drunk people everywhere and the only restaurant that's open is a McDonald's that's under construction. Fun, I can tell you. 

On the way home, the train was 40 minutes late and we missed our connection. Same station, same wait, same environment. Hurray. 

Today, I wanted to visit a friend. Got on a train that said it was going to town A that was waiting under the sign for town A - and ended up in town B. Middle of Nowhere. 

I am beginning to understand why it's so hard to get the Germans to stop polluting the air with their cars... 

 

On 10/4/2019 at 10:38 PM, Carol the Dabbler said:

As for botched communications, I once planned to fly to Albany NY on Christmas Day to visit my boyfriend's family (he was driving over a few days earlier).  I made the reservation a couple months ahead of time, and then a few weeks ahead I confirmed my reservation via phone directly with Delta Air Lines (slogan: "Delta is ready when you are").  When the day arrived, I flew to LaGuardia in NYC to make the connection, only to find that not only was there no such continuing flight listed on the monitors, the Delta ticket counter was closed!  Thanks to a very helpful agent at another airline, I was finally able to discover that my supposed flight had been cancelled well before I even made the reservation!  I did get to Albany eventually via a little commuter flight, just in time to drive back home with my boyfriend.

 

These are frustrating, can certainly imagine myself going nuts in both situation.

I am old-fashioned and would trust booking with real person too, so that's definitely a mess.

 

Luckily, I think I have been luckier than you guys. My public transport experiences are not fun, sometime dangerous, but at least, I didn't have non-existent flight/train. I do remember not having my seat in couch between two countries, there was literally no seat, it was ripped off and empty. But it was funny and we found out early, so they re-booked me to another vehicle and we were on schedule. Another time we had two connecting flights, and the airline changed the schedule of those flights that resulted in almost overlapping, with only 30 minutes buffer time to make an international connecting flight. My request to change the flight time was met with them asking me to pay (for wanting to change flight!), so I had to march to their physical office, luckily they had one, bringing the print-out of their term and condition, that clearly stated passengers are required to check-in two hours prior and demanded them to explain how I could make it in 30 minute buffer between flights (not to mention delay or luggage), I got the change, but it still sucks because the returning flights were also changed, which cost us a day and made us cancel a destination we had booked and paid.

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36 minutes ago, Van Buren Supernova said:

My public transport experiences are not fun, sometime dangerous, but at least, I didn't have non-existent flight/train. I do remember not having my seat in couch between two countries, there was literally no seat, it was ripped off and empty. But it was funny and we found out early, so they re-booked me to another vehicle and we were on schedule.

I must say that's one experience I've never had!  There may have been one time when my airline seat didn't work properly (so I couldn't follow the required safety instructions), but they were able to switch me to another seat on the same flight.

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See why I don't travel? :P Seriously, it's stuff like this that makes me choose to drive my car 99.9% of the time. I've been planning to use the train to visit my brother, I may have to rethink this....

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Nope, the nearest Metro station is about 40 minutes from here … and unless you get there before 8 a.m., there's no parking. At least, during the week. I've used it a few times on the weekend, it's nice. 

There's another station a little further out where you can find parking at a nearby mall, but then you have to take a shuttle from the lot to the station, which adds another 20-30 minutes to  your travel time. The upshot is … it's easier to stay home. 😞 

The train's far more convenient, it just doesn't go very many places, or very often.

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You mean you have to have another mode of transportation to reach the station, presumably car, since it's 40 minutes away? Yah, I don't see the reason not to drive there altogether.

In one place I stayed before, you practically need to be significantly rich to afford a car, but at least it's easier to reach the Metro, either by walking, bus, or cycling. It takes time and effort, but at least you don't need a car to reach the Metro. It's a moo point. Like a cow. It's Moooo.

If it's hard to understand me sometimes, the last three short sentences are quotes from TV show. XD

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