My first job was pizza delivery for a local shop. My mom knew someone who worked there, and I got the job through her. They weren’t exactly hiring for the position yet, but they knew they were going to need someone seen because their current delivery guy was going back to college in a couple months. She knew I was looking for a job, floated my name to the owner, and he called me.

Second job was a warehouse shipping/receiving position. Again, got it through a family friend who was their accountant or something. He mentioned they were looking for someone, I said I might be interested, and he basically set everything up for me to come in and interview and I was basically hired on the spot.

Now I work in 911 dispatch. This is basically the only job I actually found and applied for myself, I saw they were doing some sort of hiring event and I thought it was something I could do. Still though, I worked my connections, my brother in law is a firefighter, and knows a lot of people in local public safety/first responder circles, so I got him to ask someone he knows who works here to put in a good word for me. It could be that I just really impressed them, but I only had one interview and a lot of people who got hired at the same time as me, some arguably with more impressive resumes, had to go through an additional round or two of interviews.

So as the old saying goes, it’s not so much what you know as who you know.

When I was applying for jobs on my own back at 16-18 years old, even shitty retail gigs, I never seemed to get anywhere, online, paper applications, etc. never seemed to go anywhere, occasionally I got an interview but they never panned out. But when I know someone, or know someone who knows someone, I have a 100% success rate of getting hired and I’ve gotten to skip some of the bureaucracy to boot, and they’ve turned out to be pretty stable, reasonably well-paying jobs given my level of experience and such.

Assuming you’re getting regular dried pasta, there is no cooking happening to it at the factory, it’s all happening in your pot. It’s extruded or rolled out and cut and then just dried still raw. There may be some products out there that are precooked in some way, but that’s not your standard dry pasta noodle.

There’s two aspects to cooking dried pasta that usually happens roughly simultaneously when you boil it- rehydrating the noodles and cooking them. Rehydrating is mostly a matter of time- making sure they spend enough time in enough liquid for the pasta to soak it up, although higher temperatures do speed that up a bit. And cooking is mostly a matter of temperature- making sure it gets up to a temperature where the necessary chemical changes happen. There’s some recipes where that gets mixed up a bit, I’ve seen a couple that call for soaking the pasta before cooking, or there’s things like spaghetti all’assassina where it’s cooked before rehydrating.

So what’s going on here?

I suppose it’s possible that there was some kind of manufacturing issue, like the pasta wasn’t mixed or dried right so it’s not cooking or rehydrating properly. There’s really not much to most pasta dough, some nicer brands literally just list flour of some kind as an ingredient and nothing else, most grocery store brands probably have some of the other usual food additives you’d find in enriched flour, but really there’s not too much to mess up there, and if they messed up the mixing bad enough, odds are in probably wouldn’t have extruded or rolled out right either.

And I have a hard time imagining them screwing up the drying process bad enough in a way that could result in this that wouldn’t have just resulted in the pasta cracking apart before you got it.

So I think it’s more likely that something went screwy with the cooking.

I know you said you didn’t, but honestly the safe money is probably on that you just didn’t cook it long enough. Maybe it’s a different brand than you usually get, or you mistakenly used the cooking instructions from a different shape of pasta, or there was a misprint on the box.

Maybe you’re at a higher elevation where water boils at a lower temperature so the cooking and rehydration didn’t go quite right.

Maybe you over or under salted the cooking water, or added something else which affected it

Or maybe there’s some other water quality issue where your water that didn’t allow it to rehydrate as well as it should have.

Maybe it’s something else I’m not thinking of, but I can say with confidence that it wasn’t an issue with the cooking process at the factory because pasta does not get cooked and the factory.

Yeah, there’s plenty of VESA mounts that will allow you to rotate the monitor, move it up/down, side-to-side, and tilt it forwards and backwards as needed

As for ones that will automatically change the orientation that things are being displayed when you turn the monitor from portrait to landscape, if that’s what you’re looking for, that’s a tougher nut to crack, I’m sure they’re out there but they’re not common, or (last I checked) cheap. But changing the orientation is as simple as Ctrl+Alt+arrow key (I think some newer Intel display drivers have changed that, but I haven’t looked too far into that)

Honestly, your required specs are basically any monitor on the market at this point, you can rotate the display orientation of any monitor with settings baked into any OS you’re likely to be using

You probably won’t even need to spend $100 for a 60hz 1080p monitor

If you can’t find one with an adjustable stand that’s to your liking, just look for one that can use a VESA mount and get another stand for it, probably less than $50

You can probably get 3 monitors and stands for your budget and still have enough left over to grab lunch.

Unless you have some gaming, graphic design, etc. needs you haven’t disclosed, I don’t think it’s worth getting too hung up on this, even cheap monitors tend to last a pretty long time

My wife worked at a higher end kitchen store for a long time, and got to test out a whole lot of different brands of kitchen gadgets and such, and made really good use of her employee discount

In the end, her recommendation is to basically go with Breville for everything but stand mixers (go with KitchenAid) and blenders (go Vitamix)

So we have a Breville hand mixer. This was actually one of the last things she picked up before leaving that job, and it was at my request, she kind of didn’t see the point of it since we already had the stand mixer, and an immersion blender, and honestly just about everything else you could want, but now that we’ve had it I’ve made a convert of her. It gets regular use and abuse and it’s still going strong probably almost a decade later

It’s got a light that shines into the bowl, which doesn’t seem like it should be a big deal but it’s actually really nice to have, it’s got plenty of power but is also probably the quietest mixer I’ve ever used, it comes with the usual beaters, whisks, and dough hooks, and its got a little storage container in clips onto so that the attachments are always there with it and you don’t have to go looking through your drawers for them when you need them.

The silicone on my beaters is starting to look a little worse for wear, but I don’t think that’s unreasonable given how long we’ve had it, and I’m pretty sure I can order new ones from Breville still if I wanted to.

Also, when they’re recording the audio, they’re usually not just reading through the whole script in one go

They’re probably doing multiple takes of most of the lines, changing little things until they get the take that feels right

So you’d end up with a bunch of choppy little cuts instead of a nice long continuous shot of the VA doing their thing in a recording booth like OP is probably imagining

That same week

I happened to be out in the middle of nowhere on a backpacking trip when both of them died, and along the way we ran into a couple other groups who had started their treks more recently, and they dropped the news of those two deaths on us, so I think that was the first thing each of of us asked our families about when we got back to civilization and got a cell signal

We were also a little relieved that the H1N1 swine flu hadn’t killed everyone while we were gone.

It probably depends on the music festival you’re going to but there was one I used to go to every year

It was 3 or 4 days of day-drinking, eating like crap, staying up late, being outside in the sun on probably one of the hottest weeks of the year while probably not drinking enough water, and sleeping in tents on the ground.

And depending on how the festival is laid out, walking around the grounds from one stage to another, to different vendors and food stands, to your campsite and back, etc. can add up pretty quickly. The one I went to was pretty small and compact, but I still probably managed around 5-10 miles a day walking around, and you may be hauling around camp chairs, blankets, and coolers with you for a lot of that. And I’m not saying that that’s a lot of walking, personally I can do that pretty easily, but it’s more than a lot of people normally do.

I think @southsamurai@sh.itjust.works pretty much hit the nail on the head, but just to sort of reiterate

Wearing “women’s” clothes (I always liked the Suzy/Eddie Izzard quote “They’re not women’s clothes, they’re my clothes. I bought them”) doesn’t necessarily make you gay or trans or anything, it just means you’re wearing women’s clothes.

If you’re comfortable identifying as a man, and you’re attracted to women, all that means is you’re a straight male cross-dresser or “transvestite” (I believe some people find the term transvestite offensive, others have no problem at all with it. I’m not a cross-dresser myself so I won’t weigh in on that debate) or perhaps a femboy. It could be that you just like wearing women’s clothing and there’s not much more to it than that. It could be some sort of kink/fetish thing, it could just be that you find it comfortable or feel cute, or maybe you just think it’s fun and silly.

And you could probably go down some pretty deep rabbit holes trying to unpack why you like it. There’s probably as many reasons for it as there are people who enjoy cross-dressing. But unless it’s really causing you severe emotional distress not knowing, you can always just take a page from Popeye the Sailor and say “I yam what I yam an’ that’s all that I yam”

Or it could be that you have some sort of gender dysphoria, and this is your way of working it out and coming to terms with that. In which case you might figure out at some point that you identify as a woman or some flavor of non-binary.

But at the end of the day, clothes are just clothes, and the person wearing them is just a person. I don’t think it’s worth getting too hung-up about putting labels on things, go ahead and try some different labels out for yourself, maybe you’ll find something that sticks, but a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Policies and what resources are available are going to vary a bit from one agency to another, but assuming it came in to us on a 911 line

From landlines, we get an address for the phone number. There’s a couple exceptions to that with certain kinds of business and VoIP lines where the address we get may not actually be the actual address where the person is, or there’s always the chance that the phone company has wrong info, but generally speaking if you call from a landline we know where you are.

From cell phones, things get a bit fuzzier. For the most part we’re relying on triangulation from cell towers to locate you (we call it “Phase II”) which means the quality of that location can vary from pretty good to basically useless based on how many towers your phone can reach, signal strength, geography, etc.

What that location looks like is we get a set of coordinates

An “uncertainty radius” or “confidence factor” which is a distance in meters from that point that the caller is probably within

A “confidence percentage” which is how confident the system is in that location (I’ve literally never seen this be anything other than 90%)

So what it ends up looking like is something like “90% confident that the caller is with 200m of 40.12345°N,-90.12345°W” (random-ish coordinates, not sure where that location actually is, but it’s definitely not where I work)

I’ve seen the confidence factor be in the single digits, and I’ve seen it in the thousands. Sometimes it takes a minute before we get a good fix, sometimes it comes in right away, sometimes we never get a good location from it.

My agency’s policy is that if we have a confidence factor of 300 or less, we can enter the call as normal with just that phase II if we’re unable to verify that location any further

And if they’re in somewhere like a wide open field or parking lot or something, 300m is pretty good, they’ll probably see you when they get out there. If you’re in a denser neighborhood with apartment complexes and a bunch of houses, wooded areas, etc. that’s really not much to go on. Usually we can get at least that 300m, but again not always.

That phase II location also takes a while to update, if we’re lucky we can only get an updated location every 20 seconds or so, so if, hypothetically, you’re in a car flying along the highway at 70mph, you could be about a half mile away from where you were by the time we got a new ping.

So we always try to verify the location, and we can’t, as my callers like to put it “just GPS your phone”

New technology is rolling out, we can sometimes get actual GPS locations from your phone which is usually more accurate and updates faster, but it depends on what settings you have enabled, what your carrier supports, etc. I think my center currently can only get it from iPhones. Same for your emergency information like contacts, medical info, etc if you’ve filled that out.

Once you hang up with us, that’s usually pretty much it, we’re not getting any further updates on your location even if we call you back and you answer.

We also don’t get any of that if you call on a 10-digit non-emergency line, usually we get your phone number and maybe a name on the caller ID, but depending on how the call got routed to us, like if you were forwarded from a station, we may not even get that much.

If we get a call with no other usable location info, if it came from a landline we can look up the phone number to get the address.

We can also look up the phone number to see if we had any prior calls from that number that we might be able to get an address from. We only store those records for about a year, sometimes our police departments have records that go further back they can look up, but we need something to go on to pass it along to the correct department that would have those records.

Pretty much anything beyond that is usually something that needs to be initiated from the police. There are only very narrow circumstances where we’re able to request for a phone company to try to ping your phone, and even if we can do it, the location may not be any better. They can also try to get subscriber info from the company to get your home address (although that’s not always super useful, people move and don’t update their address, are on someone else’s plan, etc) if they get a name and date of birth they can try to look up your info from your drivers license info (again assuming it’s up to date) property records, etc.

So if we get a call that’s just an open line with heavy breathing or something else suspicious, we’re using those tools to try to get someone out to at least the general area to try to locate the, and police are hopefully using whatever other resources they have on top of what we do to try to narrow it down if needed.

We’re probably going to enter it as a hang-up call or a suspicious activity which just gets a police response unless we heard something that makes us specifically think fire or EMS are needed.

If we heard yelling, gunshots, alarms going off, etc. then we might enter it as something else as appropriate to make sure we’re sending the right resources.

If they stop talking to us while we’re on the call, hopefully the first thing we got from them was a location, it’s the first thing we ask, otherwise all the same thing applies.

If it’s just an open line, we’ll stay on for about 30 seconds or so to see if we hear anything. If we don’t we enter it as a hang up, try to call it back, and if they don’t pick up we just kind of move on and it’s in the hands of the police to do something about it.

I’ve always been a cheap sunglasses guy, I buy whatever brand they’re selling at whatever store I happen to be at when I need sunglasses. I usually go through a couple pairs of them a year, they get lost or broken, or the lenses get all scratched up.

Arguably I could be more careful with them, but $20 a couple times a year for something I use almost every single day seems more than worth it to me.

One time I came across a good deal on a pair of Oakley’s, and I figured I’d treat myself. IIRC they were a return at an REI garage sale, they looked brand new and the tag said they were just returned because the original customer did like them or they fit poorly or something.

It was a relatively cheap model of Oakleys to begin with, and with the discount I think they came out to like $60, which still made them the most expensive pair of sunglasses I’ve ever owned.

I liked them, I don’t think they were in any particular way better than my usual cheap sunglasses.

And about 3 days later I found out that if you drop them and someone accidentally steps on them before you pick them up, they absolutely break the same way a cheap pair of sunglasses would.

So no more fancy sunglasses for me.

If I have to pick only one, I’m going to go with modern crumple zones

But man, I do wish we had some kind of magical smart metal that could be as rigid as an old car for low speed collisions, but still crumple for more serious impacts.

Because when you drive an old shitbox like I do, pretty much any damage is enough to total it, and having to get a new car really sucks when the accident was minor enough that no one was going to get hurt anyway.

Once in a while I get a notification that, for one reason or another, doesn’t actually bring me to the content it was supposed to link to and instead brings me to the main page of an app, and sometimes it’s difficult or impossible to find where the link was supposed to go

But going in through the notification history, the second try usually takes me where it was supposed to go

I remember shortly after the switch launched, my friends had gotten one, and when I was over their house one day I asked if they had licked one of the cartridges yet.

One of them said no, of course not. It didn’t seem like he was going to grant a request to taste one, so I didn’t press the issue.

A few minutes later he walked out of the room for something, and his wife, who is definitely much more of my partner-in-crime when it comes to dumb ideas, got a little bit of a mischievous look in her eye and asked if I wanted to lick one.

I of course said yes, and tasted their Breath of the Wild cartridge.

I asked if she had tried it when her husband wasn’t looking, and of course she had.

I’m pretty sure there are two kinds of people in this world, those who, on being told about the bitter coating on the cartridges have to test it out themselves to satisfy their curiosity.

And those who think the whole idea is gross and it never crosses their mind to test it for themselves.

And I think the two types tend to end up marrying each other, those two did, and my own wife has not yet licked any of our switch cartridges despite having ample opportunity to do so.

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As much as I’m happy to blame boomers

The youngest boomers are in their 60s now, not too many of them are out working as any kind of field agent. Most of those assholes out there now are Gen X, Millennials, or even Gen Z.

There have been some changes under this administration, and I don’t know what the current “rules” are (as if they care about following rules anyway) but I know at one point there was actually a mandatory retirement age for federal LEOs, and I’m pretty sure it was at about 55 or 60, so under those old rules you couldn’t be an ice agent as a boomer. Some probably hung around in admin positions and such, and since the rule changes I’m sure a couple have come out of retirement, but I’m pretty confident that that’s a vast minority.

The issues with not questioning authority, gullibility, tech-illiteracy, etc. remain though.

It hasn’t become a pattern yet, at least not in my area, but I’m sure it’s not gonna be the last call I handle where bad AI info is gonna be a problem somehow

I did mention it to my supervisor, and did my best to politely and professionally chew the cop out for blindly trusting the AI search results.

We’ve already had plenty of experience sorting out issues where addresses and such that people got from Google maps or whatever don’t match up with reality, but we’re pretty good at catching that kind of stuff and figuring it out.

As far as getting calls passed along to us in weird ways, unfortunately I think the only solution for that is for people to just suck it up and call 911 on their own instead of calling their mom. With a few exceptions for VoIP phones and such, if you call 911, it’s going to your local dispatch center wherever you’re located, and we hopefully have some kind of approximate location for you. The amount of times I’ve had to play 20 questions with a 3rd party caller who has no clue about what’s going on for something I could have cleared up in about 30 seconds if someone had just called themselves is pretty insane.

And even if you do have to be that 3rd party making a call for someone somewhere else, calling 911 is probably going to be your fastest way to get there. It can be weirdly hard to find a good number for local police sometimes, but most 911 centers have access to some database or service to find the right contact info faster than you probably would googling it (I’ve gotten calls come into me for towns in other states or even other countries, because they had the same or similar names to ones in our area, and the caller didn’t double check that they were calling for the right Townsville)

Although, I will say, some 911 centers are pretty terrible. One that borders my county has a bad habit of transferring any calls for something that isn’t in their area to us, either because they didn’t bother to verify the location, or because they just can’t be bothered to look up the information themselves and they know we’ll do it for them. Occasionally they even transfer us calls that they should have kept themselves and I have to transfer a really frustrated caller back to them.

That’s another thing my higher-ups are aware of and working on.

Yeah, personally I can probably just about dry shave against the grain with a piece of broken glass and splash on some acetone as aftershave and be none the worse for it, not too much in this world irritates my skin.

I figured it was worth mentioning it because I know it’s a concern for some people, but I’ve never had an issue with it personally with shaving or waxing.

Philly-area millennial.

Among friends and family around my age, I have probably around a dozen or so people or couples who own their homes, one of whom inherited it, and one who bought it from family for cheap

And many more than that who rent, live with their parents (who often but not always own their home) and a couple whose housing situations aren’t quite what you’d call secure but aren’t quite homeless either.

As for myself, I’m kind of caught in paperwork limbo living in a house that’s owned by my mother in law, that she’s agreed to sell to us and we’ve been given carte Blanche to do whatever we want with it, are responsible for repairs and maintenance, but actually getting shit together for a mortgage is being way more of a pain in the ass than it should for reasons I don’t really want to go into.

In my parent’s social circles, the vast majority own homes or have in some way secured some kind of long-term housing for themselves, like one who basically gets their apartment rent free by being some kind of property manager.

The pain really isn’t that bad

And at least for me, the worst parts of it are more on my sort of FUPA area, not so much on my dick and balls themselves, so for the service I get, it’s only like 3 patches around the edges that actually hurt. Might suck more if you’re planning to get more than that done, but I can’t really comment on that myself.

And again. It’s only for an instant with each rip and then it’s over, by the time you’ve flinched it’s already stopped hurting.