Tag: Suckage

Things that totally suck

Age Limit

Old Age

Most people, men especially, consider themselves to be excellent drivers.  If truth be told, however, most people aren’t even good drivers, as witnessed by the appalling number of car crashes that occur every year on the roads and streets of the world.

I’m not even referring to crashes that occur through outright stupidity or recklessness, and I’m certainly not going to open the festering can of worms known as “Wimmen Drivers”;  not in this post, anyway.

I consider myself to be a competent driver in that I’ve only ever had a couple of serious accidents in well over four decades of driving — not serious in that people were injured, but serious enough that cars were either written off or close to being so.  And yes, some were technically the fault of the other driver, but once again, I can also assume at least a little culpability in that perhaps I wasn’t paying enough attention to the traffic.

What bothers me — and I’ve noticed it a lot recently — is that as I’m getting older, my driving skill is declining.  Some of it is physical:  my neck and body are stiffer, making it more difficult, for example, to turn to look behind me;  and my reflexes certainly aren’t what they used to be either, which means I can’t drive on auto-pilot anymore and have to concentrate really hard on what’s going on around me.

The latter certainly came to mind when I read about this little tragedy:

A man and woman were killed after an Audi ploughed into them as they were visiting a popular seaside resort at the end of the summer holidays.

The pair, in their 60s, were walking in Anglesey when the car swerved to avoid a horse and carriage before ploughing into them. The driver, a man in his 80s, also died at the scene.

(I don’t know what the car’s make has to do with the story, but it is the awful Daily Mail, after all, so maybe a little gratuitous class hatred was needed to make the story a little more spicy.)

From an eyewitness:

One local said: ‘The Audi swerved to go around a horse and carriage, mounted the pavement and hit pedestrians who were walking past a house – they didn’t stand a chance.’

It seems pretty clear that the Olde Phartte was going too fast — this didn’t happen on a freeway but on a narrow city street, after all — and that he either didn’t leave enough room to brake, or else he lost control during the swerve and smashed into the luckless pedestrians before hitting the wall.  (And in a modern car (like the Audi), you have to be going really fast to be killed by crashing into a wall.)

Or else his octogenarian reflexes were like mud, and he left it all too late.

I know that Olde Pharttes get a bad rap for the heinous sin of Driving Too Slowly, but I’ve noticed myself slowing down a lot when I drive these days, because I’m fully aware that my reflexes are those of an older man, and not some young whippersnapper in his forties.

There’s a reason why modern F1 drivers don’t carry on racing into their fifties.  Even once-world champs like Fernando Alonso (43) and Lewis Hamilton (39) are quite aware that their days of F1 racing are very much numbered.  (I know:  the peerless Juan Manuel Fangio raced almost into his fifties, but the F1 cars of his day ran at less than half the speed of today’s.)

Anyway, I am (perhaps surprisingly) in favor of stricter driving tests for Olde Pharttes like myself.  When my current license expires, I will have to retake the practical and theoretical tests as though I were a newbie driver, and I will do so willingly.  Because I would hate to be like that 80-year-old in the above tragedy, killed (and killer) because I was, quite simply, driving beyond my capabilities.

As Dirty Harry (himself quite an Olde Phartte) said once:  “A man has to know his limitations.”  And I’m certainly aware of mine, when it comes to driving anyway.

It’s called maturity, and it’s well past time that I started showing some.

Work Ethic

Good Stuff, Gummint

The State (i.e. governments large and small) can always find ways to stifle individuality, especially when that individuality manifests itself in young people.  Here’s a recent example:

Bored and looking for something to do this summer, Danny Doherty hatched a plan to raise money for his brother’s hockey team by selling homemade ice cream.

But a few days after setting up a stand and serving up vanilla, shaved chocolate and fluffernutter to about 20 people, Danny’s family received a letter from the Norwood Board of Health ordering it shut down. Town officials had received a complaint and said that the 12-year-old’s scheme violated the Massachusetts Food Code, a state regulation.

No surprises there, this being Massachusetts.  (My only question:  who complained?  Some goody-goody, or someone fronting for the local ice cream shop?  Either way, they need a swift slap.)

Back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, I lived in in one of the Chicagoland suburbs — Palatine, a modest middle-class neighborhood of the kind that’s so Norman Rockwell it’s almost a caricature.  And while my house itself was small, it sat on just over a quarter-acre, which meant a large lawn in the backyard.  Said lawn took well over two hour to cut and edge, and in the short but warm, fecund Chicago summers, the grass grew quickly, meaning it had to be cut at least weekly;  actually, I would cut it about five times a month.  And it was a hot, sweaty business:  Chicago’s summers can be sticky, especially when contrasted with its icy winters.

At that point I was working from home (long before it became the cool thing to do) because the company was based near Fort Lauderdale.  And I really couldn’t afford to spend the time doing the lawn.  Anyway, one afternoon I was just about to go out and cut the thing when the doorbell rang.  When I opened it, there were two boys standing there, aged about ten.

“Cut your lawn for ten bucks?”

Hell, yes.

Whereupon these two little buggers (each had their own, okay, most likely Dad’s lawnmower) cut the lawn — good grief, they ran behind the mowers, and the grass was cut to almost professional standard in just about fifteen minutes.  They didn’t do edging (“Our Dads won’t let us because they say it’s dangerous”) but that was really just a half-hour job, and easily done after 5 o’clock.

“See you again next week, boys?”

They actually sounded surprised.  “You want us to come back?”

Hell, yes.  And over the next couple years, I never cut my own lawn again. And nor did a lot of my neighbors, once I told them about these kids at the next block party.  These boys made an absolute fortune, and worked their tails off.

And if the local council gauleiters  had ever tried to stop these kids from earning some money from good, honest hard work, I do believe that the neighborhood dads would have burned down their offices.  They didn’t interfere, of course, either because they never learned about these budding entrepreneurs or because they just ignored them (as they should).

Now I’m not suggesting that whenever Gummint does what they did to young Danny Doherty above, the neighborhood dads should torch their offices or tar and feather the bastards.  That would be incitement, and I’m never going to do that no sirree not me not ever.

But I sure as hell wouldn’t try to stop those irate folks if they did.  I would offer to hold their coats, however, just as a good neighbor should.

Speed Bump

Law and Order, Surveillance Society

…and this one isn’t grammatical.

It turns out that when local law enforcement offered the SecServ their drones to overfly the Trump rally in Butler PA, the SS (perhaps unsurprisingly) turned down the offers, repeatedly.

“According to one whistleblower, the night before the rally, U.S. Secret Service repeatedly denied offers from a local law enforcement partner to utilize drone technology to secure the rally. This means that the technology was both available to USSS and able to be deployed to secure the site. Secret Service said no,” Senator Hawley wrote in a letter Thursday to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. “The whistleblower further alleges that after the shooting took place, USSS changed course and asked the local partner to deploy the drone technology to surveil the site in the aftermath of the attack.”

So far, so good.  Fleeing horse, meet stable door:  standard Gummint cock-up.

Here’s what caused me to choke on my morning G&T, though:

The failure to deploy drone technology is all the more concerning since, according to the whistleblower, the drones USSS was offered had the capability not only to identify active shooters but also to help neutralize them.

Wait, WTF?  Are we to understand that the local Barney Fifes in Fucknuckle PA have drones that can take out targets?  Like what the Ukes are using on Russkis, or the CIA uses on Muzzy terrorists?

Fucking hell.  I thought Meal Team Six was bad news…

Or am I misreading the thing?

Health Update

Health

No, I haven’t been able to shake off this little (ahem) cough that has kept both me and New Wife from sleeping for over a week.

So last night:  desperate measures.  I cut my throat went to the local ER place, was given steroids, various stout cough suppressants and a “Z-pack” (antibiotics) which knocked me out…

…until 4 this morning, when I woke up coughing, and of course waking up New Wife as well.

So I took MOAR DRUGS and went to the living room to write this.  I should be okay by the weekend, but that’s what I thought before last weekend.

We shall see.

Worst part is that I had to curtail my range activities lest I alarm a dozen heavily-armed men with my gut-wrenching, organ-expelling coughs.  Tomorrow, I’ll talk about what I’d planned to shoot .  Right now, it’s back to bed.

Laters.

I’m Not Saying I’m Sick, But

Health

Death would be a semi-welcome relief right now.  Cough, sore throat, sneezes (as many as a dozen in a row), post-nasal drip:  all sneering at whatever I throw at them: penicillin, Mucinex, saline spray, cough lozenges.

I suspect even a fucking .45 bullet would just evince a mocking laugh: “Is that the best you can do?  Hahahahaha…. here, have another sneezing fit, and let’s throw in a little bowel action, just to make your life still more pleasant.  Oh, and forget about sleep, we can add some cold shivers to help with that.”

Back tomorrow.  Maybe.

Mighty Falling

Management, Retailing

Back when I were a young (!) data analyst and retail specialist at The Great Big Research Company, one of my minor clients was Walgreens Drug Stores.  (I say “minor” only because I was reporting only on the grocery section of the stores, and not the Rx or even the over-the-counter (OTC) drug or general merchandise products.)

Anyway, I became very friendly with one of the execs, and in one of our conversations she let slip that at that point in time, Walgreens had never — not ever in the history of the company — failed to make a quarterly dividend payment to shareholders.  I checked on that, and she was correct.  So a couple of years later, once I’d left Nielsen and was managing my own 401k account, I purchased a bunch of Walgreens shares and watched the dividend payments roll in, reinvesting them back into the business for several years.

Then one day I was driving to the local mall, and something stuck in my brain on the way there.  I couldn’t figure it out because that’s the nature of such things;  but on the way home I figured out what it was.

On the short five-mile trip between the mall and home, I had passed six Walgreens outlets.  And all my old retailer instincts came to the fore:  Walgreens was, in the industry parlance, over-stored.  Granted, this was in Greater Chicago (Chicagoland), where Walgreens’ head office was located, but still…

A short time later I sold all my WAG shares (at a very handsome profit).

Of course, all that was back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, but I note this recent development (as shared by Reader Mike L.) with interest:

Walgreens is set to close a substantial number of its roughly 8,600 locations across the United States as the company looks to reset the struggling pharmaceutical chain’s business.

CEO Tim Wentworth said on a call with analysts Thursday that “changes are imminent” for the roughly 25% of stores that aren’t profitable and Walgreens’ strategic review will “include the closure of a significant portion of these underperforming stores.”

“We are at a point where the current pharmacy model is not sustainable and the challenges in our operating environment require we approach the market differently,” he said.

Okay, fine,  This can and does happen to many a business.  But there’s a wrinkle:

Wentworth said the closures would focus on locations that aren’t profitable, too close to each other or stores struggling with theft.

The first two phenomena are common, while the third… well, let’s just say that unless I miss my guess (but I doubt that I do) a whole bunch of inner-city Walgreens outlets are going to be boarded up because of undocumented product movement.  And those areas are going to become not only “food” deserts, but “medication” deserts as well.  (The other kind of “medications” are firmly established there, of course.)

And by the way, Wentworth is a seriously smart cookie — unlike so many other corporate CEOs of recent vintage — so if he can’t get the existing show to work, it’s a safe bet that nobody in the industry can.