Started a new job, when I arrived on the first day they didn’t know where to put me and didn’t know what I was going to do. So they sat me in the boss’s office and told me to read a book. After a few hours, the boss showed up and immediately started on “imagine starting a new job and not wearing a plain shirt!” (My business shirt was white with widely spaced faint grey stripes). Sacked immediately. They still paid me for two weeks though.

Incurable cancer, chemo brain means I can’t concentrate and often have trouble thinking straight. Involuntarily “retired” on medical insurance. Not working wasn’t what I expected it to be.

56/M/Australia

Your dad went grey at 9!?

Quantum Leap. The original series with Scott Bakula was much better.

I’m immunocompromised and I wear a mask whenever I go out. When people challenge me, saying “COVID is over, and anyway, it’s just like a cold”, I tell them that it’s not over, it will never be over, over 100 people in our local city went to hospital just last week, and another 30 or so died from it.

I think that people know deep down that COVID really is serious, they don’t want to admit it or wear masks, and seeing people taking it seriously makes them feel threatened emotionally and philosophically.

Q: What’s brown and sticky? A: A stick

Get them all together in one place and tell them all at once, so you don’t have to go through the same story and questions over and over. As soon as you can. Just say it.

Old growth forest, with tall trees and enough space between trees to walk or sit, and the occasional clearing.

Do you feel that your “customers” are the administration or the general public? Whom do you feel that you are serving in your job? Do you feel that the directions given to you by your administration are legal and safe and reasonable? Do you feel that the directions given to you by your administration cause a disadvantage to yourself or your “customers”?

You could try to clutch at straws to justify staying in your job. You might be able to reasonably determine that your feelings for your administration don’t affect the performance of your job. Maybe staying in your job is the best way to benefit your “customers” and obstruct the administration.

Only you can decide how you feel and what is an appropriate match for your own moral and ethical position.

“Be excellent to each other”.

The vendors like you to buy a new phone every year so that they can get more money from you.

When they advertise that “only our latest product has smart thingy, or picture erase, or circle to search”, they’re really telling you that they are trying to find a reason for you to throw perfectly good hardware away so that you can spend more money.

If the software lasts that long, and it’s doing what you need, there’s no reason you have to buy a new phone each year.

Every time you keep your phone a bit longer instead of buying a new one, you’re reducing the waste that goes to landfill (let’s be honest, most people throw their obsolete electronics literally in the trash rather than direct them to approved recycling and disposal).

Friends, family, and lovers dying before you.

Imagine you like the shape of the front of a Mini Cooper and the rear of a Ford mustang. You could take the paneling from the interior of a rolls Royce and the seats from a Lamborghini and make a really cool car.

Unfortunately, unlike modern standard PCs, phones are individually designed and built and even models in the same range can’t use each other’s parts or software.

Each component is designed to work with each of the other components and just slapping them together doesn’t necessarily make a new working product.

So where’s the problem?

I stopped to look around and never left.

Being completely unaware of anyone else:

• Standing in doorways, using your phone or having a conversation
• Talking loudly when inappropriate, when I’m in pain at the doctors, I don’t want to hear about your roses
• leaving your shopping trolley blocking the aisle sideways in the supermarket while looking for your stuff
• driving down the middle of the road so everyone else has to pull over, when there’s plenty of room for two cars to pass
• stopping in the middle of the road without indicating, while: looking for your destination, or having a conversation, or deciding what day it is
• riding your delivery bike down the footpath at high speed weaving between pedestrians

As Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is other people”.

… Boeing …