davidroberts

The endurance sport of poor people is called survival.

Yes. I only had liability coverage.

It probably would have taken longer and I really needed my car fixed.

This advice works in other scenarios where companies string you along hoping you will give up and disappear.

Once my car was badly damaged by someone who ran a stop sign. It was clearly the other driver's fault. Her insurance was Allstate. They strung me along for more than a month "investigating" this obvious situation.

My car was an older one that was worth about the cost of the repairs, and they probably thought I would just give it up. But it was my only transportation and I needed it for work.

I did some research on California's insurance regulations and discovered their requirement that claims be settled within 40 days. After 40 days passed, I wrote a email similar to the letter examples in this article, giving then five days before I reported them to California's insurance department.

It was astonishing to see the immediate change in their behavior. The adjustor who had been playing telephone tag for weeks called me within an hour and arranged for a body shop near my home to start work immediately.

They laugh at angry bluster, but will move mountains to appease a focused person who can bring a regulatory agency down on them.

I'm a pastor, and I'm technical, and I think I may just have found the Church Directory software we've been looking for! Thank you!

Actually, nobody interviews carpenters. You either:

A. Call the carpenters' union and take whoever they send over.

B. Ask some carpenters you trust if they know any decent carpenters who are looking for work, and when they show up at the job site sober with appropriate tools, you put them to work.

It's a slightly different process than programming.

It can get pretty silly in any technical field:

Q: So, your resume says you've been a systems administrator for 10 years. Have you worked much with Linux?

A: Sure, almost all my experience has been with Linux.

Q: How much experience do you have with Red Hat. That is what we use here.

A: Hmmm. Red Hat. Most of the servers I've worked on are Debian based. But I worked a lot with Fedora in college.

Q: But not Red Hat?

A: Well I have some Red Hat experience. I had a temp job where I was setting up Red Hat servers back in 2008.

Q: How long was that.

A: About six months.

Q: Well, perfect! We have an internship available to someone with six months of Red Hat experience! But wait a minute... What version of Red Hat was that?

I'm definitely not as beautiful as I think. In my mind, I'm still a dashing handsome 25-year old. But the stupid mirror keeps insisting that I'm in my fifties with the wrinkles and sags to prove it.

In SEO as in life, if your success depends on gaming the system, you will only be successful until the system changes.

I like this dad.

I think the OP is right. His dad was a surrogate for his own fears. It's easy to put parents up on a pedestal and see them as the voice from above, but in reality the only difference between parents and children is age. A different life stage might bring a different attitude about security and such, but that doesn't mean forgetting about what it means to be young. The OP's dad himself had the pioneering urge and acted on it. He understands.

I'm in my fifties and recently back to the security of regular employment after quitting my good job 12 years ago to start my own business. It was a long, hard time, without much to show for it, but I don't regret any of it, and my three kids turned out fine.

As another dad to the OP: I wish you the best of luck. I'm sure you'll do great.

How about the fourth kind of lazyness--not knowing what the hell to do out of the many choices available, so you sit around hoping the right choice will make itself obvious. It can turn into a very long wait.

I interviewed for a job with them (Nintendo of America), and also did some freelance work over the past couple of years, and I got the feeling whatever they may have been in the past, they currently run on a fairly bureaucratic model, and are not the kind of place that inspires or rewards innovation and creativity.

They had video games in the lobby, but the recruiter warned me "Don't play them!" She told me a previous candidate she took there got a job, but was later fired for playing a video game on company time.

In Japanese, the work "Manma" is a baby-talk word that means food. "Mama" is used for mother sometimes, but I think this is a recent influence from the West. "Haha" is the normal (non-polite) word for mother, although children are taught to use the more polite "o-kaa-san." "Haha" still has those repeated "ah" sounds.