I have been job hunting the past few months, so much of my thinking has been about how stupid the entire process is. Are cover letters actually valuable to anyone? They seem entirely like a waste...
I have been job hunting the past few months, so much of my thinking has been about how stupid the entire process is.
Are cover letters actually valuable to anyone? They seem entirely like a waste of time to me. So for most of the past few months, I wouldn't send a cover letter on applications. If I really thought I was a good fit and liked the place, I would include a cover letter. But most of the time not. I have received absolutely no positive contacts about any of my applications in months. Last friday, I send out a handful more, but this time I had chatgpt write a cover letter. I made a few edits, but mostly used them unchanged. They were full of absolute nonsense. But I got a call from one of these applications today and have a phone interview for monday. I just don't get why they are useful, but apparently they are.
I've been job hunting for years now and struggling quite a bit, but I think I'll give the chatGPT cover letter strategy a try. What prompts do you use?
I've been job hunting for years now and struggling quite a bit, but I think I'll give the chatGPT cover letter strategy a try.
I used ChatGPT 4 “I need you to write a cover letter for a job position. Here is my resume: // copy and paste of my resume Here is the job posting: // copy and paste of the job post” Then for...
I used ChatGPT 4
“I need you to write a cover letter for a job position. Here is my resume:
// copy and paste of my resume
Here is the job posting:
// copy and paste of the job post”
Then for subsequent letters I prompted in the same chat
“Create a cover letter for this position:
// job description”
It was really quite simple. I also have given chatgpt a bio of myself in the custom instructions, so I think it made use of that info as well. The result was a set of pretty nice cover letters considering I put about 2 minutes of “work” into them. This style of writing is pretty formal and doesn’t change much with authorial “voice” but it still managed to capture my voice well enough. I am a pretty decent writer when I put my mind to it, and the chatgpt letter is pretty close to what I would have written if I had taken the time.
Neat, thanks for sharing. I saw a meme about how job postings are going to be mostly AI generated soon, so resumes and cover letters in response will be as well. I hate that this is what things...
Neat, thanks for sharing.
I saw a meme about how job postings are going to be mostly AI generated soon, so resumes and cover letters in response will be as well.
I hate that this is what things have become, but... it's the current state of affairs and there isn't much I can do to change it.
When chatgpt first came out, OpenAI talked about how people would give chatgpt a bullet point list and have it write out a long email to send to their coworkers. Then the recipient would put the...
When chatgpt first came out, OpenAI talked about how people would give chatgpt a bullet point list and have it write out a long email to send to their coworkers. Then the recipient would put the same email back into chatgpt to get the bullet points. This feels exactly like that. Just like you I hate what it has become, but there is not much you or I can do.
@ShroudedScribe fyi I don't care for the chat GPT output because it has no "voice". I want my writing to sound like me. One thing I have liked is adding the prompt, "ask me 10 questions that would...
I don't care for the chat GPT output because it has no "voice". I want my writing to sound like me. One thing I have liked is adding the prompt,
"ask me 10 questions that would let you write a good cover letter." This gets me thinking about good content, then I can write it myself.
I just ordered a cappuccino with oat milk at a coffee shop and the barista rang me up for $7.27 before tip and after taxes and whatever new surcharges SF has come up with. The oat milk had a...
I just ordered a cappuccino with oat milk at a coffee shop and the barista rang me up for $7.27 before tip and after taxes and whatever new surcharges SF has come up with.
The oat milk had a surcharge of $1. It's an outrage! Let's break it down.
A cappuccino has 6 oz. of steamed milk. This place claims to use Clover Sonoma Organic Whole Milk. A gallon of that costs $8.50 at retail (tax-exempt), so 6.64¢ per oz. So a normal cappuccino's milk would cost $0.40 in material even with pre-mo milk.
I don't know what kind of oat milk they use, but let's presume it's also the pre-mo stuff, Oatly Barista Edition, which costs $5.29 for a 32oz carton, or 16.53¢ per oz. But you can buy it in bulk for $90 for 24 cartons, so $3.75 for a 32oz carton, or 11.72¢ per oz. So this is our range. An oat milk cappuccino's 'milk' would cost $0.70–0.99 in material. Plus oat milk is much more shelf stable than regular milk, so there's less waste.
So, substituting in premium oat milk costs the coffee shop $0.30-59 more. But they could probably use cheaper oat milk and cut the absolute cost of the oat milk down by 25–35%.
Anyway, it's Monday and I'm George Constanza-ing over oat milk.
Having worked as a barista briefly, I’ll mention that sometimes the non-standard milk options have to be chucked out before they’re all used up, so if those milk alternatives aren’t super popular,...
Having worked as a barista briefly, I’ll mention that sometimes the non-standard milk options have to be chucked out before they’re all used up, so if those milk alternatives aren’t super popular, you might be partly paying for your own milk and partly paying for the fact that the rest won’t be sold/used.
But also, the cost of offering non-standard milk isn’t simply the cost of the milk — you also need to multiply your milk jugs by the number of options you offer. You can’t just trust that a jet of water (and maybe a bit of soap) will remove every trace of almond from that latte you just made, and the next person comes along and orders regular dairy milk, but whoops unmentioned nut allergy means you’ve just risked a hospitalisation if you use the same jug.
Off topic, but I just (a couple hours ago) finished a biography on Erdős.... Did I immediately find an in-the-wild reference to his SF? (It feels somehow blasphemous to spell it out lol)
Off topic, but I just (a couple hours ago) finished a biography on Erdős.... Did I immediately find an in-the-wild reference to his SF? (It feels somehow blasphemous to spell it out lol)
I'll go second. This one is kinda serious. I'm sure this has been discussed elsewhere, but because I'm so self centered, I don't really clue in until it affects me in a concrete way: the internet...
I'll go second.
This one is kinda serious. I'm sure this has been discussed elsewhere, but because I'm so self centered, I don't really clue in until it affects me in a concrete way: the internet has greatly reduced my analytical ability.
I was trying to troubleshoot Audacity. So, I asked the question to google. I have lost even the ability to make a technical query. But if I don't find the exact answer in the first four results, I get frustrated.
I have enough discipline to press forward through feelings of frustration, and finally figured out the answer. The meta-frustration I realized at that point is that I was so hung up on having the answer told to me, I refused to engage my cortex and read and synthesize.
Google is partly to blame for this, they have made technical searches harder by removing boolean operators. SEO is a big party to this too. Even when I use quotes on Google I get irrelevant and wrong results, and results where the quoted word is not present.
But before there was google, I could usually get to an answer by reading the docs, contemplation, and experimentation, and that seems a lot harder now. I need to re-discipline myself there . . .
One clever tip I've seen recently is to add before:2023 to a Google search. It'll get rid of a lot of AI generated SEO junk. Of course, SEO garbage has been around longer than 2023, but it'll help...
And yes, Google search is largely ruined at this point. Quotation marks don't work, boolean operators neither. The only thing that marginally still works is "thing you are looking for site:reddit.com". But most of the results are still SEO garbage.
One clever tip I've seen recently is to add before:2023 to a Google search. It'll get rid of a lot of AI generated SEO junk. Of course, SEO garbage has been around longer than 2023, but it'll help some.
Similarly, adding before:2025 (or any year in the future) to search queries on YouTube works a treat to remove all the bullcrap recommendations and such YouTube has polluted results with now, and...
Similarly, adding before:2025 (or any year in the future) to search queries on YouTube works a treat to remove all the bullcrap recommendations and such YouTube has polluted results with now, and actually returns only videos matching what you actually searched for.
E.g. Halfway down the results for mystery box it starts getting populated with videos "People also watched", "Channels new to you", "Shorts", "For you", "Previously watched", and all kinda of other useless, unrelated crap. Whereas the results for mystery box before:2025 is still interspersed with Shorts but all the other results are just videos related to the actual "mystery box" search terms.
The fact that you even have to do something like that to bring up actually relevent results is bloody obnoxious. Whoever is in charge of site design decisions at YouTube is an asshole. It's probably some manager whose only concern is maximizing "engagement", and who doesn't care about giving users want they actually want or expect.
Plato and Derrida were onto this, and it sounds like you're hitting that wall personally. The technology to even write things down turned a lot of our problem-solving and memory tasks secondary to...
Plato and Derrida were onto this, and it sounds like you're hitting that wall personally. The technology to even write things down turned a lot of our problem-solving and memory tasks secondary to search/recognition tasks. We have a lot more useful information at hand and saved time, but the problem-solving and memory sharpening are casualties to some extent.
It doesn't help that Google is now taking away the ease to which we are accustomed, but I get the frustration about feeling some kind of mental "laziness."
I don't have any answers, but rest assured that you are in good company across the millennia. :)
I was traveling this weekend, and I renewed one of my prescriptions yesterday, for pickup today after I got back. I went to go to pick it up for my designated time, and it wasn’t ready. Turns out...
I was traveling this weekend, and I renewed one of my prescriptions yesterday, for pickup today after I got back.
I went to go to pick it up for my designated time, and it wasn’t ready. Turns out their system offset my pickup time because of a difference in time zones, so it won’t be ready until later.
The same thing has happened to me before: I scheduled a haircut in a different time zone and their system (an entirely different one from the prescription system, presumably) offset my actual appointment time. When I showed up for my haircut as scheduled, I’d actually missed it by an hour.
I get that this is hard to parse in the abstract, so here’s an example: if I was in the PST time zone and I scheduled an appointment for a place under EST for 3:00 PM, the scheduling system is actually putting me down for 6:00 PM but telling me that it’s 3:00 PM (because 3:00 PST = 6:00 EST).
I get that automatic time zone conversion based on your current location is a nice digital convenience, but this also seems like a complete misapplication of it? It feels to me like, if I am making an appointment for a physical place, the appointment times should be locked to their local time zone with no conversion. Am I missing something here?
(Note: neither of these were due to daylight savings time, just in case anyone is thinking that was the issue)
One time I showed up at my accountant's office at the scheduled time and she looked at me and was like "wtf are you doing here!?" and I was like "...I scheduled an appointment for this time?" and...
One time I showed up at my accountant's office at the scheduled time and she looked at me and was like "wtf are you doing here!?" and I was like "...I scheduled an appointment for this time?" and she was like uh, no you didn't?
Turns out I hadn't, I missed one step in the confirmation process or something and then put it on my personal calendar two months earlier. She was kind enough to let me hang around for an hour and then do my taxes during her lunch, I was so grateful haha
The typical convention for the vast majority of webapps is to transmit datetimes as number of seconds or milliseconds since midnight of 1970-01-01 UTC (called “unix time”), and render them to the...
The typical convention for the vast majority of webapps is to transmit datetimes as number of seconds or milliseconds since midnight of 1970-01-01 UTC (called “unix time”), and render them to the user by asking the browser to convert to local time. If a user send a datetime back to the server, their browser converts the local timestamp back to unix time and the server stores that. The advantage to this strategy is that the server doesn’t have to know anything about your personal time zone: everything it’s sending and receiving is in UTC.
Unless otherwise noted, you can assume things are always being displayed as local time (though you’ll absolutely find edge cases out there). Your reasoning totally makes sense, but the people making the websites are following the general pattern above as a matter of consistency/tradition - even though it may not be the most sensible choice for a smaller business with a single location away from any zone cutoffs.
Time zones in general are a huge pain. I wish we just all used a 24 hour clock that was universal everywhere, and just accepted the fact that (example) night in California may start at 14:00 but...
Time zones in general are a huge pain. I wish we just all used a 24 hour clock that was universal everywhere, and just accepted the fact that (example) night in California may start at 14:00 but starts at 11:00 in New York.
Sure, it'd require a different type of conversion, but wouldn't it be easier to say that (another example) "NY HQ working hours are 3:00 - 10:00 and LA satellite office hours are 6:00 - 13:00" so we all have the same reference point?
I think this would make it much harder to travel because when you go somewhere, you're constantly doing time zone math to figure out mundane things like, "is it time to eat lunch?" Whereas now you...
I think this would make it much harder to travel because when you go somewhere, you're constantly doing time zone math to figure out mundane things like, "is it time to eat lunch?" Whereas now you know that lunch is pretty much at noon no matter where you are.
It actually makes sense that our system is this way because it developed at a time when there was a lot more travel than there was long distsnce communication.
As a tip, if any of these websites have an "add this to my calendar" feature, the calendar event is likely to reflect the actual unix timestamp that was scheduled, and your calendar should jump it...
As a tip, if any of these websites have an "add this to my calendar" feature, the calendar event is likely to reflect the actual unix timestamp that was scheduled, and your calendar should jump it to the correct time when you return home. It still won't be when you wanted it, but at least you'll know.
A few of the anecdotes here have reminded me of a story. I would describe it as peak mundane, but somehow this memory has stuck with me for years, so maybe it's a perfect fit for this thread. Some...
A few of the anecdotes here have reminded me of a story. I would describe it as peak mundane, but somehow this memory has stuck with me for years, so maybe it's a perfect fit for this thread.
Some years ago I attended a local, minor league baseball game, and out of sheer luck, our section was gifted coupons redeemable for a free cupcake at a local bakery. I have a massive sweet tooth, so even though this coupon just guaranteed, like, a $4 cupcake, this small stroke of luck was the highlight of my evening.
As my birthday was just around the corner, I figured I'd hold on to the coupon for a week or so (well before the expiration date on the coupon), at which point my friends and I would pick up the free cupcake as well as buy a few extra. The coupon had the somewhat unusual requirement that the order needed to be placed in advance. But it's a local spot, so I understood that availability could be limited. I waited a few days, went to their website, placed the order, and scheduled the pick-up time.
Fast forward to my birthday. My friends and I walked into the shop, and I proudly announced that I had arrived to pick up a cupcake!
"Did you get a confirmation email?"
Yes, it's right here! Here is my confirmation email! It even has the scheduled pick-up time in it!
"Oh, no. I meant, did you get a confirmation email from the owner?"
Dear reader, I did not have this second, hitherto unknown confirmation email as required by this secret, hitherto unknown coupon requirement.
I did not get a cupcake that day. I did not get that secret, second confirmation email ever. I did not get my free cupcake.
Reminds me of how I placed an online order at a restaurant and they didn't start making it until I got there, because they called me to confirm and I was unable to answer. I paid online already...
Reminds me of how I placed an online order at a restaurant and they didn't start making it until I got there, because they called me to confirm and I was unable to answer.
I suspect it's a way to hedge things so the Doctor isn't just sitting around wasting their valuable time doing nothing waiting for a client if there is a no show.
I suspect it's a way to hedge things so the Doctor isn't just sitting around wasting their valuable time doing nothing waiting for a client if there is a no show.
Yeah I'm in Canada and I routinely try and book any doctor visit to the family doc in the morning so he isn't late by the time it comes to check on me or my family.
Yeah I'm in Canada and I routinely try and book any doctor visit to the family doc in the morning so he isn't late by the time it comes to check on me or my family.
Paperwork and in-processing. If you're a new patient it gets you out faster, without delaying other patients. In the US it alsonallows time to process insurance which is generally easy, but...
Paperwork and in-processing. If you're a new patient it gets you out faster, without delaying other patients. In the US it alsonallows time to process insurance which is generally easy, but occasionally has a hiccup.
If you say "come in at X time" with the understanding that you're waiting 15 minutes to have the appointment, it sounds like you're being inconvenienced, but if you are asked to come in 15 minutes...
If you say "come in at X time" with the understanding that you're waiting 15 minutes to have the appointment, it sounds like you're being inconvenienced, but if you are asked to come in 15 minutes then you're being asked to be considerate. The latter is probably more effective at getting people to show up at the correct time.
Come in 15 min early just so the doctor can see you 30-60 min LATE. Also fuck them all for asking to be paid PRIOR to the appointment. Do you pay your mechanic before the job is done? No? Then why...
Come in 15 min early just so the doctor can see you 30-60 min LATE. Also fuck them all for asking to be paid PRIOR to the appointment. Do you pay your mechanic before the job is done? No? Then why pay a doctor before they see you..
I have been job hunting the past few months, so much of my thinking has been about how stupid the entire process is.
Are cover letters actually valuable to anyone? They seem entirely like a waste of time to me. So for most of the past few months, I wouldn't send a cover letter on applications. If I really thought I was a good fit and liked the place, I would include a cover letter. But most of the time not. I have received absolutely no positive contacts about any of my applications in months. Last friday, I send out a handful more, but this time I had chatgpt write a cover letter. I made a few edits, but mostly used them unchanged. They were full of absolute nonsense. But I got a call from one of these applications today and have a phone interview for monday. I just don't get why they are useful, but apparently they are.
I am pretty fed up with job hunting right now.
I've been job hunting for years now and struggling quite a bit, but I think I'll give the chatGPT cover letter strategy a try.
What prompts do you use?
I used ChatGPT 4
“I need you to write a cover letter for a job position. Here is my resume:
// copy and paste of my resume
Here is the job posting:
// copy and paste of the job post”
Then for subsequent letters I prompted in the same chat
“Create a cover letter for this position:
// job description”
It was really quite simple. I also have given chatgpt a bio of myself in the custom instructions, so I think it made use of that info as well. The result was a set of pretty nice cover letters considering I put about 2 minutes of “work” into them. This style of writing is pretty formal and doesn’t change much with authorial “voice” but it still managed to capture my voice well enough. I am a pretty decent writer when I put my mind to it, and the chatgpt letter is pretty close to what I would have written if I had taken the time.
Neat, thanks for sharing.
I saw a meme about how job postings are going to be mostly AI generated soon, so resumes and cover letters in response will be as well.
I hate that this is what things have become, but... it's the current state of affairs and there isn't much I can do to change it.
When chatgpt first came out, OpenAI talked about how people would give chatgpt a bullet point list and have it write out a long email to send to their coworkers. Then the recipient would put the same email back into chatgpt to get the bullet points. This feels exactly like that. Just like you I hate what it has become, but there is not much you or I can do.
@ShroudedScribe fyi
I don't care for the chat GPT output because it has no "voice". I want my writing to sound like me. One thing I have liked is adding the prompt,
"ask me 10 questions that would let you write a good cover letter." This gets me thinking about good content, then I can write it myself.
Reminds me of my school's insistence on using Grammarly. I feel like it sucks the soul out of my writing sometimes.
I just ordered a cappuccino with oat milk at a coffee shop and the barista rang me up for $7.27 before tip and after taxes and whatever new surcharges SF has come up with.
The oat milk had a surcharge of $1. It's an outrage! Let's break it down.
A cappuccino has 6 oz. of steamed milk. This place claims to use Clover Sonoma Organic Whole Milk. A gallon of that costs $8.50 at retail (tax-exempt), so 6.64¢ per oz. So a normal cappuccino's milk would cost $0.40 in material even with pre-mo milk.
I don't know what kind of oat milk they use, but let's presume it's also the pre-mo stuff, Oatly Barista Edition, which costs $5.29 for a 32oz carton, or 16.53¢ per oz. But you can buy it in bulk for $90 for 24 cartons, so $3.75 for a 32oz carton, or 11.72¢ per oz. So this is our range. An oat milk cappuccino's 'milk' would cost $0.70–0.99 in material. Plus oat milk is much more shelf stable than regular milk, so there's less waste.
So, substituting in premium oat milk costs the coffee shop $0.30-59 more. But they could probably use cheaper oat milk and cut the absolute cost of the oat milk down by 25–35%.
Anyway, it's Monday and I'm George Constanza-ing over oat milk.
Having worked as a barista briefly, I’ll mention that sometimes the non-standard milk options have to be chucked out before they’re all used up, so if those milk alternatives aren’t super popular, you might be partly paying for your own milk and partly paying for the fact that the rest won’t be sold/used.
But also, the cost of offering non-standard milk isn’t simply the cost of the milk — you also need to multiply your milk jugs by the number of options you offer. You can’t just trust that a jet of water (and maybe a bit of soap) will remove every trace of almond from that latte you just made, and the next person comes along and orders regular dairy milk, but whoops unmentioned nut allergy means you’ve just risked a hospitalisation if you use the same jug.
Off topic, but I just (a couple hours ago) finished a biography on Erdős.... Did I immediately find an in-the-wild reference to his SF? (It feels somehow blasphemous to spell it out lol)
it's primo
I'll go second.
This one is kinda serious. I'm sure this has been discussed elsewhere, but because I'm so self centered, I don't really clue in until it affects me in a concrete way: the internet has greatly reduced my analytical ability.
I was trying to troubleshoot Audacity. So, I asked the question to google. I have lost even the ability to make a technical query. But if I don't find the exact answer in the first four results, I get frustrated.
I have enough discipline to press forward through feelings of frustration, and finally figured out the answer. The meta-frustration I realized at that point is that I was so hung up on having the answer told to me, I refused to engage my cortex and read and synthesize.
Google is partly to blame for this, they have made technical searches harder by removing boolean operators. SEO is a big party to this too. Even when I use quotes on Google I get irrelevant and wrong results, and results where the quoted word is not present.
But before there was google, I could usually get to an answer by reading the docs, contemplation, and experimentation, and that seems a lot harder now. I need to re-discipline myself there . . .
One clever tip I've seen recently is to add
before:2023to a Google search. It'll get rid of a lot of AI generated SEO junk. Of course, SEO garbage has been around longer than 2023, but it'll help some.Similarly, adding
before:2025(or any year in the future) to search queries on YouTube works a treat to remove all the bullcrap recommendations and such YouTube has polluted results with now, and actually returns only videos matching what you actually searched for.E.g. Halfway down the results for mystery box it starts getting populated with videos "People also watched", "Channels new to you", "Shorts", "For you", "Previously watched", and all kinda of other useless, unrelated crap. Whereas the results for mystery box before:2025 is still interspersed with Shorts but all the other results are just videos related to the actual "mystery box" search terms.
The fact that you even have to do something like that to bring up actually relevent results is bloody obnoxious. Whoever is in charge of site design decisions at YouTube is an asshole. It's probably some manager whose only concern is maximizing "engagement", and who doesn't care about giving users want they actually want or expect.
This is very strange but seems to change the results, even when I searched the generic "new tv shows." That's... baffling.
Plato and Derrida were onto this, and it sounds like you're hitting that wall personally. The technology to even write things down turned a lot of our problem-solving and memory tasks secondary to search/recognition tasks. We have a lot more useful information at hand and saved time, but the problem-solving and memory sharpening are casualties to some extent.
It doesn't help that Google is now taking away the ease to which we are accustomed, but I get the frustration about feeling some kind of mental "laziness."
I don't have any answers, but rest assured that you are in good company across the millennia. :)
I was traveling this weekend, and I renewed one of my prescriptions yesterday, for pickup today after I got back.
I went to go to pick it up for my designated time, and it wasn’t ready. Turns out their system offset my pickup time because of a difference in time zones, so it won’t be ready until later.
The same thing has happened to me before: I scheduled a haircut in a different time zone and their system (an entirely different one from the prescription system, presumably) offset my actual appointment time. When I showed up for my haircut as scheduled, I’d actually missed it by an hour.
I get that this is hard to parse in the abstract, so here’s an example: if I was in the PST time zone and I scheduled an appointment for a place under EST for 3:00 PM, the scheduling system is actually putting me down for 6:00 PM but telling me that it’s 3:00 PM (because 3:00 PST = 6:00 EST).
I get that automatic time zone conversion based on your current location is a nice digital convenience, but this also seems like a complete misapplication of it? It feels to me like, if I am making an appointment for a physical place, the appointment times should be locked to their local time zone with no conversion. Am I missing something here?
(Note: neither of these were due to daylight savings time, just in case anyone is thinking that was the issue)
One time I showed up at my accountant's office at the scheduled time and she looked at me and was like "wtf are you doing here!?" and I was like "...I scheduled an appointment for this time?" and she was like uh, no you didn't?
Turns out I hadn't, I missed one step in the confirmation process or something and then put it on my personal calendar two months earlier. She was kind enough to let me hang around for an hour and then do my taxes during her lunch, I was so grateful haha
The typical convention for the vast majority of webapps is to transmit datetimes as number of seconds or milliseconds since midnight of 1970-01-01 UTC (called “unix time”), and render them to the user by asking the browser to convert to local time. If a user send a datetime back to the server, their browser converts the local timestamp back to unix time and the server stores that. The advantage to this strategy is that the server doesn’t have to know anything about your personal time zone: everything it’s sending and receiving is in UTC.
Unless otherwise noted, you can assume things are always being displayed as local time (though you’ll absolutely find edge cases out there). Your reasoning totally makes sense, but the people making the websites are following the general pattern above as a matter of consistency/tradition - even though it may not be the most sensible choice for a smaller business with a single location away from any zone cutoffs.
Time zones in general are a huge pain. I wish we just all used a 24 hour clock that was universal everywhere, and just accepted the fact that (example) night in California may start at 14:00 but starts at 11:00 in New York.
Sure, it'd require a different type of conversion, but wouldn't it be easier to say that (another example) "NY HQ working hours are 3:00 - 10:00 and LA satellite office hours are 6:00 - 13:00" so we all have the same reference point?
I think this would make it much harder to travel because when you go somewhere, you're constantly doing time zone math to figure out mundane things like, "is it time to eat lunch?" Whereas now you know that lunch is pretty much at noon no matter where you are.
It actually makes sense that our system is this way because it developed at a time when there was a lot more travel than there was long distsnce communication.
As a tip, if any of these websites have an "add this to my calendar" feature, the calendar event is likely to reflect the actual unix timestamp that was scheduled, and your calendar should jump it to the correct time when you return home. It still won't be when you wanted it, but at least you'll know.
A few of the anecdotes here have reminded me of a story. I would describe it as peak mundane, but somehow this memory has stuck with me for years, so maybe it's a perfect fit for this thread.
Some years ago I attended a local, minor league baseball game, and out of sheer luck, our section was gifted coupons redeemable for a free cupcake at a local bakery. I have a massive sweet tooth, so even though this coupon just guaranteed, like, a $4 cupcake, this small stroke of luck was the highlight of my evening.
As my birthday was just around the corner, I figured I'd hold on to the coupon for a week or so (well before the expiration date on the coupon), at which point my friends and I would pick up the free cupcake as well as buy a few extra. The coupon had the somewhat unusual requirement that the order needed to be placed in advance. But it's a local spot, so I understood that availability could be limited. I waited a few days, went to their website, placed the order, and scheduled the pick-up time.
Fast forward to my birthday. My friends and I walked into the shop, and I proudly announced that I had arrived to pick up a cupcake!
"Did you get a confirmation email?"
Yes, it's right here! Here is my confirmation email! It even has the scheduled pick-up time in it!
"Oh, no. I meant, did you get a confirmation email from the owner?"
Dear reader, I did not have this second, hitherto unknown confirmation email as required by this secret, hitherto unknown coupon requirement.
I did not get a cupcake that day. I did not get that secret, second confirmation email ever. I did not get my free cupcake.
Reminds me of how I placed an online order at a restaurant and they didn't start making it until I got there, because they called me to confirm and I was unable to answer.
I paid online already...
I'll go first.
Why do doctor's offices ask you to come in 15 minutes early? Why not just set the appointment 15 minutes earlier?
I suspect it's a way to hedge things so the Doctor isn't just sitting around wasting their valuable time doing nothing waiting for a client if there is a no show.
That's implying the Doctor isn't 15 minutes late (I have never been seen on-time by a doctor in life).
Strangely enough, this hasn't happened as often since relocating to another state (in the US). It was the norm where I lived before.
Yeah I'm in Canada and I routinely try and book any doctor visit to the family doc in the morning so he isn't late by the time it comes to check on me or my family.
Paperwork and in-processing. If you're a new patient it gets you out faster, without delaying other patients. In the US it alsonallows time to process insurance which is generally easy, but occasionally has a hiccup.
If you say "come in at X time" with the understanding that you're waiting 15 minutes to have the appointment, it sounds like you're being inconvenienced, but if you are asked to come in 15 minutes then you're being asked to be considerate. The latter is probably more effective at getting people to show up at the correct time.
Come in 15 min early just so the doctor can see you 30-60 min LATE. Also fuck them all for asking to be paid PRIOR to the appointment. Do you pay your mechanic before the job is done? No? Then why pay a doctor before they see you..
Can you actually build and fire a cannon that is made out of glass? Feels like something Mythbusters or some YouTuber should have tackled by now.
I’d say yes, but it’d be impractically sized. Cool to watch tho i bet.
Funny you should say that, I found this after another pass.
https://youtu.be/N1ufwJp3WCg
https://youtu.be/s1vSZ1nuaN8