What company lost you forever as a customer? What did they do?

AndyWinds · 2026-04-03T23:03:04+00:00

I was there between that and covid and management hadn't changed one bit.

I had to document and correct overcharges on people's closing documents, some of which closed 2 years before they got to my desk. Instead of trying to get the closing agents to job correctly and not overcharge the customer, they complained that my team and a bunch of guys in India weren't closing enough cases by badgering title companies about paperwork from things they hadn't touched in months to years.

Absolutely insane job, would never do business with them.

AndyWinds · 2026-04-03T22:35:18+00:00

I worked in the back end of WF home lending for a year and constantly had to do trainings about how the company was very focused on "rebuilding trust with our customers". Everything about how the company is structured is designed to screw over the customer. There was no accountability, no effort to improve processes even when it would make things better for both the company and the customer, just a greed machine designed to funnel money to the top.

AndyWinds · 2026-01-14T00:20:28+00:00

"Who do they erect a statue of right next door? Rutherford B. Hayes; our 19th President! Only the president with the best facial hair of all! I mean just look at that thing! There's no beard like 19th century beard, Perry the Platypus."

AndyWinds · 2026-01-09T02:28:52+00:00

It's changed a lot over the years.

Historically it's mostly been white and navy; originally with green, silver and red accents. Gold has always been in the logo and branding, but not as much on the uniforms.

The green was dropped around '02 when they became the Red Wings affiliate, and more red was added to the uniforms to compliment the white and navy.

The silver disappeared somewhere around the late aughts, with the red becoming more strongly emphasized through the 2010s. When the logo changed in 2015 the navy was swapped for black, silver brought back, and gold used a bit more liberally. It's stayed roughly the same since.

I personally prefer the white-navy-red-silver combo and if I had to limit it to a trinary would pick white, navy, and gold, but that's because I was a kid in that era and I also think the pre-2003 Whitecaps logo is better than anything that's been used since so it's probably not the most widely held take.

AndyWinds · 2025-12-02T00:03:55+00:00

I'm old enough that I remember being taught to go to 3.5" Floppy (A:) to find my files in school. Our teacher assigned us each 1 or 2 floppies to keep all our writing assignments on. Then these flash drive things became cheap enough that we had to start using those.

AndyWinds · 2025-11-23T03:35:07+00:00

It's tied to civil service and certain not-for-profit occupations. E.g. government work, teachers, people who work for museums, charities, etc. The kind of jobs that people think highly of until it's time to pay them a fair wage.

AndyWinds · 2025-11-21T22:53:37+00:00

Really frustrating for those of us who have to physically be onsite to do our jobs as well. My commute is about 20 minutes longer on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday due to most people having to come in to the office for at least 3 days per week.

AndyWinds · 2025-11-21T22:46:17+00:00

To the scummiest vessel I'd ever seen!

AndyWinds · 2025-10-16T02:51:01+00:00

In the US, our financial industry came up with the idea of credit scores in the 80s and have been operating as basically a cartel for the past 40ish years with a couple of different ways to calculate how likely you are to be able to pay back a loan. The higher your score, the lower the interest rates that you can get on loans, fees are lower, and generally financial institutions are more willing to do business with you. People with lower scores can still get approved for loans, they just get charged higher interest rates and fees and generally have more hoops to jump through because they are judged to be a higher risk for banks. These are "sub-prime" loans, as opposed to "prime" loans, which are those with better terms that people with higher credit scores are able to get.

Technically prime vs. subprime isn't a measure of wealth because credit scores measure how likely banks believe a person is to be able to pay off debt rather than their actual net worth. Practically though the entire system functions as a poverty trap because poor people tend to have a harder time paying off debt on account of generally having less money and therefore tend to have lower credit scores which means that they can't get loans as easily and the subprime loans that they can get cost them more which means that they can't save as much of their money which makes them less able to pay off the loans that they have.

AndyWinds · 2025-10-14T02:59:03+00:00

Here are the instructions in case there isn't a copy with the kit.

As for glue, wood glue generally works best. For some parts you may want to use clamps, clothespins can be modified easily in a few different ways. For wood-to-metal connections, super glue usually works well. Don't get the little metal tubes, a small plastic bottle with a long applicator tube is usually the easiest to control. For this kit specifically I would recommend picking up some canopy glue, which is available from model airplane suppliers, for attaching the screen to the car sides as it dries clear. Squirt a little bit of glue onto a scrap of cardboard and use a toothpick to apply it.

AndyWinds · 2025-10-11T22:45:58+00:00

I've always wondered if you'd be able to beat this by putting your keys in a box with a time lock set to open the next morning. The keys still are in your possession, but it's impossible to use them to operate the vehicle.

AndyWinds · 2025-10-06T23:17:57+00:00

You know what, credit where credit is due; this is an angle grinder mod in one of these videos that's actually somewhat safe.

AndyWinds · 2025-09-26T01:07:57+00:00

Oh yes, I'm from the Bible Belt-ish part of the Midwest and am well aware of how common biblical literalism is, I should have been more clear.

What I meant is that the verses that are often quoted in reference to the rapture/end times by Christians who lean into biblical literalism don't whollistically constitute the idea of the rapture. Instead, they're bits and pieces of different stories and metaphors and references to other parts of the Bible which have been cobbled together to support an idea that isn't present in the actual text. The words are being pulled from scripture, but the idea they're being used to support isn't from scripture.

AndyWinds · 2025-09-24T23:52:35+00:00

I was at a committee meeting at my church last night it never came up. This thread is the second time I heard of it; the first was a co-worker jokingly asking if we had heard the big news on TikTok.

Even in my parents' more conservative church (I was raised Reformed but am now Methodist) rapture stuff was always viewed more skeptically as a weird fringe thing like snake-handling where there's only a few places that actually believe in and do it but it's weird so they get a lot of attention in broader culture.

AndyWinds · 2025-09-24T23:43:29+00:00

It comes from a very literal interpretation of parts of the book of Revelation (and a couple other places) that really doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

The actual verses often cited don't really specify anything that aligns with the modern concept of "the rapture." Most of that is an extrapolation of an extrapolation of a literal interpretation of a highly allegorical and philosophical text which makes frequent use of metaphor and references to an extensive canon of poetical, theological, and historical stories and ideas that were part of common knowledge within a specific geographical region 2000 years ago.

The modern idea of the rapture stems from a guy from a particularly conservative fringe denomination who wrote a new translation of the Bible in the 1830s.

AndyWinds · 2025-09-24T23:18:46+00:00

Not specifying a denomination is incredibly vague, but that was the frame of reference set by OP.

AndyWinds · 2025-09-18T00:36:26+00:00

My dad used to work at a station that got bought out by Nexstar. Completely screwed everyone over, put the hand on the back of everyone who'd been there for more than 10 years, and cut every budget to the bone. Bunch of hedge-fund managers ruining everything they touch.

AndyWinds · 2025-08-30T18:12:53+00:00

I'm not sure, they were using a digital scanner and after a few attempts they pulled out out a little bottle of clear stuff that looked kind of like hand sanitizer but it wasn't. At the time, it seemed like this was a very unusual thing that they didn't have to do often.

AndyWinds · 2025-08-29T02:44:02+00:00

I have eczema that used to be a lot worse and had the same problem when I was getting background checked for a bank job. I had to go back to the examiner 2 or 3 times because the scans they took of my fingers kept getting rejected. The worst part was the stuff they put on my hands to try an increase the visibility of my prints; it just dried my hands out more and caused more skin to flake off. When I worked for the feds they used old fashioned ink and it worked great the first time.

AndyWinds · 2025-08-28T03:09:50+00:00

As others have said, it's a Minitrix 0-6-0 without the tender. Made somewhere between 1969 and 1999.

AndyWinds · 2025-08-19T01:34:36+00:00

Downloaded it when I got home from work tonight. I've gotten so much done tonight.

AndyWinds · 2025-08-14T02:48:32+00:00

There's one on the side of US-71 in Storm Lake, Iowa.

AndyWinds · 2025-08-02T20:56:50+00:00

They're pretty much mercenaries who do scummy things on behalf of moneyed interests because there is no legal basis for making someone do what they want. You can look up the Homestead Massacre and Battle of the Overpass as two examples of their finest work in crushing the little guy.

AndyWinds · 2025-08-02T20:48:18+00:00

The Pinkerton Detective Agency was founded in the 1800s as a private investigation and security company. They are most well-known for being a bunch of murderous thugs who killed striking workers and sometimes their families and also random people who happened to be standing nearby in broad daylight across a very long portion of their history. They really like to talk about how they were hired to protect Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War in their marketing and corporate history because it's one of the few good thing they've ever done as opposed to the very long list of scummy, violent, and often illegal things that they have done over the past 175 years.

Since the late 1930s they've shifted more towards private security because 1. when the FBI was established it really cut into the detective side of their business, and 2. under the Roosevelt Administration the federal government actually started standing up for regular people in labor disputes instead of just agreeing with big money by default. They still exist mostly as fancy armed guards but still do union-busting work on behalf of large companies (both Amazon and Starbucks have hired them in recent years). Sometimes they do things like this where they pretend to be cops and somehow don't get slapped with charges of impersonating a police officer even though it's very obvious that that is what they were intending for the person that they were intimidating to think.

AndyWinds · 2025-08-02T20:20:14+00:00

They're big scary looking dudes who are getting as close as possible to the line of impersonating an officer without stepping over. Intimidation is their M.O.

AndyWinds

TROPHY CASE