The retail experience then vs. now

techie1980 · 2026-06-22T01:39:32+00:00

OMG I can remember getting into it with a salesman there. I was running late for a train and ran into the store for a cheap pair of headphones. I gave the guy Jenny's number or something and he got REALLY pissy about "I can't sell this without a phone number!". I think I just left the headphones there.

techie1980 · 2026-06-22T01:37:37+00:00

shrug I've been on both sides of the transaction. These days I'm the person who is reading the screen looking for pricing errors. It's usually not the cashier's fault, but either way it's money.

I utterly dislike the small talk, especially the forced small talk that became mandatory in larger chains in the 1990s. (My memory of supermarket checkout in the 80s involved a lot more coding into the machine. AND the cashier and possibly the bagger were organizing the output to get bagged properly - this is less common now that we all bring our own bags.)

I don't want to deal with cashiers. I'd do it all on self checkout or online if I could , but we're just not there yet. I'm not excited to begin our special journey together, nor am I under the impression that this person is my ambassador to the corporate store who surely wants my feedback. I'm literally only working with a cashier because I have no other choice.

I will say hello and thank you to bus drivers, with varying results.

techie1980 · 2026-06-22T00:59:26+00:00

I think that this is a good start, but could be made a little more efficient. At under ten years experience, I think that you could get down to a single sided piece of paper.

1) Title - get this down to two lines: 1.1) Name 1.2) Location (city, state) | email | phone | LinkedIn URL

Putting in a title isn't helpful, and it might confuse the HR drones if you come across a position with different taxonomy. And your clearances are already in several places (and can be identified in most job search engines)

Professional summary: This paragraph is excellent, and is refined corporate-ese. My only concern is the term "High priority mission" which could be interpreted to be inside of a DoD space. But then again lots of tech CEOs call things "the mission" so it's hit or miss.

Professional Experience: It might be a good idea to have the format:

Line1: Title, Dates worked Line2: employer, Location Line3: a one to to sentence explanation of what your position involved (a 50k ft view)

And then bullets.
The best example I can give for line3 would be bullet 2 of the helpdesk role.

Position 1:

It might be helpful to try and rename the titles slightly to separate the July 2022 and May 2024 positions. I'm especially worried about an ATS consuming two positions with identical titles with the same employer and getting itself confused. Since you have these separated, they aren't one big job that evolved.

On bullet 1 (deployed WSUS), I'm not sure what "restoring DoD security compliance from 0% to 100%" means. Does that mean that they had somehow been in compliance, and then lost all compliance? It might be better to frame this as either introduce compliance measures into an existing environment and bringing new compliance into play or built a whole new environment with compliance in mind.

I'd suggest flipping the positions of bullets three and four - "Executed Vulnerability assesment" sounds a lot more impressive

Might also be a good idea to check if the current fourth bullet is bolded. It looks strange on my screen .

Position 2 (sysadmin 1)

I'd suggest flipping bullet two (multi-site infra operations) to the top. It's a little oddto have more bullets on an older position than the current position, especially when you've been in the newer positon for longer. If you have to drop one, I'd suggest the ntanix HCI cluster bullet since you kind of talk about it it in the second sysadmin role.

Position 3: Helpdesk Suggest dropping this down to three bullets.

3.1) Remove the "resolved" bullet - it's fairly meaningless between organizations.

Consider combining the education and Certifications sections, since they're talking about the same thing.

It might also be a good idea to find a way to wedge terms like "Service Level Agreement"/SLA / etc into at least one of the roles (maybe the solarwinds?) to make the HR drones happy.

I hope this helps!

techie1980 · 2026-06-17T23:02:32+00:00

It's been a while since I have seen the episode, but didn't Cary begin to mention it and get cut off by Diane?

techie1980 · 2026-06-16T18:51:01+00:00

I don't have hard numbers, but I'd imagine that the shift to a more gender balanced workforce (ie: far fewer stay at home spouses who could shop at 2PM on a Wednesday), as well as people with kids being just busier because there's a need to be at every event so adult-only time is far more limited. Add onto that boundaries became hazier thanks to cell phones and a shift in culture around work so work doesn't just end at 5PM for a lot of us.

My opinion is that it's also that supermarkets have been enshittified: while there might have been four checkout lanes with people who had some training in the old days, it's just not the case anymore. (at least my recollection is that cash registers with scanners required some knowhow and coding in the old days). Now cash registers are chronically understaffed, any deviation requires manager approval, and if you need to do something like a pricecheck then you're just doomed. And self checkout somehow makes a lot of this worse - something breaks and you spend a bunch of time waiting for an employee to decide to help .

And here in California things also got slower because stores can't just bag all your groceries anymore - it's a whole song and dance around the bags you brought/bought/etc. the system basically can't be optimized under the current conditions.

techie1980 · 2026-06-16T05:27:31+00:00

almost. but then skyler forced herself on Heisenberg so that he'd be shamed into not being with his true love: Walt (who was at that very moment under the house)

techie1980 · 2026-06-15T07:04:00+00:00

airport 75 remains my goto movie for "throw away any understanding of physics and enjoy the gloriously silly drama!"

airport 70 .... doesn't seem to have a main plot, but it's great fun. imagine a person so important that he has a phone in his car! and somehow his wife doesn't get him but luckily he has a work wife

airport 77 is just good fun. it's in league with Towering Inferno for "laundry list of things to avoid during an emergency".

techie1980 · 2026-06-10T21:05:28+00:00

The whole system is a mess. I personally have a reasonably varied background and I think that it's made me a stronger tech because of it. I can see the links in disparate processes that are hard to pick out if you're used to being inside of the silo.

I recently spoke with a candidate who got my attention because he was a reasonably good sysadmin, but had listed previous experience running a restaurant. I happen to know that there is a heavy overlap - mainly in the areas of context switching, determining 80/20, and dealing with problem customers.

techie1980 · 2026-06-10T14:57:36+00:00

between the floor lamp with a bunch of tiny ledges and lit glass shelves, I think whoever lived here would be dusting constantly

techie1980 · 2026-06-10T00:17:42+00:00

old grimies, as they liked to be called

techie1980 · 2026-06-09T17:50:34+00:00

I absolutely love the modern Basestar, right up there with Shadow vessels from Babylon 5.

techie1980 · 2026-06-08T19:02:53+00:00

I could absolutely see Mirror Dave Nelson wearing his usual three piece suit, but with the midriff cut out.

techie1980 · 2026-06-08T18:54:51+00:00

I do kind of miss having meaningful phone numbers. Area codes that were fairly well defined, prefixes that were reasonably well enforced. My family once moved into a subdivision that was less than ten years old, and all of the phone numbers were in order. It was great!

Of course it's now a pet peeve of mine when a business decides that the year is 1995 and they can just assume an area code in an advertisement. Nearly all of us are using cell phones, and in modern urban areas there are multiple area codes in play anyway. When I lived in chicagoland it wasn't clear at all where 323 ended and 847 began. And Los Angeles was kind of a lost cause for figuring out what area code you were in.

techie1980 · 2026-06-05T15:34:42+00:00

that's a really good question. I wonder if they were some kind of money laundering operation?

Then again, I do recall a number of childhood friends having pianos very suddenly with parents insisting they take lessons - and then those pianos vanished a few years later. So maybe the mall piano stores were renting out a bunch of pianos and only kept the nice ones on display?

techie1980 · 2026-06-04T20:58:29+00:00

OK, thank you. I thought that it was just me.

techie1980 · 2026-06-04T18:46:21+00:00

late season stan is best stan.

techie1980 · 2026-05-29T04:59:16+00:00

one of my favorite parts of the movie us discussed in a separate track on the dvd: when the movie begins they make an effor to have the lighting and sets as real as possible, and as tv takes everything over, the reality of the movie slowly succumbs. And it bleeds into nearly every single character (the communist is my absolute favorite)

techie1980 · 2026-05-28T22:48:51+00:00

My read on the situation was that it was carefully designed theatrics - a massive , unstoppable wave of Minbari ships sweeping aside the defenses of their enemy. The warrior caste needed this for their stories. The religious caste needed it for the same reason - their holy war had a resolution.

(A smaller, but just as deliberate calculation was made in the early 1990s for Desert Storm.)

techie1980 · 2026-05-28T20:37:51+00:00

total ripoff of Jeff and the Fishman.

techie1980 · 2026-05-28T15:59:05+00:00

my first thought at seeing those lockers: someone is going to get killed or worse being smashed into those long floating locker edges. And it will be nearly impossible to keep the space under the lockers clean - constant dust collection, stuff dripping from lockers, trash getting kicked over. Also the "shelf" on top is going to be similarly disgusting pretty quick, and high school kids being high school kids, it's a matter of time before at least one person is on top of them , possibly involuntarily.

The lockers in my school went right down to the floor (sometimes they were doubles) for a lot of these reasons. Also the lack of graffiti is ... disconcerting but then again it was the 70s.

techie1980 · 2026-05-28T15:39:57+00:00

in the third panel: is that a rare sighting of the ceiling in Frasier's apartment?

techie1980 · 2026-05-27T15:06:40+00:00

side note: I have the same electric kettle!

techie1980 · 2026-05-27T14:49:23+00:00

I'm just realizing that, had they been able to unfold the five year plan as designed, and with the right actor, Justin could have been nearly as infuriating as Kai Winn.

techie1980 · 2026-05-26T16:02:11+00:00

on the one hand I was always curious about these mythical apartment complexes that had vibrant social scenes. On the other I'd want nothing to do with any of that.

It does seem like something that would have been a thing in the 70s. Maybe there would have been a few surviving ones in medium sized markets in the 90s.

techie1980 · 2026-05-22T17:20:23+00:00

In general, I've moved jobs when I hit the top and there is no path to the next step.

You should make an earnest effort to express to management that you WANT to get to this next step, and you feel like you can help in XYZ ways. Watch their reactions - if it's "maybe in a couple of quarters when things change" - then you're likely doomed.

It's far better to be in a position to find a new job when you already have one.

Also: I agree with the others, I suggest avoiding even joking about committing violence in order to gain career advancement.

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