"A Meanness About Folks"

[Kelly149]

I was reading an article about the current state of students and education and this tweet reminded me of what I'm hearing from alot of you (and why I'm not looking forward to re-opening my barn).

"I feel like this pandemic has created something that’s going to take at least a year and a half (or probably more) to recover from in our schools. A meanness about folks. Exhaustion. Apathy. And it seems to be rampant."  Dwayne Reed @TeachMrReed 

full article: https://www.today.com/parents/how-help-teens-struggling-person-school-pandemic-t239720?cid=sm_npd_td...

https://twitter.com/TeachMrReed/status/1457533967469535234?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed...

[Kitty-and-Creek0]

@Michelle53 

It feels empty and off without that safety net. We so need our support people!

[Michelle53]

@Kitty-and-Creek0    The thing that seems totally off to me is that every day folks on our neighborhood message board are online looking for work. But the delivery companies (and pretty much all the service companies) are struggling to get workers. 

I've been out of work before, and I went and did deliveries for Amazon to get by. I don't get why people aren't grabbing up the jobs, whatever they are.  Maybe they don't fit with a master's degree, but food on the table is good!

After all, those of us in home share clean bathrooms for a living 😉

[Kitty-and-Creek0]

@Michelle53 

Neither of us have ever worked in the fields we were educated in. We were overqualified for all the positions open, or we unfortunately lacked a PhD. We started our own business almost 50 years ago, learning and inventing as we went. While doing our startup we worked for temp agencies. Food on the table is definitely a good thing! 

[Sarah977]

@Michelle53  Years ago, when I still had a home in Canada but was spending most of the year in Mexico, I rented out the Canadian house on a year-long lease. 

My last renter emailed me about 2 months before my return, saying that his work as a house painter was really slow, and he proposed repainting the inside of my house in lieu of rent. 

Might have been a good exchange, except the interior didn't need repainting, and his rent was paying the mortgage. So I politely let him know that. He then just quit paying the rent.

Meanwhile, he was the ex of one of my best friend's niece, and she was well aware of his situation. She told me it wasn't a matter of him not being able to find work, but that he had a very high opinion of himself, and that his prices were too high compared to other painters. He did know how to do  special faux finishes well, which is a specific skill, but a friend of hers had asked him for a quote to repaint her bathroom, nothing special, just fresh paint, and he had quoted her almost double the other 2 quotes she'd gotten.

It wasn't that he couldn't find work, he just preferred to not pay the rent rather than work for less than he felt he deserved.

Fine to be picky if you don't have bills to pay, but otherwise sometimes we just have to do what we gotta do.

[Huma0]

@Michelle53 @Kitty-and-Creek0 

I mentioned earlier that I noticed people here have been more polite and friendly, but I definitely agree with you there's something going wrong with delivery services. I've had so many problems with these since the pandemic started and yes, you chalk it up to limited resources and try to be sympathetic.

However, lately, I've noticed this seems to have become the 'new normal'. As most couriers now are no long required to take a signature, but simply leave something outside a front door, take a picture and then it is logged as delivered, many seem to not bother delivering it to the correct address any more. 

I've had so many issues with this lately. This week alone I was frantically trying to find out what had happened to an important and time sensitive delivery related to my work. Someone I'd never heard of had signed for it and none of my neighbours (whom I know) had, so who knows where it ended up, but I was simply told it was recorded as delivered to my address. By the way, I was home the whole time waiting for it.

Also this week, my elderly neighbour was distressed about an enormous package delivered to her address that was for someone she had never heard of. Luckily, there was a delivery note, but I had to make several phone calls to get to the bottom of it as no one called me back when promised. She was so grateful that I sorted it out. It would have been too much for her.

Today, the new dishwasher was delivered. They were supposed to call me ahead of arriving but didn't, parked on my neighbour's drive despite repeated instructions not to, wouldn't apologise, wouldn't move the van, just kept telling me, "It doesn't matter. Just open the door." Maybe I am being a Karen about that, but the dishwasher was supposed to be installed on Tuesday (after a two week wait for delivery) and they screwed that up so it had to be rebooked.

This sort of stuff seems to happen every week, sometimes several times a week, not just once in a while.

So, despite what I said about people here being friendlier and more polite, I certainly don't feel they've become more efficient or are doing their jobs properly. I have definitely noticed a decline in work ethics in a lot of instances and an apathy accompanying it.

[Michelle53]

@Huma0    I had a package delivered to the wrong address several weeks ago. I have a house - it was delivered to an apartment building with a lobby door and a locked entrance into the apartment building (one of the buzz-in types).

The weird thing was that the supplier's tracking didn't show the package as delivered at all, but running late. The shipper's website showed it delivered to the wrong address.   

Lucky I checked the shipper's website 😉

So I ran over to the apartment building, but the package wasn't in the lobby area.   There was a caretaker working outside, who was really suspicious of me, but I said I was looking for a large box. At which point, she said it was upstairs on the second floor landing, and let me in. 

The box, of course, had been opened, but it wasn't anything anyone but me would want, so they just left it there on the landing. It was too big to fit in my car, so I had to  unpack the contents in the street to load my car. 

But, anyway, I got it home and assembled. For the curious amongst you, it was a plastic insulated shelter for a feral cat that visits my yard. 

[Huma0]

@Michelle53 

How kind of you to look after the feral kitty during the winter and make sure it is warm. I am sure he or she appreciates as my feral cat does (only he decided to move in with me instead).

Yep, what you are describing is scarily common these days. Not that it didn't happen before, but now it's with such frequency that I (and countless others no doubt) regularly spend hours trying to track down the missing packages we were waiting in all day for or trying to find the rightful owners of the random stuff that is left at our front doors by mistake.

Actually, the thing with the elderly neighbour happened Friday before last, around lunchtime. She knocked on my door because she was trying to find out who this enormous package was for. She is barely mobile and it was wet outside, so it was very difficult for her to even walk on the slippery pavements (I had to support her and escort her safely back home), but she was visiting all the neighbours because this package was causing an obstruction at her place and she is very kind so wanted to be sure no one was waiting for an urgent package.

I called the company who sent it and explained the situation. They reassured me that they would find out where it was meant to go and call me back asap. Regardless, they would make sure the package was collected and said to tell the neighbour not to worry about it.

Guess what? They didn't call me back. When it got close to 4pm, I called them again, only to be told that the entire sales team had already gone home for the weekend (hadn't been there in the morning either when her grandson had tried to call) and I'd have to try again on Monday.

I did eventually get this sorted for my neighbour (managed to track down the rightful owner of the package myself and get him to collect it) and she was so grateful, she bought some plants for my garden (Hellebores, or Christmas Roses). 

But really, how difficult should it be? This delivery was meant for No. 2A XYZ Gardens and was instead left at No. 151A ABC Road. Why??? It's not even the right road!

Apologies again for any typos. The autocorrect on the CC seems to have gone mad.

[Michelle53]

@Huma0  Cute kitty 😉

[Huma0]

@Michelle53 

Thank you! You can't really see him at all well in this photo. I will try to post a better one when I can.

[Mark116]

@Huma0 @Michelle53  Aw, we have a cat house in the back yard for feral cats, although we've also adopted some of the more friendly ones.  I put a window box next to it this summer to make it look more cute and less utilitarian for guests who have a view of the back garden;  and next year I'm going to nail some wood to make a fake 6 pane window and paint a view.  Hopefully.

Re packages, thankfully one of us is almost always at home, so we have fewer problems w/packages getting stolen.  Someone did open one of our packages a few weeks ago but it only had cat litter in it, ha. 

[Huma0]

@Mark116 

To be honest, my cat isn't really feral. When he turned up (a total mess) in my garden, I took him to the vet. She told me he was "completely feral, born a stray, has always been a stray and never had a home". You certainly couldn't get more than a few feet close to him, let alone touch him. But I reckon she was wrong. He is still sometimes jittery, but the friendliest, affectionate kitty and absolutely loves lap cuddles. He can't meow (he's more of a squeaker), but he tries very hard sometimes.

I love the idea of prettying up your cat house to make it more guest appropriate. I am sure the feral cats won't mind!

RE the packages, I'm not actually talking about missing deliveries because I'm out. I work from home most of the time. I'n talking about couriers/delivery people constantly leaving them at completely the wrong address - I mean a huge percentage of the time. Since they no longer had to get signatures due to COVID (most often they just take a photo of it on a doorstep and say it was received by the customer), it's gotten very, very lax.

Obviously, not all of the delivery folk are like that. Some are very conscientious. A few weeks ago, I had a very nice postwoman and postman go out of their way to get my new reading glasses to me when they got stuck at the delivery office for no reason. They actually went and found them and brought them to me in their own time, out of hours! Another example of the kindness I was talking about earlier.

[Sarah977]

@Mark116 @Huma0 @Michelle53  Wow, seems like lots of us have feral cats. I do, too. I'm really not a cat person, but she ingratiated herself by being an excellent rodent killer. I never even named her. One of my guests did that when I told him when he asked, that she didn't have a name.

He picked the  perfect name- Cersei, after the evil queen in Game of Thrones. She bites and attacks people's feet.

[Huma0]

@Sarah977 

I love the choice of name. Cersei sounds perfect!

Mine is called Merlot, but that's just because he is dark and was joining my existing fur babies Pinot and Grigio.

[Sarah977]

@Huma0  Funny, my cat also doesn't meow- she also has a little squeak. Maybe a cat that has been fending for itself for awhile has no reason to be loud (they're not screaming at a human's  feet to get their bowl of Whiskas) and it's likely better for their chances of survival if they don't make their presence known to predators or prey.

And mine also was not likely always feral, although I know she was in my neighborhood homeless for at least a year or two. But I took her in to get spayed when I resigned myself to having a cat and when they shaved her belly down, they found the tattoo they give here that shows the animal has already been spayed.

[Huma0]

@Sarah977 

I have heard several times that only domestic cats meow. While kittens meow (mostly to get their mother's attention), it's not natural for an adult cat to meow. They just wouldn't do that in the wild, although they do use other vocalisations to communicate and some like to chatter Hannibal Lecter style at birds.

Domestic cats have learnt to meow for their human companions. Like you say, it could be to get their bowl of Whiskas, or it could just be to get our attention. They hear us speaking to each other and to them and so they learn to communicate this way to, but just for us humans. 

Think about it, do you ever really hear adult cats meow to each other? They may hiss, purr, growl, howl or make other noises, but they don't really meow. And yes, they'll keep quiet most of the time to avoid the attention of predators or to avoid scaring off their prey.

So, a cat that has grown up feral (or been homeless most of its adult life) hasn't really learnt the 'meow for the human' tactic. Merlot tries really hard and sometimes gets out a semi-meow, but it's usually more of a little "meeeeek!".