Words you never want to hear from a plumber:

"Those flags in your front yard are where the sewer line collapsed and sprayed water out of the ground."

Oh jeez, Matt. Welcome to homeownership?

That's promising, askye!

Ask A Manager has a thread today about how well/poorly your job is portrayed in the media, and a lawyer said Wolfram & Hart wasn't bad! Haha.

That's hilarious, Jesse!

Yikes, Matt! How disturbing. That'll certainly be good to have fixed so it doesn't happen again...

Glad to hear that, askye, hope the money comes soon!

Just had my appraisal meeting with my former supervisor and current supervisor. My former supervisor kept apologizing that the way the total points get assessed meant that a lot of things that she wanted to rank me as "exceeds expectations" got rounded down to "meets expectations" which is nice to hear but really I have gotten to the point where I don't care about these things. Having good reviews won't keep me from being laid off, and we may or may not get merit increases this year but they have always been 3% or less, so how good the review is can't make much difference to how much raise I get, either, because it's never going to be very much.

plumbing issues done without too much problems.

Since we moved in we have essentially replaced all of the plumbing, and yet, it always finds a way for there to be one more thing. Apparently our water pressure coming onto the property is 120psi which is WAY too might and is what caused our whole house filter to barf. So now we are paying for a pressure regulator. Sigh.

Had you but known, you could have fought the wildfires with your garden hose!

I'm trying to be zen about this. While my expectations of repair costs have gone from three digits to four, none of my interior floors have been swamped, there's no property damage aside from the plumbing itself, and you cannot tell I'm having plumbing problems just from breathing inside my house.

Timelies all!

When it came time to finish off the 2022 reviews and start the the 2023, the head of the lab sent out an email thanking us for all the work we've done and offered either a step raise or a cash award. As I'm at the highest step in my pay grade, I opted for the award. Turns out it will be pretty sizable, and will show up sometime between now and May 1.

I was talking with a friend the other day about salary transparency laws and such, and he’s worked in government for years and was flabbergasted that I didn’t know what all my coworkers make and didn’t know what the salary range for the position is. Just could not understand—when I talked about companies wanting an advantage and low-balling initial salary offers, he didn’t get it. Sigh.

That's nice to hear, Sheryl!

none of my interior floors have been swamped, there's no property damage aside from the plumbing itself, and you cannot tell I'm having plumbing problems just from breathing inside my house.

All good news! I remember when my parents had what they thought was a minor leak from a new dishwasher not being installed quite right that eventually led to the whole house being tented for mold mitigation. No one wants that.

That seems weird that the water coming into your house at a reasonable pressure is not just part of supplying water to your house. Not that it's surprising, exactly, but in an ideal world it would be.

Part of my appraisal was supposed to be setting goals for this year, although maybe that will actually come later, but anyway we all agreed that we can't really do it for me right now because of how unsettled my actual duties are. We did talk about in what order we will be tackling the various parts of my job and whether I will keep doing them, etc and my main take away is that from now on I'm going to work "my job, like Gaul, is divided into three parts" whenever possible. Which is probably not all that often, to be honest, so I'm going out of my way to say it here now.

That seems weird that the water coming into your house at a reasonable pressure is not just part of supplying water to your house. Not that it's surprising, exactly, but in an ideal world it would be.

Yeah, you would think. It's way over pressure which is the issue. It turns out it was damaging valves and other things in the house.

Dear self

Just because you apparently can get Commander’s Palace delivered next Tuesday does not mean you should. Oh look, Veselka’s! Graeter’s! STOP LOOKING

Love always Your overworked and under appreciated superego