A bus pass maybe, that way you can just get on and not have to fumble around paying the fare when you board.

The key point is that if it’s not signed, it gives them an excuse to throw it away.

Do that to enough people and you end up with a big problem. The uncounted votes could swing the election, or you get a messy court case where some judges step in and basically decide the election on their own, or who knows what else.

At a minimum, it’s sets the stage for chaos. And from the chaos can emerge a chaotic outcome.

Side note: do I have this right? You can actually picture a time in the foreseeable future where you never have to use Excel again?

If so, I am soooo deeply envious of you :P

Already lots of great answers, but I’ll add a note about intentional barriers to exit.

Many services tend to make it easy to sign up and comparably more difficult to quit. So while people always can leave and take their business elsewhere, they might not have the motivation to do it. I imagine each additional click in a form deters more and more people. OP mentioned being unmotivated, and these barriers play into that.

It’s like wandering around in Ikea. You could use a map and chart out the fastest route to find what you need and get out. But it’s so much easier to follow the little path they draw out on the floor and look at everything, which makes you way more likely to impulsively buy something extra.

Screen capture while the video is running, like the VCR days of yore

Labor power has apparently scared the shit out of us to such a degree that no amount of toilet paper will ever be enough to wipe it up.

As far as I know, I have 2 main allergies: pollen and metals (some metals, not sure which exactly).

Pollen

• It feels like my nose is a leaky faucet. It will run and run and I’ll have sneezing fits for hours. If I blow my nose, it makes the inside feel super-dry and itchy, which just kicks off more running and sneezing. So it basically feels pointless to blow my nose at all, and I usually settle for sniffling instead. But if I do that too much, I start getting mini-sinus headaches.
• Flare-ups. Sometimes I’ll see the plants that trigger it and I’ll start sneezing within 10-20 minutes. Other times I’ll go outside and it’ll start out of nowhere. It’ll last for hours.
• Meds do not seem to help at all. Maybe they shorten what would be a 6-hour episode into a 3-hour episode but who tf knows. I have yet to find anything that kicks in faster than a couple hours after use.

Metals

• I break out in a highly localized rash. It’s red, bumpy, and itches like mosquito bites.
• Flare-ups after prolonged contact (several hours) with a metal. It’ll last anywhere from a couple hours to a couple days.
• No meds. It’s pretty easy to ignore when it flares up, and it’s easy enough to avoid exposure.

Wait, all these baby hippo posts have been a single baby hippo? I thought people were just posting cute baby hippos.

Despite new evidence to the contrary, I will continue to hold this false belief 🦛

Me and my gf way back in the day trapped a stray kitten once.

It was living under a car. We put little piles of dry food out for it for a few days, gradually moving the pile further and further away from his hiding place. Then one day we made a little trail of food leading to a carry box that we filled with food. Once we heard it chomping away inside, we crept up and slammed the door shut. It felt like a scene out of a cartoon lol

Little thing freaked out and clawed at the door and cried for a while. But once we took it into the house and out of the summer heat, it was very happy.

Note, I am neither an experienced pet owner nor a trapper. I just like telling this story hehe

Edit: …what pronouns do you use for a kitten from decades ago whose sex you don’t remember?

Once the “weird” label took off, I thought it would lose some of its power because it was being used so much.

But damn. There’s no other way to put it. This is weird.

My sense is it’s getting at “what’s an overated candy flavor”

WHO IS THIS PERSON

I really wish the nomenclature was consistent. If you say “shreds”, it’d better be documents in a literal paper shredder, perhaps in service of obstruction of justice.

If you’re just referring to people saying “Trump bad”, please use “slam” or “blast” so I know to ignore it.

I thought most hoes would be quite easy to plow

When referring to a difficult task: “That’s a tough road to hold”, or “a tough road to hoe”, or “a tough road to [travel on]” or “a tough road to… [trails off awkwardly…]”, or just “a tough road”.

It’s a tough row to hoe.

It’s an agricultural metaphor. The row is a line of dirt in a field where you plant seeds. You use a hoe to dig the lines, remove weeds, and create little holes where you drop the seeds. Hoeing may be difficult if the soil is too hard or too full of rocks and weeds. Such a row would be a tough one to hoe.

To me, this says that your workplace has acknowledged and accepted that the way they do business is leading to burnout, at least for some people. But rather than using that as evidence that their business practices need to change, they’ve instead opted to individualize the problem. Our growth projections aren’t unreasonably ambitious, you just need to do more deep breathing.

It’s like how I’m told to take a vacation to relax, only to return to the same (or an even larger) pile of to-dos that I left behind.

Edit: If this resonates with you, check out the book “McMindfulness” by Ronald Purser.

Whatever it was, I forgot what it was today

That’s fair. I won’t dispute that sometimes they’re helpful. If I spend more time typing the message than it’d take to just talk it out, then meeting up is a viable option.

But gosh, the number of meetings I’ve had where I send the email, we meet anyway, and I simply read the email to them and they go “Ohhhh”… Sigh.

I find it interesting that “attend meetings” is said in the same breath as “walk around” and “take lunch or bathroom breaks”.

Meetings are way worse for productivity than breaks and water cooler bullshitting, at least in my experience. There’s more of them, they take longer, and they tend to leave me with a vague sense that nothing’s really getting done and everybody’s sort of okay with that. AND they’re treated as an obligation in a way that taking breaks is not.

At least when I get back to my desk after walking around, I feel a bit more refreshed and ready to get back to work. In fact, it’s usually meeting burnout that prompts the walk-around in the first place.