That’s not an apples to apples comparison. I am buying a single thing at a pump: fuel. I boop my card. I stick nozzle in hole. I pull lever until it stops. Vending machines? Second verse same as the first. I boop card. I push button. I take chippies, I walk away. Vending machines specifically are purpose-built for self-service.

I spend maybe 30 seconds to 3 minutes at these things. The only work I do is tapping my payment and pressing a button or two. Groceries are a whole different animal. It’s scanning, weighing, coding, bagging, loading, and paying. It’s a fuckton more involvement by the customer. I don’t think you can in good faith compare self-checkout to a vending machine.

The business is incentivized to trick you into performing labor for them. Part of the cost of my groceries is for someone to have a job doing that. If I’m gonna do that labor for the store, I should get an employee discount, at least.

And why is that? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the business benefits by making the customers the employees, too? Would a business be in any way incentivized to make paying customers also perform labor for them?

The things boomers complain about aren’t always wrong. I ain’t their damn employee.

He was the Hulk once so I can’t blame you.

Here’s mine. I bought it new in 2015, and I wear it almost daily. It has never needed work.

Our aim is to need this room. Clean your aim. Would help.

The Shawshank Redemption never gets stale for me, but it is a healthy time investment.

My cousin and I once invented the “Booter.”

One would ride a bike.

The other would ride a scooter.

The bike would tow the scooter with about a half dozen bungee cords. If you accelerated really hard on the bike, the cords would store all that extra energy, contract, unhook from each other, and send the scooter rocketing past.

Great fun. We never wore pads or helmets. For weight savings, of course. We were engineers first.

Coffee has always made me shit from the time I started drinking it regularly when I was 21.

But now, a cup of water in the morning will trigger it. Like my body says, “MOISTURE?? I guess we don’t need this anymore!!”

I’ve stopped drinking coffee since getting on Adderall. Which is a shame. I was getting into some good stuff. But I’ve got a history of heart trouble in my family so coffee has been replaced by herbal tea. Gotta have a hot drink to truly wake up.

One of the better evolutions.

POTATO XD

Even paintballs suck when they hit you. Mask shots are great because those don’t hurt lol The worst is when your shirt comes up that litte bit and you get nailed on bare skin.

I’m a big baby so I didn’t play much paintball lol

Not to mention how plastic recycling isn’t exactly easy anyway. Not all jurisdictions take all kinds of plastic. So you have to know what your recycling center can handle and what you’re tossing in or risk contamination.

I go out of my way to buy things shipped in paper, glass, or metal containers. Even though steel and aluminum cans do have a little plastic in them, it’s far less plastic than containers made entirely of it.

It would be nice if we could have more things sold in the bulk section so you can bring your own container. Like, if I could buy laundry detergent or shampoo using my own containers, that’d be sick.

My cats are on automatic feeders. So when the time change happened in fall, I didn’t adjust those clocks. As far as they were concerned, they got fed on time.

Now that the time changed back, those clocks are right again lol

Good drivers miss their exit sometimes. Bad drivers never miss their exit. Pat yourself on the back knowing you’re on of the good ones.

I once missed my exit in the middle of nowhere and had to drive an extra 20 miles until I reached the next exit so I could turn around, go back those 20 miles, and take the right exit lol

Or my guacamole 30 seconds after I scoop it onto my plate.

Blue has always been a favorite of mine, but purple has really grown on me lately. Naturally, I love bluish purples.

Once you figure out that purple doesn’t actually exist it’s even neater. Purple and magenta are colors your brain makes up when it sees red and blue light at the same time.

Yesterday, I ate two eggs for breakfast, water for lunch, and chow mein, kung pao chicken, broccoli beef, two nutri grain bars, twenty-seven gummy bears, and a small milkshake for dinner.

My father in law (age 78) just got a new phone. His last phone cost $100 new, was only a year old, and took actual seconds to respond to most things. It finally got stuck boot looping to recovery mode so I lent him my old OnePlus 7T to use because we were gonna get him a new one for his birthday, but he just went ahead and bought a new (used) Samsung for $200.

The Samsung is actually a pretty decent phone, but he refuses to learn how to use it. He badly wanted to use his old phone, but it won’t work anymore. He made me put the SIM card in his old phone. I told him he’s free to use that old thing, but I won’t be helping him with it anymore.

He is finally learning how to use his new phone a month after getting it. The man refuses to shell out for a half decent phone, despite having the money to. He’d rather spend $150 every 18 months buying a new crap phone than spend $400 on one that could easily last 5 years.

He doesn’t even need a smart phone. He doesn’t understand what a launcher is. So he downloads whatever crapware is advertised to him, then gets really confused why his home screen is all fucky. I’ve told him he should really consider getting a flip phone and using a laptop for anything else. He doesn’t want to. He wants a smart phone.

I can’t save this man. My parents are in their mid 50s and have finally caught up. 20 years ago, I was telling them they do not need the crapware DVD that came with the digital camera to import their pictures. All you need to do is put the SD card in the computer and copy the DCIM folder to the Pictures folder on the computer, then delete everything in the SD card’s DCIM folder to free up space.

Since I don’t use Windows anymore, I don’t answer Windows questions anymore lol If anyone calls with a Windows question these days, I just nope outta that.

I told my wife we’re going on an extended vacation in Kenya Tanzania. She sounds stoked.