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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 30th, 2023

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  • Holden and Ford Australia. Partly for personal nostalgic reasons but also because of local engineering and manufacturing. A bit of our national identity disappeared when they shut down, although they were owned by US companies they were still a source of Aussie pride. Nowadays we have no local industry and it all just feels a bit hollow. Like watching sports when you have no local team.

    I doubt they’d be able to make them these days but seeing as we’re talking hypotheticals, there’s something about a big cube V8 or turbo 6 that’s missing from everything since. Yes I know on here the hive mind demands we boo ands hiss if someone dares to like anything ICE, and when our current runabout goes it’ll likely be replaced by an EV of some sort. But for us, cars are a hobby and a source of enjoyment too, and I dare say we’ll have at least one ICE vehicle for a long as it’s feasible for us to do so. And if I can get a semi-modern nod to the past that would be perfect.

    And if the Japanese car industry could go back to the 90s I’d be pretty stoked about that too!



  • I’m not an expert but have worked in these kinds of environments on and off over the years.

    It’s hard to offer broad advice as every encounter is different. Your workplace might offer training though to give you some tools, which will likely also teach you the things not to say (eg promising a result, stoking the fire, preaching, etc).

    Calming someone down isn’t always the goal either, sometimes people just need to process difficult information or grieve for the loss of a loved one. All you can do in this situation is to offer a safe place to do that, and maybe a sympathetic ear if they need to talk, and perhaps to validate their feelings. Otherwise just being present is often enough, as is knowing when to give someone space.







  • In two different companies I’ve seen people refer to “the database” when they actually mean a spreadsheet. That’s not just a terminology mixup, these things were super complex, with pseudo-relational tables, lookups, links to other files etc. The sort of thing that should be in an actual database, that has less chance of breaking in obscure ways when someone inserts a row or types a value over a formula. It was actually pretty impressive, in an “impending doom at any moment” kind of way.

    Also had one where there was a spreadsheet of everyone in the business top to bottom, shared by HR and IT. Both groups needed a list of staff, so why not just keep one, right? This thing had personal details like home address and medical conditions, plus things like salary (inc garnishments), performance management notes etc, as well as of course their username and password (which was assigned to them and they couldn’t change) and security questions and answers. It didn’t even have a password on the file. I noped tf out of that place as quickly as I could, but for reasons even worse than that stupid spreadsheet.