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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Used to work in digital design. By pure happenstance the foundational initial team on a major project was all women and we recognised that wasn’t a good balance in terms of external perception but also in terms of getting different perspectives on design approaches.

    We managed to recruit some great blokes, but they were hard to find. So many of the new dudes didn’t work out because it was so obvious how inferior they perceived us women to be. Very few of them had the skills to warrant any level of arrogance, let alone full blown superiority complex.

    It was disappointing.










  • I’m no expert on the technology but God I love our battery powered lawn mower. Our lawn, front and back is mostly temporally embarrassed grass (weeds) but keeping it down is critical in Australian snake season. Plan is to get rid of most of it and do the native plants and minimal grass thing.

    In the meantime, no fumes, no refueling, the dog isn’t scared of the noise, and it works a treat. The batteries and how to recycle them in the future is certainly something to worry about, but in the meantime it’s vastly superior to our old stinky, do a rotator cuff turning it on, 2 stroke option.


  • Our phones are such amazing pieces of mobile, personal technology. We’re using them for all the most mundane details though and they’re detracting from some of the better things we could be doing with our time and intellects.

    I feel it’s a problem for all of us but as an elder millennial at least I have experienced a world without them. I feel for the younger generations - they’re all consuming for them.

    When I noticed it encroached on something I enjoy - trying to guess or remember a bit of trivia - my partner and I now have a rule that we must spend at least 5 minutes trying to guess who that actor is from, or who sings this song before we look it up. The technology was robbing us of imagination and rifling through the mental files.

    I don’t disagree with you at all though - we’re using star trek tech and it’s fucking cool.



  • Yes. They started the rudeness and I was done being the polite one. It was clearly a misunderstanding that led to a mistake on their part but once I made that obvious to them, they doubled down.

    I was getting more and more blunt, think ‘so what you’re telling me…’ type tone. And then I heard myself and internally cringed.

    Yes the fuck up was theirs alone. But having worked in a similar role 20 years prior, I remembered how one interaction like the one we were having would completely ruin your day.

    She was flushed red in the face and neck and I remembered being young and making the (wrong) decision to double down when I’m caught out in a fuck up rather than admitting fault and working on a remedy. It’s a lesson only learnt in time and humiliation.

    I think she’d learnt it at that point but it was too late. And an angry middle aged woman ranting at her was not going to do anything.

    So I stopped and said ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be speaking to you like this. I’ve already had a bad day and this has made it so much worse. But that’s got nothing to do with you and you don’t deserve to be spoken like that by customers. When’s the next available appointment?’

    She gave me a curt ‘that’s ok’ - and believe me that almost made me snap again, but we sorted it out.

    I noted the next time I got a confirmation for my appointment that they’d included my suburb in my surname - I think to differentiate between me and another customer (the reason for the crossed wires). That’s a win. But I hope she learnt a lesson about seeking truth rather than victory and I hope she wasn’t too upset.