Yep. Can’t imagine how heated.
Believe it or not, my wife is supportive of my blogging efforts, as long as it doesn’t interfere with real work and family duties, which it has from time to time. In the beginning, I didn’t even tell her I had a blog because I wasn’t sure she would like me writing about bitter things. But when she saw how funny it was and how I was getting readers responding to my posts, she started being okay with it.
What is kind of crazy is now, is several dozen of my post ideas came directly from her. Jay Mohr, the comedian and villain of Jerry McGuire once said that it wasn’t the things he had in common with his wife that made their love strong. It was the mutual distaste and complaining they both agreed on their kept them together. I absolutely believe that is true. My wife and I don’t have a lot in common. She is a girl and I’m a boy. I love sports and going out to movies. She doesn’t love sports and likes staying in for movies. She loves Hallmark movies, I love making fun of Hallmark movies. She loves going to stores to spend money, I love going to stores to look…at other people.
What we have in common is complaining about others and observing the dumb things people do. We just start lighting up when we find something to complain about together.
Always something to complain about.
This weekend was a prime example. We went to McDonald’s and now they have those machines you have to use to order. As convenient as you would think they are to use, they are a little tricky to find the right categories. You have to tell them what you want on each burger, fry, and drink, and then let them know what you want extra. It takes a little while to make sure you get everything right, and I observed almost everyone in the store having a little trouble and taking a lot of time. Nice for McDonald’s, not so much for the people ordering.
The worst part was when the touch screen wasn’t working on our machine. We were halfway through our order and couldn’t go any further. We each tried using what we thought was our special sense of touch to get it to work, but nothing did. My wife got so frustrated that she started slapping the machine and getting the attention of everyone around us.
They all started expressing their frustration, so she finally decided that we weren’t going to do the machine and just order from the cashier. The problem was, everyone was so busy either making food or catering to the precious drive through people, that we stood there for 5 minutes. My wife had enough and was like, “Excuse me, does anyone work here?! Are we going to have to go in the kitchen and make our own burgers?” Finally, someone heard her anger and quickly moved toward the register.
Is anything in order around here?
After some frustration and bitterness, we finally got it ordered, even though the salad my wife wanted “wasn’t in stock”, so she didn’t even get her food. She assured me that she would be keeping the receipt so she could let the survey people have a piece of her mind. Needless to say, we won’t be going back there anytime soon.
What this experience brought up was an idea she had for stores and such. You know how we as the consumer are doing more of the work? Like McDonald’s we are ordering from the machine, or at a grocery store, we are not only checking out by ourselves more, but also scanning the items, and bagging our own groceries? Why aren’t we getting discounts for doing all the work for these people? I know they are there for something, but it seems like we have to do more work. We might as well get a discount on it.
What do you think? Should we get a discount for doing all this work at stores now? What problems have you had with fast food or grocery stores lately?
ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH
Bitter Discounted Rate Ben
The links in this post contain affiliate links, and I will receive a small commission if you make a purchase after clicking on my link.
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Yes, we should!
I can so relate! I’ve thought and said some of these exact same things!
Like “Why would I use the self-check? I’m not employed here!” and such!
These days we have to do things that people used to do…and machines could probably do! Ha! Some of it I call monkey-work, ’cause a monkey could do it! (But, they might be unemployable because they like to monkey around too much! đŸ˜› )
HA! I think your wife is great! And, no offense to you, BB, but I envision her as a saint! đŸ˜‰ đŸ˜€ Just teasin’ you, BB! đŸ˜›
HUGS of a non-bitter nature!!! đŸ™‚
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She is definitely a saint. She puts up with the bitterness and sometimes even goes along with it to appease me, but yeah she puts up with a lot.
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đŸ™‚ Aw, that’s sweet! And I’m sure you are a great hubby! đŸ™‚
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Not so much. I’m pretty bad at most things that it takes to be a good husband.
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Aw, well, keep trying.
Hey! Sense of humor is important and you have a GREAT sense of humor. You should get points for that! đŸ™‚
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I think that is the only thing that has saved me from getting strangled honestly.
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My best friend once said that she and I should be food/restaurant critics, and I said Yeah because we criticize every place we eat!
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I would be a great critic too, but I can’t stand critics, because they are so good at tearing down people’s creative endevours and I prefer to be creative than a critic.
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I’ve been saying for a while now that we’ll be stocking the shelves in the grocery stores soon enough. It’s total bullshit. I don’t mind the self-checkout at Target because it tends to go faster for me, but literally everywhere else is a nuisance. It’s great for us to have a choice, but most of these companies are trying to drive us to machines by keeping two whole employees in the entire store. If I’m using a machine and doing someone else’s job, my receipt should be showing a discount. This machine business is the new barbarism.
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Yeah, my wife was the same. She was like, do we have to make the burgers ourselves? Come on man!
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What I really need to know is about those affiliate links? Can you help, Ben?
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I can help. It took me a while to figure out, but once I did, it clicked. What do you want to know?
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The basics first, of course. How do I get started?
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First thing you need to do is choose a company to do affiliate links with. It helps to do it with a company that has lots of products like Target or Amazon. But if you have one particular company your prefer, go with them. Most companies do them. Go to their website and usually at the bottom you will find something called affiliate program or something like it. Follow that and you will need to sign up for the program. Amazon has it at the top. With Amazon, you click on a product that you want to link to and at the top there is something that says Amazon Associates SiteStripe. It will give you the option to get your special link by either text, image or text + image. The link will be your special code. If one of your followers clicks the link, and buys the product you will get a certain percentage of the product. To put the link in your blog, you type the product out, click the link button in your WordPress editor and put the link from Amazon or whatever product and then the link will show up as a link in your post. Let me know if any of this makes sense.
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smart wife – she’s right, we are doing more things ourselves now, and not just in stores. Used to be you wanted to withdraw money from your bank account, you went into a building and asked a teller to give you some money, handing them your passbook for them to mark the transaction in it and up date your balance. Now there’s no middleman (or woman) involved. We do it all ourselves via an ATM machine. We’re saving banks a lot of money in reduced labour costs. Be nice if they rewarded us by sharing some of that extra money they are making by paying a little extra interest or bonus into our account at the end of the year
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Heck yeah banks. Instead our interest is so miniscule they can figure out how far to move the decimal point. It’s like they took the savings of people and just took the money and ran.
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Fire Dumpster for the win, Alex.
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You are correct, sir. I’m sure Saturday Night live would love to work that into one of their celebrity Jeopardy skits.
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So with you I guess it’s Bitter Wife, Bitter Life. I’d like to see stores offer discounts for stuff like self-checkout, also. But if they did, I’m sure we’d have to wait in line to collect it.
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That is so true. I just think it’s crazy where there are huge lines now for the self checkout, but short lines for actual people. I guess they don’t trust people as much as themselves.
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Aldi had the best prices and go figure, you HAVE to interact with people when you check out. No auto-checkouts in Pittsburgh anyway.
BTW, the floating dumpster fire happened literally down the hill from where I grew up. Gotta love Pittsburgh–we know how to take things next-level.
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I loved that floating dumpster fire. Not only does it describe my life, but it also was pretty fun to watch. Was it Pittsburgh that had the river on fire, or was that Cleveland?
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That was Cleveland. And it was Lake Erie! They also go big or go home.
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It so awesome that happened that Jim Rome talks about it all the time. Hilarious.
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The bottom line is it is all about the Bottom Line. Machines don’t need vacation, don’t take sick days, don’t whine, complain, don’t have to take lunch breaks, and you never have to worry whether or not they washed their hands after a potty break. It’s all about making more money by paying fewer employees.
Here’s the kicker: if you will do the work for free, why pay someone to do it? Why give you a discount to do the work? If they did that, they might as well pay an employee to give you crappy service because either way, it comes off the Bottom Line. So, as long as we do it for free, it will keep expanding. Wanna fight it? Ignore the machines and go straight to the lines staffed with real people, even if it takes longer to check out.
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I think it is funny that all of us worry about the Bottom Line when we work at the company, and worry about the company making money even though the company isn’t a real person, and we have to lay people off that are real people. Corporations are the worst.
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I definitely think that anyone who is doing all the work of a cashier and order taker should receive a discount. People would complain less.
I like ordering from real people and having a real person at checkout. That’s one more person who has a job.
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I’m glad to have a human there, but if we decide to do all the work and use the computer cashier, we should get a discount.
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