Tag: coronavirus

The irony of remote work

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

At the time I’m writing this, pretty much all schools in the Metro Atlanta area have been declared closed on Monday, on account of the arrival of Icepocalypse.  Mythical wife and the girls are excited because it’s now turned into at least a three-day weekend, and therefore will get to spend another day in jammies and not having to leave the house.

However, as for myself, despite the fact that the my office building may be or may not be closed, the fact of the matter is that I will still have to work, because, I can.  Remote work has given everyone the ability to work outside of the workplace, but that also means that all of us capable of remote work are no longer capable of using inclimate weather as an excuse to not come into the office, and thus have a bonus day off, like everyone else in my house can.

I remember like a decade ago when Snowpocalypse ravaged Atlanta with its one inch of city-crippling, debilitating snow, I got like an entire week of work off because of it.  One, because I worked for the government, and government needs absolutely no excuse at all to shut the fuck down and not work, but two, because work then was done solely in the office, and if the office is close and incapable of being gotten to, then there’s no work to do.

Make no mistake, COVID-19 revealing to the world that just about everyone is capable of working remotely was somewhat of a blessing.  Without such, I wouldn’t have gotten nearly the bonus time that I did have to raise my kids at their earliest stages, and I wouldn’t have been able to be nearly as flexible in my job performances without the ability to work from home. 

But in a rare ironic sense, WFH also sucks in the sense that in the onset of shitty winter weather, I won’t be able to phone it in and get a bonus day off like those in particular fields will be getting for at least one or more days, because I’ll simply be able to log in and do my work from afar.

I wouldn’t trade it in for full in-office work for a second, but it’s something to brog about, how ironic it is of one fairly unintentional drawback to remote work.

Dad Brog (#152): I now have a kindergartener

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When people are in high school or college, when they think about kindergarteners, they probably think about kids that are babies, barely out of diapers, a stone’s throw from being out of the womb.  When people become parents, and realize that from the day a kid is born, there’s still around five years before kindergarten comes into play, and it feels like a lifetime before the kid is walking, then is out of diapers and if you’re like my kids, navigating through three years of preschool before entering elementary school.

My firstborn is now a kindergartener, and is going to freaking elementary school now.

I still remember with crystal clarity, the days and nights spent at the hospital with #1 when she was born and was kept at the NICU on account of being premature.  I remember the hospital being closed off to visitors shortly after #1’s birth because the first COVID-19 death had occurred within a day, and began ravaging its way across the entire planet.

I still remember the diapers, the apnea monitor, the first time meetings with grandparents.  I remember the first solid food, the first crawl, the first steps.  The introduction of #2 into the mix.  The revolving door of shitty nannies, feeling like life was nothing but one big shit show trying to raise two kids in a fucked up society.

I also remember all of the extraordinary things, like all the glimpses of intelligence and emotional growth.  Traveling and watching my kids experience the world and new things.  Going into preschool, and meeting new kids for the first time and learning from peers, and seeing the breakneck speed in which she began her educational journey.

And now, kindergarten.  Elementary school.  Five years later, in elementary school.  Five years more, and it’ll be middle school.  By then, she’ll probably be 11 going on 24, thinking she has all the answers to the world.  Three more years, and then comes high school where she’ll inevitably think she has life figured out, and I used to make jokes about how with each life’s milestone achieved, that she should go out and get a job next, but at this rate, such remark will become a reality sooner rather than later.

Similarly recently, I saw some memes about how now is the introduction of the 2020 COVID babies into the school system, and varying remarks about how teachers should be ready, but I can’t really imagine what it is there’s any need for concern over.  Responsible parents kept their kids safe through the worst of the pandemic, and by the time #1 entered preschool, coronavirus was way less a threat than it was initially.  She never had to wear a mask during the height of masking up, and she started preschool at the appropriate time and age, and I don’t think her interpersonal growth was really stunted at all by the pandemic.

Frankly, such a COVID-related designation to be watched and observed really should be the classes of 2032-2035, where those were the kids, already grown, who had to completely alter their school experience, starting school in-school, getting pulled, adjusting to remote learning, and then heading back.  But not my kids, either of them, as far as I’m concerned, they’re as normal as things were pre-COVID.

The point is that it’s absolutely bonkers to me that my oldest child has just started elementary school.  She is now going to school with mythical wife, as she’s a teacher there, and has conveniently placed her where she works, giving our child the ultimate in safety nets knowing that mom is in the building with her, every day.

Which is good, because #1 has expressed nerve of moving onto the next level, because she’s spent the last three years of preschool with widely the same kids every day, and now there’s not a single one of them going to be in the same class with her now.  I’ve reminded her that most of her classmates will also be going through the same thing, and it’s also exciting to be in a situation where there’s going to be so much new-ness across the board.

And it’s not just for #1 too, because of this one step for her life’s journey, is a change for pretty much everyone in my household.  I’m now having to get up even earlier in the mornings to make sure #1 is out of bed earlier and fed, because she now goes to school with mythical wife at the teacher’s schedule, and I’m basically having to make breakfast twice, since #2 is now going to preschool by herself, on a completely different schedule.

Inevitably, that’s what life is, constant change and adapting to it, but in spite of my occasional gripes of having to be the earliest riser and on point with my parenting, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my children, and I’m not mad or grumpy about having to alter my schedule.  It’s more exciting to witness the growth of my kids and seeing what comes next in their life’s journeys.

Las Vegas sucks now, plain and simple

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Every time I come across posts or articles about the general downward trends of Las Vegas tourism, I just scoff and remind myself to hold my tongue and save it for the brog, because I think I’m in the minority now about my feelings and attitude about Las Vegas.

But as the subject of this post says, Las Vegas sucks now, and is a far cry from the place that I used to go to multiple times a year, and it makes me sad to see just how much it’s changed and how I just now have absolutely no desire to go back any time soon.  And like I said, I think I’m in the minority here, especially among my friends who all seem to think the place is still good, regardless of if they acknowledge the changes or not, and as to not be the Debbie Downer, I more often than not, keep my feelings unspoken since I don’t want to be accused of peeing in the pool.

But yeah, Las Vegas sucks now, and I fully understand why their tourism and revenues are trending downwards, and feel little opinion other than the euphemism that this is the bed they made, and they have to lay in it.

Sure, COVID had a lot to do with their state of collapse, as a city so reliant on tourism was absolutely decimated when the whole world was encouraged to stay put, but the whole city didn’t do themselves any favors once things started to return to normalcy.  It’s like the whole place went into this determined recoup-mode, and decided to up the cost of just about everything in sight in order to make up for lost dollars from the pandemic, and as often the case whenever any business raises costs to justify something, once that something has been justified, they grow so used the revenues that they make no attempt to revert or reduce, and as is the case with Vegas, they actually doubled down and kept increasing the cost of everything to further push people to see how much they can get away with.

See, the Vegas I remember and loved, it wasn’t $Fuck you.99 per night to stay anywhere on the Strip, and there weren’t Ticketmaster-amounts of resort fees every night.  Parking was often free, which justified getting a rental car so we didn’t have to get taxis everywhere, and could occasionally explore the city beyond the Strip.  Food, sure, had its upscale joints where you could feel like a baller, but there were also plenty of options where you could get a cheap meal or just enough to satiate hunger, and it not be an automatic $100+ bill.

Every resort had a buffet, and I can say that I’d been to almost all of them at various points of my life, from the Riviera’s, Aladdin’s, MGM’s, Mandalay Bay’s, and my guiltiest of pleasures was the Rio’s Carnival World Buffet, where on two different times, separated by years, I managed to get the same server who had this creepy, Igor-like demeanor, but was still nice and did his job well.  But, they’re all gone now, with to my knowledge, the only ones truly left and worth a damn, being like Caesar’s Palace, Bellagio and Cosmopolitan.

Drinks were plentiful, and thankfully is still the case, free as long as you’re gambling, but for when you weren’t blowing all your money away, a domestic beer didn’t cost $20 plus a tip.

Which brings us to gambling, where across the board, the cost to play has risen to where the last two times I went to Vegas, I was basically done after a single day’s gambling.  I used to be able to bring $500 in cash, and manage to have a pretty fun long weekend; I could be lucky enough to play with some house case from time to time, and when the trips were over, be able to come back with a little left.  Now, $500 can’t get me through a single day, which was almost literal when my last trip was just 24-hours, with gambling time being less than four of those hours.

Casinos hardly bother with fluctuating table minimums anymore, and the lowest on the Strip is like $15, which is a perfectly uneven number to where anyone who wants to play a hundo, has almost no possibly way of playing an exact amount at $15 a hand or spin of anything without having an embarrassing remainder, or need to buy back in, and it makes me think of the New York MTA and how their fares are mathematically strategized so that it’s almost impossible to zero out a fare card, and the city rakes in millions a year on forfeited remainders.

The bottom line is that Las Vegas has completely abandoned even remotely trying to cater to anyone that isn’t at the very least, upper class, or can at least pretend to be for the duration of a trip.  Middle-class and lower schmucks like me can no longer afford to go there comfortably, much less have a good time, when we’re being gauged left and right, having the city wishing they could charge us to breathe.

I’m of the belief that there’s way more money to be made in catering to everyone, and my favorite stories in business are always ones where companies have embarked on such strategies and have found immense amounts of success in doing such, like sports teams that lower their tickets, concessions and accessibility and then they make record profits.  Apps that are released for free, but then rake in millions on ad revenue and in-game micro-transactions.  Look at Wal-Mart, whose last time I checked was #1 on the Fortune 500 for the last 30 years, because they cater to the lower class, and they make fuck numbers of profits every year in doing so.

And Las Vegas turning their back to those under the upper class line, screams of elitism, catering to the wealthy and those arrogant enough to demand exclusivity, I enjoy reading and seeing things about how their numbers aren’t doing as hot as they probably wish they were doing.  I love reading comments full of shade and criticisms from people who feel similarly to how I do, abandoned and resentful, and pining for a Las Vegas that they once loved so much, they used to “joke” with their friends about exploring looking for a rental property.

Like I said, this is the bed that they made, and it’s what they have to lay in, and I hope that one day, Las Vegas can get back to closer to being the city I once loved and hopefully in time for me to have some more memorable trips with my friends and my family.

Dad Brog (#150): Next stop, kindergarten

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I blinked a few times, and now my eldest daughter has graduated pre-K, and is en route to starting kindergarten the next school year.  I still have a hard time digesting that, considering that the last five years have soared by, where my kids were born the generation of COVID babies, and the world has gone through a whole lot of hoopla to get to where we are today.

Like, it didn’t feel that surreal when #1 began 2K and went onto 3K while #2 started a year later, but more recently, it dawned on me when I went to the last Friday sing-along of the year, that this was also the final Friday sing-along for #1 outright.  Very soon, the school year was going to come to a close, and all the classmates she’s mostly had over the last three years, almost all of them are going their separate ways, since being a private pre-K, kids are from all over the place, and despite the fact that this school is zoned for a specific elementary school, almost none of them will actually be going there.

Obviously, #1 doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that she’s not going to be seeing a lot of her classmates again with any regularity very soon, and instead it’s me the parent that feels sentimental for her that she’s not going to be seeing her friends, some of whom she’s grown quite close with over the years, and we as the parents can all tell each other that this doesn’t have to be the end, but much like our own adult relationships, it basically is.

Such is the relentless passage of time and the journey of life, and my first kid has completed one of the first stages of life, being preschool.  She’s a whip-sharp, intelligent and observant kid, that has a beautiful imagination, loves to draw and paint, and I’m often floored at the academic development she’s shown over the last three years of preschool, and it’s going to be all sorts of emo-dad emotions in the future to see what she does next, starting elementary school.

As most parents aside from myself probably opine at similar circumstances, I just can’t believe that time has flown so fast, and I’ve already got a kindergartener on deck.  Aside from the financial alleviation of having one less kid in a private pre-K, it’s going to be exciting to see what lies ahead in the future as #1 takes the step into the next stage of life, entering contemporary education.

I miss the pandemic, for real

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, or even posted about it before, but I really do miss the pandemic.  This thought usually crosses my mind whenever I’m in a scenario that wouldn’t have existed during the pandemic, like being stuck in traffic on my commute to the office, or in this most recent episode, whenever an illness permeates its way into my house and waylays fucking everyone, leading to several miserable days for all.

A stomach bug of some sort, was picked up by both #2 and I concurrently, most likely at a birthday party that only we went to on Monday; Tuesday was the customary incubation day for said bug, and by Wednesday in the AM hours, shit hit the fan and we were both victims of near-identical symptoms, all of them unpleasant.  It should also be noted that Wednesday was #1’s birthday, which meant I literally spent the entirety of my own child’s birthday in bed and basically incapable of functioning.

Thankfully, #1 was not ill on her birthday, but what I feared most came to fruition the night prior, which led to this avalanche of thoughts and emotions manifesting into a salt-filled, nihilistic sounding post about how I thought the world was a vastly superior place when a killer pandemic was ravaging through it.  But Thursday was apparently the incubation day for #1, and by the AM hours, shit hits the fan, and then it’s me, of course, at like 70% myself, as the one staying up until 4:30 in the morning catching her vomiting every single half hour while the bug takes its turn with her.

Shit like this, would never have occurred during the pandemic.  The common cold didn’t happen at all, during the pandemic.  It was one of the most glorious years in human existence, 2020 was, where there wasn’t even a single day over the span of a 365-day span except for one exception which I won’t delve into, where anyone in my house was sick.  No questionable mornings where anyone woke up with a tinge in the sinuses, and requiring some preventative care, no sniffles after going out somewhere, not a single cold, much less the flu, any sinus infections or stomach bugs like the one ravaging my house right now.

No god damn sicknesses whatsoever, and it was marvelous.  But in retrospect, there’s no way that would have been allowed to continue, because that would have basically killed the medical and pharmaceutical industries, and can’t possibly have healthy populations when there’s profits to be made for white folks.

But in addition to the sheer lack of sicknesses rewarded to the intelligent who exorcised caution, it was a world where nobody had to commute into offices, remote work was the norm and championed and applauded at the adaptability and fluidity of the workforce, and not politicized and weaponized as it’s been today.

And speaking of politics, it’s the then-administration’s sheer idiocy behind pandemic response that basically united a country to boot out the orange clown from his first dictatorship, and for a brief moment in time, it genuinely felt like the United States were back to becoming America again instead of being shitty ‘Murica.

Naturally, no good thing is truly ever allowed to last, and when the dust settles, Americans always falls back into their self-destructive patterns, and here we are back to dictatorship #2, which has somehow managed to feel even more terrifying than the first one.

At this point, I genuinely wouldn’t mind if some fucking savages at a Chinese wet market started trying to eat some moar bats or some possums or some other feral wild animal, and try to get COVID-29 started up to try and correct the world all over again.  I know many probably think that the parties involved in the original COVID-19 bat-eating scenario are a bunch of hindsight murderers, but frankly I see them as quite the contrary, and wouldn’t mind if that shit fired itself up again, if it would bring us back to the utopia that 2020 really turned out to be in retrospect.

I’m tired of commuting to the office, I’m sick of stupid fucks who go out while sick with no regard for the people around them, and I’m sick to fucking death of those people passing those illnesses onto my families and allowing them into my home.  I know COVID-19 took a lot of people out, but I’m having a real hard time, especially as time goes on, at thinking their negatives actually outweigh all the positives that emerged from the time.

My 600 Lb. Life needs to go into rebuilding mode

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The other night, I logged into Max and went to My 600 Lb. Life, hoping that there would be a new episode posted.  Season 13 has been a clunker of a season, with no real standout participants for all the wrong reasons, and the show has always had a tendency to start and finish their seasons with the best or worse people. 

Episode 7 Juan was another forgettable episode, and I figured that there would have to be someone better to close out the season, but it’s never easy to tell how many episodes there are in these arbitrary seasons, because it’s never been consistent.  So after I logged in and checked in on the series, it became apparent that Juan was the last episode of the season, and mythical wife and I are just kind of like, oh..

Counting season 12, I think it’s safe to say that the series as a whole has put up two straight clunker seasons.  There have been no real memorable participants, and although it’s the guiltiest of pleasures to see when some of them turn into shitheads and fail spectacularly, an occasional success story is always welcome and leaves viewers like me feeling optimistic and satisfied for five minutes. 

But over the course of the last two seasons, there have been barely any successes, even fewer to actually succeed and get the weight loss surgery, and an increasing number of participants whom never even get to Houston and the episodes are these droll journeys of stock footage of Dr. Now wandering around his clinic or St. Joe’s Hospital lamenting at the dangers of being morbidly obese, and occasional video calls with participants where they’re all super eager to comply and participate, before they hang up and do jack shit.

I know the pandemic made TLC and the show have to pivot and allow for more remote participants, but what was the exception has gradually become normal, and the episodes where you just know that a big motherfucker ain’t going to step foot in Houston and actually get face to face with Dr. Now, where the real charm and magic of the show tends to happen.

In fact, S13E06 Deshaun was probably the most depressing episode of My 600 Lb. Life I’ve ever seen, and that’s really saying something considering the clinging to survival nature of the show as a whole.  The man from Omaha had no goals, no aspirations, no dreams, and no motivation whatsoever, with the closest thing to a want being, getting out of Omaha and going to fucking Missouri.  Like, when the place you want to end up going to is Missouri, you know the bar couldn’t possibly be buried under the ground any lower.

Unsurprising, he like loses no weight, dodges his weigh-ins, so we never get a number of his actual weight, dodges his virtual therapy sessions, is extremely difficult to get a hold of with Dr. Now, and by the time the episode ends, two months early, he’s completely fallen out of contact, and is speculated to have blocked Dr. Now’s office outright. 

As I’m watching this episode, I know all human life is precious and all that, but I genuinely was feeling like this is a person that really has no business, existing.  He probably draws disability, basically exists solely to eat trash and play video games and watch television, but he provides even less purpose to the world than inmates in prison, whom at least have to do some sort of labor to repay society.

I’d never been more depressed watching an episode of My 600 Lb. Life more than I have with Deshaun, and that’s a pretty bold proclamation because there have been episodes where the participants have actually died.

Frankly, I think the show really needs to go back to the drawing board with their format.  It genuinely feels like it’s been on auto-pilot for the last 4-5 seasons, but it’s easier to ignore when you get the occasional gem of a participant who is a total trainwreck, an ass to Dr. Now, which usually takes the shackles off of him to start zinging back, but then eventually goes to therapy, supercharges their mental health and they get on the train and actually lose some fucking weight.

But over the last few seasons, the show has basically been following a template.  Every episodes starts with the participant waking up, lamenting on how they’re surprised to be alive, they have an awkward shower and then eat the mother of all breakfasts before the first commercial break.  Month 1 starts with them all talking about this doctor in Houston that specializes in helping people like me as if we all haven’t seen the last 13 seasons of this show, and depending on where they’re located, either they make a very long drive where you just know every participant is looking forward to the highways of road food available to them and they gain an extra 5-10 lbs before they see Dr. Now, or as has been increasing, they’re just too far away from Houston, and have a mostly pointless video call with Dr. Now, eagerly agree to get started on the program, and then hang up and probably go on another binge once the cameras are off.

Afterward, 9 out of 10 participants completely fail to meet the initial weight loss milestone, and nobody ever exceeds it, and Dr. Now has been too nice and too empathetic over the last two seasons, mostly because his reputation seems to precede him and nobody wants to throw hands with Ali, and he has little reason to be tough in return, and he just tells them the same goal, 70 pound in two munt and they’re on their merry way.

The show then goes into a strange fast forward through the remainder of the months, with sometimes them going back to Houston for follow-ups, and others ducking Dr. Now or their appointed therapy, and if there’s any surgeries, they usually happen in like months 7-10, and that’s only if they’ve managed to get their shit together and lost at least 80% of their goal weight loss, and find a place to live in Houston. 

The endings of every episode feel real rushed and hackneyed, and it’s fairly obvious to me that such is done in order to create separation between the filming of an episode of My 600 Lb. Life versus their eventual Where Are They Now? episode, and I feel like the latter is probably why the prime show has gotten so templatized, because the spin-off has become as much of a mainstay as the prime, and it’s like it’s a means to conserve content so that there can be a follow-up.

Like I said, I think the show needs to take a few steps back and reset their approach to producing.  I get that Dr. Now is like 80, not going to be doing this much longer, and probably on a personal level, doesn’t want to deal with shitheads like the Assanti brothers, and people who give him a colossal amount of grief.  But this shit is television, and we degenerate viewers need to see some shitheads and strong personalities that bring the best-worst out of Dr. Now, and everyone ends up happy when he lights a fire under their asses and drags results out of them.

So we need some real strong participants, that will bring out the Dr. Now fans all love, perhaps some more stringent participant rules and guidelines to ensure we have fewer Deshauns who turtle up the whole episode and more Jonathans (S13E01) who actually manage to do things with his life.  The current format has also been a little deceptive in presentation, because most everyone over the last few seasons fails after their initial consult, and we’re never seeing the diet cheating they’re doing, so that it’s more of a surprise (but it’s not) when they go to their next weigh-in and have only lost like 7 lbs.  It’s like, we know they’re going to fuck up, might as well let us see it.

Fewer remote participants because the journey is already hard enough, but adding insurmountable distance on top it leads to more episodes you just know are going to eventually dead end, and at one point, I found it to be astounding when there was a season where zero people actually got surgery, but now it’s becoming the norm, and this isn’t helping.

I love the show too much to give up on it cold turkey, but we’ve literally had two straight duds of seasons.  Megalomedia, TLC, and the Nowzaradans need to get their shit together, and breathe some life back into the series, because although I might, I can’t speak for everyone else out there, on if they’ll tolerate sitting through a third straight turdy pound turd, especially when we all know what the series is capable of.

Is this anyone else’s experience or just mine?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Obviously, it’s arrogant of me to assume that I’m the only person in the world who deals with this on a regular basis, but who really knows; I might be the only one who thinks about it to length enough to blab about it in a brog that nobody reads.  The point remains however, that this is still a phenomenon that I deal with on a daily basis, and I’m curious to know just how much this is the case in places all around the country and the rest of the world.

But I can’t help but feel like this is a behavior that spawned from life after the murderous peak of COVID.  I’ve said it many times, that I kind of miss the COVID era, minus all the senseless death and tragedies to people who really didn’t deserve it, but if there was one thing that was really nice about the whole pandemic is that it sure as hell made the roads really, really nice to drive around on.

I never really minded the early onset of return to office, because I quickly learned how much more efficiently I worked when I was in the office setting, plus it gave me the opportunity to formally return to a gym regimen.  But the commutes to and from the office were that of dreams, being able to leave the house at 8:45 and make it to the office at 8:57, almost nobody else walking into the building, almost always having an elevator to myself.

Now, I’m fucked if I leave the house at anything after 8:35, and I usually get to the parking lot at 8:55 if I’m lucky, and there’s always a ton of other people headed into the building at the same time, and I often have to get into an elevator with 2-4 other people where inevitably someone will be coughing, peaking my anxiety about getting sick because we’re long past the days of masks in public.

And in the midst of my obnoxious commute, is a whole fucking lot of this bullshit behavior; people camping the left lanes way long in advance, because they need to get ready to get on the highway, a lightyear away.

I really feel like this really started happening after COVID, because during COVID, driving behaviors in general kind of reset all over the place, and lots of common sense behavior and tendencies were forgotten all over the place.  Left is the fast lane, right for slower drivers, right-of-way rules, all of that shit seems to have been forgotten, as lots of olds have died off and stopped driving outright, and there was even a point where dumbass 17-year olds didn’t even have to take behind-the-wheel training in order to get a license.

But left lane camping, as what I like to call it, seems to have gone way the fuck up since COVID restrictions and return-to-office mandates have come into play.  There are two major left turns that I have to make on my morning commute, and it’s ridiculous the amount of camping that goes on, every single morning, by people who want to get in their lane that inevitably takes them to the left-turn lane they eventually need to be in, as early as humanly possible, regardless of how many other motorists might need to be in them, get into them, for them to make sooner left turns than they do.

There’s a stretch that’s jump into every morning where it’s around four miles until you get to the highway; every single morning, commuters pile into the one lane that inevitably dead-ends into the left turn lane of said intersection as early as humanly possible.  It doesn’t matter how empty the adjacent lane is, people will fight gangbusters in order to get into this particular lane so they don’t have to worry about switching again for the next four miles.

And not only do they give no fucks about getting passed or how much they’re inconveniencing motorists who need to turn in one mile, two miles or three miles, nobody is going to move them out of their lane to where they might actually have to put some effort into driving.

Heaven forbid you try to squeeze in at any point, because once these types of drivers get into their desired lane, they will defend their spot like they’re a Spartan warrior against the forces of Xerxes.

Naturally, the second major left turn that I need to make every day is the one that takes me to my office building.  The thing is, there are three different ways I can enter, but they all require a left turn to get in; my preferred one is the last one, as it is the closest to my actual building, but I’m not picky, if I see that the first or the second one has a green light, I’ll do it, just so I can get out of the petty rat race of left lane campers who will trudge along in a voluminous lane, because they need to get onto the highway that’s five miles away.

And honestly, it’s getting worse; since the school year started, and commuters are in an adjustment phase to their daily routes, to account for school buses and elevated traffic, I’m finding that on my route home, there are tons of people now camping the left lanes on my way home, where this was not the case just a few weeks ago.

It’s among my biggest pet peeves now when it comes to observing the behavior of the drivers all around me, and it’s times like these when I’m stuck behind a bullshit line of cars in a left lane, while everyone in the adjacent and right-er lanes are flying by, I begin to pine for the days of coronavirus, when so many of these shitheads were simply off the roads altogether.