What’s wrong with being drunk?

Ask a glass of water.

I don’t know if this qualifies as revenge, or just justice, but it’s a good story, so I’ll tell it.

For background - I live in the Phoenix area, so in the summer, air conditioning is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.

Shady a/c tech put far too much freon in my system, charged me $500 for it, then every time the compressor turned on, it shook the house… The goal, I believe, was to ruin my old unit (a compressor will fail catastrophically if it pulls in liquid rather than gas) so they could sell me a new one for ~$8k. Overnight I went from knowing next to nothing about air conditioning to knowing enough to not take their shit… Gave the company the chance to make it right, but they doubled down, continued to say it was just because my system was old.

So I called another company - they found it was in fact massively overcharged, I had to pay ~$200 to have the excess freon removed (which, coincidentally was about what it should have cost to fix it properly in the first place).

Then I talked to my credit union to see if I could do a chargeback- I had used my debit card to pay the shady company. At first they were reluctant to take it on, since it wasn’t the typical fraud case, they said it would be very difficult to prove- but because I had done the research and had everything laid out for them, they started the process. There was some back and forth, my offense was all technical with sources cited, the company’s defense amounted to “we have x satisfied customers and have been in business for y years”… at one point the owner of the company called me, talked shit about me spending “a few minutes on the internet” and thinking I was an expert, and threatened to take me to court- I said “go ahead, then this will all be public record.” He didn’t sue me. I won the chargeback and never heard from the company or the owner again.

O yeah!

What if I don’t like coffee?

approach them the way you would feel comfortable being approached

I would feel comfortable with a woman walking up to me and saying, “hi, let’s fuck” so I don’t think your advice is very good.

Then she cheats on me with a dude I don’t know the name of (except I’ve unfortunately seen his dick)

This seems like it could be an interesting story, do you mind sharing?

For some… solidarity? Doesn’t seem like the right word but whatever… I know the name of the guy my wife cheated on me with - he’s our son’s best friend’s dad.

Doing nothing definitely won’t get you anywhere.

Not necessarily true, I’ve never been conventionally attractive, but I’ve had women approach me multiple times, in fact all but one (out of… 6 I guess) of my long term relationships were initiated by the woman… Of course that was when I was young, now I’m 50 and going through a divorce, I’m not holding my breath…

That’s what I thought about my wife… We worked together, I wasn’t looking for a relationship, in fact had just come out of a bad one and intended to be single for a while, but she was persistent in putting herself close to me, and while she didn’t exactly “ask me out” she did push me into situations that very much resembled dates… After about a year we moved in together, then another year we were married… 19 years and 2 kids later, she started up a relationship with another guy in much the same way, but I was preoccupied with health problems so didn’t notice for a couple months. When I did start to notice, she told me I was crazy, ridiculous, a few other not nice things, said he was “just a friend” or “nice to talk to”… But that she wanted a divorce because she had been unhappy for pretty much our entire marriage. I ended up having to talk to the other guy (because of course it was someone we both knew, our son’s best friend’s dad in fact) to get confirmation, and found out just how long it had been going on. He said she had told him we had been separated for “a while” but still living together for the sake of the kids. When I said that wasn’t true, he seemed genuinely distressed and apologized pretty convincingly, and said he was going to break it off… of course I can’t be sure he was being honest either… Holy traumadump, batman…

So now you are treating this person as not a person… Good talk.

Where there are lots of people close together, weird how that works…

Yes but that might take a few years, we need to prop up our shitty city now…

I miss my mini. With the rear seats folded down, it had a surprising amount of cargo capacity.

I tried an airzound, it was not as effective as the boat horn. Though to be fair, it was a long time ago - so long, in fact, that I could go to RadioShack and buy dust remover spray to replace the canister, and it was significantly cheaper than the official refills at marine supply stores…

I used to have one wedged between the brake and gearshift levers of my bicycle, so I could hit the button with my thumb, it was very handy.

Getting married…

My wife lied about who she was and what she wanted from me for 20 years before she started fucking another guy… She even managed to hide that from me for a few months, and continued to try to hide it as I figured out what was going on… I ended up having to talk to the guy (because of course it was someone we both knew) to get confirmation- and I thought it had only just started, he’s the one who told me it had been going on for months. He said she told him we were already separated, just living in the same house to keep things stable for the kids… He seemed genuinely distressed and apologetic to find out that wasn’t true, and from my wife’s change in demeanor afterwards, I think he broke it off with her, though she was still trying to stay close to him, under the guise of letting our kids play together… But I suspect even that’s stopped now, based on what I hear from our daughter… Sounds like she’s latched onto another guy she works with… Which is how we met way back when… And she still hasn’t filed the divorce papers, she started working on it back in March… At this point I’m going to beat her to it, I’ve been talking to a couple lawyers…

I was raised a combination of atheist (mom) and Quaker (dad) - the atheism definitely won, though I did internalize a decent amount of the Quakerism… I was engaged to a Catholic girl in my mid-20s. We discussed things early on, I said I’d respect her beliefs if she’d respect my lack thereof, and for a while it worked out nicely, we’d talk about spiritual stuff, but neither of us was trying to convert the other, it was more of a “how do you feel about x” or “how do you explain y”… But after a while, she decided that since I was “preventing” her from going to church some Sundays (I wasn’t, I was fine with her going without me, she just didn’t want to if she had the option to stay in bed and fool around with me, and why on earth would I turn her down?) that she wanted me to go with her the next Sunday whenever she skipped one. In retrospect, this was the first nail in the coffin of our relationship, but of course I didn’t recognize it at the time. It took us moving in together permanently for me to see how controlling she was, and how mean she could be if she didn’t get her way…

I prefer elephantoplasty…