Me

One of the things I am doing is changing the way that we handle Internet and Television. That system is a ripoff thanks to what they call “bundling.” My last bill was $230 for CATV and Internet. We don’t get any premium channels. I am trying to figure out what I am getting for all of this, but I have seen Greek instruction manuals that are less confusing than our cable bill:

• They charge me $102 for Internet service that is nominally at 800MBps. When I check it, the best I get is around 50-70 MBps. My in-laws live 2 miles away and are getting 250 MBps, according to speedtest. So I decide that I am not paying for speed that I’m not getting and look to see what a lower speed would save me. Lowering my speed to 400 would actually RAISE my bill by $22 a month. Going to 200 would raise my bill by $34 a month. Yeah, I know that they have a disclaimer that says speed can vary, but only getting 10% of what they are advertising seems to be a stretch.

• Now on to television. My wife watches far more of it than I do, but I do occasionally watch. Mostly movies, hockey, and old television shows. My wife loves watching shows like medical dramas. I can’t stand those, but we gotta keep the wife happy. They charge us $91 for 185 channels. Cutting it to the 125 channel option would save us a whopping 94 cents per month. If I go to only 10 channels, it would save me $40, but I can get those same 10 channels with an antenna for free.

They bundle them together, and the bill claims that with discounts, I am being charged $130 a month. Seems reasonable, so how do they arrive at my $230 biil?

• Add-ons. They charge us $30 for three cable boxes, another $10 for DVR service, $6 for the remote controls so we can use their cable boxes, and $38 a month in service, sports, and local channel fees, Then add in the taxes, and the total bill is a quarter grand. $3k a year for cable and Internet. Believe it or not, this is the best of the providers in our area. We tried DSL. That service has even slower Internet. T-mobile has a home Internet that works over 5g cell towers, but there is a 200gb per month data limit. That isn’t going to work if we stream. They are raping us because there are really no other options.

So I called them. We are getting rid of cable TV and cutting the Internet speed to 400mB/s. Why pay for 800 when we never get speeds that high, anyway? If it continues, I may even cut it further. We already have Amazon Prime and Netflix, because they were free with other things that we already have and pay for. So here is the plan:

• Internet: $87
• Netflix: Free
• Amazon Prime: paid for through other means
• Paramount+ $12/mo
• Hulu (with ads): $8/month
• Peacock (with ads): $5/month

So it will cost us $25 for TV and $87 for Internet. Once we see if there will be any hidden charges, especially from the not-so-transparent Internet provider, we can consider upgrading to the “no ads” version of the above services, which will cost us an additional $19 per month. However, we just cut our cable/internet bill from $230 to $112 per month.

There are some things that commenters say, not just on this board, but on the Internet in general that really make you come off as being less intelligent. As the owner of this site, I am not going to prohibit them, but I do want people to be aware that saying these things makes people want to ignore anything that you have to say. Call them my pet peeves. I will still post comments like this, but I can’t promise that I won’t roll my eyes while clicking the “allow publication” button, nor can I promise that I won’t make fun of you for it:

• Using “HONK!” in a comment. I get that you are trying to sound smart by calling things “clown world” but it really makes you look like a moron. When I see this, it is a sure indicator that the rest of the post will not make a coherent point and is guaranteed to be annoying. Make your point without it.
• Writing a comment that so poorly uses the common rules of English grammar that your post is indecipherable. Honestly, I just skip your comment without reading it when I see things with tons of deliberate misspellings and poor grammar. Life is too short to spend several minutes rereading your comment and trying to decipher what you meant to say.
• Don’t purposely misspell names to sound clever. Obozo, Teabaggers, Trumpf, Bushitler, Magats, all of those are juvenile put-downs that do nothing to forward a real exchange of ideas. It usually is a huge distraction from whatever point you are trying to make.

It reminds me of how people used “word” for everything back in the late 80s. You would say, “I love chocolate ice cream,” and someone would reply with: “Word.” Feel free to roast me for being a grumpy old man in the comments to this post.

My ongoing series about carrying in hospitals has been a bit of a disappointment to me. I am receiving a number of messages, comments, and emails warning me about raising a fuss with an employer about firearms. A couple of points:

Nurses in Florida are in extremely short supply. Good emergency nurses, even more so. To the point where hospitals are paying bonuses of $10,000 a year just to accept a job there, on top of their pay. Considering that nursing is an associate’s degree, a nurse fresh out of school who is starting with no experience is being offered $70,000 a year is pretty good money.

Unarmed security guards in Florida have to take a 40 hour class. They are easily replaced, and there is no hospital that is going to fire a nurse over their disagreement with the opinions of a security guard, barring unusual circumstances.

With that being said, I am not dumb enough to give the guard any of those unusual circumstances. I was polite and that is why it pissed off that guard. It went like this:

Security Guard: That law doesn’t apply here. You can’t carry a gun here because (reasons covered in other post)

DM: Really? I didn’t see that in the statute. Can you point me to that law, or cite the number? I would like to read it for myself.

SG: (produces Facebook page of local cops) See? The cops even say so. Just trust that security and the police know the law better than you do. It’s our job to worry about the law, you guys just need to worry about the medicine. If you see anyone that you think might have a gun, let us know and we will take care of it.

So like I said, Mall Ninja is practicing law by reading Facebook posts. So if THAT is the reason why I get fired, so what? Nursing shortage- I will have another job within a couple of days. Even so, that is why I have the emergency fund that I talked about last month. It’s called “fuck you” money. Don’t let someone use money to control you. You should be working on your financial independence.

To my second point, and the thing that really has me disappointed: If those of us in the freedom/gun community are too afraid to even ask questions of a security guard about gun policies at your place of employment, then how are we ever thinking that we will use those guns to defend your rights? If you won’t even risk pissing off a Mall Cop at your job, how will you ever use those same guns to defend freedom? If so, the entire argument about the Second Amendment is moot. You might as well turn them in for some gift cards. Think about how far you are willing to go in defending your rights.

I would also add that the nurses in the emergency room tend to be on the Conservative end of the spectrum. It’s hard to see what we see and still have a bleeding heart. I have already had in depth conversations about guns with several nurses and Doctors at the new job. Most of them belong to the local gun club, and there are even a couple of III% and Molon Labe stickers on vehicles in the parking lot. A couple of us are looking to setup a range day, and one nurse I was talking to is a precision rifle shooter who builds his own rifles and rolls his own ammo because factory isn’t precise enough. He was telling me about a 1,000 yard range that he makes the drive to. This is the most progun ED that I have ever worked in.

This new hospital is a much different environment from the old one. The first several weeks are spent learning every policy and procedure that the hospital has- and they have policies and procedures for everything from pregnancy testing to inserting foley catheters. They want things done a certain way, and they spend quite a bit of time making sure that you know what that way is. I am busy doing online training while I am at home- they pay you an extra 4 hours a week for doing it. So you work your three 12 hour shifts, do your online training, and get paid for 40 hours.

The ED is about twice the size from the old one, with three times the staff. It’s more organized, better managed, and the employees seem happier. On my first day, they presented me with a welcome card that was signed by dozens of the nurses working there.

It will take me a few months to get fully up to speed, but things are much better than they were at the old hospital.

I was awakened this morning at 5 am by a text message from the charge nurse at my now former job. He wanted to let me know that they were calling me off for my scheduled shift today. I responded that I already knew that, as they had told me last week that I was no longer on the schedule. I respect this nurse and he wasn’t part of the decision to let me go, so no hard feelings.

Then I got another text message from management at 9am that reads:

We removed you from the schedule for the rest of this week. Good luck to you in your new job. Our loss is their gain. Please return your ID badges at your convenience.

I haven’t worked there for 3 weeks. That means I have already received my last paycheck. There is no reason for me to go back there to return my IDs, and it is therefore not convenient to me.

I am still on the text messaging group that my (now former) job uses to communicate with employees. I just got a text message that all employees need to attend a mandatory training session on Tuesday the 23rd so they can be trained on the new Philips cardiac monitoring system that is being installed on Wednesday the 23rd. It seems that they just spent a quarter of a million to replace 3 year old monitoring system with a new monitoring system. Now I know why they can’t afford to pay anyone.

An hour after losing my job and promising the wife that I won’t spend any money until I start getting paychecks again, I get an email from Sportsman’s Warehouse that looks like this:

I asked my readers whether or not I should give 2 weeks’ notice. Giving two weeks’ notice doesn’t mean anything, and when it comes time to get rid of employees, employers are quick to point out that Florida is an “at will” employment state where you can be terminated at any time, for any reason. I gave a month’s notice to one job when I left for PA school in a different state, and left on what I thought were good terms. They even threw me a going away party. I am on the “no rehire” list.

Well, I gave two weeks’ notice last week. I drove into work and had a very cordial conversation with my manager. I told him the story about how the HR director wouldn’t even offer to pay more in order to keep me. His response was that the HR director should not have been so unprofessional, and that he would be mentioning it to the Chief of Nursing. He then told me that I would like working at my new hospital, because he has heard a lot of good things about them. I am the third nurse this month to head over there, just from my department. He told me that I was great at my job, and the department would be worse off without me. It was very cordial.

So what happened next? My current employer fired me this morning. By text message. This is the text message I just got from my manager:

We are removing you from the schedule for this week and next week. So now you can move forward with your new position.

Cowards. They didn’t even have the guts to tell me I was fired, or to do it to my face. Instead, I get “removed from the schedule.” This proves is that the old standard of giving a two week notice is no longer the norm in the United States. It would have been better for me if I had simply worked to the end, then told them on the way out the door at the end of my last shift that I wouldn’t be returning. Doing the “right” thing just cost me two weeks’ pay.