Tag Archives: rant

Recovery time

Leave a reply

I’m so frustrated dealing with injury recovery. I feel like I’m living my life in recovery mode.

Sciatic pain: 4 months of limited cardio, stopped my weekend walks for 5 weeks, and while now pain free, I am still coming back slowly so as not to trigger it again.

Golfer’s elbow: Ongoing. It reminds my that it’s still there every few days.

Teris major (the muscle behind the deltoid on my right shoulder): No idea how I injured it, but it stops me from getting a good night’s sleep, and has forced me to take it easy on all kinds of exercises to avoid pain.

My buddy is coaching me on keeping the weights I do down and focusing on good technique. I’m actually listening rather than being a stubborn fool who just pushes through pain like I’ve done for decades. But, dang, this is mentally tougher than actually pushing myself.

I’ve spent my athletic life being the underdog. I was the smallest kid being picked last on teams until Grade 10. Playing water polo and having the most inefficient swim stroke made me one of the slowest players in the pool… who had to work harder than anyone, with less rest, on every swim set.

I got accustomed to pushing hard to compensate for my shortcomings. What I lacked in talent I made up for with heart and effort. I learned how to push myself… hard! And now I know that this is not the way forward. Now I have to be smarter than to push through pain and injury. I need to be ok with showing up and doing the work that will protect me from future injuries rather than bring them on.

It’s so much easier to say than to do.

If I’m honest, this sucks. A few days ago I mentioned that I’d like to go one week injury free, I concluded in that post,

I’m reminded of the quote, ‘Choose your hard.’

When I’m sedentary my back aches. When I’m working out, different muscles choose to ache. Well, I guess I just have to choose my ache. Yet I’m actually not joking when I say, when I beg, can I please get one week ache free, just to know what that’s like.”

Being constantly in recovery mode is not the kind of hard I want, but it’s the kind of hard I have to face right now. Progress currently isn’t getting better or stronger, it’s not losing ground while I let my body heal. The trick is not to injure anything else in the process.

Daily aches

1 Reply

I was joking with a buddy yesterday and said, “What I wouldn’t do to have one week with no part of my body aching.”

I dealt with sciatic pain from December to March. I’ve been dealing with golfer’s elbow almost as long and it pops back unexpectedly, even when I’m not using it much. And now, I’ve got a deltoid pain that is making it hard to sleep comfortably.

The sciatic pain has caused me to reduce my cardio goals. I’ve also been less focused on lifting heavy and my buddy is coaching me on both better form, and also pacing myself in the gym… things I can struggle with on my own. And still the aches and pains persist.

Granted, I’m not in agonizing pain every day with my back haunting my every move, like I was 20 years ago, and I’m in great shape… but the aches! I’m tired of alway feeling like I’m on the mend.

I’m reminded of the quote, ‘Choose your hard.’

When I’m sedentary my back aches. When I’m working out, different muscles choose to ache. Well, I guess I just have to choose my ache. Yet I’m actually not joking when I say, when I beg, can I please get one week ache free, just to know what that’s like.

Crappy user experience

Leave a reply

A bit of a rant here. I’m doing some medical expense claiming and my provider has an App that is not designed with the end user in mind. First I have to go to 3 different pages to make a claim. Then after all the claim details are entered, I have to scroll down on a confirmation page that has my address on individual lines that take up to much screen real-estate that the ‘Consent and Declaration’ is hidden under the ‘Submit’ button. So you end up hitting the Submit button only then to learn that you need to scroll down and click the consent, which opens up in another page.

Also, I use my laptop and phone for much of the day and don’t need reading glasses, but my pharmacy prints the details I need to make the above claim in tiny, hard to read font. This is so unnecessary. It’s already really confusing trying to locate all the information, which is spread out into 3 different sections of the prescription receipt, does it also need to be in microscopic font? This is the only thing I’ve had to put reading glasses on to see in the last few months.

I get tired of user interfaces that are designed for the product and not the user. The insurance company probably doesn’t want to claims to be easy to do, they’d rather you had to go through a more challenging process to make a claim. The pharmacy changed their format so that the prescription receipt gets printed on a small sticker, and I’m sure cost saving was more important to them than providing a readable receipt for their aging customers. And this kind of behaviour may or may not be intentional, but it is ignorant of the end user’s experience. I’ve complained before about inconsistencies in remote controls, apps that want your attention at the cost of your convenience, and how it feels like we are decades behind where we should be when doing things like setting up a new printer. I would say that over 95% of the things I rant about are related to products and services providing crappy user experiences.

How hard would it be to have the customer in mind as a priority, rather than an afterthought?

Avoid this, try this, buy this

Leave a reply

I am getting sick and tired of social media ads these days. They are following a recipe designed to make you less knowledgeable, more stressed, and frankly dumber. Here are the two main formulas, or should I say ingredients, in these tasteless ads:

Either:

“Don’t eat these 3 items that are killing you.” Followed by a list that includes seed oils, or certain nuts, or another common item in your kitchen. Before plugging a product, or casually naming a name brand item while suggesting alternatives.

Or:

“Doctors hate me.” Followed by an exercise program or diet that has made the person ultra fit without ‘traditional’ medicines and practices. What,you need is our callisthenics program, Tai Chi, ‘Just 9 minutes a day’, or the Butt Blaster 3000.

It’s ‘Avoid this – it’s killing you!’ And then a product plug. Or it’s ’Transform your body, it’s easier than you think… if you buy into what I’m selling.’

And none of these are 30 seconds long. They are all longer format where they attempt to suck you in, feeling invested in the video for a minute or two before the secret to a better or healthier you is revealed.

But there is no real science behind what is claimed. Or worse yet, there are some factual aspects that are proven but irrelevant. “Did you know that ingredient XYZ in product ABC causes cancer?’ You didn’t, so you watch the video. But what isn’t shared is that the dangerous amount of that item would be 10,000 times the dose you would get from eating product ABC… and it only ever showed a link to cancer when that massive dose was fed to mice for continuous days or weeks.

These ads scare you with ‘facts’ that aren’t actually scary, or make promises that a program or product will change your life with a sample size of one person who is telling you how ‘This worked for me and it will work for you too’.

Fear and false promises are being sold on a grand scale and this formula is just showing up more and more. I guess from the amount of ads like this that I’ve seen, the formula is working.

(I’m sure everyone who tries Tia Chi looks like this at 62! 🤦‍♂️)

Extra sauce please

Leave a reply

This is a bit of a rant.

I hate ordering food and it comes with a tiny side of sauce. It’s annoying. Would it really be too expensive to add what would be 5-10 cents more sauce on a $15-25 dish?

When waiters walk by can they not see that I’m on my 2nd of 5 chicken fingers and I’m already scraping the bottom of the puny sauce container? Do I really have to ask for more?

When I’m at the bottom of the salad and I’m eating dressing-less lettuce, do you think I’m enjoying my meal? When I’m scraping the last tiny streaks of raspberry purée from an almost perfectly white plate to add a tiny morsel of the flavour to my last bite of cheesecake, am I thinking about how wonderful my final bite is going to taste?

I’m a saucy guy… give me the sauce, don’t make me ask.

Thank you!

It should be getting easier, but it isn’t

Leave a reply

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that we live in the 21st-century. It should be getting easier, but it isn’t. All of our schools just got new photocopy machines, and there is a one hour video tutorial to learn how to use them. More videos and instructions are required, if you are the one who is doing any kind of basic maintenance like replacing the toner.

Related to this, when was the last time you bought a new TV and you instantly knew how to use the remote? I find incredible irony that there is nothing universal about a universal remote control. I don’t know, call me crazy, but I would think that in this day and age the tools we use would get simpler to use, not more complicated.

Borrow a friend’s car and try to fill the gas tank and you’re left puzzled as to where the release is for the gas tank’s door. Go to the gas station and there’s a process to get your rewards card punched in, because you don’t have room in your wallet for 17 rewards program cards. Try to connect your phone to that same borrowed car, and you’re worried that you’re going to have to cancel another users profile. Or you are faced with a touch screen menu that just doesn’t make intuitive sense.

How is it that the user interface of almost everything we do now is more complicated than necessary? Why is it that every single place we go to online we’re expected to login or create an account, or at the very least close one or two pop-up invitations to do so? i’m looking at a website for 30 seconds, to find out one piece of information, do I really need to decide whether or not I want to accept cookies?

My microwave has a touch dial where I have to spin my finger in a circle to get to the appropriate time. I don’t think I can ever hit the time I want without toggling back-and-forth. This takes me significantly longer than if I had to punch three number keys on a touchpad and hit ‘Start’. There is nothing convenient about this. And that’s my point…

We live in an era when things should be getting a lot easier, user interfaces should be intuitive and natural to use, but instead everything seems to be getting a little more difficult. I just don’t get it.

I don’t ever ‘want to’ see ‘wanna’

Dear Siri,

I love speech to text. When I’m on the go I want to just speak into my phone and not bother typing. This is such a handy way to get words into a text or email with minimal effort. But this is the age of AI and it’s time to grow up and get a little more intelligent.

I don’t ever ‘want to’ say ‘wanna’.

“I don’t ever wanna see that word as a result of you dictating what I say.” (Like you just did.)

Listen to me Siri, I know my diction isn’t perfect. I know I don’t always enunciate the double ‘t’ in ‘want to’. But after I’ve gone to settings and created a text replacement shortcut from wanna to want to;

After I’ve corrected the text you’ve dictated from wanna to want to hundreds of times… Can you learn this simple request?

Don’t ever assume I want to say wanna!

Please.

Block and Move to Junk

I might have shared a similar rant before, but I had to deal with this a few times last week and I hope at least one person in sales will learn from this.

If you cold email me with a product or service when we have had no relationship beforehand, that’s a cold call, it’s a virtual knock on a strangers email door. I find it annoying. I understand it’s hard to get your product in front of people and while I don’t like it much, I tolerate it.

However, when you then follow up with an email saying, “I haven’t heard back from you…” Well now that’s just rude. I don’t owe you anything for taking my unsolicited time to look at and maybe even read your first message. You didn’t hear from me because I’m not interested. How many thousands of ‘I haven’t heard back from you’ emails do you have to send to get a positive response? I bet it’s astronomically low. I bet your time would have been better used elsewhere.

On Friday, I got a call from someone who had sent me an email and a follow up. The only reason it got through my secretary is because the product name had the word ‘class’ in it, my secretary thought the voice sounded like a student, and I said to put it through instead of asking her to take a message like I usually do. When he started in with, “Hi, I’m [Name] from [Company], I’m not sure if you’ve had a chance to look at my last 2 emails…” I was already done. I was actually politer than I needed to be and started into a routine I’ve gotten pretty good at. I start with ‘We’ve gone through a lot of changes in the last while and I’m not interested in adding anything new at this time… and I go on for about 10 more seconds on double speed and end with, ‘I wish you all the best but we really are not interested, thanks, bye’. And I hang up even if the person has time to respond.

No, if I didn’t respond to your first email then I’m not interested in your product or even a free trial. A follow up email won’t help. A follow up email then phone call is doubly obnoxious. In fact, you can be sure of two things. First, I don’t want to work with you even if your product is great. And second, I won’t see a third email from you because I’ve blocked you and moved your email to junk. If enough of us did that after second unsolicited cold-call emails, that company email address might even find itself on the wrong side of spam filters… and I’m ok with that because if their first email wasn’t spam to begin with, their second email was definitely was.

Not so techie

I’ve shared before about how I’m not as tech savvy as most people think. The reality is that I’m just willing to spend a lot of time getting to the bottom of an issue, and so my savviness has more to do with patience than with prowess. That said, I’m getting very frustrated with the technology challenges that seem to be coming my way that I can’t solve. A couple days ago the WordPress App stopped working. I could no longer save anything on it and so I couldn’t write posts on my phone. I deleted and re-installed the app, I tried logging in with my back-up access account, and then I gave up and finally moved to the Jetpack App that I have been begrudgingly avoiding. I didn’t want to make the switch because it forces block editing, which I think is clunky and works against me, rather than helping me with my writing. Now that app won’t work with my blog either. Maybe that’s a good thing because I wanted to write on my laptop rather than phone, so this might be the push that I needed.

Still, this wasn’t my only technology challenge this week or today. My wife is with her parents and her dad can’t access his Shaw mail. It’s an issue on his computer because my wife can access it on her phone and I can access it on my computer, so it has to be an issue with his machine. But the account uses web-based access and I suggested updating Chrome, and then we tried Firefox and while he can log into the account, he can’t click on any of the items in his inbox to read them on either web browser. The fact that I’m trying to give support over Facetime doesn’t make it an easier. I have Teamviewer (to take over a computer remotely) on my mother-in-law’s computer, but not on my father-in-laws, and while I’ll set that up soon, I didn’t feel like doing that for what I thought was a minor issue, and with my wife there, the support itself went fast, even if we couldn’t figure out the issue.

So here is my little rant, why does it seem that there are a lot more things breaking rather than working these days? I have to manually share my blog posts on social media because the tools I try to use (and have even paid for) don’t seem to work consistently. My wife gets a new phone and I spend a week updating issues that come up that were not a problem with the old phone. I upload a new plugin (after the issue with the WordPress login – yes I thought about that being an issue already), and it takes an hour to move from the free version to the paid one. I get stuck on a technical issue and google searchers seem less helpful than they used to. I buy a new toaster oven and the extra features make it harder to use and less convenient than the old one. I can’t decide if I’m getting old and curmudgeonly, or if things are being made less convenient and harder to repair?

In any event, I’m not feeling so techie right now. I seem to be coming across issues that are too hard for me to fix, and my patience is thinning. Cue the memes about old people not understanding technology… I hope that’s not me despite my little rant.

Chilly outside

I really don’t like the cold. I am the Caribbean kid who used to get out of the ocean when it started raining because the sun was covered by a cloud and the ocean was too chilly for me. I need to warm tap water up to rinse my mouth out after brushing my teeth. I sleep with a toque on because my head gets chilled.

There is a cold streak here and I just want to spend the day under the covers. I won’t have to spend much time outside, basically just getting to and from the car and that’s already feeling like too much. Yes, I’m whining. No, it’s not that bad. But sometimes I wish I’d never left Barbados. Or that I came to Canada much younger so that I wouldn’t know anything different.

I’ll bundle up. I’ll brave the cold. I’ll remind myself that it really doesn’t get too cold here compared to other parts of the country… but I’ll also whine a bit. ‘Baby it’s cold outside’. And I don’t like it.