Did You Know I’m a Teabagger?

By Jennyjinx | Published: February 26, 2011

I have a funny! I was crabbing about firebaggers, because that’s what I do. Mostly, it was firebaggers who tell commenters on blogs that we (the commenters) have to make her/him (the firebagger) feel better so they will vote Democratic. Anyway, someone that I don’t follow decided to jump in my stream. I said this for the above reason:

I have more respect for GOPers who continue to vote for their beliefs than for #firebaggers whose vote depends on who’s kissing their ass.

Dude jumps in and says this:

@Jennyjinx You dummy Where do all you crazy people come from? Like wow man I mean you guys are special. The election of Obama exposed y’all.

So, I tell this person to fuck off:

@bromoore Fuck off, piece of shit spammer. No one here’s asking for your egg-head opinion.

Then I get this:

@Jennyjinx My first amendments rights are just as valid as yours I am an American citizen BITCH tea bagger freak triple fuck U Bring it YEA

Mwahaha! Holy shitballs, that’s funny. Poor Twitter n00b.

Here’s my reply– follow the “in reply to” link and you can see the whole thing. And, yes, I am that childish. You didn’t know?

That’s all.

Posted in Adventures of Jinxi, firebaggers, Internet Drama | Tagged , | Comments closed

Time to Move On

By Jennyjinx | Published: February 22, 2011

If you follow my twitter feed you know that yesterday I got a new job. I can’t really talk about it publicly (I signed an agreement and everything!) so I’m not going to go into specifics. It’s a desk job and I’ll be working part time. I also won’t be in so much pain when I get done working. That’s the best part of the new job– looking forward to not feeling like I got the shit beat out of me the next day. I’ll still be sore and miserable, but hopefully not as this miserable.

I didn’t get a chance to turn in my notice yesterday. The Key and Associate manager was there, but my direct supervisor wasn’t. Plus I was still thinking maybe I could keep this job. I’ve been there for over 2 years and, like someone who stays with an abuser, feel some kind of loyalty to the place. It felt weird just thinking about going somewhere else. But throughout my shift I became more resolved and realized that it’s for the best even it wasn’t for my physical well being.

A little history: Last May our GM got fired and a new guy was brought in. The Corporate HR chick came in and interviewed us all and asked us if we’d seen our old GM taking money out of the bar register or deleting checks. Well, duh, that’s all part of his job, right? He’s got to give discounts to pissed off guests, reconcile the receipts and whatever else needs done with the money. But we all told stories of his history of sexual harassment, asking guests to leave so he could their table to someone else, throwing hellacious tantrums and just generally being an asshole. The new guy seemed nice and reasonable. Most of us liked him.

Well, over the last couple of months a lot of people have been fired or suspended for bullshit reasons. Then someone asked the old GM what he thought was going on and he asked one of his old buddies at Corporate then he told that other someone the new guy wants to clean out the whole staff. He wants to get rid of anyone that was here under the old GM. Some of us think that it’s just the people that were loyal to the old GM– maybe people that came to his defense during the investigations. I was never concerned because I couldn’t stand that motherfucker. He was the biggest asshole I’d ever met and I happily told the Corporate chick shit I’d seen him do. Then two of my friends were suspended for reasons that made zero sense.

One was suspended for 3 weeks because a secret shopper1 said she didn’t smile when she greeted them. The hostess that day was graded poorly because she was snotty to them when they came in and the managers were graded with a big fat 0% because they didn’t go out to talk to them2. The food from the kitchen took ½ an hour and the steak was overdone. She got suspended for 3 weeks but no one else received any “punishment”. Servers are awesome scapegoats for incompetent managers and kitchen staff, just so you know. Anyway, she decided not to come back from her suspension and they hired 2 people to replace her.

Another friend was suspended for 2 weeks because they heard a rumor that she was doing crack. A rumor. She was, at the time, divorcing from her husband and was trying to figure out how to handle the bills on her own. She was stressed the fuck out. So, what better way to help her out than to suspend her for two weeks so she could “get herself together”? She offered up her urine and blood to prove she was innocent, but the rumors were strong and out she went. She went the next day and got a test all on her own. Imagine their surprise when it came back negative. She decided not to come back and they hired 2 people to replace her.

Another was just let go because she was joking too loud with a regular guest, offending a guest in another booth. She told the regular (our regulars come there for the funny, by the way) that she wanted to go home, so don’t keep her too long. Har-dee-har. The guest to whom she was speaking laughed. The other person eavesdropping complained. The server was fired. They hired 3 people to replace her.

Are you seeing a pattern here?

Then last night I found another girl was suspended for two weeks for a guest complaint. The complaint? Well, apparently the guest ordered a caesar salad, but with bleu cheese dressing. She mistakenly brought him the salad with caesar dressing already on it and with a side of bleu cheese. He got pissed, she went back to fix it, he complained– she got suspended. Didn’t matter that the mistake was easily remedied. Doesn’t matter that it happens all the fucking time. Nope. Gotta suspend her for 2 weeks.

That’s bullshit. We have guests come in all the time looking for something for free. The best way to get it? Complain about the food or service. Most restaurants will give the complainer a discount of some sort. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve taken away half eaten food when a hair mysteriously appears right on top of it. One time it was a perfectly placed fly. Another time was a piece of finger nail. No lie. It’s an obvious placement, too. I mean, sure, these things can end up on food, but it’s generally not apparent when it’s being dressed or taken out. If it’s sitting very nicely on top of a half eaten strip steak, you can bet your sweet ass that it was placed as a scam. Happens all the time. Anyway, we know this and our managers know this. But because of the bullshit with our other GM the management staff is under a lot of pressure to bring the money situation under control. They’re getting heat from their bosses. They pass that down to us. Servers as scapegoats, don’t forget. Doesn’t fucking matter how bad the place is managed or how much money the previous guy stole or the fact that the service manager has her obvious favorites who neither any wrong or do their jobs. So it’s one person at a time until they stop feeling pressure. Suspending and firing people makes it look like they’re taking things seriously, but there are no other policy changes happening to make that store run more efficiently. None.

Finally, they’ve fired the teacher I mentioned in my last post. Not because she can’t do her job, but because she can only do her job on weekends. She’s worked there for 10 years and for the past 4 she’s worked full time in the summer and weekends only during the school year. They told her they couldn’t have her on anymore because she can only work 2 days. That’s it. After 10 years. I don’t know how many people will replace her, but I’m sure there are a couple in the pipe. The plan is for them to have enough servers that there will be 18 on the floor every day, plus 2 extras– but no server can have more than 4 shifts a week. Do you know how many single parents are working there?

Anyway, so all of this is going on yesterday. People are freaking out and deciding that they just can’t do that. Yes they can, I tell them, because Ohio is an at-will employment state. They could theoretically walk through the alley and tell everyone they’re fired. There are no contracts and no one’s job is safe. One chick said “Well, that’s an awful lot of us. They can’t replace us all.” Yes, actually, they can. Servers are a dime a dozen and all of us are expendable. That wasn’t a very popular thing to say, but the facts are the facts. We’re all on the chopping block. They’re cleaning house and there’s nothing they can do about it. Corporate doesn’t give a flying fuck, according to my first friend who was suspended for 3 weeks, they just want their profits.3.

By the end of my shift I decided that I made the right decision. My whole body was stiffening up, as it’s wont to do when it’s ready to curl up and die, and I don’t like the idea of someone finding a reason to can my ass. I did at one point threaten to use the ADA against them, because they know about my fibro. Just to be contrary and put the fear of god in their asses. But what’s the point? That job isn’t a good fit for me anymore. I just can’t do it and it’s time for me to move on. I predict in 6 months the entirety of the front of house staff will be new people anyway. Better to hit the road now. One of my friends told me she didn’t want me to go and asked for me to think about it. I told her it’s just too physically painful for me and I’m just not willing to fight the politics of the place just so I can be allowed to wait fucking tables. Fuck that. There are some folks there that have never worked anywhere else and others that do anything they can to get in good with the managers. They’re going to be in for a big surprise. It’s kind of sad, huh?

Today is a bad pain day for me. I’ve got a new one– my upper body feels way too heavy for my hips. It’s very weird and very painful. I always feel like I’ve been in a car accident after I have an extra stressful shift. I’m so not going to miss that. Kelly assures me that I’ll still be sore, but that’s ok. I’m convinced I won’t be as sore and that will be so fucking fantastic. I don’t work at this job again until Sunday so I have a couple of days to recover– just in time for another flare. Woo hoo! Where the hell is spring?

  1. A secret shopper is someone hired by the corporation to come in and evaluate the store then send a report back to Corporate. If they’re pissed when they come in they can cause a server to get fired. [↩]
  2. They’re supposed to be seen in the dining room and personally greet every table. [↩]
  3. That’s absolutely shocking, isn’t it? I know. I couldn’t believe it either. [↩]
Posted in Fibro Me, The J-O-B | Tagged , , | Comments closed

Firebagger Cues

By Jennyjinx | Published: February 22, 2011

Enough with the serious “Jinxi’s throwing another fit” posts for a minute. I’ve got a couple of funny stories to tell.

The first one might not amuse you generally, but it made me laugh my evil laugh1. I was looking at my stats yesterday and saw that a couple of people were coming here via a search for the term “what is a firebagger“. Well, the 2nd result on the page is my post “Firebaggers“. I already knew that post was high on that particular search, but then I noticed this TPM post. It points to the Urban Dictionary definition of “firebaggers”:

2. Firebagger
A person nominally of the political left viewed as excessively critical of President Barack Obama, especially if the tendency is to reflexively or obsessively criticize him and seemingly not other political figures. Etymology: Jane Hamsher’s popular, left-leaning FireDogLake blog was regarded by Democratic moderates as having gone around the bend in being hypercritical, such as when Hamsher appeared on Fox News to denounce Obama’s Health Care Bill, got involved with Neocon zealot Grover Norquist and even reportedly Tea Party activists. Thus, <b>FireDogLake + Teabagger. </b>

The best part? Whoever decided to post that definition quoted my post for the example on it’s usage (2nd to last paragraph):

Firebaggers are just pissed because Obama hasn’t invited them into the Whitehouse and/or isn’t the Great Liberal Savior they thought he was going to be (depending on the firebagger doing the bitching).

That makes me giggle just because I really don’t like firebaggers and they get all pissy when anyone calls them that.

To anyone searching for that term: There’s your definition of “firebagger”. You can stop reading now.


My 2nd story is more personal. Last week I went into work and saw a flier for a self-defense course. On that flier was a bulleted list of things that will be covered. One of the bullet points read:

5 Ques to look out for when an attacker is approaching [emphasis mine]

Well, I’m all kinds of helpful, so I scratched out “Ques” and wrote “cues”. Then I went about my merry way.

I come back into the alley and Chick is losing her mind. “Who changed that? Who changed that?!” She’s looking all around, her arms flailing.

Me: “I did.”

Her: “Well, you’re wrong. That’s not how you spell it.”

Me: “Yes, it is. I’m not wrong.”

So, we go back and forth for a minute. I laugh and leave the alley. I had work to do, guests to take care of, blah blah blah. Besides, doesn’t everyone (besides her) know how to spell “cues”?

Apparently not. I come back into the alley and there’s quite the scene. People are telling me I’m wrong– I laugh because I’m not. They’re just thinking she can’t possibly be wrong. She decides she’s going to prove I’m wrong (without benefit of a dictionary, of course).

Her: “That’s how you spell a pool cue. That’s not how you spell a regular cue. A pool cue is a thing, but this isn’t.”

Didn’t make any sense to me either. I mean, a noun is a noun is a… whatever. This is funny shit to me. I can’t believe she’s arguing some kind of difference.

Me: “That’s how your spell the pool cue and the cue that indicates some kind of mark or sign. They’re spelled the same. Maybe you’re thinking of q-u-e-u-e, which is pronounce ‘cue’ but doesn’t mean the same thing.”

Kitchen Key2: “Yeah, my Netflix says q-u-e. So she’s right.”

Me: “No. Your Netflix says ‘Instant q-u-e-u-e’. Queue means that something is lined up, such as ‘We’re in the queue to get into the movie’. It doesn’t indicate a mark or sign. You’re wrong. However, ‘q-u-e-s’ does spell “what” in Spanish– kind of.”

Her: “No, I’m not. You’re wrong. And we’re going to prove it. Who’s got internet on their phone?”

So, I laugh again. Another girl comes up to me and whispers “I think you’re right. She’s not going to admit that though.” I laugh some more. This is funny to me. Better than some stupid ass prank. This is some chick losing her mind because she misspelled a word and someone called her on it. I said “She probably thinks that her spell check was wrong too.”

Note: My spell checker is blowing up with the squiggly line on “ques”. Just so ya know.

Next thing I know, Chick and Key are huddled over someone’s phone, frantically (and I mean frantically) looking for their “aha!” moment. Me and the other girl just sat there3 and watched. The other two were typing and looking at each other and we knew they weren’t finding their proof. My friend says “They’re not going to find it.” I look at her and say “Nope. They’re not.” Then we walk out into the dining room4.

Oh! But she’s not done! She gives up on the phone because “we can’t find a dictionary”5. Of course she can’t find a dictionary. The dictionary proves her wrong. So she goes and asks my friend, The Teacher, to prove her point. My friend tells her we’re both right. Huh? She comes strutting over to me and says “We’re both right. Ha!” Really? So I ask my friend what the fuck she’s thinking. I tell her that Chick was trying to spell q-u-e-u-e and not only misspelled that, but used it wrong. She says “Oh.” Of course, that’s the end of her involvement.

It’s time to go home. Chick hasn’t been able to find anyway to prove that she ignored the spell check on her Word program. She’s pissed and just scratches out “cues” and replaces it with “signs”. I told her that’s what cues meant, after all, and it was better than admitting she was wrong about anything. Meh. That should have ended it, of course. Because we’re all grown and don’t rub salt into the wounds. Right? Wrong.

I came home and looked up both “cues” and “ques”. Only one online source tells me “que” (sans the ‘s’) means “half farthing”. I don’t even care what a half farthing is so I ignore it. I did print out the definition of “cue“, though. Who was right? Well, me of course!

I go to work to rub the salt. This heifer says to me “I meant to spell it ‘q-u-e-u-e’. We’re still both right.” She thought that was the end. Nope. She made such a big deal of it previously, right? She actually convinced other coworkers that I was wrong. Of course I wasn’t done.

Me: “Nope. You’re still wrong. You meant to use it as ‘signs’, which is spelled c-u-e-s. You argued with me about that. You also argued with me about the spelling of the other queue. You’re wrong on all counts. It’s ok. You’re allowed to be wrong here. Next time you should trust that spell check, though.”

With that she literally stormed off and I got yet another chuckle. I love when people get that pissed because there’s just no way they could possibly be wrong6. It’s sad but comical. Poor spoiled baby…

  1. The one that my friend requested I stop because it gives her the creeps. The “Mwahaha!”. You didn’t know I really do that? I also really say “bomb-diggity”. [↩]
  2. Assistant to the assistant manager [↩]
  3. And here I found a typo! Oops. Ironic? [↩]
  4. Yeah, it was funny and a little dramatic. Ha! [↩]
  5. Most of her supporters at this time realized she’s full of shit. [↩]
  6. My mother is exactly the same way. No lie. [↩]
Posted in firebaggers, Internet Drama, Politics, Slap Upside the Head, The Funnies, The J-O-B | Tagged , | Comments closed

Again with the Hotlinking

By Jennyjinx | Published: February 21, 2011

I don’t like content thieves. I don’t like sites that scrape other sites for content. I don’t like when spammers just re-purpose one site’s content to fit their own site. And I really don’t like bloggers who hotlink images willy nilly. I can pretty much guarantee that anyone who spends time and effort into creating their site and their content feels the same as I do.

Today I read a post on Daily Kos1 about the differences in pay between public and private sector employees in Wisconsin and Ohio. The post talks about a study done by the Economic Policy Institute and links to the page on their site with this information. It also contains graphs that the EPI has put up showing these differences (the validity of the study and/or the graphs isn’t the subject of this post, by the way). I thought it was really interesting and so I tweeted it. A little while later I saw a link retweeted to another blog that contained the same information. Because I’ve seen this blog repost information without giving credit to outside sources previously2, I wondered if they perhaps have mended their ways. So, I followed the link.

Nope. The post mentions the study and links to tweets that have accused the blogger of lying and misrepresenting certain facts. So, the blogger was linking to opposition tweets. This particular blogger is one of those that will take the credit to get the traffic. That’s why I stopped following and reading during the primary. I’m old school. I think that when someone sees a story and decides to blog it that there should be a link crediting the original story. Most people that have blogged for any considerable amount of time do that. We’re not of the SEO school that says linking out is wrong. We don’t believe that it’s bad to send traffic to other sites that we’ve found so interesting we use their ideas. They’re ideas are good for us, for our voice and for our traffic, right? There’s no reason not to give credit.

I left a comment asking the blogger to please credit the original story (not me because it’s not my story), because I just couldn’t ignore it anymore. For some reason, yesterday and today really chapped my ass. Maybe because I saw the stories before they were published on that blog. Maybe because it’s time for Blogroll Amnesty and I really want to see bloggers linking out to each other3. I don’t know why I decided to leave that comment4. But then the post was amended to include a link to the original work.

I don’t like to see bloggers building their own audience by watching for links to other stories and not giving credit. That just seems dishonest to me. Is it? Probably not. We all tell stories that have probably been told elsewhere, we discuss the news we saw somewhere else, we do what bloggers do. But it used to be that when we gave our opinion on a subject, joined in the “conversation” we let others know where the fire for that conversation was lit.

However, that doesn’t solve the hotlinking. All down the front page of that blog are images that are hotlinked from other sites. This tells me that the blogger is helping herself to even more work belonging to someone else. It doesn’t really matter where she’s getting it, because it’s someone else’s intellectual property unless they’ve specifically offered it up as Creative Commons– and then it should be uploaded to the blogger’s own server or image hosting account. Some of those images are specifically copyrighted. At the bottom of the EPI page is:

All material within this site Copyright © 2010 Economic Policy Institute. All rights reserved.

There’s that violation. Then there’s the matter of driving traffic to a post that is stealing bandwidth from another site via that hotlinked image. I thought about looking at all of the Copyright information for every stolen image on the front page, but I didn’t. I looked at the source to see where it was hosted and that was enough to fire me up. This person is not ignorant. She’s not an internet novice. That’s just sheer laziness, pure and simple. It’s a lot easier to add the <img> tag to her posts than it is to download a copy of the images and add them to her own folder.

Honestly, half the reason I don’t put many images on my site is because it’s such a pain in the ass for me. I’ve got to check the licensing (I prefer to use my own images or something with a CC type license), left click to “save image as”, rename it and then upload the damned thing to my site. I’d really rather not have an image in my post than to steal the image and/or someone’s bandwidth.

The thing about this kind of theft, is that she’s probably just googling for an image or using a plugin to scrape images from Google. So, she doesn’t know who holds the copyright to some of them. Maybe some poor photographer, from fotolio.com for instance, has work for sale and has sold a one time license to a site. Here she comes, hotlinking, and cutting into that photographer’s profits, while the site she’s hotlinking from actually paid money to be able to use that image. She’s hurting the photographer and the site where it’s hosted. As for vectors, well, those take some work too. Did she get a license for them? Considering one of them (on the front page as I write this) is hotlinked, I’m going to say no. So she hurt that artist by stealing the work, perhaps from someone else who stole the work, and totally bypassing the person who did all the work to put it online.

Shit, she can’t even say she got them from a “free graphics” search on Google. She’s linking to them directly. And to make this even more rich: she appends each post with a Creative Common License that prevents use without attribution and on commercial websites. Hmm.

This isn’t bad enough, in my opinion. This is a respected Liberal blogger. Would it be better if she weren’t? Not really, but I wouldn’t feel so angry. I feel like she’s pimping her blog for traffic on the backs of other people who are doing the work and that goes against my principles as a Liberal. I find it hypocritical that a blog that is calling out the Right for their every wrong doing is also guilty– if only because of laziness5. We cried foul when N.O.M was caught hotlinking an image by Zach Weiner for their own nefarious purposes, but I’m the only one to point it out when one of our own is caught helping herself to all kinds of images? By the way, his solution was gold.

Most of my favorite political blogs have very strict guidelines against hotlinking and copyright infringement. If you get caught at the Daily Kos, for instance, you’ll get banned. As a matter of fact, all of the blogs that I visit regularly host their images on their own sites or on an image hosting service (Photobucket or Flickr, for instance). They are usually good about only using portions of another story in a quote and then linking to the original (even though the bigger blogs will only really link to each other). It goes back to high school, really. If you write a paper for school cite your sources and don’t help yourself to too much of someone else’s work. The real world analogy for the bandwidth theft is best explained by Webweaver:

Bandwidth is a bit like gas for a car. Every time you drive (or a file is loaded), a bit of fuel (or bandwidth) is used up. Now imagine if each night one of your neighbors siphoned out a tiny bit for their own car… then other neighbors thought “I’ll just take a couple drops as well”… by morning your fuel tank is empty. Your neighbors each thought taking just a tiny bit would be unnoticeable.. but added all up it left nothing for you.

I told her that she was hotlinking and gave her a link to a site explaining what that is. As of right now, she hasn’t changed those images out. She’s changed the images on the front page out and the graphic images which caught my attention. However, on page 2 of her site there are still other images hotlinked, including this one– which is for sale as a postcard. So, we’ll see if she changes those out at some point. Considering she changed one image on the second page but none of them around it…*fingers crossed* I’m on the fence as to whether to link to her or not. I want you to see what I’m talking about, but even a single hit from a link from me (and the PR juice that link would pass) is too much right now. I’ve got a couple of screen grabs that I’ve taken with my element inspector showing the coded link to images, but I’ll probably wait to post those6. It doesn’t really matter if I’m frustrated by this or not, though. I’m not that important. What’s bothersome is that people that are important to our side– such as Keith Olbermann and David Schuster– are sending traffic to that site (which is hosting BlogAds, by the way). That’s bothersome to me because we call out these things if we find them happening on the other side and we should do the same for ourselves.

By the way, the images on my sidebar are either hosted by me or are linked with permission. Just so ya know.

  1. Wisconsin, Ohio public employees are not overpaid by Meteor Blades [↩]
  2. I used to follow the blog host on Twitter, but stopped when I saw that this blog preferred to get the traffic associated with various stories. This is also the reason why I mentioned the retweet instead of the original tweet. [↩]
  3. Once again, this isn’t about me per se. I could easily play blogwhore, but I don’t. If someone follows my link on Twitter, so be it. Otherwise I do pretty much no self-promotion. [↩]
  4. It didn’t make it past moderation and that’s perfectly fine. [↩]
  5. And not because of ignorance. Not now. [↩]
  6. Mostly to see if anyone else wants to see them. [↩]
Posted in Adventures of Jinxi, I'm Pissy, PSA, Slap Upside the Head, Stumblin' | Tagged , , | Comments closed
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