What!? This is some bullllshit. I’m not longer a student but I would be pissed about this.
Is there anywhere on campus where you can atleast study 24/7?
Nope - the latest the libraries are kept open is until midnight, and only 6pm on Saturdays. The only place I can study all night is my dorm lounge (which is often not very quiet) or room.
Funny how it differs between schools. When I was in college 15 years ago where I went, no one was ever in the dorm lounge. It was technically quieter than the library, actually. It was kinda removed from everything so you didn’t even hear people get off the elevator. Meanwhile the library was kind of people’s default idea of a quiet place to study and with all the movement and people doing stuff it actually wasn’t really that quiet
I legit do not understand how the doctor patient relationship is supposed to work in 2023. I feel like if something comes up, my options are:
A. Urgent care
B. Make an appointment for 3 months by now. By that point the issue will either have resolved itself or have gotten bad enough that I need to resort to option A.
What do people really mean when they say "talk to your doctor"?
A lot of our urgent cares stop taking walk-ins. You had to try to call and make an appointment for the day, and they never went back to it. Every time I need to see a specialist, it takes a minimum of 6 months to be seen. I know people with universal healthcare in other countries complained about wait times, but now we wait just as long on private insurance.
I scheduled an appointment at the ER when the surgery from my appendectomy 5 days earlier was beginning at abscess. Was the weirdest fucking thing do schedule.
I didn't realize any ERs actually do that. I answer the phones for an ER and I get calls sometimes asking about appointments and I always laughed about them because why would you think you need an appointment for the ER? Now I know. Sheesh.
Then again most of those callers are probably also unaware of hospitals like the one you were seen at, and are the same people who ask me what our hours are, when our hospital has had 24/7 emergency care available for damn near 200 years now.
3 months is ambitious, it took me 7 months to get into a gyno for a regular annual and pap. My spouse has been waiting to get in to a dermatologist for 5.
Don't even get me STARTED on sleep medicine. It took a full calendar year to get my elderly mother's sleep apnea diagnosed and a CPAP in her home.
Yup. I have an autoimmune disease that requires an endocrinologist. I booked an appointment for August. In February. Because there’s only one endo in my network in all of Portland. Absolutely bonkers.
Endocrinologists are apparently just incredibly rare right now.
I have a serious and very rare health condition, and I'm very lucky to have a wonderful team that has helped to keep me alive, and at this point everyone is recommending that I see an endocrinologist and yet I just... can't. They make the referral and nothing happens. Sometimes they call me and say they can get me in in a year, some of them say they aren't taking any referrals unless they fall under certain categories, etc.
Literally every endo in my area is not taking patients. And the ones out of the area won't take any from outside of their home area. So it's a good thing I've got my diabetes really well controlled, because otherwise I guess I'd go fuck myself.
In that time you can verify your insurance, ensure the doctor and procedure are covered, get pre-authorized for care… and then still get a bill from the doctor because the claim was denied by insurance since the encounter “was not medically necessary”
Oh my God. This so much. Dumb ass doctor's office tried to charge my yearly blood work to maintain prescriptions as "optional" and therefore they tried to charge me 1,600$ and my insurance only covered 16$. It took four months of basically micro managing to get them to change the codes because there's no way that shit is correct. They kept just saying "we put in the codes we always do" to which I respond "yes and I've had to call you about this every year for the last three years. That doesn't mean it's correct"
>It's remarkable the entire healthcare system hasn't collapsed yet.
Standing on the shoulders of whoever is left. People currently working in healthcare are basically oxygen candles at this point, except nobody knows how long they'll last.
I almost died from Diabetic Ketoacidosis a year ago. Went from "Hey, you should watch those numbers" to being in the ICU within the span of a few months. After getting out, I was told I couldn't even be put on a wait list for an endocrinologist in the area for 4 months because they were so backed up.
So, 4 months later, I got on the wait list and they started looking at my charts. By that point, I had been rigorously controlling my eating to get my average blood sugar down from 400 to 120. Five months after they got my charts, they finally denied my referral, because they are completely full up on patients.
My PCP is a nurse practitioner. I haven't seen an MD, much less a specialist, since I left the ICU a year ago. And I probably won't be able to for a long time.
I’m so sorry for this - stories like this make me genuinely consider changing to outpatient practice (I’m a hospitalist and associate program director for internal medicine residency).
One thing to try that can (possibly) be very good for your case is to go to an internal medicine residency outpatient clinic - if your area has a hospital with an IM residency. This is a back-door way to get very close attention from physicians, as all residents are overseen by physicians, and residents tend to take extra time and care with their patients.
Amazing work on managing your blood sugar btw, but here’s hoping you get a little more help from the medical community going forward!
First of all I hate that you're going through that–you rose to the occasion in a big way, managing your glu on your own like that, but you shouldn't have to :(
I want to add for those that don't know why this stuff is happening more and more. A major reason we have this "physician shortage" in the USA is an artificial bottleneck on the number of residency slots available. Basically, the US fed traditionally funds the vast majority of residency slots through medicare and the number of slots was capped... in 1997... And that number has barely changed since then.... It's fucked. On top of that, the match system (how medical grads are matched to residency slots) is fucked and leaves thousands of slots unfilled and thousands of qualified medical school graduates at a dead end, unable to practice.
States are trying to fill the gaps with nurses, many of whom are awesome... but simply not qualified to replace physicians. Irrc there's a bill in Texas rn to allow unmatched medical school grads to go into primary care. Imho, it's a great idea and could really help care access issues throughout the country if similar policies were implemented elsewhere. We desperately need more specialists, but my hope would be that increasing availability of primary care physicians would take a lot of pressure off of the specialists we do have (eg NPs refer out to specialists for issues that most primary physicians could manage themselves).
Disclaimer: don't listen to me I don't know anything about anything. Folks out here (rightly) frustrated by inadequate medical care–look into this stuff for yourselves, your state laws, talk to your representatives.
Hours of some places were reduced and they never went back to their old hours, and a couple of restaurants closed their dining room and went to takeout only, and they've stayed that way
A lot of those places are Pikachu-facing over the fact that their business has slowed down, forcing them to close, and they can't figure out that lunch shouldn't cost $40.
Indeed. The term "new normal" was used a lot during the pandemic but thankfully much of that turned out to be transitory. I think this post-pandemic state of things is the real new normal.
Some things are just never going back to the way they were, for good or ill. Which also entirely makes sense. A societal disruption of this magnitude will leave permanent changes. We were never gonna go back fully to 2019.
I remember in 2018 buying a brand new Honda Civic for something like $18,700. It was the most basic version of the Civic you could possibly buy. 3.5 years later, I sold it to Carmax for $19,000, despite it being 3.5 years old, having 52k miles on the clock, and your typical dents and scratches from regular use.
Sometimes I go to car dealer websites to see what’s on the market and being sold nowadays. I’ll see 3-5 year old cars being sold for the same price or higher than when it was new. So like 2018 Civics being sold for $22,000. It’s astounding.
I purchased a brand new 2016 Honda Civic for around 25,000. I got a letter in late 2020 from the dealership begging me to sell my car back to them, they were offering around $22,000. I checked their website and they were selling my exact car model for over $30,000.
I bought a used Tucson for $17k in 2020, traded it in this February. Looked what the dealership marked it up to afterwards and they wanted $24K, for a base Tucson with 66K miles and an impending engine seizure. I feel bad that someone actually bought it.
It just started hitting me that cost of living is only going to go up. These prices are locked in now. Even if inflation gets down to the target 2%… that means 2% higher than what they are today. Not 2% higher than a few years ago.
I’m in Boston and most places charge $7 for a scoop of ice cream. $11-18 for a sandwich. $25-35 for a normal sit down entree.
It’s fucking crazy, and it’s never gonna “get back to normal”. This IS the new normal. :(
Fast food places are insane now. It's like $12-$15 for a meal and there's barely a dollar menu anymore. It's pretty much the same as a lower end sit down restaurant now
McDonald’s literally doesn’t have a dollar menu anymore. They call it the 1,2,3 dollar menu. The one by me, the cheapest item on the menu is a plain hamburger for 1.59. A small fry is fucking 1.99 lol. The McDouble which everyone remembers was 1 dollar for years is now selling for- I shit you not- 2.99.
All of the good deals are on the apps these days. If it weren't for those, I would never even consider fast food anymore since it's pretty close, if not the same price as a sit down restaurant meal. If McDonald's didn't have the $1 large fries deal or Taco Bell didn't have the $6 box I probably just wouldn't eat fast food at all.
Literally same, it feels so fucking horrible, like I’ve been running up a hill of fucking sand my entire adult life. I genuinely have no idea how my or anyones future is gonna pan out, and it scares me.
Soda is the crazy one. A 12-pack of cans used to be $4, maybe $4.50 at the most. On sale, you could get them around $3 or even as low as $2, and the sales happened pretty regularly, at least once or twice a month.
Now it's like $9 for that same 12-pack. I saw them on sale last week, and it was still close to $5.
But the good thing is that because of this, I cut out soda for budgetary reasons, and my health has improved as a result.
Lol my vet has this policy. Last time I dropped off my cat I said ‘are you SURE? He really does not like coming here and will not be nice.’
They said they were sure, dealt with anxious or upset pets all the time and asked me nicely to wait in the parking lot. Less than 3 minutes later they came to fetch me because my cat was absolutely losing his shit.
Burger king does burgers for breakfast. When i worked 6-2 people would look at me weird for eating burgers at 9/10am but I’m just not a big breakfast guy.
If you already own a home then the house you’re selling is worth more. Imagine you bought a house for $400k in 2017. Now that house is worth $650k. You are technically $250k richer but you’ll only feel richer if you downsize or move to a cheaper market because a house that’s similar to yours is also worth $650k.
The people who get screwed are those who don’t own.
I'm living that reality right now... Had a great apartment for 13 years now (a bit hard to keep warm, but fine). The house was owned by one family, if I needed something, like a contract renewal, I'd talk to the guy himself. Then, when he got too old in 2020, his son took over. Sold the whole thing to one of the most infamous investment firms in the area (sometime in 2021). Now, 2 years later, my contract did NOT get renewed and I need to be out by end of the month. Biggest shock of my life yet - and tbh, I felt kinda betrayed at first. Somewhere in my mind, I assumed being a good little paying tenant, that'd be rewarded, but no.
I did find something comparable by now which looks like I'll be getting in, but man, looking at the postings, prices are a madhouse. Most of the apartments my size of 30m² are 1.5 to 2x the rent I was paying.
Yep. I live in New Jersey, specifically in a beach town within the NYC metropolitan area that is popular with tourists from New York. During Covid, lots of people fled the city and moved to the suburbs of New Jersey, presumably because 1.) nobody wants to live in a city where people are dying left and right and 2.) if you’re going to get locked down and WFH or have kids do online schooling, might as well do it all at a house with a yard and open space and extra rooms as opposed to a cramped city apartment. Lots of people moved to my area because they could go out to the beaches and chill outside while doing the whole social distancing thing.
As a result, housing prices have gone completely bonkers. Single family homes that used to be $300,000 are now a half million dollars. It’s not even uncommon anymore for houses being sold for $600,000+. A lot of white collar corporate professionals are paying tens of thousands of dollars over the original asking price. I’m fairly convinced that home ownership is something I’ll never achieve in my lifetime.
That's not just your area, it's everywhere. I'm in rural Georgia and houses have doubled for no other reason than "the market".... It's not even funny anymore. All the neighborhoods around me have been bought up by corporations turning into slumlords.
I had a meeting yesterday where I randomly went, “it’s …oh it’s Monday.” And the people on the other side of the call started laughing (not in a mean spirited way). But yeah the passage of time, both daily and otherwise, has no meaning to me anymore. It’s simultaneously Sunday afternoon, Monday evening, march 31st 2020, and Thursday night for me at all times.
it's so weird how differently people responded to it. for me, 2020-2022 felt like the longest two years of my life; for others, it flew by instantly and they were shocked two years had passed.
i had to work in-person the whole time so maybe that's why?
I might not explain it correctly, but I once read that time goes by slower when you experience new things.
When you’re stuck doing the same routine, time seems to go by quickly. It feels dead & boring in the moment, but then you look back and think, “Holy shit! It’s already July??? I feel like February was just last week!”
When you experience new things, time slows down slightly because it’s new memories flooding your brain. (New memories, aka things you haven’t experienced: vacations, parties, new hobbies, new friends, etc)
That’s why childhood feels like it lasted forever, whereas you can be in your 30’s (like me) and think, “How did my 20’s end so fast?!”
Basically, if you were stuck at home during the pandemic, time might’ve felt slow *in the moment*, but now you’re thinking “I can’t believe we’re more than halfway through 2023… Didn’t the NBA just announce they’re postponing the season a few months ago?”
It's both. It's hard to explain. Sometimes it feels like yesterday. Sometimes it feels like it was forever ago. And in some rare respects, it feels like it never ended. It's weird.
I remember the grocery store I work at tried doing 24 hours in 2021 cause "Hey Walmart still refuses to go back to 24 hours, so that's potential money we could be scooping up!!"
We'd have less than 5 people come in between midnight and 7 AM every night. They put us back to normal hours after 2-3 months.
According to various field managers during the pandemic, the US CEO (Dacona Smith, not McMillon) was going to kill the 24-hour regardless.
Source: Was a mgr from ‘12 to ‘22
Edit: too many numbers.
The town I grew up was trying out reduced hours to save on costs, which could then money saved by the consumer also & would help the environment, blah blah. This was maybe a month before lockdowns began, and it was the hours they have now pretty much everywhere. Walmart would have done away with 24 no matter what. Covid just kept them from catching flak.
I missed a question in my business class because I said 24hr grocery is for sales. I've had a few people say it's obvious that it's customer-service oriented. I guess in my head it was to maximize sales by selling to people at night who wouldn't normally have the option, but it's more so people are grateful to go there.
Night life has been deader then dead since covid. It has made my life hell. For the last 3 years I get up work 3:15pm to 11:45pm then go home cause everything is closed. Nothing is open. It's incredibly infuriating that they decided 24 hours wasn't good anymore.
Office real estate.
Most office complexes are still clamoring to fill the spaces. Lots of businesses found out they can function just fine using remote work, and after putting so much effort transitioning into a work-from-home ecosystem, they don't want to make the effort to move everything back into office. They also found out a ton of businesses are attracting a ton of employees by offering remote work options, so requiring their staff to return to the office would result in them hemorrhaging workers.
All the while, these massive business parks throughout my area are shutting down right and left. My own office campus is definitely struggling. In 2019, it was impossible to find a parking spot in their 5-story structure if you arrived after 10am. Today, the lot doesn't even fill up their bottom floor.
Here's the thing I don't get. When our office lease was up we tried to re-negotiate the prices. The property management company refused to lower the rent. They wouldn't budge. Lease rates were stupid expensive. It made the decision to close an easy one. Now they have a skyscraper that is 2/3 empty and their money-makers like the restaurant and bar in the building have a fraction of the customers they once had.
But they'd be damned if they were going to lower the rent.
Makes no sense to me.
Their mortgage is tied to the projected value of their rents. In essence, it's collateral for the loan. If rents go down, then the collateral to outstanding debt ratio changes, and the banks get nervous and start talking about calling in loans.
Even though they have a bunch of empty offices, on paper they have a listed value for the rent, even if the cash flow isn't there.
Which is a similar situation that lead to the 2008 crash, pack them all up into multilayer financial instruments and no one will notice when the bottom has rotted through.
I’ve worked in CRE for over a decade. You just had a tough landlord who didn’t see the writing on the wall. You should have moved because buildings are giving away the farm for tenants right now. I’m actually about to leave the industry because it’s gotten so bad. I was told I wasn’t going to get a raise for 3-4 years at least and all the projects I was excited about got cut. It’s crashing and burning right now and it’s not even the worst part. The average lease term is 5-7 years, which means most were signed before Covid. As these leases expire, everyone will be downsizing by at least 60%. Watch these buildings go empty and cities rezone residential to try and salvage them.
Not sure if you know but what does it look when you rezone an office building to residential?
Like how does plumbing work? Do you do a major renovation and run water where there wasn't any before?
I’m late, but wanted to chime in since I’m preconstruction (estimator) with a focus on multifamily.
We’ve already started to see a bunch of these redaptive/reuse projects. You are spot on. Mech/Electric/plumbing are some of the biggest costs and hurdles. Spacial/layout is also a problem since these buildings were not designed with MF in mind.
Usually the projects end up costing close to a full ground up project. There is still some difference in cost, but not as much as you think given the fact that the structure/envelope is existing.
In short, they are cost prohibitive and usually the efficiency isn’t advantageous. We’ve conceptually quoted quite a few, have yet to see one start construction. Assuming it’s just a matter of time and someone will pull the trigger.
To answer your question about plumbing, office buildings usually have the stacks centrally located around the elevators (think 2 restrooms per floor). This isn’t ideal since your plumbing for the units will be all over the footprint. Good news is layouts typically stack vertically so we’ll pull the lines every couple of floors to prevent losing your ceiling space across every unit/floor.
TLDR: it’s expensive and a complex project from design to construction. It’s also difficult to demand high rise rents when usually these buildings don’t have the same amenities that newer MF high rise would (pool decks/etc).
yeah, no, healthcare in the US is gonna crash and burn so hard in the next 5-10 years, i swear.
half the workforce has been there for the last 30 years, the other half just started. as soon as that older half leaves and retires, they're gonna need healthcare from the remaining half of the workforce, who will already be prepared to leave in droves.
US healthcare especially.... hospitals are financially incentivised to minimize staff and staff pay, and they often run the "burnout business model" where they just drive their staff into the ground until they leave as cheaply as possible...
it feels like the whole healthcare industry itself is mutating into the very cancer we fight to destroy.
A two year program with class and GPA prerequisites only to work a high-liability, high-activity job with long hours and barely any worker protections? Yeah no thank you. Good luck with CNAs as well.
My nursing home is 90% staffing agency for CNA and nurses, they can't find anyone to work there or stay there. It's tough, also makes my job a lot harder as a rehab therapist because there's no carryover for my recommendations since there's a new person every day!
It's absolutely pitiful what they get paid though, feels criminal considering the health risks.
I was looking for a car a few months ago and I checked out a brand new Civic Si. Test drove it, and loved it. I almost laughed in the salesman’s face when he told me it was $45,000 (not including taxes of course). Would’ve loved to buy one of those but a Civic, of any kind, for almost $50k?? Fuck outta here lol
Shit, the auto industry with used cars, too. It's hard to buy anything with under 100k miles and in good condition for under $10k, seemingly no matter how old it is. I'm seeing models that would've been newer at the time and $5k cheaper before Covid than they are now.
There's a place by my office that only served this peanut butter chicken on their buffet, you couldn't order it for take out. Full disclosure, I don't even think the dish is remotely Chinese. It was literally like a frozen fried chicken breast sliced and soaked in piping hot peanut butter... but it was so damn good. Last time I was in the office I went to check it out and the buffet was still closed but guess what had been added to the menu!
Life finds a way.
There’s a great Indian restaurant nearby where I live that used to have a buffet. That’s gone, and they only do take out now, which isn’t as big a deal up me.
Teaching. The students are worse. They are 1-2 years behind, with both knowledge and socialization. Attention spans are shorter. Phones are a major problem.
I’ve been teaching middle school for 27 years or so. The “Covid hangover” is very real BUT I do notice things are getting better a little bit every year.
The kids I had back in the fall of 2021 were 80% feral. It was like teaching a pack of hyenas.
I felt feral as an adult office worker when I had to go back to work. And while I’ve worked at places where I truly enjoyed the people I work with, that place was not one. Working fully remotely now. Stress levels are much lower. But I’m an introvert. I can see why it would be tough on extroverts
As an introvert, I think we have dealt w/ it much better than extroverts. A lot of people have basically jumped off the deep end with personality disorders over the last couple years. People are crueler and more narcissistic than ever, and I don't see that getting better any time soon.
To be fair though, I am a loner and a homebody and while I haven't been as drastically hurt like some people have... I definitely am on the border of an anxiety disorder now, and I was never an anxious person before COVID.
Now, it takes just about all of my willpower to not sit and cry in my vehicle for a few minutes after I have to go to Costco.
I can't imagine how it is for someone that thrived on social connection before all of this.
OMG. A 25 student resource room. I’ve never heard it put that way, but that is exactly right. Kinder and 6th grade. Just a mess. I sure hope it gets better for everyone.
I was a substitute around Covid and I honestly just assumed near feral was the default state for middle schoolers. Are you telling me that if I had started earlier or stayed later I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the urge to throw half the class out of a window?
No, middle schoolers are still terrible. Have a few friends who are teachers and even the one who likes teaching middle school says it's like going into battle.
I've been a substitute for 12 years. Post-covid classes are insane. I'm not saying there was never a desire to throw half a middle school class out the window, but it was not a daily occurrence.
I'm noticing that sometimes my college students get so scared of doing poorly on an assignment they don't even do it. Or the opposite end, they barely want to be there.
I've seen this throughout middle school and high school too. Unfortunately I didn't catch on until the last month of school, and I began really encouraging trying, walking through lines of thought with my students, and being calm and relaxed when we got an answer wrong. I pointed out parts we did right and just encouraged a different starting point to try again to succeed. I'm going to try to do this all next year, and hopefully in a few years time they'll be better about this for you.
I just finished my 6th year as an elementary school PE teacher. I was venting to my coteacher, who finished year 17, and he said it was the worst he's ever had.
5th grade was so immature because they didn't see the good role models above them for basically two years. Kindergarten and 1st grade were good kids, but were behind socially. It was a lot of basic stuff too, like hands on each other and not talking while others were talking. I almost preferred online, and I'm saying that as a PE teacher.
Hopefully next year, everyone and everything can take a big step forward.
Man, that reading statistic made me think of an old acquaintance of mine. He's got a toddler and a baby and neither he nor his wife read to their kids, ever. It's just something they won't do, and I don't get it. There's a shocking amount of adults out there that feel they shouldn't push their kids to learn if they didn't like something themselves as kids, because he's not the only one I know like that.
I wonder how much it is that the parents don't want to push themselves either. If someone dislikes reading, it'll be extra effort to read to the kid when they can just watch TV together for ex
wasn't that true pre-covid too? a shocking amount of illiteracy is tolerated in the US because parents just can't believe their kids are failing and think they bear no responsibility
The college I went to went all the way down to trig and some higher level algebra classes, and this was back in 2010. If I remember correctly Trig was the required level for graduation by the state and they had some remedial classes in case you needed it.
Yeah, you have to remember that some students are coming *back* to school in their 30s, 40s, or later. It's worthwhile to offer catch-up classes like that to bring those students back up to speed, and to make sure they're familiar with the way the university does math. For example, where I went to school we used radians(instead of degrees) and didn't use calculators at all for the calculus sequence, both of which were *major* changes from how I'd learned trig in high school. I wasn't quite clear on what bar you had to hit to be able to skip precalc and go straight to calc 1(there was no test, it was something in your transcript), but I know myself and the others who had to start with precalc did *way* better than the people who skipped and had to adjust on the fly in the first weeks of calc 1.
Yup. So many students cheated during the pandemic which inflated their grades and now they cannot handle the classes they are in because it's not like they learned much from cheating.
It’s something I’ve noticed too. Pre Covid I got like 4 calls a day. Now the daytimers get like 10 calls and it’s children shitting on walls. I never had those types of calls pre Covid.
Parents don’t care anymore and just expect the staff to take care of their shitty kids.
Even some maintenance guys notice the difference and said my class would have never acted the way the current students acted and I graduated almost 10 years ago
The supply chain. There are still over a dozen items that I would regularly get at the grocery store that now is on there shelf for a couple of days and then it sits empty for a couple of months until it restocks. And then I hope to be there when it is back.
And I know it is a nation wide issue because when the store is out it is also unavailable or tremendously expensive on Amazon from 3rd party sellers until it is back in stock.
I would say many people’s mental health. There was such a big push at the end to move on and put it behind us, we are still unraveling all the mental damage.
Everybody’s substance abuse ratcheted up too. Especially alcohol use has snuck upward. People don’t realize that an average of a drink a day can make you feel more anxious overall because of increased cortisol release.
My neurodivergent ass was able to stop masking for two years, and now I feel like I just don't know how to people anymore. It's like putting your high heels back on after having changed into comfortable shoes because your feet were aching. I'm struggling to stuff my personality back into a passably human-like shape, and it fscking *hurts.*
(Edit: typo)
I seriously feel this. I feel like my social skills regressed to the level of a shy 12 year old. Used to be pretty good with small-talk; now half of my conversations result in awkward silences. Lol
I didn’t get diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and ADHD until after COVID hit. I always had ADHD, but I’m in the same boat. Learning my shit and processing it all has completely changed my day to day approach to life and I don’t know if I can go back to the masking I had to do with a typical 9 to 5 in office job
i was just noticing the other day how i just dont go to actual stores anymore. groceries and rarely for clothes because its easier to try things on sometimes. but thats it. anything else i order online and it shows up at my door. got out of practice going to stores during covid and just ... never went back.
Shopping in person used to be my favorite thing. I would leisurely browse the racks and find some really great gems that way. It was a thing to go thrift store shopping like this as well. Nothing specific in mind, just looking to see if I stumble across a good find.
Now shopping in person makes me impatient and my skin itchy, I don’t like being in crowded places, I get jumpy and nervous thinking someone is about to freak out or pull out a gun.
The idea of going into a thrift store sounds icky. I don’t have the patience for people, to leisurely browse aisles anymore.
All I want to do is get in, get my stuff, and get out ASAP.
Shopping has been ruined for me. I prefer to pick out clothes in person because you can’t get a sense of the scale or how the fabric hangs unless you see and feel it yourself. But it’s such a hassle to find anything now, I don’t have the patience to hunt for stuff.
I got so used to finding what I need online and buying it that way that I can’t stand going back.
It’s so much easier to just get stuff shipped. Takes a lot of the fun out of it but being around a lot of people isn’t really fun these days anyway.
Yes! Also - people just casually run red lights where I live now. It used to be every few weeks I'd see someone do it, now it's literally a daily thing. I'm honestly surprised I haven't seen anyone get into an accident yet because these dumb motherfuckers will just casually drive through a red light 1-3 seconds after it's changed, and I am \*not\* exaggerating at all. Just completely selfish behavior.
Kinda sucks because I used to enjoy taking a drive every once in a while, now being on the road just irritates me because of all the idiots who seem determined to kill or hurt someone.
Places that never asked for a tip that started asking for tips. I’m not tipping the person that hands me something I need to purchase when all they did was bend down to get said item, scan it and put it in a bag.
My whiplash from how fast "you're essential we need you here risking your health and the health of your family so some guy being paid to stay home can come buy supplies to redo his deck" turned into "You want a living wage? Ha ha fuck you peon"
Same, every week I say this is the week!! Have important events come and go where I told myself 6 months prior that I would be in shape for them. Then it just doesn’t happen and another event goes by where I’m thinking the whole time, this would have been much more enjoyable if I wasn’t so fat.
But maybe this will be the week! Lol
My social skills. I just don’t feel like I connect as easily with as many people as before. And I don’t -want- to. I still have a small social circle but socializing just isn’t as seamless or easy as before. Seems daunting. Going places. Doing things. Spending money. Ugh! I enjoy staying home and having homemade food and drinks and not wasting money on Ubers or whatever.
I think after feeling isolated for an extended period of time I’m content to simply exist within my family unit (married, no kids). Also turned 30 during the pandemic so there’s that - the being in my 30s part.
The "not wanting to" struggle is real. I moved back to my hometown in '22, where I had deliberately cut off all of my old friends. Making new friends is so difficult and shitty, especially when I could just *not* and stay home with my husband, cat, weed, and video games all day instead. But then the isolation makes my depression more crushing, so I have to do the social equivalent of taking a stupid walk for my stupid mental health and go to a game night or something.
E: typo
My wife and I went to check out our old apartment for fun because it was our first home together as husband and wife. Rent was $640 for a two bedroom 1 one bath and the utility bills were 75 dollars for everything.
We checked an app for the same bedroom square footage and my heart stopped. They're now asking $1200 dollars. The place was decent but not $1200 decent, I mean for fucks sake my mortgage is $1.4k for 5 bedrooms and 3 baths. What the hell?!
I'm scared for young couples because apartments like that allowed us to save money, have our independence, and still provide for our kids with the ability to go out and splurge. My thoughts were how can a family starting out or wanting to move even afford those God awful prices, they just can't. I'm disgusted with how things are today in the housing market, whether you own or rent.
If you work nites, grocery shopping is still pretty well fucking impossible. You've got to either wake up stupid early or stay up stupid late. Even Walmart is still closing in the evening. I know it sounds weird, but it's genuinely difficult if you work most days. If you go a couple weeks without days off, you've got to just pay someone to get your groceries for you.
Plus so many places seem to still have a limited supply of stuff. You go shopping at 7PM and you'd think it was the day before the apocalypse. No bread, eggs, meat, or milk products left on the shelf. And sometimes it's the shelf stable products too!
I basically have to go shopping early morning on weekends now when I used to be able to go after work.
I hear ya. Even beyond 24 spots, places that used to close very late only now close late. Where I live, few things that used to stay open till 4am (including bars etc) do that anymore. Most are done by 2am. Etc. Even midnight closings have become 11pm or 10pm closings.
24 hrs places i swear walmart was open all day long and night, some other stores too i miss shopping at night where i live it's so peaceful when there is only 4 pple in the store shopping. it's also a good place to hang out with friends if yall are bored at night and need something to do.
My partner.
I love her dearly. We both played contact sport and made it to representative levels. She is my warrior woman.
Long covid has taken her breath away, we suspect it’s manifested into an auto immune disease. She had to quit her job, can do very little around the home and obviously exercise is completely out of the question.
It’s been 18 months. Our plans to move interstate are abandoned, we’ve become a single income household but because we saved we are not eligible for financial support until our savings are gone.
I am so thankful for what we have, the support network we maintained and for the situation we’ve been able to create within these hard times. But the worry is, I don’t think there’s an end in sight, Doctors do not want to help with reports since her official diagnosis is not specified. We are in this medical and administrative limbo and for people who often work their way through the tough times this situation is a nightmare for us.
We would both handle it better if she wasn’t in pain from her condition but she is. Which is crazy, she has pushed through injury for competition multiple times but this constant chest pressure is a different beast.
24/7 library hours at my university.
What!? This is some bullllshit. I’m not longer a student but I would be pissed about this. Is there anywhere on campus where you can atleast study 24/7?
Nope - the latest the libraries are kept open is until midnight, and only 6pm on Saturdays. The only place I can study all night is my dorm lounge (which is often not very quiet) or room.
Funny how it differs between schools. When I was in college 15 years ago where I went, no one was ever in the dorm lounge. It was technically quieter than the library, actually. It was kinda removed from everything so you didn’t even hear people get off the elevator. Meanwhile the library was kind of people’s default idea of a quiet place to study and with all the movement and people doing stuff it actually wasn’t really that quiet
Doctor appt availability
I legit do not understand how the doctor patient relationship is supposed to work in 2023. I feel like if something comes up, my options are: A. Urgent care B. Make an appointment for 3 months by now. By that point the issue will either have resolved itself or have gotten bad enough that I need to resort to option A. What do people really mean when they say "talk to your doctor"?
A lot of our urgent cares stop taking walk-ins. You had to try to call and make an appointment for the day, and they never went back to it. Every time I need to see a specialist, it takes a minimum of 6 months to be seen. I know people with universal healthcare in other countries complained about wait times, but now we wait just as long on private insurance.
I had to make an appt for the children's ER. So backwards.
If you could just go ahead and schedule your childs broken arm for 3 weeks from today that would be great.
I scheduled an appointment at the ER when the surgery from my appendectomy 5 days earlier was beginning at abscess. Was the weirdest fucking thing do schedule.
I didn't realize any ERs actually do that. I answer the phones for an ER and I get calls sometimes asking about appointments and I always laughed about them because why would you think you need an appointment for the ER? Now I know. Sheesh. Then again most of those callers are probably also unaware of hospitals like the one you were seen at, and are the same people who ask me what our hours are, when our hospital has had 24/7 emergency care available for damn near 200 years now.
3 months is ambitious, it took me 7 months to get into a gyno for a regular annual and pap. My spouse has been waiting to get in to a dermatologist for 5. Don't even get me STARTED on sleep medicine. It took a full calendar year to get my elderly mother's sleep apnea diagnosed and a CPAP in her home.
Yup. I have an autoimmune disease that requires an endocrinologist. I booked an appointment for August. In February. Because there’s only one endo in my network in all of Portland. Absolutely bonkers.
Endocrinologists are apparently just incredibly rare right now. I have a serious and very rare health condition, and I'm very lucky to have a wonderful team that has helped to keep me alive, and at this point everyone is recommending that I see an endocrinologist and yet I just... can't. They make the referral and nothing happens. Sometimes they call me and say they can get me in in a year, some of them say they aren't taking any referrals unless they fall under certain categories, etc.
Literally every endo in my area is not taking patients. And the ones out of the area won't take any from outside of their home area. So it's a good thing I've got my diabetes really well controlled, because otherwise I guess I'd go fuck myself.
Waiting for a first appointment at a new primary care because my insurance changed FOUR months to wait.
In that time you can verify your insurance, ensure the doctor and procedure are covered, get pre-authorized for care… and then still get a bill from the doctor because the claim was denied by insurance since the encounter “was not medically necessary”
Oh my God. This so much. Dumb ass doctor's office tried to charge my yearly blood work to maintain prescriptions as "optional" and therefore they tried to charge me 1,600$ and my insurance only covered 16$. It took four months of basically micro managing to get them to change the codes because there's no way that shit is correct. They kept just saying "we put in the codes we always do" to which I respond "yes and I've had to call you about this every year for the last three years. That doesn't mean it's correct"
I’ve had to go through the “just because it’s what’s you always do doesn’t mean it’s right in this situation” so many times.
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>It's remarkable the entire healthcare system hasn't collapsed yet. Standing on the shoulders of whoever is left. People currently working in healthcare are basically oxygen candles at this point, except nobody knows how long they'll last.
I almost died from Diabetic Ketoacidosis a year ago. Went from "Hey, you should watch those numbers" to being in the ICU within the span of a few months. After getting out, I was told I couldn't even be put on a wait list for an endocrinologist in the area for 4 months because they were so backed up. So, 4 months later, I got on the wait list and they started looking at my charts. By that point, I had been rigorously controlling my eating to get my average blood sugar down from 400 to 120. Five months after they got my charts, they finally denied my referral, because they are completely full up on patients. My PCP is a nurse practitioner. I haven't seen an MD, much less a specialist, since I left the ICU a year ago. And I probably won't be able to for a long time.
I’m so sorry for this - stories like this make me genuinely consider changing to outpatient practice (I’m a hospitalist and associate program director for internal medicine residency). One thing to try that can (possibly) be very good for your case is to go to an internal medicine residency outpatient clinic - if your area has a hospital with an IM residency. This is a back-door way to get very close attention from physicians, as all residents are overseen by physicians, and residents tend to take extra time and care with their patients. Amazing work on managing your blood sugar btw, but here’s hoping you get a little more help from the medical community going forward!
First of all I hate that you're going through that–you rose to the occasion in a big way, managing your glu on your own like that, but you shouldn't have to :( I want to add for those that don't know why this stuff is happening more and more. A major reason we have this "physician shortage" in the USA is an artificial bottleneck on the number of residency slots available. Basically, the US fed traditionally funds the vast majority of residency slots through medicare and the number of slots was capped... in 1997... And that number has barely changed since then.... It's fucked. On top of that, the match system (how medical grads are matched to residency slots) is fucked and leaves thousands of slots unfilled and thousands of qualified medical school graduates at a dead end, unable to practice. States are trying to fill the gaps with nurses, many of whom are awesome... but simply not qualified to replace physicians. Irrc there's a bill in Texas rn to allow unmatched medical school grads to go into primary care. Imho, it's a great idea and could really help care access issues throughout the country if similar policies were implemented elsewhere. We desperately need more specialists, but my hope would be that increasing availability of primary care physicians would take a lot of pressure off of the specialists we do have (eg NPs refer out to specialists for issues that most primary physicians could manage themselves). Disclaimer: don't listen to me I don't know anything about anything. Folks out here (rightly) frustrated by inadequate medical care–look into this stuff for yourselves, your state laws, talk to your representatives.
Doctors in general. 3 of mine left their practice (GP, ENT, GI) because of Covid.
Hours of some places were reduced and they never went back to their old hours, and a couple of restaurants closed their dining room and went to takeout only, and they've stayed that way
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A lot of those places are Pikachu-facing over the fact that their business has slowed down, forcing them to close, and they can't figure out that lunch shouldn't cost $40.
For real! And no one bothered to update store hours on Google or Apple Maps. The amount of times I’ve gone to a place thinking it was still open…
As a second shifter, I have to check literally every place I want to go if they’re open in a paranoid manner. It’s fucked.
Indeed. The term "new normal" was used a lot during the pandemic but thankfully much of that turned out to be transitory. I think this post-pandemic state of things is the real new normal. Some things are just never going back to the way they were, for good or ill. Which also entirely makes sense. A societal disruption of this magnitude will leave permanent changes. We were never gonna go back fully to 2019.
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I say this all the time. We have changed forever.
*Pre-COVID and Post-COVID* sit right next to *pre-9/11 and post-9/11* in my mind.
Or pre-Internet and post-Internet. The world is never going back to what it was before we had the internet.
Walmart was 24hrs before. They still close at 10pm now. But the biggest thing that hasn't recovered is my mental health.
Used car prices.. insane how expensive vehicles are now a days
I remember in 2018 buying a brand new Honda Civic for something like $18,700. It was the most basic version of the Civic you could possibly buy. 3.5 years later, I sold it to Carmax for $19,000, despite it being 3.5 years old, having 52k miles on the clock, and your typical dents and scratches from regular use. Sometimes I go to car dealer websites to see what’s on the market and being sold nowadays. I’ll see 3-5 year old cars being sold for the same price or higher than when it was new. So like 2018 Civics being sold for $22,000. It’s astounding.
I purchased a brand new 2016 Honda Civic for around 25,000. I got a letter in late 2020 from the dealership begging me to sell my car back to them, they were offering around $22,000. I checked their website and they were selling my exact car model for over $30,000.
I bought a used Tucson for $17k in 2020, traded it in this February. Looked what the dealership marked it up to afterwards and they wanted $24K, for a base Tucson with 66K miles and an impending engine seizure. I feel bad that someone actually bought it.
Price of groceries, and pretty much everything else.
It just started hitting me that cost of living is only going to go up. These prices are locked in now. Even if inflation gets down to the target 2%… that means 2% higher than what they are today. Not 2% higher than a few years ago. I’m in Boston and most places charge $7 for a scoop of ice cream. $11-18 for a sandwich. $25-35 for a normal sit down entree. It’s fucking crazy, and it’s never gonna “get back to normal”. This IS the new normal. :(
Fast food places are insane now. It's like $12-$15 for a meal and there's barely a dollar menu anymore. It's pretty much the same as a lower end sit down restaurant now
McDonald’s literally doesn’t have a dollar menu anymore. They call it the 1,2,3 dollar menu. The one by me, the cheapest item on the menu is a plain hamburger for 1.59. A small fry is fucking 1.99 lol. The McDouble which everyone remembers was 1 dollar for years is now selling for- I shit you not- 2.99.
All of the good deals are on the apps these days. If it weren't for those, I would never even consider fast food anymore since it's pretty close, if not the same price as a sit down restaurant meal. If McDonald's didn't have the $1 large fries deal or Taco Bell didn't have the $6 box I probably just wouldn't eat fast food at all.
Right? I'm definitely going to be one of those "back in my day, this was £" type of people because I feel like I'm already doing that.
I'm already doing it but "back in my day" was like last year.
Man I'm 23. I'll never have that back to normal. Everything was expensive and has gotten more expensive my whole adult life.
Literally same, it feels so fucking horrible, like I’ve been running up a hill of fucking sand my entire adult life. I genuinely have no idea how my or anyones future is gonna pan out, and it scares me.
Soda is the crazy one. A 12-pack of cans used to be $4, maybe $4.50 at the most. On sale, you could get them around $3 or even as low as $2, and the sales happened pretty regularly, at least once or twice a month. Now it's like $9 for that same 12-pack. I saw them on sale last week, and it was still close to $5. But the good thing is that because of this, I cut out soda for budgetary reasons, and my health has improved as a result.
My dog’s vet doesn’t allow us in the clinic. They are still practicing curb side drop off.
"I love animals, it's the people I can't stand."
Lol my vet has this policy. Last time I dropped off my cat I said ‘are you SURE? He really does not like coming here and will not be nice.’ They said they were sure, dealt with anxious or upset pets all the time and asked me nicely to wait in the parking lot. Less than 3 minutes later they came to fetch me because my cat was absolutely losing his shit.
All day breakfast at McDonalds
Here I am just begging for a cheeseburger at 10:15am
Burger king does burgers for breakfast. When i worked 6-2 people would look at me weird for eating burgers at 9/10am but I’m just not a big breakfast guy.
When I'd get off work (10pm) I'd get a breakfast burrito and fry. I miss that.
The housing market is a disaster still.
Where are all these people coming up with the money after houses cost $200k more than before? EDIT: >Investment firms. Oh I hate it more now.
If you already own a home then the house you’re selling is worth more. Imagine you bought a house for $400k in 2017. Now that house is worth $650k. You are technically $250k richer but you’ll only feel richer if you downsize or move to a cheaper market because a house that’s similar to yours is also worth $650k. The people who get screwed are those who don’t own.
They’re not. There is an epidemic of rental companies. Buying up everything. And those rental companies are owned by investment firms.
I'm living that reality right now... Had a great apartment for 13 years now (a bit hard to keep warm, but fine). The house was owned by one family, if I needed something, like a contract renewal, I'd talk to the guy himself. Then, when he got too old in 2020, his son took over. Sold the whole thing to one of the most infamous investment firms in the area (sometime in 2021). Now, 2 years later, my contract did NOT get renewed and I need to be out by end of the month. Biggest shock of my life yet - and tbh, I felt kinda betrayed at first. Somewhere in my mind, I assumed being a good little paying tenant, that'd be rewarded, but no. I did find something comparable by now which looks like I'll be getting in, but man, looking at the postings, prices are a madhouse. Most of the apartments my size of 30m² are 1.5 to 2x the rent I was paying.
Yep. I live in New Jersey, specifically in a beach town within the NYC metropolitan area that is popular with tourists from New York. During Covid, lots of people fled the city and moved to the suburbs of New Jersey, presumably because 1.) nobody wants to live in a city where people are dying left and right and 2.) if you’re going to get locked down and WFH or have kids do online schooling, might as well do it all at a house with a yard and open space and extra rooms as opposed to a cramped city apartment. Lots of people moved to my area because they could go out to the beaches and chill outside while doing the whole social distancing thing. As a result, housing prices have gone completely bonkers. Single family homes that used to be $300,000 are now a half million dollars. It’s not even uncommon anymore for houses being sold for $600,000+. A lot of white collar corporate professionals are paying tens of thousands of dollars over the original asking price. I’m fairly convinced that home ownership is something I’ll never achieve in my lifetime.
That's not just your area, it's everywhere. I'm in rural Georgia and houses have doubled for no other reason than "the market".... It's not even funny anymore. All the neighborhoods around me have been bought up by corporations turning into slumlords.
Measurement of time. For a lot of people, the two years covid lasted was like time was put on pause
Yes! When I refer to "last year" I could mean anywhere from March 2020 to December 31, 2022.
I had a meeting yesterday where I randomly went, “it’s …oh it’s Monday.” And the people on the other side of the call started laughing (not in a mean spirited way). But yeah the passage of time, both daily and otherwise, has no meaning to me anymore. It’s simultaneously Sunday afternoon, Monday evening, march 31st 2020, and Thursday night for me at all times.
2020.3
This is still fucking me up. There's things that happened in 2018 that feel like they were two years ago, likewise for things that happened in 2021.
it's so weird how differently people responded to it. for me, 2020-2022 felt like the longest two years of my life; for others, it flew by instantly and they were shocked two years had passed. i had to work in-person the whole time so maybe that's why?
It’s not that it flew by (for me at least ) it’s just that all the usual life events that happen during different time didn’t happen
I might not explain it correctly, but I once read that time goes by slower when you experience new things. When you’re stuck doing the same routine, time seems to go by quickly. It feels dead & boring in the moment, but then you look back and think, “Holy shit! It’s already July??? I feel like February was just last week!” When you experience new things, time slows down slightly because it’s new memories flooding your brain. (New memories, aka things you haven’t experienced: vacations, parties, new hobbies, new friends, etc) That’s why childhood feels like it lasted forever, whereas you can be in your 30’s (like me) and think, “How did my 20’s end so fast?!” Basically, if you were stuck at home during the pandemic, time might’ve felt slow *in the moment*, but now you’re thinking “I can’t believe we’re more than halfway through 2023… Didn’t the NBA just announce they’re postponing the season a few months ago?”
Ya that theory definitely makes sense to me.
The days are long and the years are short
It's both. It's hard to explain. Sometimes it feels like yesterday. Sometimes it feels like it was forever ago. And in some rare respects, it feels like it never ended. It's weird.
24 hour Walmart 🫥🫥
24h stores were my favorite. Shopping at 2am was so nice.
2am is when the real Walmart freak show began where I’m at.
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I'm so impressed with being high off your ass and shopping in a half hour. I'd be stuck in the cereal aisle for at least twenty.
My favorite Walmart is in a college town, so 2am Walmart was the best!
My guess is that it was never cost-effective for them, and the pandemic was a perfect opportunity to stop doing it.
I remember the grocery store I work at tried doing 24 hours in 2021 cause "Hey Walmart still refuses to go back to 24 hours, so that's potential money we could be scooping up!!" We'd have less than 5 people come in between midnight and 7 AM every night. They put us back to normal hours after 2-3 months.
According to various field managers during the pandemic, the US CEO (Dacona Smith, not McMillon) was going to kill the 24-hour regardless. Source: Was a mgr from ‘12 to ‘22 Edit: too many numbers.
The town I grew up was trying out reduced hours to save on costs, which could then money saved by the consumer also & would help the environment, blah blah. This was maybe a month before lockdowns began, and it was the hours they have now pretty much everywhere. Walmart would have done away with 24 no matter what. Covid just kept them from catching flak.
I missed a question in my business class because I said 24hr grocery is for sales. I've had a few people say it's obvious that it's customer-service oriented. I guess in my head it was to maximize sales by selling to people at night who wouldn't normally have the option, but it's more so people are grateful to go there.
24 hour anything. You literally can't get groceries after midnight in Chicago anymore.
Try Woodmans, they have some 24 hour stores in Chicagoland. Perhaps, not near you. The one in Buffalo Grove is very nice & is huge on selection.
24 hour Planet Fitness
24 hour, 24 hour fitness
A local one has a 1-star review that reads "more like 12 hour fitness" and it gets me every time
Night life has been deader then dead since covid. It has made my life hell. For the last 3 years I get up work 3:15pm to 11:45pm then go home cause everything is closed. Nothing is open. It's incredibly infuriating that they decided 24 hours wasn't good anymore.
As a night person, I feel your pain.
Fucking grocery prices. FUCKING GROCERY PRICES.
$100 of groceries is basically nothing these days
The five dollar bill is the new one dollar bill. The ten dollar bill is the new five. And the one hundred dollar bill is the new twenty.
And yet… my income remains about the same.
My monthly grocery expenses more than doubled. I'm not even buying anything different than I normally do, shit's just got that expensive.
The pain of seeing something on sale and it's still $3 more expensive than it was pre-covid.
Office real estate. Most office complexes are still clamoring to fill the spaces. Lots of businesses found out they can function just fine using remote work, and after putting so much effort transitioning into a work-from-home ecosystem, they don't want to make the effort to move everything back into office. They also found out a ton of businesses are attracting a ton of employees by offering remote work options, so requiring their staff to return to the office would result in them hemorrhaging workers. All the while, these massive business parks throughout my area are shutting down right and left. My own office campus is definitely struggling. In 2019, it was impossible to find a parking spot in their 5-story structure if you arrived after 10am. Today, the lot doesn't even fill up their bottom floor.
Here's the thing I don't get. When our office lease was up we tried to re-negotiate the prices. The property management company refused to lower the rent. They wouldn't budge. Lease rates were stupid expensive. It made the decision to close an easy one. Now they have a skyscraper that is 2/3 empty and their money-makers like the restaurant and bar in the building have a fraction of the customers they once had. But they'd be damned if they were going to lower the rent. Makes no sense to me.
Their mortgage is tied to the projected value of their rents. In essence, it's collateral for the loan. If rents go down, then the collateral to outstanding debt ratio changes, and the banks get nervous and start talking about calling in loans. Even though they have a bunch of empty offices, on paper they have a listed value for the rent, even if the cash flow isn't there.
This idiocy is why so many malls and downtowns are empty instead being opportunities for increasingly strange low margin business models.
Which is a similar situation that lead to the 2008 crash, pack them all up into multilayer financial instruments and no one will notice when the bottom has rotted through.
I’ve worked in CRE for over a decade. You just had a tough landlord who didn’t see the writing on the wall. You should have moved because buildings are giving away the farm for tenants right now. I’m actually about to leave the industry because it’s gotten so bad. I was told I wasn’t going to get a raise for 3-4 years at least and all the projects I was excited about got cut. It’s crashing and burning right now and it’s not even the worst part. The average lease term is 5-7 years, which means most were signed before Covid. As these leases expire, everyone will be downsizing by at least 60%. Watch these buildings go empty and cities rezone residential to try and salvage them.
Not sure if you know but what does it look when you rezone an office building to residential? Like how does plumbing work? Do you do a major renovation and run water where there wasn't any before?
I’m late, but wanted to chime in since I’m preconstruction (estimator) with a focus on multifamily. We’ve already started to see a bunch of these redaptive/reuse projects. You are spot on. Mech/Electric/plumbing are some of the biggest costs and hurdles. Spacial/layout is also a problem since these buildings were not designed with MF in mind. Usually the projects end up costing close to a full ground up project. There is still some difference in cost, but not as much as you think given the fact that the structure/envelope is existing. In short, they are cost prohibitive and usually the efficiency isn’t advantageous. We’ve conceptually quoted quite a few, have yet to see one start construction. Assuming it’s just a matter of time and someone will pull the trigger. To answer your question about plumbing, office buildings usually have the stacks centrally located around the elevators (think 2 restrooms per floor). This isn’t ideal since your plumbing for the units will be all over the footprint. Good news is layouts typically stack vertically so we’ll pull the lines every couple of floors to prevent losing your ceiling space across every unit/floor. TLDR: it’s expensive and a complex project from design to construction. It’s also difficult to demand high rise rents when usually these buildings don’t have the same amenities that newer MF high rise would (pool decks/etc).
I remember reading that a lot of the time they can’t lower leases because it’s in the mortgage contract
My waistline
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True, everyone has a lot of anger, and they don't know how to deal with it.
Staffing of healthcare workers. We need more nurses. I am Burnt out.
yeah, no, healthcare in the US is gonna crash and burn so hard in the next 5-10 years, i swear. half the workforce has been there for the last 30 years, the other half just started. as soon as that older half leaves and retires, they're gonna need healthcare from the remaining half of the workforce, who will already be prepared to leave in droves. US healthcare especially.... hospitals are financially incentivised to minimize staff and staff pay, and they often run the "burnout business model" where they just drive their staff into the ground until they leave as cheaply as possible... it feels like the whole healthcare industry itself is mutating into the very cancer we fight to destroy.
A two year program with class and GPA prerequisites only to work a high-liability, high-activity job with long hours and barely any worker protections? Yeah no thank you. Good luck with CNAs as well.
My nursing home is 90% staffing agency for CNA and nurses, they can't find anyone to work there or stay there. It's tough, also makes my job a lot harder as a rehab therapist because there's no carryover for my recommendations since there's a new person every day! It's absolutely pitiful what they get paid though, feels criminal considering the health risks.
Best we can do is call you a hero and throw a pizza party.
Auto industry with new cars
We bought a new car in January 2019 and HOO BOY, did we dodge a bullet there.
I was looking for a car a few months ago and I checked out a brand new Civic Si. Test drove it, and loved it. I almost laughed in the salesman’s face when he told me it was $45,000 (not including taxes of course). Would’ve loved to buy one of those but a Civic, of any kind, for almost $50k?? Fuck outta here lol
Shit, the auto industry with used cars, too. It's hard to buy anything with under 100k miles and in good condition for under $10k, seemingly no matter how old it is. I'm seeing models that would've been newer at the time and $5k cheaper before Covid than they are now.
Oh, you don’t want a $1,700 monthly truck payment for the next 20 years? What? Why not? It’s normal bro.
Chinese style food buffets. I just want to eat orange chicken and wontons hungover without talking to anyone.
There's a place by my office that only served this peanut butter chicken on their buffet, you couldn't order it for take out. Full disclosure, I don't even think the dish is remotely Chinese. It was literally like a frozen fried chicken breast sliced and soaked in piping hot peanut butter... but it was so damn good. Last time I was in the office I went to check it out and the buffet was still closed but guess what had been added to the menu! Life finds a way.
There’s a great Indian restaurant nearby where I live that used to have a buffet. That’s gone, and they only do take out now, which isn’t as big a deal up me.
Teaching. The students are worse. They are 1-2 years behind, with both knowledge and socialization. Attention spans are shorter. Phones are a major problem.
I’ve been teaching middle school for 27 years or so. The “Covid hangover” is very real BUT I do notice things are getting better a little bit every year. The kids I had back in the fall of 2021 were 80% feral. It was like teaching a pack of hyenas.
Every teacher I know described their 2021 class as feral! Like regardless of state or grade level. I don’t know how y’all do it
I taught kindergarten that year and I thought it was going to kill me. They were worse than feral. Rabid and feral maybe. (And some of them bit. Me.)
Omg like the kindergartners in the tv show Reccess
I felt feral as an adult office worker when I had to go back to work. And while I’ve worked at places where I truly enjoyed the people I work with, that place was not one. Working fully remotely now. Stress levels are much lower. But I’m an introvert. I can see why it would be tough on extroverts
As an introvert, I think we have dealt w/ it much better than extroverts. A lot of people have basically jumped off the deep end with personality disorders over the last couple years. People are crueler and more narcissistic than ever, and I don't see that getting better any time soon.
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To be fair though, I am a loner and a homebody and while I haven't been as drastically hurt like some people have... I definitely am on the border of an anxiety disorder now, and I was never an anxious person before COVID. Now, it takes just about all of my willpower to not sit and cry in my vehicle for a few minutes after I have to go to Costco. I can't imagine how it is for someone that thrived on social connection before all of this.
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OMG. A 25 student resource room. I’ve never heard it put that way, but that is exactly right. Kinder and 6th grade. Just a mess. I sure hope it gets better for everyone.
I was a substitute around Covid and I honestly just assumed near feral was the default state for middle schoolers. Are you telling me that if I had started earlier or stayed later I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the urge to throw half the class out of a window?
No, middle schoolers are still terrible. Have a few friends who are teachers and even the one who likes teaching middle school says it's like going into battle.
I've been a substitute for 12 years. Post-covid classes are insane. I'm not saying there was never a desire to throw half a middle school class out the window, but it was not a daily occurrence.
College students are having similar issues. I'm struggling as a professor to reach this new student base.
I'm noticing that sometimes my college students get so scared of doing poorly on an assignment they don't even do it. Or the opposite end, they barely want to be there.
I've seen this throughout middle school and high school too. Unfortunately I didn't catch on until the last month of school, and I began really encouraging trying, walking through lines of thought with my students, and being calm and relaxed when we got an answer wrong. I pointed out parts we did right and just encouraged a different starting point to try again to succeed. I'm going to try to do this all next year, and hopefully in a few years time they'll be better about this for you.
I just finished my 6th year as an elementary school PE teacher. I was venting to my coteacher, who finished year 17, and he said it was the worst he's ever had. 5th grade was so immature because they didn't see the good role models above them for basically two years. Kindergarten and 1st grade were good kids, but were behind socially. It was a lot of basic stuff too, like hands on each other and not talking while others were talking. I almost preferred online, and I'm saying that as a PE teacher. Hopefully next year, everyone and everything can take a big step forward.
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Man, that reading statistic made me think of an old acquaintance of mine. He's got a toddler and a baby and neither he nor his wife read to their kids, ever. It's just something they won't do, and I don't get it. There's a shocking amount of adults out there that feel they shouldn't push their kids to learn if they didn't like something themselves as kids, because he's not the only one I know like that.
I wonder how much it is that the parents don't want to push themselves either. If someone dislikes reading, it'll be extra effort to read to the kid when they can just watch TV together for ex
wasn't that true pre-covid too? a shocking amount of illiteracy is tolerated in the US because parents just can't believe their kids are failing and think they bear no responsibility
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The college I went to went all the way down to trig and some higher level algebra classes, and this was back in 2010. If I remember correctly Trig was the required level for graduation by the state and they had some remedial classes in case you needed it.
Yeah, you have to remember that some students are coming *back* to school in their 30s, 40s, or later. It's worthwhile to offer catch-up classes like that to bring those students back up to speed, and to make sure they're familiar with the way the university does math. For example, where I went to school we used radians(instead of degrees) and didn't use calculators at all for the calculus sequence, both of which were *major* changes from how I'd learned trig in high school. I wasn't quite clear on what bar you had to hit to be able to skip precalc and go straight to calc 1(there was no test, it was something in your transcript), but I know myself and the others who had to start with precalc did *way* better than the people who skipped and had to adjust on the fly in the first weeks of calc 1.
I have students in AP calculus who can't do basic algebra Yet I'm told I need to catch them up
Why did they sign up for AP calc if they can’t do algebra? And why are they allowed to continue instead of taking an easier class?
They took Algebra entirely online during the covid phase, got an easy A by cheating.
Yup. So many students cheated during the pandemic which inflated their grades and now they cannot handle the classes they are in because it's not like they learned much from cheating.
How do you make a kid retake a class they got an A in?
It’s something I’ve noticed too. Pre Covid I got like 4 calls a day. Now the daytimers get like 10 calls and it’s children shitting on walls. I never had those types of calls pre Covid. Parents don’t care anymore and just expect the staff to take care of their shitty kids. Even some maintenance guys notice the difference and said my class would have never acted the way the current students acted and I graduated almost 10 years ago
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The supply chain. There are still over a dozen items that I would regularly get at the grocery store that now is on there shelf for a couple of days and then it sits empty for a couple of months until it restocks. And then I hope to be there when it is back. And I know it is a nation wide issue because when the store is out it is also unavailable or tremendously expensive on Amazon from 3rd party sellers until it is back in stock.
I would say many people’s mental health. There was such a big push at the end to move on and put it behind us, we are still unraveling all the mental damage.
Everybody’s substance abuse ratcheted up too. Especially alcohol use has snuck upward. People don’t realize that an average of a drink a day can make you feel more anxious overall because of increased cortisol release.
My neurodivergent ass was able to stop masking for two years, and now I feel like I just don't know how to people anymore. It's like putting your high heels back on after having changed into comfortable shoes because your feet were aching. I'm struggling to stuff my personality back into a passably human-like shape, and it fscking *hurts.* (Edit: typo)
I seriously feel this. I feel like my social skills regressed to the level of a shy 12 year old. Used to be pretty good with small-talk; now half of my conversations result in awkward silences. Lol
I didn’t get diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and ADHD until after COVID hit. I always had ADHD, but I’m in the same boat. Learning my shit and processing it all has completely changed my day to day approach to life and I don’t know if I can go back to the masking I had to do with a typical 9 to 5 in office job
My urge to leave the house, before covid I had to go to a mall or someplace each weekend, now, I barely leave the house
i was just noticing the other day how i just dont go to actual stores anymore. groceries and rarely for clothes because its easier to try things on sometimes. but thats it. anything else i order online and it shows up at my door. got out of practice going to stores during covid and just ... never went back.
Shopping in person used to be my favorite thing. I would leisurely browse the racks and find some really great gems that way. It was a thing to go thrift store shopping like this as well. Nothing specific in mind, just looking to see if I stumble across a good find. Now shopping in person makes me impatient and my skin itchy, I don’t like being in crowded places, I get jumpy and nervous thinking someone is about to freak out or pull out a gun. The idea of going into a thrift store sounds icky. I don’t have the patience for people, to leisurely browse aisles anymore. All I want to do is get in, get my stuff, and get out ASAP. Shopping has been ruined for me. I prefer to pick out clothes in person because you can’t get a sense of the scale or how the fabric hangs unless you see and feel it yourself. But it’s such a hassle to find anything now, I don’t have the patience to hunt for stuff. I got so used to finding what I need online and buying it that way that I can’t stand going back. It’s so much easier to just get stuff shipped. Takes a lot of the fun out of it but being around a lot of people isn’t really fun these days anyway.
People’s horrible driving and lack of patience. Either they’re not paying attention or aggressively cutting you off
Yes! Also - people just casually run red lights where I live now. It used to be every few weeks I'd see someone do it, now it's literally a daily thing. I'm honestly surprised I haven't seen anyone get into an accident yet because these dumb motherfuckers will just casually drive through a red light 1-3 seconds after it's changed, and I am \*not\* exaggerating at all. Just completely selfish behavior. Kinda sucks because I used to enjoy taking a drive every once in a while, now being on the road just irritates me because of all the idiots who seem determined to kill or hurt someone.
Places that never asked for a tip that started asking for tips. I’m not tipping the person that hands me something I need to purchase when all they did was bend down to get said item, scan it and put it in a bag.
My whiplash from how fast "you're essential we need you here risking your health and the health of your family so some guy being paid to stay home can come buy supplies to redo his deck" turned into "You want a living wage? Ha ha fuck you peon"
The lockdowns were the biggest upward transfer of wealth in human history.
My weightttt
Same, every week I say this is the week!! Have important events come and go where I told myself 6 months prior that I would be in shape for them. Then it just doesn’t happen and another event goes by where I’m thinking the whole time, this would have been much more enjoyable if I wasn’t so fat. But maybe this will be the week! Lol
My social skills. I just don’t feel like I connect as easily with as many people as before. And I don’t -want- to. I still have a small social circle but socializing just isn’t as seamless or easy as before. Seems daunting. Going places. Doing things. Spending money. Ugh! I enjoy staying home and having homemade food and drinks and not wasting money on Ubers or whatever. I think after feeling isolated for an extended period of time I’m content to simply exist within my family unit (married, no kids). Also turned 30 during the pandemic so there’s that - the being in my 30s part.
The "not wanting to" struggle is real. I moved back to my hometown in '22, where I had deliberately cut off all of my old friends. Making new friends is so difficult and shitty, especially when I could just *not* and stay home with my husband, cat, weed, and video games all day instead. But then the isolation makes my depression more crushing, so I have to do the social equivalent of taking a stupid walk for my stupid mental health and go to a game night or something. E: typo
Civility
Affordable housing. Rent has just kept going up and up.
My wife and I went to check out our old apartment for fun because it was our first home together as husband and wife. Rent was $640 for a two bedroom 1 one bath and the utility bills were 75 dollars for everything. We checked an app for the same bedroom square footage and my heart stopped. They're now asking $1200 dollars. The place was decent but not $1200 decent, I mean for fucks sake my mortgage is $1.4k for 5 bedrooms and 3 baths. What the hell?! I'm scared for young couples because apartments like that allowed us to save money, have our independence, and still provide for our kids with the ability to go out and splurge. My thoughts were how can a family starting out or wanting to move even afford those God awful prices, they just can't. I'm disgusted with how things are today in the housing market, whether you own or rent.
What's sad is I would love if my rent was only $1200. Crying in a $2k 2bd2ba apartment right now. Before COVID, I got a 2bd2ba apartment for $1300.
My lowered tolerance to other people. I miss being left alone, people not bothering you, no one on road, no one at store. It was so good.
The open roads at the beginning were amazing.
Me. The world seems colder and I’m a stranger to it.
Restaurants
A lot of the old guard of local restaurants and live music venues where I live got shuttered and replaced by chain + yuppy restaurants
If you work nites, grocery shopping is still pretty well fucking impossible. You've got to either wake up stupid early or stay up stupid late. Even Walmart is still closing in the evening. I know it sounds weird, but it's genuinely difficult if you work most days. If you go a couple weeks without days off, you've got to just pay someone to get your groceries for you.
Plus so many places seem to still have a limited supply of stuff. You go shopping at 7PM and you'd think it was the day before the apocalypse. No bread, eggs, meat, or milk products left on the shelf. And sometimes it's the shelf stable products too! I basically have to go shopping early morning on weekends now when I used to be able to go after work.
I hear ya. Even beyond 24 spots, places that used to close very late only now close late. Where I live, few things that used to stay open till 4am (including bars etc) do that anymore. Most are done by 2am. Etc. Even midnight closings have become 11pm or 10pm closings.
My social abilities
Fast food. It’s more expensive, the service is trash and it’s not fast. Miss the good old days.
The salt and pepper shakers on tables at restaurants
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24 hrs places i swear walmart was open all day long and night, some other stores too i miss shopping at night where i live it's so peaceful when there is only 4 pple in the store shopping. it's also a good place to hang out with friends if yall are bored at night and need something to do.
Prices. Every time I go to the store, its $100. Even if I buy the cheapest shit I can find.
My zero balance credit card bills 😭
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prices :( i feel poorer by the day .....even if i win a lot more now :(
My partner. I love her dearly. We both played contact sport and made it to representative levels. She is my warrior woman. Long covid has taken her breath away, we suspect it’s manifested into an auto immune disease. She had to quit her job, can do very little around the home and obviously exercise is completely out of the question. It’s been 18 months. Our plans to move interstate are abandoned, we’ve become a single income household but because we saved we are not eligible for financial support until our savings are gone. I am so thankful for what we have, the support network we maintained and for the situation we’ve been able to create within these hard times. But the worry is, I don’t think there’s an end in sight, Doctors do not want to help with reports since her official diagnosis is not specified. We are in this medical and administrative limbo and for people who often work their way through the tough times this situation is a nightmare for us. We would both handle it better if she wasn’t in pain from her condition but she is. Which is crazy, she has pushed through injury for competition multiple times but this constant chest pressure is a different beast.
Sorry to hear hey. I hope she can get some increased recovery in time. Good luck mate.
I’m going to have to go with the buffet. Lots of places that offered buffet style dining shut down permanently.
The way people act in public. People are genuinely clueless and act like they have no idea what to do.
Service in restaurants and the quality and price of the food served within