Even the 'attention deficit ' part isn't really right.
I don't have a deficit of attention, the problem is that I have more than I know what to do with. So I'm trying to concentrate on every damn thing rather than the specific thing I want to/need to be.
The average person doesn't. That's just for rich people.
The rest of us just suffer the consequences.
A client.
The boss assigned a new client to me once (I was working as an accountant at the time), I had a meeting with them, did the onboarding stuff, then promptly forgot they existed.
It was only like two months later when I got a call from them (er, I noticed you haven't done anything with our accounts yet, is there anything you need?) that I realised. Oops.
And that's perfectly fine.
When you think about it, it's weird for someone to get offended if you forget their name, and it shouldn't be embarrassing to ask for a reminder.
It's information. People get and forget information all the time. We're not computers. Forgetting someone's name shouldn't be embarrassing or offensive - particularly at social events where you might be introduced to a dozen or more people. Nobody's gonna remember that much information flawlessly, and neither should anyone be expected to.
People seem to forget that even highly senior people - particularly in the forces where (at least nominally) everyone starts at the bottom and works up the ranks just like everyone else - are still just people. I find the ones that let power go to their head don't tend to rise all that far.
I personally know a guy that's high up in the RAF (a step below General equivalent, roughly) and has an OBE. He's also a major warhammer geek, adores his children, drives a ten year old Audi and has a sense of humour best described as 'juvenile'. Particularly when he gets drunk. If you met him in a bar, you'd assume he was a salesman or some sort of middle management guy.
Yeah, the guy's probably like 'screw you, I'm boiling in this stupid costume and I'm getting paid $50 to do this. Stop being such a snotty bitch and just smile and wave'
TBF They're still a bunch of crooks.
The issue (or one of them at least) is that they can energise an otherwise dead circuit in a way that an electrician might not expect.
Say. for example, a storm knocks down a power line down your street. So you plug your generator in to the house wiring using this cable. All good, your house now has power.
Then the power company sends a guy out to fix it. He picks up the 'dead' side of the break, thinking he's safe because the line upstream is broken. But it's actually live - it's being fed power by your generator. So you end up zapping your power guy because he wasn't expecting to be dealing with live cables.
(Not a power guy but I would imagine they would test any cables before working on them for reasons like this, but it's still a dangerous situation)
Did you know the Berlin wall has now been down for longer than it was ever in place?
Don't worry, you'll get used to the responsibilities that come with adulthood and eventually you'l flourish.
Or learn to hide the horror with a combination of drugs, alcohol and denial (with just a dash of depression/anxiety), which is basically the same thing.
Well duh. HDMI only came out a couple of years ago, of course the Wii doesn't have it.
TBF I used it as a password for a while. It's instantly memorable.
But I never used it on anything I actually cared about. Just for like one time stuff, where a site would insist I created a login but I knew I almost certainly wouldn't ever go back there. Or I had a google account for those times I needed a login or burner email quickly without messing around with my password manager or 2fa. There was never anything on the account that I ever cared about losing or being compromised.
No no, see what you've gotta do is swap some of the letters out so they don't look like words, so like '1nc0rrecth0r5eb@ttery5taple. See? Easy. All you gotta do is remember which letters you substituted for what and you're good to go.
If this is the sort of shit they post on the regular, it's not that crazy really.
Had that happen with my wife's car insurance. She was involved in an accident (not her fault) and another car just slightly tapped her bumper. No damage, no problem.
But she called her insurance company, told them about the accident but said she wasn't claiming, she just wanted them to know in case on of the other people involved put her details in with their claim.
Fast forward to my next renewal, they refuse my renewal on the basis that I lied to them as I said my wife (a named driver on my policy) hadn't claimed when in fact she had. What?
A few phone calls later it turns out that even though there was no fault and no claim on my wife's behalf, it went on her record anyway and a lot of insurers will just log that as if it's a claim.
I had to switch to another provider and my wife's own renewal shot up from the previous year. All told, that accident (that again, wasn't my wife's fault, she didn't claim against and was barely even involved in) has cost us over £100 in extra insurance premiums so far.
Bastards.
For me it's a matter of laziness tbh.
Like if I come inside I might not bother taking my shoes off for a bit, particularly if I'm about to go outside again (eg if I'm coming in from the garden to grab a drink). But if I'm 'properly' in the house, particularly if I want to go into the carpeted areas, then the shoes will come off.
Sure, that makes my floors a bit dirtier than if I took my shoes off every time, but honestly? It's a floor. It's not like I'm eating my dinner off it. Besides, it's not as if my cats wipe their feet when they come inside, so my floors are never perfectly clean no matter what I do.
I do, of course, follow house rules when I'm visiting someone else's home, because I'm not a psychopath. The attitude in this article horrifies me.
I think Douglas Adams did it better in Long Dark Teatime of the Soul:
"He had what Sister Bailey supposed was what people meant by an olive complexion, in that it was extraordinarily close to being green."
I remember reading an article about twenty years ago that predicted this. The premise was that all new industries and technologies (it cited automotive, telecoms and electricity industries as examples) start off with a whole bunch of small players that eventually whittle down into a handful of large companies and nobody else gets a chance to play any more. The article predicted the same would happen with the internet.
I remember reading that and thinking 'pfft, the internet's not like that though, it's really easy to create a website, the barrier to entry is too low to allow any big companies to take over'.
So I was wrong on that count...
Unfortunately, forums have bot problems too, or at least they would if they were still popular.
I run a (very) small PHPBB site that's only visited these days by like half a dozen people and I only keep it running for old time's sake. I had to disable all new signups a couple of years ago because in spite of all my anti-spam measures, I was getting a dozen or so spambots trying to register every day.
Last month, I had to block all traffic from Hong Kong because I was getting about 5 million hits a day from there, which was bringing my cheap shared hosting to its knees. Either my site got really popular with the HK populace all of a sudden, or I was getting hit with some major bot traffic.
Bots will go wherever the traffic is, it's not just a reddit/twitter/FB thing.
Absolutely not, I just need to get some time to spare to read and deal with all the emails in my inbox, then I'll file them properly.
All 18,267 of them.
I'll get round to it soon, I swear.
I write bad stories.
When I say 'bad', I think (or at least like to think) at least some of them are pretty okay. I've (self) published a few and they've been pretty well received.
But my writing habits don't really make for decent, completed and edited stories. I enjoy that initial burst of creativity that comes with writing that first draft, not so much the editing and rewriting process that's needed to produce a decent readable story. So most of my stories are stuck in that rough first draft stage. Hell, most of them aren't even finished.
My usual process is something like:
Realise my latest daydream fantasy can be made into a decent story
Spend ages fleshing out details in my head
Spend hours outlining the plot and painstakingly researching details that probably nobody would notice anyway
Start obsessively writing the story, sometimes writing up to 10,000 words a day
Get bored/burned out with the story and abandon it. Sometimes for weeks, sometimes forever (I recently picked up a story again that I hadn't touched in three years)
Daydream about new story. Repeat.
I've got something like seventy different stories in my 'in progress' folder in various stages of completion, anywhere from 5,000 to 100,000 words long. In comparison, my 'completed and published' folder has six items in it.
One problem I do have is understanding people in a noisy environment, eg bars or busy public areas.
I thought for the longest time (way before ADHD was even something I considered) that I had a hearing problem.
I couldn't follow along with, or even understand what was being said in a group conversation that apparently everyone else had no issue with. I used to spend a lot of time just smiling and nodding along, trying not to mind how excluded I always felt.
Then (embarrassingly late in life) I realised something. I could hear everything just fine, I just couldn'tunderstand it. I could hear every word everyone was saying, but they might as well have been speaking Norwegian for all the good it was.
I think the issue is that in noisy environments, my brain takes in everything, every conversation in earshot, the music on the pa, the clattering of glasses, and it's just way too much to sort though. Like aiming a firehose at a teacup, it quickly overwhelms me and I end up with nothing.
Where are my auditory processing disorder homies at?
ADHD