I don't like the part of adulting where I have to deal with... other people mostly. Bureaucracy too.
Strictly work/ chores/ working out, that's fine - it's the same as before being an adult. Yesterday I was computing determinants and stuff, vacuumed my room... all stuff I did before I was an adult. It's just the working out part that has changed, now it's low impact stuff because my days of jumping from trees are over. My frame and hinges can't take that anymore.
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What really gets to me about work is the getting paid part because, as you say, there are bills to be paid.
On the rare occasions I do get to do a commercial project, I just do the work, fill in an invoice template, send it and get paid. Usually. There have been a couple of occurrences where the payment part never happened. And honestly I'm a lot more pissed about the wasted time on back and forth emails and about what a nerve-racking experience that was than about the money.
There's dealing with banks and payment processors. I have a Patreon account, which I sometimes really regret for a bunch of reasons. I recently learned they also take a heavy share from patrons in addition to taking that from me (the % varies from country to country, but with the "right" combo of patron-creator countries, they may keep around 35%). Then there's the fact that the won't pay me directly into my bank account, it has to go through a payment processor.
This is why I didn't do anything with my Patreon account for the first five years I had it and instead opted for Liberapay, which allowed payments directly into my bank account. They were using Mangopay in the back, but at some point about 5 years ago, they ran into some trouble... the details of which I didn't really understand, but I think it was somehow related to the fact that neither checked the identity of the people on the platform (something with "Know Your Client", but I don't really understand that stuff). So then Liberapay switched to using payment processors like Stripe or Paypal, which made it pretty much the same as Patreon, just with fewer users.
That's when I switched to Patreon because it had become the same in terms of payment and most people were there anyway... and couldn't figure out how to get paid. Paypal won't accept my bank, so even if I get the money into Paypal, I can't get them from there into my bank account, plus it feels icky to use. And I understand it has pretty heavy fees too. Payoneer has the interface of a fucking space ship, good luck figuring it out and their customer (dis)service never answered when I asked for help. Plus they charge quite a heavy sum just to have an account if you don't roll a lot of money through them. I eventually managed to figure out Stripe, but by the the time I did, I couldn't get my Patreon money through them anymore. I did end up using Stripe for Liberapay and it worked. For a while. Until recently this year when it stopped working... something about the same "Know Your Client" thing and they wanted a copy of my ID. I did that and I don't see any of the blocked warnings in my dashboard anymore, but I also haven't received any more money through Stripe since.
As for Patreon, I ended up getting my money through a friend's Paypal account, though that involved extra steps, an extra currency conversion (my Patreon account is in USD because that was the only option when I signed up a decade ago and now I cannot change it anymore without fucking up a ton of stuff, my friend's account was in EUR and I have a RON account) and extra fees... but given Paypal was not an option for me and I couldn't figure out Payoneer... what else to do? But now that doesn't work anymore either. I eventually found someone who has the same problem with Paypal (bank not accepted) and eventually he managed to get Payoneer to work. I had already somehow managed to get my bank account approved by Payoneer and he helped me check I had gone through all the steps needed to connect with Patreon in order to get money from there. But there's also the "Know Your Client" thing, the same thing as with Stripe, no way of knowing if they're fine with my ID (which is my real ID, ffs!). Plus Patreon blocks all possibility of taking money out for a while whenever you change the payment method. So I'm at the point where I a have on a few months of earnings on Patreon which I cannot take out at least for the moment. And once Patreon unblock that, I don't even know if Payoneer is going to work. And Patreon won't even let me refund patrons fully. So I asked Patreon what happens to the money if I can't get it and they don't even let me to fully refund the patrons. Crickets.
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I am at least paying an accountant, so at least I don't have to worry much about that part other than collecting invoices and stuff which I give to her. But sometimes even an invoice is a problem. Most times it isn't, but yesterday I came across a store employee who yelled at me "really, do you really need one?" when I asked for an invoice and started cursing and slamming drawers and pens and everything in sight when I said that yes, I did need one. And loudly commented how idiots (like me?) who ask for this shit piss him off. Yeah, dude, if you have a problem with it, please change the law, instead of barking at me, I just do what I got instructed to do.
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Then there's just every day life.
Flowers from the mini garden next to the block getting stolen or even worse, just vandalised. Or worse, flowers stolen from the cemetery. There's a water fountain a little over 10m away from the grave. We replaced the old and hard to use faucet there out of own pocket a few months ago. With an easy to use one. A couple of days ago, found that vandalised too. I regularly find cigarette butts, empty cigarette packs, various other packaging and other stuff thrown in the mini garden by the block. Stuff getting vandalised all the time in general.
There are always people who feel the need to park right at the entrance, which means their damn cars are pressing on the rose bushes in the mini garden... and they have parking spots that they pay good money for a few tens of m away! But they just have to fucking park as close to the block entrance as possible. I sometimes think that if the damn cars could fit through the block door, they'd try to go in with them, up the stairs, maybe even park them in their beds.
Now I've seen flower bouquets in Kaufland finally have the number of flowers in the bouquet on the label, but for a long time, they didn't. They just had a tiny, easy to miss, round sticker with the number. And there were almost always fewer flowers in the bouquet than that number. So people probably took some thinking nobody would notice.
I have to always be careful when I buy a tub of ice cream and check that nobody opened it before to stick a couple of fingers in and get some ice cream on them. I have to be careful with everything in general because chocolates may be missing from chocolate boxes, wafers from wafer bags, someone may have stuck a finger in a face cream to give it a try. Or may have had a drink out of a milk carton. I always try to be in sync with bake times at stores (good thing some even have a display that tells you just when they take stuff out of the oven in the bakery section) because otherwise, it's likely someone grabbed bread rolls and the likes and squished them in the hand to judge how soft and fresh they are.
All of this and so much more like it... basically being in the world... where there are shit people doing shit things...
Wow. I would say move to England but I am not so sure it would be "better" here, just different shit by different shitty people!
As for KYC/Know Your Client, that is Anti Money Laundering stuff, although here in the UK it's used for Safer Gambling too I.E. have to legally ensure someone can afford to spaff £100k on bets before allowing them to do it, because some people cannot take responsibility for their own actions. "Hey, I didn't have that kinda cash *spare* why did you let me gamble it all away?" 🤷🏼♂️
Uh, oh... I've seen some "gamble responsibly" ads here. And it really feels like a way that they just wash their hands. Please come and gamble here, but if something goes really wrong for you, we told you to only gamble responsibly. There was recently a teenager who killed himself after gambling away a lot of money and those ads may have arrived before that, but I've only seen them after. They still feel very hypocritical either way.
Gambling is becoming a big problem here and I can't exactly blame the people who see it as their one way out of shit. Because they're not really wrong about thinking that what they need is a fucking miracle. They are wrong about their chances of making that miracle happen via gaming, but that's another story. These are desperate people and unfortunately, there are plenty of scumbags who see other people's broken dreams and misery as something they can make money out of.
There are a few types of thriving businesses I can think of and they all thrive on exploiting what goes wrong in people's lives. There's the church. Pawn shops. Pharmacies. Gambling has entered the chat too.
I mean, just look at this:
Those pharmacies (Dr.Max, Richter, Catena, Dona) have been all there side by side for well over a decade. None of them went out of business.
There used to be a shop selling spices, herbs, nuts, fruit & veggies a few minutes away from me. It first closed during the first lockdown in 2020 and then it struggled to recover. And then closed down permanently after a while. Same as a lot of other businesses. Like the shoe factory where my mom worked for 40 years.
Where that spice shop was, you can now gamble your money and your life and maybe even your wife away.
Last Edit: Jul 14, 2023 11:20:08 GMT -5 by anaix3l
They’ll tell you that they love you, like a spider loves a fly Promise you you’re safe, but never look you in the eye
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