My wife and I bought a house with two GIANT trees in the backyard. At least sixty feet tall, four feet across. They were probably planted when the house was built in '72.
One month in, one of them dies. It cost $2,700 to remove it and leave the stump.
Then in March this year the OTHER ONE FUCKING DIES TOO. We went ahead and had the stumps ground this time. $4,400.
I spent $7,100 to have a backyard with 0 trees and 2 mounds where I would rather have trees. Fucking NOTHING to show for all that money. Those trees were gorgeous. I was pretty devastated when we had to have the second one cut down.
Apart from the trees, we have had:
A 50 year old toilet flush valve break ($35 plus the time it took me to repair the toilet because I do not want to figure out how to get rid of an old toilet);
The garbage disposal fail ($300 for a new disposal; $450 for the plumber because I got in over my head);
The gas valve on the heater break ($840 plus a weekend of it being 45° in my house before anyone in town could come with the part)
A garage door that hangs up as it closes. I’m gonna ignore that one for as long as I can and just pull it down while it closes for now. Maybe I’ll get the hardware to convert it to a manual door while I’m young enough to pull it up and down.
Getting rid of a toilet might be easy. My trash company accepted one as my once a month “large item”. I just had to dry out all the water and bag it up with the tank and bowl in separate bags.
Upgrading to a modern toilet with a good MAP score was a huge upgrade and not terribly expensive compared to other projects. I think we’ve plugged it maybe once since we got it? The old toilet needed to be plunged regularly.
If you decide to take it on just give your trash company a call first and see what their policies are.
A lot of people break up the toilet and put it in their normal trash in pieces. I paid $100 for a junk collection company to pick up my 35 year old toilet.
This is why I jumped at the chance to buy my parents' old house when they moved out. Not only were they giving me a good deal, but I knew how my dad took care of the place and that I wasn't buying a fire hazard or worse.
My rule is that it goes back less fucked than it came out
Sometimes it’s not by much, but it still happens
Which is why I’m pissed my FIL redid my kitchen light switch without me there: it came out broken, went in the way he likes, and now half my kitchen doesn’t work and I cant figure out the fucking arcane bullshit the original guy did to fix it
I weep for whoever bought my parents old house. My dad left so much half-assed shit that’s going to break again for them to find. Hell he’s already done a number on their new house and that’s just what I can see walking through. I’m probably going to inherit that one…
Our walk in shower on the 2nd floor leaked to the first due to the membrane being compromised. Found out there is no easy fix and had to completely redo the shower. It was 9k. T_T
Sucks about the trees, but your other repairs you’ve made don’t seem too bad. It could’ve been worse… trees could’ve been neglected and fallen on your property.
A 60ft tall 4ft wide tree costs $4k to remove in your neck of the woods? In my area, it costs that much to remove a tree a third of that size and I shopped around and got multiple quotes too 😣
I don’t know if it’s because prices are different where you live, but around here, you totally got hosed on the trees. Admittedly, we didn’t get the stumps removed, but we’ve had multiple very large oak trees cut down (they predate the house by many years and the house was built in the 1980s) and they cost around $1000 each time.
The garbage disposal fail ($300 for a new disposal; $450 for the plumber because I got in over my head);
This seems a little outrageous. Garbage disposals are about $150 new, and I have no plumbing experience and can swap one out in less than 15 minutes. Unless you seriously damaged some pipes or the plumber was getting double time I have no idea why it would cost that much.
I did fuck up the plumbing. Like I said, got in over my head. All the old pipes were cemented in and the disposal didn’t match up to the existing plumbing. I should have thrown in the towel sooner, but “too late” was when I, the dumbass with a sawzall, chose to admit defeat. He was here a solid 2 hours cleaning up my mess. I can fix most stuff, but sometimes, it just goes the wrong amount of sideways.
As for the disposal, if we were gonna replace it, we were gonna get a GOOD one. It’s a 1 horse and it’s probably overkill, but I’d rather spend the extra on a higher quality machine. We both spent way too much time living with shit tier appliances in cheap apartments.
Fortunately, the plumber was a total bro and replaced all the cemented fittings with compression fittings. So if the next one doesn’t perfectly fit, it’ll be as simple as loosening everything up and adjusting it all.
IT guy here, Excel is a data analytics tool, not a database, not a word processor, not a sales system, not a photo album, not a notepad, not a paint program.
If at anytime you are treating Excel as a database, you are doing it wrong, and you deserve me mocking you when asking for help recovering it when it breaks, I won’t as I am not a dick, but if I did, you would deserve it.
If you want a database, build an SQL database, or have someone build it for you, not me.
The problem is, people dig to deep into excel functions, some of them could easily build a database or do some programming (if/else), but they know nothing outside of their ms-office -ecosystem.
Just a hint for ms-office devs, why not a low-code-builder with SQL backend. Just call it squirrel or powersql or something.
It’s more than just knowing things outside the ms office ecosystem. People use the tools they have. So when IT locks down the whole system and it takes an act of God to get anything else installed, you find ways to hammer that nail with whatever blunt object you have in hand.
Isn’t that part of the same office package or does that cost more?
Not sure about the current state of things since I haven’t used MS Office in decades, and I believe it’s entirely made of web apps now, but Access definitely used to be extra. As in, there always were at least two editions of Office, one that included Access and one that didn’t. And the former was significantly more expensive.
All those stories are 100% true. And when someone did end up hosting an Oracle based SQL database, they’d pull from it in Access and it’d take several hours for one query. My R code did the same in about 10 seconds.
Access has its uses, need a database to catalog your (parents) physical photo albums, or perhaps you want to have a database for recipies at home to make them easier to find, then in those cases Access should be fine if you are willing to maintain it.
Shit, I’ll mock them. I’m too jaded and depressed at this point in my career to give a fuck. I’ll go full Nick Burns on their asses if one of my end users wants to use Excel as a database and expects me to make it work. The may even learn something in the process. It might be the fact that I’m a dick, but everyone figures that out pretty quickly.
Yes, there are the people who think there is genuinely no problem with this. Just like there are people who will never delete a line of code in favor of commenting everything and who refuse to write commit messages no matter how many times their co-workers beg them to.
But, generally, people know it is a horrible workflow and is prone to failure. But there is no time and resources available to revamp the entire system. Because that likely involves going “offline” for the migration as well as the subsequent retraining. Its no different than the technical debt we all laugh and cry about. We know that server is held together with chewing gum and shoe strings but we don’t have time or authorization to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch. We are just hoping it doesn’t fail at a bad time.
If you’re lucky? You can periodically export the excel sheet to a database (sql or access, it doesn’t matter). You are still doing things wrong but you at least have a recovery option at that point. But, if you can’t, you are more or less fucked and know it.
As for another Lesson Learned. A database solution without high-ish availability and backups is actually worse than the god awful spreadsheet. Because people know when the spreadsheet fail and likely are self-important enough they will stop everything to recover it. People tend to ignore error messages when they try to submit a record or save something and you find out that the disk failed last week and you lost everything.
Years ago, I’ve recommended KeePass to a girl from marketing who kept a long list of passwords on paper on her desk. She forgot the master pass after a week or so. That was the end of my trust in users’ ability to maintain a safe environment.
It’s not even a good analytics tool. If you submit an academic paper with excel plots in it, I’ll reject that shit without reading it and type “lmaoooooooo…” To the review character limit.
My 12 year old child knows how to use matplotlib and he thinks Santa can fit down a chimney.
It is good enough for financial and marketing analytics, just because there are better tools for scientific applications doesn’t make Excel a bad analytic tool for general use.
I work for a Fortune 500 company and I can tell you the reason why excel (and Google sheets) are used inappropriately is because cyber data controls make creating and maintaining a database very hard. Not only that but the skills required to know how to make a table in a spreadsheet is nowhere near the skills required to deploy, maintain, and provision a database table.
Spreadsheets don’t require a UI to be built. People don’t have to learn a new app just to be able to see data.
I’m an IT guy too and I’m the first to tell you that spreadsheets suck. But when it takes an act of a board to create new tables in a database, I tell ya…might as well just use spreadsheets.
I’ve always had top due to loft bed vibes but now that I’m an adult, I want a bottom floor bed so bad, but I’ll lose the space saving capabilities! I currently have a whole chest of drawers under the bed and it’s been great to be able to stash things away.
But, the ability to flop into and out of bed is dearly missed…
That second guy was me walking into a target at 9pm to buy bungee cords after is spent an hour on the side of the highway in -20 weather trying to straighten my skidplate out enough that it wasn’t dragging after I slid into a median.
The customer wants the brand new website we are building them to be able to load data from several types of excel files and then email them an excel file with results. Please shoot me…
It can be sometimes. I do a simple import in one of my personal projects. In case for the client, for over 20 years they have used excel to make all CRUD changes and now they get to build a brand spanking new website to do all of those CRUD changes and they still want to do it in excel.
Customer wants a database, but has the MBA learning disability? Yes, literally the primary use of excel. Microsoft would go bankrupt without MBA brain rot.
It’s still a crap-ton of calories, at least the way I eat it. I’ve proven you can gain weight on keto. It’s harder but snacking on PB all day is one way to get enough calories to do it.
I was almost finished redoing a floor when one of the planks kicked back in the table saw and hit me in the arm. I didn't think anything of it, and then realized the threshold I bought wouldn't work.
So there I was, in Home Depot at 8:58pm, walking back to the flooring section when I realize that I've been dripping blood on the floor from a cut in my arm the entire time.
I have colleagues who have 20 copies of the same document with slight variations named like this in a folder. I honestly don’t understand how they function at work.
Every tech noob user I see. Worse if it’s mac because 1) I cannot use it for the life of me and 2) almost every Mac user stores it in the same default downloads folder and won’t know what path it’s in unless they use the Finder tool.
I work in Finance at my company and we always save revised copies for Excel files instead of saving over.
But we also have strict rules on it. File name is always “xxxx_Workbook Template Name_MMDDYY.xlsx” or “_YYYY_MM.xlsx”, depending on how often it gets updated.
Older versions get moved to a subfolder. It helps us go back and find out what something was if there was a mistake or revert back if Excel done fucks up.
It never works when you need it. Like “that file was too big”, that file was on a network share, that file is outside the window of how many old changes are saved. It’s like using an undelete utility. Sometimes you get lucky.
It’s better to save every change as a dated/numbered file or use a real source control system.
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