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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • The day after the 2016 election, I sent an email to the guy who contracts most of my services. He’s also one of my best friends. It was in response to a job we were working on, so I cc’d his assistant.

    Basically said I was disappointed about the outcome of the election, then got into the job specifics.

    From his response, I knew I fucked up. He just said he was glad the election was over.

    I never liked his assistant anyways, but I looked up her voter registration and she’s Republican. And she’s totally the Trump type, though I hadn’t thought about it before.

    She’s been pretty much on the warpath for me ever since. I provide a great service at a good price, so she keeps me around. Plus some clients know me and would possibly revolt if I were taken off their jobs. I think she’s been disparaging me to them for any misstep that I make.

    I suspect she asks me for quotes and gives projects out to anyone who bids lower.

    This was never the case with my friend; if I made a bid too low or too high he’d ask me to requote it. Yes,** if he thought my bid was too low, he’d tell me to charge more.**

    Not so with this monster. She’s nickle and diming me for everything.

    And now my friend’s health has taken a turn for the worse, and she’s in charge.

    God I wish I never sent that stupid email.













  • Glad you asked.

    Short answer: gambling

    Long answer: us kids were starting high school and he knew college was after that, so he needed to figure out how to come up with some money to help us. He was good at math, so someone suggested he play the stock market.

    He started off investing “fake” money (just his own personal ledger) and did pretty good. So he invested small amounts and continued to do well. He finally decided to borrow money from the bank, which is how the story came about.

    He actually did REALLY well; paid off the loan, got a bigger one, paid that off, etc, until he had enough of his own money to keep investing. He beat the S&P every year, he had a talent for it.

    But he really didn’t enjoy it, he said it was a lot of work to keep up with the markets and how they interacted with each other. He kept it up for a few years after we finished college until he had a comfortable nest egg and quit.

    He only paid for half our college, as a matter of principle he wanted us to come up with the other half. I still have loans to pay off but it was a huge help.

    Now he hates capitalism and doesn’t do any investing at all. He used to have some safe mutual funds but he’s jaded about the state of the world, he doesn’t want any part of the system.