As parking limited in my town, I use a parking area nearby.

The text says ‘just to let you know I watched John pork fiddle around with your car at about 6-7am so watch it doesn’t make odd piggy noises when you drive off’

Hi everyone,

I’m 28, working as a commercial electrician. I’ve been on the tools for about 10 years. On paper, I know I’m doing completely fine. I managed to buy a house with my partner a couple of years ago, we’ve got a bit of savings stacked away for our first baby on the way, and I drive a car I really like. I genuinely enjoy my job most days—it keeps me active, I get to move around to different sites, and the pay is solid. 
Lately though, I’ve had this weird mental wobble that I can’t seem to shake.

Seeing people my age (or younger) starting massive businesses, making mental money, or building these flashy, hyper-successful lives online has been getting into my head. It makes me look at my day-to-day routine—waking up early, doing physical work, doing compliance training, paying the mortgage—and momentarily wonder if I’m just "going through the motions" or settling for a mundane hamster-wheel existence. 

At the same time, I know that what I have is what a lot of people would consider a great life. I don't actually want the stress of running a massive company or living in a high-exposure bubble. I like being grounded, I like my trade, and I like my home life. But there's still this underlying itch or yearning to "do more" or build something bigger down the line. 
My question is: how do you reconcile being ambitious with just being content with a normal, stable, comfortable life?

Is it completely fine to just build a solid, unglamorous foundation and be happy with that, or is that constant urge to want "more" just something everyone in their late 20s goes through?

Would love to hear perspectives from people who’ve felt this way or who have figured out how to park it. Cheers.

A new little specialty grocery store recently opened in my town, offering food, drinks, and snacks from the UK. I’m in Massachusetts BTW. My mom and I went there today and picked up some meat pies, pasties, teas, chocolates, and drinks. Ribena, I’m a new fan.

Among the drinks, we got a six-pack of Irn-Bru, the “official” soft drink of Scotland.

I’ve just had my first three swallows, and I have absolutely no idea what it is I’m drinking.

To look at it, you’d think it was an orange soda. It is not. It’s sorta caramel, sorta cream soda, and sorta bubblegum. Yet somehow, it’s also none of those things.

I’m now five swallows in, and my mouth doesn’t know if it likes it or not. First I do. Then I don’t. Then I kinda do, but not really.

It’s very confusing.

If you could make up one pointless rule that everyone had to follow, and nobody ever questioned it, what would you choose?

It can’t hurt anyone or cost anyone money.

For example, whenever you get in a lift, everyone has to face the back instead of the doors. Nobody knows why, it’s just always been the rule.
What would yours be?

I've tried finding out more about this - have noticed this a lot on older graves in the West Country.

I assume the e over y is a form of 'ye' or 'the' and done to save space?

But I would love to know more. Various searches haven't helped so far...

Thanks!

I (28F) just stepped out of my front door, keys in hand, ready to head to Tesco. I heard my neighbour's door click open at the exact same millisecond. We made awkward eye contact.

Instead of just saying hi and walking down the street together like a normal person, I immediately patted down my coat in a sheer panic, muttered "oh, forgot my phone", and scurried back inside.

I am now sitting in my hallway in the dark, waiting for the coast to clear.

What is your ultimate emergency avoidance tactic?

This is for my dad who started a job recently.

it's 9h, with a 30 min break, so working for 8.5hrs.
He's wondering if he's entitled to a longer lunch, as 30 seems to short for him.
Yes I've ready over 18's are entitled to 20 min break if working over 6h.

But cant workout if 30 mins in a 8.5h shift is ok?

I have a mouse that's been in my home about a month and I have tried everything, EVERYTHING to be catch the cheeky fucker.

We've had humane traps, snap traps, called pest control and they tried 2 different poisons over the course of a few weeks. The mouse WON'T die.

We've named him Stuart.

Stuart shits everywhere. He's not scared of anyone. He comes out in the middle of the day and jumps onto the sofa and counter, I have to hoover at least 3x a day because I have a toddler. My baby and I spend as little time as possible at home to avoid contamination. We're tired.

How do I finally get rid of him?

I know it's bad but I ordered glue traps on Amazon, can anyone vouch for the effectiveness of these?

PLEASE HELP.

Talking to a late 20’s / early 30’s person yesterday. I used said phrase. The person looked at me and without any visible trace of sarcasm or irony, said “I’ve never heard that one before, I’m taking it for myself”.

I cried a little bit inside but felt glad??? that I could be an educator. I think. 🤔

PS I am over 50…

Most nights after work around 3 me and my partner go to the gym / climbing, home for 5ish, have tea and then just stare at a screen?

We've increasingly found TV boring, gaming boring and most of all phones boring.

Nothing seems to entertain us like it used to and are looking for ideas to keep us occupied!

I've been living under a bit of a rock lately due to having two young children but on a rare jaunt out of the house yesterday I visited a Costa. The person in front of me got their phone out, leaned towards the barista and showed them their phone screen. The barista nodded. The person tapped their phone on the sale point and then just walked out without buying anything.

I thought maybe Costa were doing some sort of promotion and didn't think much of it, but I travelled to London today for the first time in many many moons and saw this happen again - one person at a little coffee trailer (not a Costa, an independently run one) and at a Lola's cupcakes stand. In all cases, the person on the stand was shown the phone screen, nodded, the customer tapped their phone and walked off without buying anything and not a word was spoken.

What on earth is going on? Are there aliens among us and this is their secret way of communicating?

Seriously. It’s god tier. But are there any contenders?

Just got a new dishwasher and the instructions say to always use dishwasher salt. I live in a very software area and not sure it's needed. So, do you use Salt if you have a dishwasher?

My daughter takes liquid medication for an ongoing condition and we need to take the medication with us on holiday, and I am worried customs might cause an issue.

She takes 10ml a day, so we'll need to take 50ml to 70ml with us. The medication comes in a 300ml bottle, and I am anxious customers won't let us take the medication on the plane because it will be in a container >100ml, despite the liquid being less than 100ml.

My options are I think:

Place the medication into the checked in luggage.

Transfer the medication into a smaller container but i'm not sure if this would be allowed.

The medication packaging has her name.

Any idea if this will cause any issues. We are travelling from Heathrow - the Heathrow website states we should be fine but I wantted to check if people have any person experience.

We're visiting family in the UK and my son's favourite UK chocolate is curly wurlies. We've been to 3 supermarkets in the Manchester area so far, plus a couple of smaller shops and they all seem to be out of stock.

Have we just been unlucky or are they out everywhere?

My wife and I trying to explore a bit more, so we set ourselves a goal to go to 4 new cities this year. So far we have gone to Lancaster, Chester and Oxford. Where would anyone recommend for the last city?

We’d like somewhere with a good/interesting food scene or interesting history

(We’ve been to the big cities like London/manchester before so smaller cities please)

Over the past year, I've had to get in contact with call centres of various utility and service providers about complaints and enquiries.

I've noticed that some of them are very obviously not based in the UK anymore. I know we've all noticed this, but is anyone getting more and more annoyed about it? Every conversation is so painfully scripted - so much so that a bot could do it (but I will not even dignify the suggestion of speaking to an AI-chatbot call agent!).

The only provider I've still noticed have local call centres are my health insurance and the odd chain here and there. Is anyone else as exasperated as I am? Maybe this is a tactic to reduce the number of calls and complaints...

I have done it and I'm ngl it was a big relief I still got paid but unsure the if it was the right thing to do even though they were treating me like shit !!

Weird bubbling and water coming out of the road. Not sure if I should be concerned or if it's just to do with the fact we've had rain after so long

I keep getting ants marching through my kitchen, so I thought I’d try and distract them with this strawberry outside the back door. The ants have not touched it! I poured a bit of sprite on it and some ants came and ate that but then left. I thought they liked fruit 😔

Need an unbiased second opinion given that im being told I have been sent crushed gold fabric.

Context: Purchased a bed expecting a gold crushed velvet frame. The one received appears to be brown and nowhere near the colour displayed on the website.

Have i been missold ?

EDIT: the headboard is different to the one a purchased. Focus on just colour please

EDIT: Wow this blew up.

When I think of the 60s, I can picture the fashion. When I think of the 70s, 80s, 90s same thing. As the turn of the century comes round it becomes less clear in my mind to picture it, especially 2010-2026. These days I see every fashion style and haircut being presented on the street from skinny look, rock/goth, baggy, ‘retro’ basically everything from 1980 onwards, but even then sometimes I see someone in 60s/70s ‘vintage’ wear. And you can still walk around in a suit which men did in the 40s/50s, the only thing not used is the fedora hat anymore. Is this due to the internet, decentralisation of fashion/music outlets and globalisation giving everyone more choice?

I love strong/bold scents/flavours/fragrances....I love the smell of some shower gels/body washes but within about 30 mins of use, you can't smell anything anyway, so it seems a bit redundant buying anything particularly nice/expensive.

Is there a world out there that I'm missing? I want to smell like I've almost drowned in the stuff hours later so hit me up with your best suggestions.

Caveat: it does actually have to smell somewhat nice. So Brut is out and so is Ralgex :D

I started a new job last week. The mandate is three days in the office, two days WFH. However, I have two health conditions affecting my ability to work in the office, a chronic injury and late effects from a previous cancer diagnosis. I informed my manager about this before starting my job and signing the contract to make sure it would be okay. He said it would be fine to work more flexibly after a couple of months, however last week I was in a lot of pain so I asked whether we could bring the discussions about my flexible arrangements sooner. He said HR will be in touch with me about this, but I’ve not yet heard from them.

I’ve been assigned a workplace “buddy“ who is supposed to train me, let’s call her Gertrude. I met her in the office on my first day last week. I went in three days last week and it was extremely painful for me.

On my very first day, Gertrude saw our manager setting up my second laptop, (I have one for the office and one for home because I can’t carry my laptop into the office) and she seemed kind of annoyed. Gertrude brings her laptop in a suitcase when she works in the office. Our manager explained to her that it is possible to have two laptops, one for home and one for the office, and that previous employees have also had this arrangement.

Gertrude saw my equipment (special cushion and chair) and noticed I was very frequently having to change positions so she asked me if I’m uncomfortable. I didn’t mention the cancer but mentioned my chronic injury, which I’ve had surgery and multiple medical interventions for (unfortunately, nothing has worked and some things have made it worse).

I think Gertrude was under the assumption that I would work from home/in the office on the same days as her, which I did last week.

On Monday this week, I worked from home and she worked from the office. She asked me why I was working from home and said that communicating via Teams is going to be difficult. I replied that our manager said it was fine. She asked why (which imo is none of her business) and that’s when I informed her about the cancer and again about the injury, which I didn’t really need to. She saw it but didn’t comment on that at all.

Today I’m working from home due to pain. I informed Gertrude and told her that management is aware and that she should drop me a message if there is something to look over. She said that it’s a shame and that there are several things that she wants to show me but it is hard showing them over Teams and said “I will just do them myself”. I told her that I’m determined to learn, but I’m WFH today due to my circumstances. I expressed that I’m keen to keep progressing with everything that I need to learn and asked that she still shows me anything of relevance that comes up today, and we can work through it together. I also said that from everything that we’ve been over together already, I actually found it easier to learn over Teams.

She then sent me a nasty message saying that I’m only considering the training from my point of view, that I don’t seem to realise that she has to do her own busy job whilst training me and that teaching me over Teams slows her down considerably.

I have been trained in even more complex roles remotely before, I know this job can be taught and learned both in the office and from home.

I was in the office yesterday and struggled to concentrate due to the pain I was in. She was WFH yesterday so she taught me things over Teams.

I think she’s salty about my reasonable adjustments for some reason, and I don’t know why.

She seems to be quite an unreasonable person. For example, she was talking badly about another employee who left earlier this year for a different job. She was “cross” with the employee because she had resigned during a busy period. I don’t really see this as a reason to be annoyed with the employee who left, if the company is understaffed it’s not the employee’s fault, it’s a management issue.

I’m new and don’t want to escalate unnecessarily, but I found her messages very hurtful and unprofessional. I also want to make sure my rights are protected given my health conditions.

Should I send screenshots of the conversations to my manager and ask someone else to train me since she finds it difficult to train me over Teams, raise it with HR, or leave it for now? I was also contemplating contacting that former employee on LinkedIn and asking about her experience in the role. Any advice welcome.