The Complaint Thread

Ru1977 said:
@AceofKnaves did the one from 3am respond to you?
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No, they haven’t. Kinda don’t think they will. I had a bad feeling about the cancellation convo yesterday, and this confirms my concerns.
It breaks my heart: the last thing I said to this client on Monday was that they could reach out to me anytime during Christmas and I would get back to them ASAP. I always do that for my clients who need extra support, and I do it at no charge. I was all “you’ve got a team around you who care about you, we all have your back, and we will get you through this”.
I feel like a fool.
And honestly the financial loss does really, REALLY suck.
 
Really doesn't sound like you were making them feel like a paycheck, BUT I know with my brother in law who has his own addiction stuff that it's easy for them to twist perceptions especially with so much insecurity and paranoia. I honestly don't know how you do it.
 
Not at all trying to school the professional where addiction is concerned but.... one of my dearest friends struggled with addiction (and died because of it). At her low points, I could have offered to buy this girl a house and give her a million dollars and she would have seen something sinister and selfish in it. It was easier than taking help, I assume. If she couldn't trust me to help her at a time in her life when I was one of the closest people to her, I just don't know what anyone could have done.

It's been a lot of years since I found out she OD'd on some shithead's living room floor while everyone refused to call for help because they feared getting in trouble. I still think about her all the time, and I still don't know what anyone could have done to convince her they wanted to help when she wouldn't see it.
 
Ru1977 said:
I honestly don't know how you do it.
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I’ve got very thick skin and a mountain of experience with addicts. Outside of personal stuff, this is all boilerplate. I’ve had lots of clients get frustrated, leave, and come back even. It’s part of the job.

BUT. I’m struggling, my wife is struggling, and I *do* want money, of course I do, but that is absolutely not my goal in treating people. My heart immediately went out to this client, and honestly I’ve done more self-disclosure with this client than I usually do because I wanted them to be able to relate and have hope for the future. They were even talking about going into mental health themselves once they were well. I really, really thought I was making a difference. And yeah, i wanted a “win”. I don’t get many.

And all of this would feel less-bad if I had a steady referral stream. For most of my career in mental health, I have had the privilege of being very selective what clients I take on, but right now I’d literally take anyone who asks, as long as it is ethical to do so. I hate feeling like that.
 
So I don't use FB professionally anymore but I cybersquat on my name there for author stuff and keep a private page for the old farts in my life who haven't migrated to somewhere less dictatorial. I just made a joke about how the 80s toy designers had to be doing cocaine to come up with some of the designs they came up with (in a private chat) and got a partial suspension immediately, which tells me they've got AI bots trawling everything anyone posts on there for sure.

Anyway, partial ban is hilarious considering I don't use it for business anymore because:
You can't post ads (WHY would I pay them?)
You can't post live videos (am I a teenage influencer?)
You can't use FB messenger to make calls (am I 90 year old but-tialing my grand-child?
And it's "no longer recommending your page to people" (It's a PRIVATE PAGE, I don't even want people I KNOW to find me!)

Anyway. I almost wish it was a full ban so I can finally do away with it, but it is the only social my parents and aunts/uncles use, so I hang onto it for convenience, but man what a piece of shit site. Zuckerberg's an idiot.
 
I kind of feel guilty because I abandoned Facebook over a year ago and there are people I know that I ONLY interact with on Facebook. So, from their perspective, I basically dropped off the face of the Earth over a year ago, never to be seen again.
 
I left even though it was the main way I communicated with my aunts and cousins. They're the only reason I would consider going back but my aunts at least will communicate via electronic letter.
 
Heh. I’m on Facebook all the time. It’s the only social media I use at all. I don’t even have instagram.
 
It wasn't even an ideological thing for me. For whatever reason, Facebook decided to do some piss-stupid encryption thing with private messages and now every time I get a private message it's deleted/unavailable. So I'll see if I have a new message, but I can't read it, and it tells me to put in an encryption passcode that doesn't exist. So I made a passcode for them and it doesn't work. So whenever someone PMs me it looks like I'm just ignoring them because I literally can't open it no matter what I do.

Destroyed my ability to do any Marketplace sales as well. I got so fucking angry that I stopped trying to fix it one day and just never went back on except ONE time maybe two months ago to see if it was still fucked and, of course, it is.
 
I abandoned it as an author because their pro site UI is fucking AWFUL, so if you're trying to do anything business related with it you have to relearn the fucking interface all the time.

I keep it around for, honestly, a solid 150 or so relatives and far-flung friends who haven't migrated anywhere else. It's private, I don't promote it or anything, if a reader finds my FB page I send them to my Bluesky instead where I'm professional and polished. But I do kinda NEED it because, as Damien says, for some people if you leave it you just cease to exist. It does get, on a technological level, NOTICEABLY worse every few months though.

Steph uses FB marketplace all the time, but I don't have patience for other humans to do that.

So I kinda WANT To be able to keep it and log onto it (I cybersquat on my Twitter handle too because I don't trust Musk to not commit mass identity theft with anyone's name that is abandoned, I want to KNOW if Twitter starts abusing my author name) but I do actually use FB every day to message friends who are still there. Kinda hilarious I got accused of being a drug dealer for making a joke about coke in the 80s though.
 
AceofKnaves said:
Friends is the only one I’d willingly sit through.
HTLAGITD is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, and Channing Tatum is funny like a child’s funeral is funny.
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Apologies, I confused How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days with 10 Things I Hate About You. With the exception of Dazed and Confused, I don't have anything nice to say about McConaughey's career until at least 2008.
docsilence said:
Comedy is always a matter of taste, but Channing Tatum doing a funny accent is 25% of the reason I haven't watched DP&W. I also can't stand Ryan Reynolds' humor either so that's 50% of why I haven't watched it. Burnout on nostalgia-bait and knowing how much of it is dogpiled into the script is the last 25%. I suppose I need to see it at some point but I'm waiting for a day I'm already grumpy.
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I think Tatum has good comedic timing. His Gambit is one of the only redeeming parts of DP&W. I'm with you on the rest.

I might get "burned out on nostalgia-bait" tattooed on my forehead.
docsilence said:
(Nothing against pop stars doing holiday songs in general though, I THINK I heard Olivia Rodrigo doing a rendition of Frosty the Snowman when I was in the liquor store the other day that was hilariously catchy)
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I looked this up because I love Olivia's music. As far as I can tell, it isn't her, but I'd love to hear whoever it was.
Damien said:
One of the things he wanted really badly is a toy sword from one of his favorite new games; Silksong (he's a gamer kid and loves toy swords).
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The degree to which your kids are YOUR kids is annoying, frankly.
AceofKnaves said:
He wasn’t any worse than in any other thing he’s terrible in, though. I’d rather watch him in this than in one of those dippy 21 Jump Street movies.
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Oh, man. I think 21 Jump Street is one of the better comedies of the century. There's virtually no competition, but still.
AceofKnaves said:
My complaint for today is that a client was really mean to me behind my back but accidentally not behind my back.

I’ve been treating this serious addiction case, trying to taper off bad stuff. This client was my first new client for my new business, as opposed to the clients I took with me from the place I used to work. Client is having a rough go, and I’ve been seeing them since October. Monday, they had trouble signing in for their weekly virtual appointment, then yesterday they sent a terse text asking me to cancel the next appointment. I said sure see you the week after, and they were like “I’ll tell you when I want another one”. Red flag. I asked if anything was wrong, they said all was well, so I said no worries and I’d keep the file open until they were ready to get back to it. All that is pretty normal, it’s the holidays and I get a lot of cancellations at this time and a lot of ambiguity about future schedules.
BUT.
I woke up this morning and my work number has a text from like 3am. It was the client, and it was a screenshot of our conversation and then words to the effect of “I cancelled further sessions, he wants money more than to help people”. I’m guessing this was meant for their “sober coach” who they say they meet with daily. Now that’s another red flag: a lot of those “coaches” are running soft cons to keep vulnerable addicts on the hook. And I know that addicts are resistant, and the client did say they were struggling with the taper last time we talked.

But fuck: that hurt.

Without going too much into it, helping addicts is a personal quest for me, I take it very seriously and I desperately just want to help and would absolutely do all this for free if I could. And also without going too much into it, I am really struggling getting my client base up where I want it because my old boss MAJORLY screwed me on my way out, sold my old office out from under me and turned off her referrals to me before I was even licensed: she was hella shady, but dammit I worked for her for five years, giving her half my income (as is customary for associate therapists working for licensed therapists in private practice). Every client counts right now, and to lose one like this, one who really needs me and who somehow got seriously poisoned against me, I don’t know what to do with that. Add to that my wife was laid off from her job a few months ago and has been laboring in retail for the holidays with no guarantee of even keeping that shitty job, and it’s a lot.

But mostly, I’m crushed that this client in need would come to think I didn’t really want to help. I thought we had a great therapeutic relationship, my “therapy radar” has never been so off before. I keep telling myself that addicts are volatile and this person is likely getting bad advice. But it still stings so hard. I even sent a reply text acknowledging I saw what they accidentally sent me and basically bending over backwards to make it right, which I really shouldn’t do because I’m supposed to have iron-clad boundaries and actually be kinda cold or even ignore this kind of thing.
But, like, this poor human is in a desperate struggle for their life.
All I wanted to do was help.

And now I’m trapped in the rain, another client is gonna call rather than show up because they basically ran away from home last night. I’m feeling incredibly down and honestly kinda hopeless.
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I'm sorry to hear that.

I'm one of those irritating people who can't listen to someone vent without offering possible solutions.

Like Damien, I will also offer the psychological professional advice he probably already knows. Are you on Psychology Today? That's how I found my therapist and my mom's therapist. I wouldn't know how else to find one.
docsilence said:
Anyway. I almost wish it was a full ban so I can finally do away with it, but it is the only social my parents and aunts/uncles use, so I hang onto it for convenience, but man what a piece of shit site. Zuckerberg's an idiot.
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I deleted my account after the 2016 election. I work in communications, so I had to create a burner account for work. I only log on once every 18 months or so, but somehow the site gets worse with every iteration. Facebook looks chintzy, and the UI is horrendous.

They're another modern company that wasn't happy making money in their lane (reading life updates from acquaintances and distant relatives), so they branched out into 15 other areas. Now the site doesn't do anything well.
 
I'll agree on 21 Jump Street. As a fan of the show when it was on, I was prepared to hate but it was an solid comedy through and through. I enjoyed the sequel as well. And really, I think it was the first think I saw Tatum in. The only other thing he was a big part of that I watched was Ten Years and I thought he was fine there. Not foooooiiiiiine as much as fine.
 
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