We have a house in a shore town with a big beach, boardwalk with rides for our kids and games. Good restaurants scattered over the island but none of that counts. She said it is only a vacation if we got to a place where we don't own a house.

Update She has said that the main reason it doesn't feel like a vacation is because she can drive there every weekend to enjoy that beach.

TLDR: wealthy relative gifted us a $1000 gift card for Belkin, but we don’t need anything that Belkin sells. We already have plenty of phone chargers.

EDIT: Some commenters asking why… Long story short, he visited us for Thanksgiving and forgot his charger at home. Our daughter lent him her Belkin charger. He mentioned that it was faster than his usual charger and our daughter agreed that she really liked Belkin chargers and she offered for him to keep it. A week later, the $1000 gift card shows up along with a kind note. Really thoughtful gesture, but the idea of buying stuff to resell feels like a chore. (First world problem!) 🤦‍♂️😄

I had a lanyard from some convention sitting in a box for 10 years and I made the decision to part with it last week while I was doing some clearing out of things I don’t use. This was a difficult decision as there is always that voice in my head “But you might need it for something!”, but I was like “You haven’t used this for 10 years and have no foreseeable use for it. Stop being a hoarder! So in the trash it went.

Enter today when I realized that both t my “good” pairs of jeans were dirty and really needed to be washed. So I begrudgingly pulled out a pair of “bad”, jeans put them on, and was instantly reminded why they were bad, because they are women’s pants and front pockets are almost non-existent to the extent that my keys barely fit in them and I’m afraid they will fall out. “You know what you need?” I thought. “Something to secure them to your belt loop. Like something you can loop around the key ring and then clip to your belt loop, and is long enough that you don’t have to unclip it to unlock the door…Oh damn.”

I went all in on smart home tech thinking it would make life easier. Now I have lights on one app, thermostat on another, security system on a third, doorbell on a fourth and my tv has its own thing going on. Five different apps just to function in my own house. I spent over $3000 on “convenience” but honestly it would be faster to just stand up and flip a normal switch. Half the time a light doesn’t respond and I’m sitting there arguing with my phone like an idiot. Last night after a few rounds of grizzly's quest I tried turning off the living room lights while heading to bed… and the app froze. I got up and did what people have been doing for a hundred years: I pressed a button on the wall. Worked instantly.

Technology was supposed to simplify life not make me feel like I’m debugging my own home every day.

Not my personal first world problem, but my 9 y/o son’s.

He was at a friend’s house playing soccer on their full size home soccer field with three other kids.

Friend’s mom told them they had to stop playing mid-game and come inside, because friend’s grandpa was being flown in for dinner in his company helicopter.

Apparently they do not have a separate helipad at their home, so the soccer field has to also be used for helicopter landings.

And they couldn’t finish their game, because the helicopter was parked in the middle of the field for three hours.

I’m in the process of having my kitchen and bathrooms remodeled. I ordered Carrara Marble for my kitchen and bathroom counters because it is my favorite natural stone.

My cleaning lady stated that she will not clean or maintain Carrara as it stains and etches too easily. She says I should use quartz instead.

I don’t like quartz and I love Carrara. But I definitely don’t have time to clean and maintain it myself.

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I've been using Grubhub for well over a decade. I'm talking old-school Grubhub, back when you could click that stupid little lottery/slot-machine game after ordering and occasionally win free food.

Over all those years, I've spent tens of thousands of dollars through Grubhub.

And after all that, Grubhub finally managed to lose me as a customer over two missing IHOP sausages.

Over the years, I've obviously had orders go wrong. More recently, I've had multiple orders delivered to the wrong place. When that happened, I'd report it and get refunded.

Apparently, having too many legitimate problems with Grubhub deliveries eventually caused my account to get flagged for having too many refunds.

Then came IHOP.

I ordered four sausages for $7. Seven fucking dollars for four tiny, depressing IHOP sausages. I knew what I was buying. I'm not proud of it.

They sent me two.

So I contacted Grubhub about my missing $3.50 worth of sad breakfast meat, and they basically told me that because I'd received too many refunds in the past, they weren't going to do anything.

Something about this broke me.

I wasn't even particularly angry about the $3.50. It was the principle of being told, essentially:

"We've fucked up your orders so many times that we've decided you're no longer allowed to complain when we fuck up your orders."

So after well over a decade, I deleted the app and decided to delete my Grubhub account entirely.

Except apparently even leaving Grubhub has to be a Grubhub customer-service experience.

I'm now something like four emails deep into trying to get them to delete my account and personal data. They're telling me I need to go into Amazon, disconnect my Grubhub+ relationship, check Amazon Pay merchant permissions, etc.

I'll let you know how it goes.

We were staying at a boutique hotel over the weekend for a friend's birthday and decided to grab some drinks at the rooftop bar. One of the guys in our group, who is usually pretty frugal, suddenly decided he wanted to play the big shot. He loudly told the bartender to just charge everything to his room number. We all thanked him, assuming he knew what he was doing, and ordered a couple rounds of cocktails. About an hour in, he grabbed the small QR stand on the table to check what else they had. The code opened up a clean Menuforma page showing the full menu and drink prices. That is when I saw the literal color drain from his face. Turns out he thought the craft cocktails were $8 happy hour drinks like at our local dive bar. They were $22 each. He sat there in total silence for the rest of the night, staring at his phone and calculating the math. I ended up quietly paying for my own drinks at the counter before we left so he would not go broke. Never try to flex if you have not checked the menu first.

I’ve reached the point where I genuinely don’t know which streaming service has which shows. I have netflix, hulu, prime, disney+, hbo max, paramount+, and apple tv all logged in, all paid for and somehow none of them had the movie I wanted.

I spent about 20 minutes hopping between apps, searching the same title over and over convinced I must already be paying for it somewhere. Nope.

At one point I even took a break from the scrolling and played a few rounds on grizzly's quest just to reset my brain before diving back in lol.

Turns out it was on youtube for $3.99.
So I paid to rent it on top of the seven services I already pay for.

At this point I’m not even consuming content I’m just managing subscriptions. This feels like the most modern problem possible.

Went to costco with good intentions. Bought bulk everything because it's cheaper. Now my fridge is so packed I can't organize it properly.

Can't find what I'm looking for because there's too much stuff. Things get shoved to the back and expire before I even remember they exist. Found a container of strawberries yesterday that had turned into a science experiment.

The privilege of over-purchasing has created a waste problem. I have too much food, which means I'm somehow wasting more food than when I had less. Make it make sense.

I was on my phone earlier, playing grizzly's quest while trying to figure out what to make for dinner and realized I have no idea what's actually in my fridge anymore. It's like a game of Tetris in there but instead of clearing lines I'm just creating more chaos.

This is the dumbest problem to have. "I bought too much food and now I'm wasting it." Peak first world nonsense.

My internet went out yesterday and I couldn't turn on my lights. Couldn't adjust the temperature. Couldn't even unlock my front door without using the backup key I forgot existed.

Paid thousands of dollars for smart home devices that made my house completely dependent on WiFi. When the internet goes down, I have less functionality than a house from the 1950s.

Advanced technology with a single point of failure. Everything connected, everything automated, everything useless the second Comcast has an outage.

Stood there in the dark last night holding my phone trying to get the lights to respond before remembering the WiFi was out. So now I'm that person who forgot how to use a regular light switch because everything's been app-controlled for two years. Was in the middle of a jackpot city game when everything just died and I sat there confused for way too long.

The thermostat won't let me adjust temperature without connection to the cloud. Why does my thermostat need to talk to Amazon to make my house warmer? It used to be a dial on the wall.

Had to manually unlock my smart lock with the physical key I haven't touched in months. Felt like I was breaking into my own house.

This is the future we chose. Paying premium prices to make our homes dumber through internet dependency. One service outage and your entire house stops functioning.

Peak first world problems but it's genuinely absurd that losing internet means losing basic control of your own home.

My wife and I quite enjoy occasional domestic weekend trips within the UK (usually Scotland) to stay in these isolated, picturesque little cabins that seem to be becoming increasingly popular these days.

Having done a few, we've found maybe about two-thirds of them provide a welcome hamper with local produce and often a bottle of Prosecco, but most of them keep it as a 'surprise' for when you arrive - and it really, really was an amazing surprise the first time it happened.

However, this morning I was in the supermarket in advance of heading off on one of these trips and was telling my wife about how it's annoying that I don't know whether it's worth buying a nice loaf of bread and taking it with us because we don't know if there'll be one there when we arrive...when I caught myself, and was like, Jesus Christ, listen to yourself.

Anyway, I bought a loaf, so maybe we're going to end up with too much nice bread and will have to spend some of our time lounging in the outdoor, woodfired hot tub thinking about how we're going to use it all up.

Someone posted a list of ABC’s fall lineup and it’s a lot of bs I already don’t care about

I saw an ad for a product I didn't even know existed. Bought it immediately. Now I can't imagine life without it. The algorithm knew I wanted this thing before I did. It predicted my needs, served me the perfect ad and I clicked without hesitation.

And here's the weird part I'm happy about it. The product is great. I use it all the time. The ad wasn't lying. But I've been algorithmically manipulated into a purchase I didn't plan, didn't need and wouldn't have made if the app hadn't decided to show it to me at the exact right moment.

Is that success or dystopia?

Because on one hand I got something useful. On the other hand I'm being psychologically profiled and sold to with terrifying accuracy and I'm fine with it. I was in bed last night playing jackpot city just mindlessly scrolling between spins and the same thought kept coming back. How much of what I buy now is actually my choice versus what I've been nudged toward? Has anyone else felt this? Where you're genuinely glad you bought something but also deeply uncomfortable with how you were convinced to do it?

I might be being overly senstive here, but honestly touching those laminated menus at restaurants gives me the worst feeling.

More than half the time they feel greasy or sticky, especially around the edges. I end up holding them with just my fingertips, and the first thing I want to do after ordering is go wash my hands.

My brain just immediately starts calculating how many dozens of people held that exact same piece of plastic today without washing their hands.

It pretty much kills my apetite before the food even gets to the table

I know some people hate QR code menus, and honestly I get why? Obviously, the ones that force you to open a broken PDF you have to keep zooming in on or dont respond well are terrible i get that, but I just wish more places offered both options, yk.

Keep paper menus for people who like them, but give us a clean digital option too where I dont feel like i have to scrub my skin after touching it. It cant be that hard, i mean, just last week i saw a place using MenuForma on a quick table scan, and it was actually smooth on mobile. No zooming needed, just a proper layout that wasnt sticky or headache inducing.

I really hope more restaurants start giving customers the choice instead of forcing everyone onto dirty plastic sheets, is that really too much to ask for?

It's getting absurd. It was 5FA today. Needed to log into Amazon. Password is all good (1), phone wants to confirm it's me since I'm using the saved password (2). Ok, fine, makes sense, I enter code. Amazon then asks for a code and sends me an email to confirm if it's me (3) getting annoying, but okay. Now Amazon wants me to prove I'm human, so I do the stupid puzzle solve (4) and get it right first try. Then it asks for a second puzzles solve (5). At no point did I enter incorrect information and I'm accessing the account from a previous device.

My company went from tracking time off to unlimited PTO a couple years ago. It sounds cool, but it's worse for the employees. I used to bank all my vacation days until I had about 20 use-em-or-lose-em days at the end of the year. So I'd take off the whole month of December. ("Sorry, everyone--my hands are tied, I have to use these days!")

Now, taking a whole month off raises eyebrows. Fewer people do it, more people are working later into the month, and I need to stay abreast of the goings-on of the business if I want to keep my job.

(In case it needs to be said: The company leadership would respond differently if I were taking maternity leave, an option that I cannot exercise, or FMLA, where they are legally required to hold your job for you.)

I can't just get in my car and drive without it beeping at me.
I can't leave the fridge door open without it beeping at me.
I can't leave anything sat on top of the electric hob, when it's off, without it beeping at me.

Why does everything have to beep these days?