Coffee Break: Battery Operated Fan

51 Comments

1. I was just thinking a small, battery operated fan would be great for camping. I wasn’t sure if they even existed.

   1. Look into stroller fans too. They have clamps. We just bought one for my son’s stroller and it is surprisingly strong.

2. This would be good for the emergency kit. I’m afraid of rolling power blackouts this summer during heat emergencies – they could easily be deadly, but at least a fan would help a tiny, tiny bit.

   1. If you’re worried about this, focus on making sure you’ll have food and water. If your family is in normal health, heat is uncomfortable but not deadly if you can stay hydrated in the shade. These are good but only work 8-24 hours and don’t cool even one room. They’re better for just keeping you refreshed.

      1. I don’t think that’s true. I agree that people who have health conditions or who are elderly are at higher risk, but when it’s 100 degrees indoors in the shade, that’s life-threatening for anyone and hydration isn’t going to help.

         1. But a fan is going to help?

         2. You know people lived in the Southern US before AC, right? I’m not saying it’s pleasant but it’s not life threatening unless you have other complicating conditions.

      2. This is true for some places, but not all. There is such a thing as deadly heat waves. High humidity, i.e. whether evaporating sweat as cooling mechanism fails, is also a factor.

   2. This is hard for me to get my head around as an adult. I’m in my fifties now, grew up in an area where it’s routinely around 100-110 degrees in the summer (Central Valley, CA) including during the school year (June, September), and none of my school classrooms had a/c. My mom was willing to run the a/c during the day but never at night. I know heat kills people but I wonder what the difference is now – did people just die all the time back then and it wasn’t reported or what? I’m not one to talk, I’m a wimp about the heat now.

      1. Did you get heat days from school? I’m in my late 30s but we got heat days (didn’t have to go to school) in the Midwest when the temp was about 100 or higher.

         1. +1 Went to school in the rural Midwest with no AC. We had heat days just like snow days. We didn’t have AC at home either but we had one window unit in the living room and box fans every where else. We’d drape sheets over the doorways to keep the cold air in the living room. My dad still went to work (outdoor labor) and I have no idea how he did it or stayed hydrated. When I ask now, he says you didn’t have a choice so you just did it.

            I do think that you get used to having air or not. When I would go back home to visit during the summer, the first week was miserable but once I stayed longer I get acclimated and didn’t miss the AC quite as much.

3. Is anyone making mid-rise curvy cut jeans that aren’t skinny jeans? I just cannot deal anymore with the current crop of bad rigid mom jeans.

   1. Weirdly, men’s Levis 514 fit me perfectly and I normally prefer a mid-rise curvy cut. They’re billed as a straight cut, and the legs are (not skinny and not bootcut), but there’s plenty of room for my hips and thighs.

   2. Aviator

   3. Sezane

      1. Ohhh not the OP but is there a specific cut/fit you recommend?

4. It all started with a colleague sending me a text. “Hey, an old friend reached out to me looking to see if I wanted to come work with them doing (K Street Type Job). Timing isn’t right for me, but I gave them your name, I hope that’s okay.”

   Please note, nobody has actually reached out to me. I don’t have an interview, let alone an offer.

   But now the idea is in my head… and I’m realizing just how much I hate parts of my job. Particularly that the staff I manage ranges from ‘borderline insubordinate but very technically good and we have reached a mutual respect’ to ‘oh god, I wish I could fire them, how are they still employed, why is government so complicated.’ I’m on vacation this week and I’ve already been called, texted, and emailed. There are perks of being a government employee that I’m not taking for granted, but DANG. Now that the idea is in my head, I keep thinking about the negatives of my job and… if you had asked me a week ago, I would have said, ‘The timing just isn’t right for me to make a move.’

   But today… I’m looking.

   1. I would expect being bugged on vacation is even more likely in the private sector, but yeah explore your options!

      1. +1 Government respects vacation time more than any other sector in my experience.

         1. Those government jobs (where people respect vacations) are not my government job. Alas.

      2. +1 I’m not sure vacation really exists anymore among most of the private sector people I know! I mean you can be out of the office, but you are definitely available!

      3. I agree with the others responding to you. I’ve never had a private sector job that respected vacations at all. From “quick” questions that aren’t quick, to fully dialing in for meetings, the only true vacations I’ve ever had were when I was between jobs.

      4. Goodness I work in Amazon corporate and we respect vacations. This sounds awful.

         1. I went on a rafting trip with someone who worked in Amazon corporate who had been there for at least 15 years. The eight days we were on the water with 0 cell service were the first vacation days he had ever truly unplugged – he said that every other vacation he’d ever been on was still tied to work. Seems like it varies.

            1. This I believe 100%.

            2. Also there are some men I know (why is it always men?) who seriously just do this to themselves. Like dude, say no. Things are not going to fall apart if you don’t answer for 4 days.

            3. Please also note my experience is ONLY for the white collar corporate workforce. The fulfillment and delivery worker experience has a good ways to grow, as is public knowledge. And now I will stop replying to myself. The end.

      5. I almost never work on vacation or when I am out of the office on PTO even for a day. If I am out of the office, I am out of the office and not working. I work in private industry and am a lawyer. I set boundaries and stick to them. I don’t save lives and if there isn’t another attorney to back up for me, that’s not my problem, that’s a higher up management problem and staffing needs to be reevaluated. I haven’t been fired yet and I continue to be promoted. *shrug*

         1. This is exactly how I feel and exactly how I handle my vacations as an attorney in mid-law civil litigation. No one is living and dying due to a lack of response from me for a week on vacation, and I just set up an OOO message with a contact person if they need immediate assistance. There is absolutely nothing I do in my work that another attorney in my practice group could not handle if needed or that a motion for extension of time wouldn’t cover until my return. I set this boundary early on as an associate, was promoted to partner a couple years ago, and the equity partner I report to has never once called me on vacation to do anything. Other attorneys at my firm tell me how the “couldn’t possibly unplug” and they check e-mail every day on their vacations, and all I think when they say it is why? Obviously, not all firms respect boundaries no matter what you do, but no one will just give them to you. You have to stick to them and establish expectations.

            1. Ha! I used to work for a partner who would come to my office during the weeks before my scheduled vacations and tell me they’d been making a list of work I could do on my vacation. I am glad you have a different experience. I am now the only lawyer on most cases and the other capable litigator in my office is completely over worked, so again there are simply things I can’t hand off, but I’m getting better at setting expectations from clients and opposing counsel before I depart and try to earn that by respecting boundaries myself.

            2. You’re lucky in your choice of firm/partner/client then. I get that no one will give you a life and you have to draw reasonable boundaries. But in many Big Law firms, a “reasonable” boundary is like 7 hours of sleep at night and not responding to emails at 3 am. At my AmLaw 50 firm (which did not have a sweatshop rep, fwiw), vacations were supposed to be rare and you were supposed to bill through them, unless it was your honeymoon. In six years as an associate, I had a two week honeymoon where I did almost no work, and I had a one week vacation right after a big trial where I did no work (although we filed the post-trial briefing while I was in the airport), but other than that, vacations were pretty much just working in a different location. I went to Maui with my family over Christmas one year and billed 55 hours and it wasn’t a choice, it was because it was made pretty clear to me I wouldn’t have a job when I got back if I didn’t get a brief written by the last day of my trip. I missed a wedding reception I had flown in for to write a brief. I sat in a lodge in Yosemite taking client calls while my friends climbed Half Dome. And I got a LOT of grief from partners I worked for about how much vacation time I took, because I dared to use about 10 vacation days every year, again billing at least a half day on most of them. I was generally a well-regarded associate and got good to excellent reviews, but my “tendency to take a lot of vacations” was noted negatively more than once in end of year reviews and I was already getting advice in my sixth year that I probably didn’t have a long term future (i.e., partnership) with the firm. I heard other practice groups at the firm were somewhat more chill about vacation than mine was, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to suggest every Big Law associate can just say “Nah, I’m not working on vacation” and not get fired, let alone make partner. There’s a huge gap between no work on vacation and being a martyr who works 100+ hours a week and is available literally 24/7.

         2. Agree that this is hugely about boundaries (and delivering results when available! And choosing teams wisely…)

      6. I’m a government employee who always works on vacation. I have also worked from a hospital bed. We are underfunded and understaffed. There is no one to pick up the slack when I’m out.

         1. Thank you for your service and dedication.

   2. Go for it! I love every post like this.

   3. Your first paragraph is exactly how I found out about the job I’ve now had for six years. I hope they reach out to you. Good luck!

5. i recently finished reading a terrible (delightful) rom com book and it made me feel… incredibly sad with where i am in life. i’m successful in my field, have a husband and child so from the outside i “have it all”, but my marriage has moved into the “platonic roommates” phase where everything does drives me insane (in a bad way), our toddler only wants to assert their independence / regress on potty and sleep training and my job is a constant grind where i feel like i can never get a break (literally — at my seniority we only get working vacations).

   is this a midlife crisis? fwiw, i’m already seeing a therapist, on antidepressants and exercise regularly but i just have a constant…. malaise. i suppose i’m not really asking any sort of question, just throwing it out into the void hoping that writing it helps me process it and move on more quickly.

   1. Be gentle with yourself! You have been through a lot (as we all have since March 2020). You feel like c r a p because this was all c r a p p y.

      I am in the process of thinking about my life and what I want moving forward. I don’t have long term answers, BUT I realized that I needed some time to be “me” instead of the 24-/7 employee/crisis-mom juggling act that the pandemic forced on me. Happy to say that I have a 4-day trip booked with my best friend soon! No husbands, no kids. I am not responding to a single work email – I don’t care what anyone thinks about that. Just food, drinks, hotel pools, dumb books. Just booking the trip increased by mood by 50%.

      1. This sounds fabulous. I’m so happy you are doing this for yourself!

      2. Just did that weekend with two girlfriends and it was balm for the soul! Highly recommend!

   2. This sounds to me less like a midlife crisis and more like a season of life. You won’t always have a potty-training toddler and your marriage and career may improve when that is the case.

   3. Right there with you. The pandemic has been really hard on my marriage, even beyond the normal kids-and-work stress. No solutions but sympathy. All I want to do is go to a hotel and be alone for a few days and do whatever I want to do. But that feels so indulgent given how much work the kids are and how “good” I have it.

   4. The toddler years are some of the hardest. I know with the pandemic it is hard to just get a babysitter and get away.. but can you? Are there any family members who would take your toddler even for a Saturday overnight where you and husband can go to a spa type hotel for a night? A nice dinner, a drink at the bar, a sleep in, a massage and then home?

      We did this kind of thing only 2-3 times for the entirety of our young child parenting years, but it helped SO much and it always felt so much longer than a single overnight.

   5. I’m right there with you as well. I love my husband but we are firmly in platonic roommate category, especially after the pandemic. I don’t want to blow up our family, but it’s depressing to think that this is all there is romance-wise for the rest of my life. My kid is 3 and while I love her enormously, it’s been a very hard age for me. She is pretty difficult behavior-wise and when she’s being well-behaved all she wants to do is ask a million questions that start with “why?” I understand that it’s great for her to be imaginative and curious, but I honestly don’t really enjoy being around her these days and feel very guilty about that fact. I really loved the baby and young toddler years, way more than I expected to (I’ve never considered myself a baby person) and find myself reminiscing all the time about how much cuter and sweeter she was back then and then I feel like a terrible mother because I enjoyed my kid so much more when she couldn’t talk. My job is fine, tolerable but blah. It also pays me very little and I know my standard of living would take a huge hit if my husband and I were to separate. Either that or accept long-term financial assistance from my parents, and neither option is appealing at all. The good news is with the pandemic ending I can finally plan vacations again and that gives me some things to look forward to (my mom and I are planning a major bucket list trip for May ’22) but it feels kind of f-ed up that the only thing I enjoy about my life is escaping from it.

      1. I’m also super curious what the book is! ;)

   6. No advice but girl same. My husband and I are just above roommates (omg I got a kiss goodbye the other day!). Kid wants only mama for comfort. I’m on an sssri and so is hubs. I think this is just normal? We have a good life but I’m also just like ehh 90% times of the time.

   7. Our marriage hit its worst point when my son was between 3 and 4 years old. I totally had the “we’re just roommates” feeling because it seemed like all we did as a couple was negotiate crises, and lurch from one day to the next hoping nothing went wrong to upend the routine (and, of course, things went wrong all the time). Everything my husband did annoyed me because I already felt so burdened between being a toddler mom and working a job I hated (and then on top of that my parents temporarily separated and I had to deal with all that emotional drama). Then my son learned to use the bathroom by himself, and feed himself without our help, and go back to sleep if he woke up in the night, and get dressed on his own, and that was game-changing. I got a different, better job and my parents worked out their issues and everything calmed down a lot. We laugh now about how miserable we were during that time, and I’m glad we stuck it out and are together to laugh about it. This is a crappy season of life, but it is just a season. It will get better. Big hugs.

6. Someone please pick a desk chair for me. Torn between Fully, Hon Ignition 2.0, and a refurbished Aeron. Open to hearing whatever other chairs you like. I’m so tired of reading desk chair reviews.

   1. I’ve found success buying the stuff that Belle at CapHillStyle suggests. Probably because she doesn’t do sponsored posts and talks about stuff she actually buys. Last Friday’s post titled So Nice, I bought it Twice includes an office chair. Knowing nothing else about office chairs, I’d probably buy that one.

      1. It’s the second item down
         https://caphillstyle.com/capitol/2021/06/17/so-nice-i-bought-it-twice-no-3.html

   2. I am short and love the Steelcase Leap2 I purchased on a recommendation received here. Having the arm rest adjust both in height and width is clutch.

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