Freezer bags, 4 slices per bag, in a freezer. That way I can take out only as much bread as I can eat before it gets moldy.

My wife shops on Temu regularly. She doesn’t trust them, so she uses one-time cards. Most of what she buys are single-use items: party accessories, crafts for kids, etc. The exceptions were solar lights, which are surprisingly durable, vastly outlasting those we got locally or Amazon. Speaking of Amazon, we used to shop there a lot but almost completely stopped. 90% of goods are just rebranded Temu products, and the “premium” selection can be found cheaper in the nanufacturers’ or speciality stores. Amazon is currently positioned very poorly, with competition pressuring them both from top end and junk. Looks like Amazon as a retailer is heading back to its origin, with books being the only reasonable deal there.

Discovery Plus. Reality show garbage; not worth even those five quid per month. I subscribed when they acquired streaming rights for Eurosport, and tried to find anything that would be at least marginally entertaining without rotting my brain. I failed. When they lost Eurosport, I immediately cancelled my subscription.

I’m a Product Owner, and my job literally is to participate in meetings, so that my engineers don’t have to. You want to talk to one of them? Sorry, you have to talk to me, and I’ll talk to them on their own time.

In the past, however, there was one time I almost quit. We had an engineering lead with a serious case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. Good with Javascript, which made him think he was an expert in everything, from c# to aws, and especially in system architecture. He could sell himself and his work really well, though, so the management always took his word for gospel. Got two developers, who had the audacity to tell him how stupid his architecture was, fired. Tried to get me fired, and it turned into a competition of who can outlast whom. Eventually it became too much for me, so I started interviewing elsewhere, when suddenly he was reassigned elsewhere within the company. I decided to stay mainly due to career growth (and to pay my mortgage), and I hear that he’s been doing his usual mess in his new position, while my team is now far happier and more productive.

E-cards. I got at least some cards for my birthday…

To switch to the timeline where Harambe was not killed.

Dodged by no fault of mine. She dumped me because I made fun of her beliefs in astrology. From the little I keep hearing about her, she makes all her decisions according to horoscopes, pendulums, some kind of wooden sticks, etc. Because of that she eventually left a very successful career, her husband, moved across the country to a place she has no ties to, etc. I keep hearing gradually less about her, as she keeps cutting off all our mutual friends.