Little things that annoy the hell out of you

[Randorama]

I have been spending the last few working days signing different versions of my contract. Basically, it's like this:

1. As a foreign national working abroad, my new contract must include certain information so that I can get a new work permit and residence permit;
2. HR currently has a new boss and employers fresh off graduation, who seem not to understand that they should follow ready-made templates;
3. My department and the international personnel department have tried to explain to the HR staff members how to prepare the new contract ("insert information in the template. Do not edit anything else"). These guys have been...well, typical HR staff. For instance, they refused adding the contact of my finance officer to their WhatsApp, because they did not know who they were (maybe the message "I am X from department Y and I am contacting you for work issues" was not clear). They then started being creative with official templates by changing legal terms;
4. The dean of the department and the Vice-Chancellor (i.e. the "big bosses" in my university) apparently had a walk, and also a talk, with those HR fellas, at some point (of the "Capisce?" kind, apparently). Nevertheless...
5. ...HR has made me sign five versions of my contract because they had to fix mistakes such as "we, the HR department" instead of "we, HR office" (i.e. they kept changing terms in the basic template).

Apparently, tomorrow we should have a new, final and finally accurate version that the immigration office will not reject. But also apparently, we may simply bypass HR and get their seals on the contract "by other means", with an officer from the immigration office having a look (because "someone" asked them to have a look as to why HR modifies templates emanated from a ministry preposed to certain tasks, hey).

Luckily, the rest of the renewal procedures are online and really fast (ten working days max, and I have time until the end of August), but at this stage I am also preparing "Plan B" in case things go badly for no real reason (say, HR people want to deal with the local government and explain to them why they are basically tampering official templates...). Unless we effectively bypass HR, which sounds wise but somewhat...dodgy?

"The situation is grave but not serious", Italian writer Ennio Flaiano used to say.

[BulletMagnet]

For some reason lately every news feed I've scrolled through contains a million "[Current Movie] Surpasses [Older Movie] In Earnings" articles; I haven't seen a movie in literally years and very seldom click on articles about films, so I have no idea why they're suddenly everywhere. Before this it was "We Asked 5 [Professionals] Which is the Best [Product], and They All Said the Same Thing" filler. AI slop, I guess?

[xEbb1993x]

I can't be the only one who's sick and tired of all the melodrama, sob stories, whiny protagonists, main characters getting fired from their own party, and sadistic villains who commit a ton of misdeeds and get away with it in anime. I swear, anime's become such an overly depressing place lately.