work

Week 13 or omfg where does time go

/ status report / , , , , ,

Work

mgbarJerb

Bartenders are riled up cos people got their schedules rearranged so we have more people on the busy times and less people on the slow times. Servers are riled up cos their hours got cut consistently cos people are lazy and leaving sidework undone. Hosts are riled up cos they’re told to communicate with bar and floor but refuse to do so. Kitchen is riled up cos executive chef sucks. Management is riled up cos we’re doing really bad on our cocktailing service and corporate is coming down hard on us because of it. I’m not riled up anymore after getting one too many talking-tos from management. We’re just annoyed people don’t want to work as a team, then complain we’re not making enough money for the job to be worth their time.

This job is literally the best-paying job I have ever had in the past ten years, including my technology jobs! I’m just surprised how most everyone treats our guests like trash, then expect those same guests to tip well.

And yeah we’re kinda done with the bad attitude. Now people get the non-committal sardonic version of ourselves.

bartendjerb

We’ve been having some issues with stocking since “floor manager quit” since we have to 1. figure out what it is we need to order then 2. Text bar manager the order that he then 3. Texts to the kitchen manager to go buy at various restaurant supply stores around town but 4. Owner gives only enough money for the kitchen guy to purchase stuff with so it’s often the bar that comes up short.

This was a really sore point over Saint Patrick’s day weekend and this lasts weekend. Bar ran out of pretty much everything and we couldn’t even make more because there was nothing to make it with.

Yesterday, when checking out of raw material stocks, we could tell someone was unhappy as we did have enough citrus juice to actually make everything we needed, for a change. Now if only they actually bought stuff we’ve been asking for months, like demerara sugar.

Between both jobs, there’s plenty of vitriol to go around.

Personal

My liver is kinda happy about it though. Same for my wallet.

One of my preferred watering spots, Iron Door Pub, shut its doors this past Sunday.

I’ve been in Minneapolis service industry for ten years.Tonight is the first time a bartender told me “I got your tab”

nullrend on Bluesky

Invited all of our coworkers to come hang out. None did. Fuck’em, last time I make an effort to socialise with them. If they want us to hangout with them we’ll just have a drink at the closest bar that’s also on the block, then going home.

Who needs sleep?

Current sleep schedule is all over the place and we’re getting tired of it. We’re thinking of rearranging our bedroom and putting up blackout curtains but we’ll need to figure out how to attach them properly to the wall without risking our rent deposit.

A more insane alternative is to move to another apartment in the same building, which would help with porch pirates.

Weather be crazy yo

In Spanish we say “Febrero loco, Marzo otro poco“. We go from blizzards to late spring warmth back to freezing then some rain and… we know global warming is real cos the weather in these latitudes doesn’t know what it wants to do anymore. This is kicking my ass and making me fall asleep early and waking up in the middle of the night and then we can’t fall back asleep.

I just want to be able to fall asleep in my building’s back courtyard and feel warm.

Government or the lack thereof

There’s just so much. Every day a new chaos. Social Security? Gutted. Department of Education? Not anymore. Secret military ops? Guess again. Meanwhile Democrats are best described by The Onion:

Chuck
Democrats Huddle To Decide How Best To Let Massive Republican Fuck-Up Slip Through Fingers

In Latin America they say “A disfrutar lo votado” (“Enjoy what you voted for”) but even if the criminal trump regime were to kill all the cruel idiots who voted for the orange cruel idiot we still have to pick up the pieces.

Good News Everyone

the classic windows xp wallpaper with your friend darth the red panda, a red panda wearing a darth vader outfit and with blue sky butterfly wings, flying above

Darth is back and it’s currently a trending topic on bluesky. They went to sleep before trending topics were even a thing.

Pretty sure that’s everything that’s rattling around in our brain… for now.

This is only week 5 of 2025???

/ status report / , ,

Ugh, it’s been a fucken hell of a month. Literally the first day of February and no one wants anymore of what this year has in store.

Work

mgbarJerb is… Consistent in its chaotic, disorganised, environment. It’s one of the reasons why we’re actively shopping for a car, even though the orange trump is about to start a trade war ( 2025-02-02_02:36 : has started. We started this post six hours ago.) with Mexico and Canada. I need to be there quickly whenever someone calls out which happens at least once a week. We spend way too much on rideshares and that’s money that should go towards a car payment.

Got written up for bad attitude. Some of that is deserved, some isn’t. But co-workers who are lazy fuckers are a-okay so fuck them and fuck the corpos who like it that way.

bartendJerb: The “floor manager” quit. She was the one who made syrups and purchased some stuff. So now we have no one to do those things. They (as in the current bar manager, and the owner) want me to do it but I will need a car to schlep all the things around. Doing it on my bike is too onerous a task, nevermind the time it will take.

Personal

My personal life is basically non-existent outside of having a couple drinks at various bars around town, after work. Work is life these days. The hangovers too but we are making an effort to keep them to a minimum, like Ernie. She’s up for a James Beard award as a professional oyster shucker. We should learn from her.

As I need to buy a car, we are shopping around and we know we want a Toyota RAV4 or a Honda CR-V. The purchase needs to be done before the economy crashes but we’re extremely leery of making a purchase of such magnitude when the economy is most certainly about to be tossed into a latrine. See what the muskrat is doing at the US Treasury department. Fucken piece of shit Nazi. Fuck his dad and his mom too.

Had a spot of seasonal depression but I think we’re past it. We hope. We’re pretty tired as we type this on our phone at the bar. (Still tired at home on the computer).

Alertness

ICE raids all over the country. ICE office in Saint Paul : they want 75 arrests a day, with increases coming down the pike. Fuck ICE and if you have someone working there, fuck you, fuck your mom, fuck your dad, fuck your grandparents, fuck your great-grandparents, and all of their fucken cows.

They don’t care whether you’re a citizen or not. A resident or not. If you en’t Caucasian you en’t staying.

So that’s another reason to not take the bus and opt for personal transportation.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

This post comes via the WP classic editor on mobile. It is 2025 in the year of the Lard and fucken WordPress still doesn’t have a decent mobile editor. Automattic has sucked as stewards of WordPress for a long time and it shows. Also fuck Matt Mullenweg, prissy bitch.

Positions

This here blog post is us being pro-union (even if most of the bosses are fucken idiots), pro-labor, pro-lgbtq. You don’t like it? The ❌ button should be on your top-right window corner, unless you’re using a corpo app in which case you’re fucked, your family is fucked and fuck you too.

Estoy cansado, jefe

/ status report / , ,

Work

We now agree with Boomers that people don’t want to work anymore. We would like to have a day off sometime? Our laundry is piling up something massive.

Personal

We’re shopping for a car. We don’t like it, but the abuse our knees are taking at work makes riding bike year-long unfeasible. Plus… there’s a couple of shows that are out of the Twin Cities we would like to attend. Having a car would make it much easier. In the meantime… we will bus to work, we will ride our bike back home.

Learning

We learned people are lazy and you can’t expect yourself out of them. Also learned we need to be the one training people at mgbarJerb, lest they become lazy like the others, so we can maybe expect something of ourselves within them.

All other learning is more or less at a standstill. We wish it weren’t so.

Intersections

We’ve now learned why bartenders are usually broke. They spend money almost as fast as they make money. This cannot, will not, be our way. We know Hunger and we know she’s always around.

it’s okay to just be a manager. It’s fine and we mean it

/ from outside / , , ,

But leadership, oh baby, that’s what everyone wants to do. Managing is mundane and leadership is exciting. A manager handles trivialities, like hiring and firing. A leader has the privilege of serving as a shining moral beacon, soothing the trouble, reading the psychodynamic eddies (read: vibes) in the organization. At its best, it is a genuinely noble endeavor, not carried out by whoever happens to be at the top of an organizational chart, but whoever has the capacity to encourage other people to be their best selves at a given moment. The most inspiring person in my life yesterday was not anyone that gives talks about how amazing their own skills are, but the seven year old in the house next door who was drilling table tennis so determinedly that I guiltily got some piano practice in.

Source: Leadership Is A Hell Of A Drug — Ludicity

We’ve worked for chefs and GMs who will say they’re not leaders. They’re just making sure the things that need doing are done and that they’re done properly and in a timely manner. And we’ve worked for leaders who will abuse and belittle everyone in the payroll because they’re inferior and unfit to even be considered for full-time work anymore; then they’re surprised when people leave or ragequit.

Looking at you, bistroBoss, you sack of shite.

The long slow painful backroad to renewed sentience

/ status report / , , , ,

It’s been a busy week over here:

  • bartendJerb: I was non-ceremoniously put in charge of the winter drinks menu. The previous-previous bar manager neglected to leave his builds behind so… we got to come up with new ones. We think there are two good cocktails, two decent cocktails, and one iffy cocktail. But they’re done and mostly ready for launch barring ingredient availability. Yellow chartreuse is not cheap.
  • mgbarJerb: It is having new-restaurant issues that we personally thought would not happen at all given it is a corporate rim enterprise with many other venues all over the United States. And yet we keep having logistics issues all over the damn place. Also, la barra fue diseñada con las nalgas (designed with the ass cheeks. Pencil held between them). But hopefully we’ll be able to implement changes that will make life easier for our barbacks and our servers.
  • bistroJerb: Gossip says they’re looking for another bar manager. It will be their fifth of this year— just this year. That’s in addition to the slow season coming up for them. The temperature dropped a solid 35 °F from yesterday. The joint is supposed to be featured on a tv show one of these days and bistroBoss is hanging all of his hopes on the business picking up for the business because of it.

All in all it has been busy and we are making money after taking a li’l menty break hiatus over the summer. Our big expense has been going out to eat and drink but we are currently in the process of reconstructing our kitchen space so we can actually cook at volume. The lack of counter space once again comes in to haunt us in our tiny little galley kitchen but… it is much better than the lame tiny space we used to live before.

Slowly we regain the ability to concentrate and think. We lost that for a long, long time. We fucked up a lot of things during that time.

Going to try and do these reports to myself more often. They help to keep track of dates and events.

Real jobs are the occult norm now

/ from outside / ,

Ghost jobs might just be a temporary symptom of an uncertain economy. But Erica Groshen, an economist at Cornell University and former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said the way companies hire and candidates job hunt is changing.

Source: “Ghost jobs” are on the rise – Marketplace

It is now August of 2024. I’ve have applied to a lot of IT jobs that aren’t in the tech sector. I’ve heard nothing from those HR departments. Ghost jobs aren’t a bug of the recruiting sector any longer, but a feature.

Fucken drama, seriously

/ rucksack / , ,

So much stuff happens at bistroJerb that I think it’ll just be better for my long-term memory if we dump it on here instead of attempting to remember it all.

In the past week:

  • Monday: no activity, thank gods
  • Tuesday: Four servers hired.
  • Wednesday: GM is out. She’s new to the job and already went off on vacation (she’s coming back but not yet)
  • Thursday: All bartenders are unavailable for me. Full patio buyout, full dining room. bistroBoss understaffed so badly he had to take tables and he absolutely sucks at it. We fang dinner service on our own.
  • Friday: Two people staging cos this is how bistroBoss gets free labor out of everyone that wants employment. Three people are actually training and they’re supposed to be paid for it.
  • Saturday: One of the new hires walks out. One of the bartenders walks out. He was going to pay them both below minimum wage in Minneapolis­— as of July 1st it is $15.57 an hour no matter the size of the employer! We close the bar as the other bartender has a health condition.
  • Sunday: 13 hour shift as there are no other bartenders available.

Every single day the schedule went through multiple changes cos bistroBoss doesn’t know how to use 7shifts. He’s still intent on having a hospitality charge instead of tipping and our guests absolutely hate it.

We have the day off today and we’re being productive, which makes for a nice change. See y’all next week in this post series lmao.

Fucken’a bistroBoss

/ rucksack / , ,

Where to even fucken start, ugh. These past few months have been a whirlwind. And when the wind hits you try your best to keep your head down.

Except we’re too fucken good (and proud of it!) to keep our head down. This has the unfortunate effect of leaving our neck exposed.

But if our head rolls, so will the owner of the restaurant we work at.

We’re the sharp end of the stick. We’re the one cancelling the apocalypse on a regular basis.

We had to be the know-it-all

/ local / ,

The past two weeks have been… weird. At musicbarJerb we’re kinda sorta getting more fare? We think?

The booker is still working through his friends looking to do gigs. It’s a good look for him and his friends but… it leaves us, the staff, with no tips. And that’s really what makes staff stay. Booker is straight up fucking people over just so he looks good.

We’re in Minneapolis so we still get our $15 USD hourly. But also does everyone in town with live music, and if our booker is not maximizing occupancy in the stage, then he’s fucking everyone else over. Apparently The Powers That Be still haven’t gotten the message. They trust him blindingly just cos he’s toured the world over.

They won’t listen to us poors, hourly staff.

But that’s our opinion. We can only see what our wages plus tips are. We also talk to coworkers about it, trying to get a feel for the situation. Already got two people out the door cos _they’re not making enough money_. We do know for a fact this is not a situation they see at the jazz spot over on Nicollet Mall. Their staff have stayed for a long, long time.

Knowing our luck, those people are going to walk and instead of moving me up, The Powers That Be will hire new people, cos we’re the only who know where everything is. There are multiple bartenders, there are multiple hosts, there are multiple servers, there are multiple cooks.

the human isn’t moving up at musicbarJerb.

/ local / ,

We’re getting used to the beatings.

Already got in trouble with The Powers That Be, at musicbarJerb, due to the human complimenting people in ways that are not workplace approved by a federal agency in the United States of America.

(the human hugged and kissed someone on the forehead, and complimented someone else endlessly. But they also brought up work roles and that’s a NO NO).

The human is apologetic, and the entities running this here blog have made sure to adjust all expectations and hope accordingly.

Capitalism demands our (remainder) of soul. We shan’t give it. We may license it.

And that’s facts

/ local / , ,
Extreme closeup of an stage. There's half a human in there, and what looks to be the top end of a bass?

🎶 today was a good day. We think.

We’ve been at musicbarJerb for just over a month. It’s been pretty good other than the physical layer (aka “my body”) suffering under the stresses of long-thought-gone abuse, for we are a mere runner. We run to help the bar, help the servers, help the kitchen.

Our bosses didn’t think the job was so physical, but hey, here we are, the only hourly employee to actually get full time hours. We kinda know the food, we kinda know the drinks, we kinda know when to fuck off and let people make out uninhibited instead of refilling their water glasses.

Maybe, in time, we’ll move up. We don’t expect it. It’s not Minnesota culture to have people like me serve you, or make you drinks.

Being employed keeps me out of trouble. Keep me employed

/ from outside / , , , , ,

“This is the beginning of the end,” Yoo said last week. “It’s already just a midsize business in San Antonio. This is not a company that’s on a trajectory of growth. They’re on a trajectory of death. It will not be around.”

Source: Rackspace ‘on trajectory of death,’ founder Richard Yoo says

I work at a small datacenter. We’re… having some issues with customer retention and customer acquisition cos everyone wants that cloud hotness, even if they’re going to pay through the nose for it. What are we to do??? If Rackspace, one of the first names you think of when you need colocation, what is a small datacenter business in Minnesota to do?

A lot of people keep saying to avoid the cloud and whatnot, but then they end up going with aws, google cloud, or azure. That’s not putting your money where your mouth is.

If they get hacked, you get hacked. This is proven. All of these platforms, in their efforts to make it easy to get onboarded make it super easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot with insecure defaults.

Right now they’re making money, sure… But what happens when they don’t? Looking at you, google. But the others aren’t that much better. Do your part and support small and local businesses that can, and will, lend you their expertise.

/ local / , , , ,

We’ve been avoiding thinking about work for the past two weeks. Why? Cos we had a jerb interview! Codename hrJerb.

Glorified receptionist but gets us out of the IT sector. We’d be able to get some actual experience working outside of the crypt.

IT Crowd - Hello IT

This would be a full time job. That’s in addition to sysadminJerb, itself a full-time job; and hostJerb, which is a part-time job. We’d have no time for ourselves other than basic system (human) maintenance. We’d be working an average of 85 hours per week— I checked. But we’ll take it if we have to. There is no path forward but pain.

It all came about cos when we got off work today I hit up Inbound Brewing, chatted with a couple friends, and on the way to Nightingale two songs came on just as a decision erupted from my subconscious.

This first one hit hard:

It played just as I was thinking about all the effort I’ve put into hostJerb only to be told “we don’t need your help” when management are clearly underequipped, underprepared, and clearly overtaken by the job.

We’ve tried chasing this kind of thing in the past and it never ends well. We learned.

And just as we were about to feel sorry for ourselves for… Coming up short for people that don’t appreciate us, this song played.

Sure it’s a love song but right there and then it felt like a balm. Like… “oh wow, other workplaces can actually be nice? I don’t have to chase people around?” and “huh we do love ourselves” and “we love this one beer and it’s not her fault the people who make her suck at their jobs”.

It’s Celia Cruz too so that helps.

All we need do is wait. Play capilalists off against one another; one set know what they can do but they don’t want to own up to it, the other coming in blind with cash and benefits. And extra seasoning! Cos all the people at hostJerb who can challenge what hrJerb might offer are out of town, and they are competing with people who are known to not care about their employees. In a competition like this everyone loses.

Then there’s also the fact we’re addicted to this fucken industry.

For shame! For shame!

/ rucksack / ,

Well guess what, here’s an actual blog post. For the past few years we’ve been putting stuff on twitter cos it’s easier to get stuff off the cuff, y’know? But we’ve realize that for a lot of things we want to do a bit more thought. Hence the following.

We’d noticed over the past couple weeks a coworker was downright hostile to us. Earlier we finally got the chance to ask her:

“Hey, is there anything we did to make you angry or annoyed?”

Yes

You don’t listen to anyone
You do whatever you feel like
And you drink too much at work

Which, fair.

  1. We listen to people who can actually impinge on our tasks, i.e. management or shift leads. If you want me to go clean tables cos you’d rather get hit on by the hot guy at the bar then no.
  2. We do whatever needs doing right then and there. Food needs doing and you’re busy getting hit on? We’ll run food. Guests in line and you’re busy chatting up a table of men? We’ll ring those guests right up. I’m not at your beck and call. I’m at the business’ beck and call. We’ve told the GM to fuck off cos we’re busy doing things they’d rather not do. We’ve told the fucken CEO off. You’re a mere peon just like me.
  3. This one actually threw us for a loop. We’re currently averaging .9 beers per hour, while the KM is doing about 2 beers/hour, the sous chef is doing 1 weed joint/hour. We believe the issue you have with our drinking is that we start making conversation with the men hitting on you, which means you then have to go and do actual work.

Now, we only found out cos we asked. She wasn’t going to let us know she had a problem, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to let management know there was a problem cos then they’ll look at her work performance.

(Management loves us, by the way. They can find no fault with our work, which is how we like it.)

But it is annoying. When they say that it’s hard to make friends in Minnesota they didn’t say anything about people who can’t deal with their own emotions in a healthy way.

A week of self-discovery

/ local / , , ,
  • We went from three jobs down to two jobs back in March and somehow… our schedule got worse? Perhaps the kitchen job at hostJerb should be counted as a third job, honestly. We’ve been telling people we work like an elemental demon to live like a mortal peasant. No one gets it :(

  • It’s becoming almost impossible to sleep at home. All the neighbors are working on their yards, their cars, their houses. There’s a bit more traffic than at the old apartment. The landlord company are working on the house. The light is bad enough, but the uneven noise is really messing our already chaotic sleep schedule even more.

  • Purchased a Nintendo Switch. I’m not buying any video games until I’ve exhausted Link’s Awakening. Love this game. Trying to figure out how to get an online membership for it without giving Nintendo any more personal data— or our credit card number.

    Screen capture from The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening

  • Decided to schedule gym sessions. It’s easier than just going there on a lark. It helps with keeping full awareness of our schedule too. We need to find a good resource for guided gym workouts.

  • The biggest change of the summer? Definitely our biking around. We decided calories are cheap and that’s really helped in getting us out of bed as long as we can get 6 hours or more of sleep between jobs. I’m not going out to party or mingle, sleep is far more important! But we’re making more of an effort to bike around instead of using rideshares or the bus, particularly at night.

    Gotta take advantage of the weather while we can. Once winter is here getting around is going to be that much harder.

Now, to find something to eat…

It’s done, thank Chaos

/ rucksack / , , ,

This past week was truly a week from fucken hell. Six nights in row at sysadmin jerb, three doubles in a row , then another two doubles in a row.

I’m fucken tired but with the fucken pigs doing curfews in Minneapolis and firing off emergency alerts at all hours of the day it hasn’t been easy to actually get any fucken sleep after they killed a Black guy in Brooklin Center and protests started.

Google Calendar from April 4 until April 17

I think I only survived thanks to the free coffee I get at my barista job and napping at my sysadmin job— which we try not to do because then we’re groggy the rest of the night and when the job is thinking that leads to problems.

I’m going to bed in an occupied territory. Fuck the police.

For Third Night After Daunte Wright’s Killing, Protesters And Law Enforcement Clash Outside Brooklyn Center Police HQ

I’d like to not stress about money kthx

/ local / , , ,

I started working at SysadminJerb about… six months ago or so. I’m looking to pickup a second job hosting at a finer restaurant since I’d like to be able to talk to more people on a regular basis; Working by yourself in a datacenter is not conducive to long conversations in person.

So why is it that I’m having a hell of a time budgeting my money? I’m realizing I’m spending more than I really want to and right now I’m not sure… why. This isn’t a problem I had to face when I was working in a restaurant full time, so now I’m just spinning my wheels trying to figure out why this is happening, and more importantly, how.

I think I’ve got the why figured out: Since I have loads more free time than I ever did before, I now have that much more time available to spend the money I’m making even when I don’t mean to be spending that money.

The how it’s a bit harder but I think that, over the past few months, the average amount of money I spend in small transactions has gone up along with the amount of transactions that I do during a pay period, which follows the fact I have more time to be out and about than I did before.

So now I’m on the search for a budgeting tool that will help me with this. I’ve tried using Mint before but… at this point in time they haven’t added any new features in a while and I’ve had a devil of a time connecting it to my auto-pay accounts, so it let’s me track only some things instead of everything. I’ll try it again since it’s free but if it doesn’t work out I’ll just let it go and never look back.

I’m also looking at other tools like You Need a Budget and Financial Gym. Right now I’m thinking those are nice but… they’re paid and I would prefer to not add more pressure to my wallet.

So as a first step I’ll try Mint, then if that doesn’t work look around for a spreadsheet I can use on google sheets, then if that doesn’t work I’ll try YNAB and the rest. I don’t have a need to track everything but it would be nice to have a better overview than the stuff my bank has for me.

Right, this all reminds me: I can actually use these tools because my income is more or less stable now compared to what it was before: I can count on a solid 40 hour work-week month after month, and before I had to actively fight for working hours. So that’s a big change.

I probably just need to cut a few services here and there that I have not been using to their full potential, or ramp them up so I do use their full potential.

Going to be habit changing, to say the least…

Start of daytime week

/ local / , ,

Bit of a status update.

Typing this at Bachelor Farmer Cafe. Expensive but there’s good wifi and the chairs are comfy. It’s becoming a bit of a habit after a shift at SysadminJerb but somehow the vibe here lets me think, which is nice. I can then go home and sleep and still feel productive about my night at work.

It’s getting cold. Got me a cool leather jacket but I will definitely need more heavy winter gear.

Still working at merBOHjob… which makes for long shifts when there are days when I have to work at both places at once. Staying up 30 hours or more is now a common occurrence and it would seem my psyche has stabilized enough to be able to do this and not feel like I’m losing myself anymore.

Chuckling as I type this cos one of the barists totally looks like she doesn’t want to be here, and she looks like the old GM at 112 that is a… colorful character, to me.

Oh right, I got kicked out of 112 this past Sunday. First time I’ve been kicked out of a restaurant. Just walked out, didn’t fight it. At least now I know for sure they don’t want my business, nor any business I might send their way. Guess I could send people to bFOHjob but I’m pretty sure they also fucken hate me.

Guess I’ll have to send people to Bachelor Farmer.

I can has sleep?

/ local / ,

I seriously thought I’d be done working more than 12 hours in a single 24 hour period… but sadly I was wrong. Very, very wrong.

Back into the aether

/ local / ,

Well, I just done and got me an IT job again. To actually keep it I:

  • Quit at tKitchenJob.
  • Ended up walking out at pbFOHjob. This place is a shithole and I don’t think I’ll ever see a paycheck from it; in the event I do I will probably never see my actual tips.
  • Reducing hours at merBOHjob. They don’t like it but what’cha gonna do? You can’t pay me.

I think I’ll call this IT job… honeyJerb. Jen would be proud.

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