If you want to confuse people... I pronounce /etc as "ets", but one of my coworkers recently called it "slash e t c" and I had to ask him to repeat it a couple times before I figured out what he meant...
I once had a PSU fail catastrophically- arcing, visible from around a corner and down a hall, and quite loud. I didn't want to go near it, circuit breakers were closer anyway, but I didn't know which one so I just hit them all. Once replaced, I fired up the machine and... I think the cmos was cleared, but other than that, no ill effects.
I need to get one of those. I have 5 spinning disks + 1 SSD, though not much else high powered - it's a file server, CPU is at least 8 years old, and GPU (if you can even call it that) is passively cooled... I just replaced my 500W power supply because its fan had died (explains why occasionally I'd come home and find it powered off) and nothing under 650W had enough SATA power connectors, so that's what I ended up with. Curious how overkill it is...
Having worked both retail and call center, no, they're not in the same league. People can be assholes over the phone, absolutely, but it's quite different from face-to-face. Someone threatens to kill me over the phone, I can say "I'd like to see you try" and hang up, and the worst that happens is I get fired. In person, they can carry out the threat.
It's nice when you have a boss that has your back. I worked at RadioShack back in the day, and the manager of the store I stayed at the longest was like that. Of course we didn't have the whole x items or less, but we were in a busy college area, only on-street parking, so we'd get people running in and wanting to be served immediately regardless of how busy we were because they were double parked. The boss empowered us to tell them to fuck off, politely of course. "Come back when you have more time, we'll be happy to help". Also, we were next to a parking lot, it wasn't ours, though we did have a couple of spots that were clearly marked employee parking only. Few things gave the boss more pleasure than calling a tow truck... Literally rubbing his hands with glee on multiple occasions.
Ok, there's a lot here so I'm going to try to address it all without losing my train of thought and going off on too many tangents...
For one, I don't think food pickiness translates at all to general adventurousness. Our daughter will try anything food-wise, but she's a chicken otherwise. Fortunately she's not quite as stubborn as our son, and she's also a show-off, so she'll overcome her fear if it gives her something to brag about.
I was a pretty picky eater as a child too, but I would also leave the house and do my own thing way past when I was expected to come home, much to the chagrin of whichever parent I was living with at the time. My dad would just send me to bed with no TV if I didn't eat what was presented, which was a pretty big motivator to me at the time, as well as trying to make me feel bad for insulting his ability to cook. I remember swordfish that was like leather, and scallops like rubber... I'll never try either of those things now. My mom on the other hand would go apeshit if I didn't eat her food, there were more than a few times she would force feed me, just one of many ways she illustrated the line between discipline and abuse by stepping over it ...
Anywho... We can't really do the whole "eat it or you go hungry" thing with our son because he was born with a heart defect that makes it hard for him to gain weight, and that's the one thing he needs to do to overcome it. He just turned 7, and while his height is about average, his weight is about that of a 5 year old. He's a noodle.
I don't think being forced to try new foods when you're young makes you more likely to try new foods as you get older, you just get more ok with trying new foods as you get older regardless.
Since used vegetable oil can be used in place of diesel, I'd guess vegetable oil is more energy dense than gasoline...