@Stigma

even if you’re a bit hapless you can use the bar girls as training wheels

Idk if this qualifies as "good " advice for guys who hold a poor success rate with the ladies of their own home country. The annals of divorce and other complex break up horror stories have entire branches on Filipina, Thai, and others, that make an entire cottage industry of fishing for a foreign chump to clamp their talons on, and superficially USE as a ticket out of their low opportunity trap of a country.

I can't tell you how many such guys I've met well along this dire pathway, with a palpable cloud of defeat and resignation over their entire personhood, trapped with an aggressive and domineering diminutive tiger wife turned tiger Mom, who even after a quarter century of immersion among English speakers, still speaks with a brash accent that sounds like a gaylord of truck coil springs tipped down a multi story concrete stairwell.

It's not even a beta exclusive risk factor, ex military dudes make a huge portion of the guys so entrapped. Only Unicorn quantity exceptions I've seen, where i don't overwhelmingly think, that's no kind of life i would want.

I mean sure, have some short term vacation fun if you can wing it. Just don't let the Little Head do all the thinking on taking it to LTR level and beyond, FFS.

Welp, thanks to domestic and geopolitics, stations in California are posting diesel prices of $9.99 which is the highest number possible without massive upgrades to pump and display systems. I'm old enough to remember when gas topped $1.00 circa 1980. Pumps back then had physical digits in mechanical displays, and many stations modded the internal gearing and added a painted or stickered on 1. next to the mechanical digits, and many stayed that way for years and years.

My first adult job was at one of the last LA area stations that hadn't converted the service bays to a mini mart with 1 cashier and digital remote pumps. I thought I was applying for a mechanic job but that old fart just used me as a pump jockey till a Pep boys hired me.

We'd run payment to the central cash box and run change back out, and process MasterCharge and Bank Americard payments using an old school chunk-chunk quadruplicate form imprinter. After each sale, we'd reset the pump with a special square key and the numbers would noisily reset to zero.

I remember one day, the gas price had fluctuated up like 4c since the week before. This old fart, plausibly a WWI vet, took his anger at this with me, an 18yo with zero control over the fact; shouting, WE SHOULD HAVE JUST TOLD THOSE IRANIANS HOW MUCH WE'D PAY THEM FOR THE GODDAMN OIL!!! The he tried to screech off like a power flex in his 20yo 8MPG lead sled that was obviously misfiring on at least 2 of its 8 cylinders.

Funny afterward, I was working at a tire store 2 years later when the old fart station owner came in to buy 2 tires for a customer's car. He spotted me across the shop and started yelling out, DON'T HIRE THAT GUY, HE'LL QUIT ON YOU!! HE'LL QUIT! HE'LL QUIT ON YOU!! As he kept on, I realized he wasn't joking, he was still seriously bitter over me quitting after ignoring several inquiries about promotion to mechanic work. The other pump jockey I had worked with was 30 years my senior, content to coast in a near minimum wage nowhere job.