The algorithms that drive traffic on the internet love a hot take so here are five hot takes to sum up 2025.
1. Maybe veterinarians should be in charge of our healthcare system.
In February, our dog pulled out of her collar when I was taking her for a quick walk at night and ran directly in front of a car. I heard two thumps and loud yelp. When I ran to find her was bleeding profusely from her mouth, head, and her leg hung at a bad angle. She wasn't moving at all. The poor woman that hit her was frantically trying to convince me the dog was going to be fine. Spoiler alert, she was. I feel bad but I was a bit rude and told her that I couldn't deal with her and the dog and that I needed her to go away so I could get the dog off the road and to the vet.
I called Leila, while my neighbor comforted the woman, and we loaded the dog onto a sled and took her to the emergency vet clinic. I crouched in the back and tried to keep Holly - that's the dog's name, still while we drove in case she had a back injury. I was really scared that this was the end of the puppy. At end of the summer we took in this dog from Emily and Celia that found her in a Hy-Vee parking lot. She was an adorable puppy - but full of worms and a ton of energy. She was way too much dog for their already crowded apartment and busy lives. This dog quickly decided that I was her person and we have spent hours every day walking off some of that puppy energy.
The emergency vet clinic for the very reasonable price of 5000 dollars performed two surgeries - one minor one to drain blood from her lungs and abdomen and another to reattach soft tissue of the side of her face back to her skull, multiple x-rays, three overnights in the clinic, anesthesia for setting her broken collar bone and the surgeries, follow up visits, all of her prescription pain meds, antibiotics, and tranquilizers to keep her calm while she healed, and some free dog food.
What would that have costed if a human being in the US had gone to the emergency room for two surgeries, four days in the hospital, medicine, and follow up visits? If you didn't have insurance? Don't even think about how much that would be.
2. Open office plans are a mistake
I had this rather posh corner office on the fourth floor since I moved to STL in 2016. It had a white board, a small table for meetings, and large windows on two walls. I used to write ideas and plans on all of the windows and the white board. I had shelves of books and a place for my stuff.
I worked here through covid since it was technically assigned to the marker lab. The rest of the offices were remade into huddle rooms and Bayer wanted everyone to have flexible work spaces in cubicles with no assigned seating. They put in open areas with couches, long tables, foosball, and ping pong tables. During covid most people were required to work from home, but I didn't love that so I got permission to keep coming to the office. I started drinking coffee that year and would hang out with the lab workers during my coffee breaks and ate lunch in the cafeteria with money from the Moderna vaccine trials. I road my bike to work almost every day and kept my bike in my office. All the security and building management people knew me by name. It really felt like my home away from home.
In April work decided that I needed to move out to a different, smaller office, with no windows since they had given up on the open office plan. My team was assigned space in a different building. My new office had no desk, no shelves, or space for my things. It did have a broken flat TV on the wall next to a large table, six green chairs, and a white board since it had been converted from an office to a huddle room and now was being converted back to an office.
The office buildings are still mostly empty. Majority of employees liked working from home and spend most of their days in meetings on Teams/Zoom/etc. and so driving to the office to work in a bland cubicle and shared huddle rooms seemed like a waste of time. My work was mostly with teams around the world so I didn't need to come in either, but I used to like to. Moral of the story - if you want people to come to the office you have to make it a place actual humans want to work. Open office plans mostly aren't designed for that. They are ugly and inconvenient and people like/need to have their own space.
3. Money spent on my daughter's wedding was worth every penny
insert collage from the wedding
4. European's have the right idea about summer vacation
5. The future is Africa
