All my life, I’ve absolutely hated going to the dentist’s office. Even worse, I seem to have been cursed with weak enamel or something, because I’ve had an absolutely insane number of cavities that had to get filled.

Whenever I went to the dentist of my parents’ choice, they would shove bulky things inside my mouth and make me bite down on them so hard that the inside of my mouth would become numb. The entire office would always have this strange, musty smell that would make me keep yawning. When I had to get work done inside my mouth, they would tilt the seat so far back that my own saliva would start draining into my nose. And of course, the worst part of it all is obviously the ridiculous number of injections I had to get to numb my mouth, seemingly for even the smallest tasks.

After I turned 24 (I think), my dental insurance plan ran out because I was too old to keep qualifying under my parents’ plan. So, since then (or rather, since slightly before then), I hadn’t gone to the dentist.

I enrolled in my own dental insurance plan after I moved to Las Vegas – I figured a day of suffering is way better than just living with bad teeth. I finally set up an appointment with a dentist in Summerlin South for my cleaning (for which I actually ended up waiting 6 months, because I assumed I already had more cavities to get filled, and my insurance only covers fillings after being enrolled in the program for 6 months).

After my appointment, I feel like I’ve just been deprived of a proper dentist experience my entire life.

X-rays? I literally stand inside a machine and it takes care of everything for me. The dentist? Looks like he actually enjoys his job, instead of being someone who is on the verge of retiring. The office? Miraculously, it’s not about to collapse.

I don’t know if the technology has just advanced so much in the past 3 years that everything is easier now, or if my parents are just terrible at picking dentists, but this was actually literally a pleasant experience. There were multiple different specialists who took care of the different kinds of work that I needed done, not just one old person who looked like he just went through his second mid-life crisis.

In case you’re curious, yes I did get two more fillings.

I have 13 total now.

lol

Several years ago, being a deliveryperson was an actual full-time job for which you had to apply to a shipping company, wear a uniform, and operate their huge delivery trucks. However, in the past handful of years, Amazon started a new system called Amazon Flex where people can essentially be their own boss and deliver packages for Amazon during their free time on their own schedule – essentially like Uber, except you’re transporting packages instead of passengers.

Ever since this started in my area(s), package delivery has been catastrophically bad. Amazon Flex was a thing in Southern California where I lived before I moved to Las Vegas, and the deliverypeople had massive issues actually reading the address properly such that they would confuse unit and building numbers and think that the number 6 was the same as the number 8.

Amazon Flex deliveries haven’t quite been as bad in Las Vegas, but I had multiple instances of deliverypeople failing to deliver and saying they did not have access to my apartment building during normal business hours when there is literally a leasing office and an unlocked front door. I had even more instances of people not realizing we had package lockers, getting lost in my apartment building while trying to find my door, then proceeding to just leave the package in a random place on the first floor commercial area.

That brings me to the amazing feature my apartment building has that people don’t use – the package lockers. My apartment building installed Luxer One into the mail room, a system that essentially accepts packages on my behalf so we (theoretically) never have to miss another package again. For the deliverypeople who actually know it exists, it’s worked very well.

However, apparently this is still a somewhat new system that not many locations have, so beyond the people who just don’t know we have package lockers in our mail room, there are others who aren’t really too familiar with how the system works. For everyone who actually isn’t familiar with it, the deliveryperson registers the package in the little tablet computer that controls the lockers, holds the package up to the camera so the resident can see the package, then places the package into the designated locker for pick-up. The resident then receives an email with the photograph and a notification to come pick up the package.

The deliveryperson who delivered my package yesterday got all the steps right… except for the photo.

But he was close.

For a short period after I moved to Las Vegas, I thought that I had forgotten my shower curtain in California. However, I soon remembered that I never actually had a shower curtain (my apartment used to have a sliding glass door, and the team house shower curtain belongs in the team house), so I went and bought a new shower curtain.

I bought a Volens ruffled white shower curtain because it looked more luxurious and elegant than a regular printed shower curtain, and it fit my apartment’s minimalistic and simple theme pretty well. After it arrived, I hung it up using the included rings, and I had my shower curtain.

Now normally, Amazon gives you product recommendations based off what you purchase. Sometimes it will recommend the same item again in the case of refillable products, but for one-time or big purchases (like televisions), it usually won’t continue to recommend you even more TVs, as it knows you now already have one. In those situations, it may instead start recommending related products, like a TV wall mount.

For some reason, Amazon insisted on constantly giving me additional shower curtain recommendations. Now, if I had purchased a product like dog treats, it would make sense for Amazon to continue recommending dog treats to me, as my (theoretically-existing) dog (for the purposes of this ex­am­ple) would eventually finish consuming the treats and need more. However, people generally don’t eat or replace their shower curtains too often, so I was very confused as to why my recommendations were lined with more shower curtains.

I ended up just ignoring the recommendations, and everything was fine for two months. But recently, my shower curtain started smelling a bit un­pleas­ant – it was actually the smell that clothes give off if they’ve been left out to air dry in a humid and bacteria-prone area, instead of being quickly dried in a machine dryer. This wasn’t a problem, though – I just unhooked my fancy shower curtain from the rings and threw it in the washing machine and dryer.

It shrunk.

For some reason, the shower curtain railing above my bathtub is unusually high, and on top of that, my tub is one of those hybrid soaking tubs that are ergonomically designed in an oval (which requires even more leftover curtain at the bottom to be able to stretch inward and fit inside the tub). My royal shower curtain was already only just barely making it in, but with it just barely shrinking in the wash (because this was made out of polyester and not vinyl), it was hanging above the tub.

This is the moment I discovered that Amazon knew what was going to happen months before it happened, and I began questioning the meaning of life. Amazon somehow knew that, because I had only purchased a polyester fabric shower curtain and no vinyl shower curtain liner to go with it, it should keep recommending shower curtains because it predicted that (1) I needed something vinyl to go inside the tub, (2) I would wash this shower curtain, it would shrink, and I would need to buy a new one, or (3) both.

I picked out a PEVA shower curtain liner and placed my order. The shower curtain recommendations instantly disappeared.

Now Amazon is recommending different kinds of body wash, soap, and toothbrushes to me.

I haven’t replaced my toothbrush in 4 months.

I’m just going to pretend like Amazon doesn’t actually know that, and they just made a lucky guess.

I was originally going to title this blog post “I am now officially a Nevadan” as a follow-up to the story of how I nearly failed my eye exam when transferring my driver’s license over from Illinois to Nevada. But, when I went to photograph my two driver’s licenses to show the difference between the two, I noticed something pretty interesting.

I have a Canon PowerShot G7X Mark II, which comes with facial recognition. There’s a setting in the camera where you take multiple photographs of yourself and record them into the camera, allowing it to recognize you in photos and videos. I guess this allows you to stay in focus a bit better, because the camera knows that you are the star of whatever you are filming.

I personally don’t think it’s really that noticeable, but apparently, my face has changed enough that my camera consistently detects my current face as my real face, even though I don’t have glasses on (yes, I still wear glasses, and all benchmark photos in the camera are me with my glasses on; I just had to take them off for my driver’s license photo because the photographer asked me to).

I guess this blog post technically could’ve gone either way – if it recognized me as my old photo, I would’ve laughed at how I used to be me more than I currently am, then just attribute the discrepancy to my glasses. But either way, I found it pretty interesting.