u/zildar

I've been playing for years with neck pain. I have tried several shoulder pads of all types and shapes with minimal luck. For whatever reason, I kept swapping the shoulder pads and never thought about changing my chin rest. I've gone through several shoulder pads and was starting to think I needed to put the viola down or go to a smaller size.

Recently, though, I found an old post here suggesting some chin rests for similar issues. Based on some other forums, I ordered a couple of chin rests without a lot of optimism, but I got the jackpot on my second try!

I never realized how much I was forcing things to fit. I ended up even doing some physical therapy because (in part) of trying to make things work that weren't fitting me well.

The whole point of my post is simply to say keep trying if you have any discomfort! There is a combo of shoulder pad and chinrest that will work. Don't focus just one one or the other - both play a role in being comfortable and reducing the risk of injury.

That's all. Happy and wanted to share.

I wanted to share a story that frustrates me and my wife.

We both work 40+ hours a week and have a toddler. Needless to say, we don't have a lot of time to spare, so we signed up for Walmart+ to have groceries delivered. Once a week we put in an order for delivery and grab it from the porch when it arrives. This is why we are spending $90/year - to have groceries delivered.

Well, our orders started getting later and later. Like, days later. We even had a few where we had to cancel the order and put it in again because it timed out or whatever.

The support department told us that this service is a third party, but it looked like the drivers weren't picking our order because we did not include a tip on the delivery. We did some experimenting, and somehow if we tipped more than 10% our orders magically arrived on time. For 15% they even sometimes arrived early.

In the end, we realized we aren't getting any additional service that warrants a tip. Now we put in our orders for pickup and drive out of our way once a week to do the pickup. It's frustrating to me because the whole reason we paid for the service in the first place was to avoid driving into town, but we can't use our paid service because the delivery drivers want tips to do the very job which they're paid to do.