#058 - Interloper
- Thread starter The Wooster
- Start date
Critical research failure: That tape looks nothing like duct tape, which is what Gunny would obviously be using here.
[small]Don't try to convince me that he'd be using inferior packing tape to repair incredibly-advanced power armor. That's just not cricket.[/small]
[small]Don't try to convince me that he'd be using inferior packing tape to repair incredibly-advanced power armor. That's just not cricket.[/small]
Dude, Erin lives off a ton of hot pockets. I'd be more surprised if her bowel movements weren't epic.Lightknight said:
Aw... how sweet of Rad.
Now I'm curious to see what happens next. After all, we don't know why Erin's in the state she is...
Now I'm curious to see what happens next. After all, we don't know why Erin's in the state she is...
Not at all, my master's thesis had me descend into Disheveled Hermit territory for almost three years, complete with a Beard of Sorrow I shaved off only for special occasions and desperate cases. I lived off a diet of campus vending machine food and takeout, and the two or three honest grocery runs I pushed myself through felt like an absolute slog. My living schedule was out of whack, with dawn frequently sending me, groaning and moaning, to a bed I stuck to almost all day long.Imperioratorex Caprae said:
And then some people are surprised that higher education comes with high failure rates, abandonment issues, a crippling lack of self-esteem and fairly frequent reports of suicidal or intrusive thoughts... I wasn't happy, not one bit. The only thing that kept me going was that damned paper I was chasing - the sort of stuff you can more or less buy for zero effort at one of the several "diploma factories" online. I'm still seeing a therapist until I'll be convinced I'm at no risk of falling back into some of the incredibly toxic lifestyle patterns I maintained.
I can *absolutely* relate to EDA's Erin, seeing as a few months of this made me loathe the outside world. I procrastinated the fuck out of several of my earlier deadlines, skipping non-essential lectures so I'd be able to keep playing Skyrim or whatever else it was that was keeping me sane at the time.
Not to mention the crippling debt that higher education can put one who has meager means and origins into an emotional tailspin of despair at seeing the degree you worked so hard to get may not even dent that looming tower of obligation. I can totally understand that view. I'm a night owl myself, always have been and I think it may be a genetic thing from coming from Scandinavian origins where my ancestors grew up in dreary and lower-than-average light conditions. Light skin, blonde hair and blue eyes (which the apparently are a technical mutation that means better night vision but sometimes abysmal daytime vision). I don't get depressed like some do from avoiding the daytime. But living in Florida makes that difficult at times.IamLEAM1983 said:
Honestly, I went from being fairly hopeful to looking back on my career on campus with a bit of a cynical attitude. Go for it if you're in the mood to broaden your cultural horizons or gain interesting skills, but getting to what you studied for is going to be an absolute gauntlet. Going in there with the notion that headhunters are going to lap up your LinkedIn profile like it's crack cocaine once you graduate is the worst reason to stick with the education system.Imperioratorex Caprae said:
Heck, I'm still living off of a small translation business I put up, and I was still under the table as of a few months ago. I'm far from being the valued professor I figured I'd become, but at least I'm self-employed. Autonomy for the win, I guess.
In other words:
Unrelated Skwisgaar Skwigelf quote: "Ya, sittings down to pees is totally brutals!"
I'm lucky I got in on the ground floor of being a basic PC technician/mobile home/office IT professional by way of being introduced to PC's as a kid in the 80's with my father who built and fixed them for a living. And PC gaming in the 80's/90's kind of had a requirement to know your hardware and operating systems to make the games work properly, taught me a lot of tricks and troubleshooting techniques that translated into a career. I almost went to school for that until I realized I already knew this stuff and was able to get a few certs (MCSE at 21, no formal schooling too bad it was for Windows 2000 and no later than a month after my cert XP was announced...).IamLEAM1983 said:Honestly, I went from being fairly hopeful to looking back on my career on campus with a bit of a cynical attitude. Go for it if you're in the mood to broaden your cultural horizons or gain interesting skills, but getting to what you studied for is going to be an absolute gauntlet. Going in there with the notion that headhunters are going to lap up your LinkedIn profile like it's crack cocaine once you graduate is the worst reason to stick with the education system.
Heck, I'm still living off of a small translation business I put up, and I was still under the table as of a few months ago. I'm far from being the valued professor I figured I'd become, but at least I'm self-employed. Autonomy for the win, I guess.
Did that seriously screw you out of employment opportunities? I mean, I know the jump from 2000 to XP is significant - at least for the time period - but I'm pretty sure the architecture of both OSes wasn't entirely different from one another...Imperioratorex Caprae said:
Unless certification is this administrative hurdle you just *have* to go through, so no matter how able to figure out your way through XP's Pro features you might've been, potential bosses snubbed you.
I'm a Lit nerd who unborks the rigs of close relatives for fun, granted - I'm probably nowhere near being considered eligible for I.T. work. I might be misconstruing a bunch of things in relation to your job. If I am, I'm sorry.
It wasn't so much that I got screwed but rather that if I'd have waited a month or so I could have spent the money on getting XP certified rather than 2000. Personally I liked Win2k better than XP at the time they were both in rotation and it only was around SP2 that I felt XP was a more stable OS. I still got work for Win2k, but more people ended up switching to XP in the timeframe and thus the certification wasn't as lucrative as it could have been. I also experienced the dotcom market crash firsthand because I'd moved to California from Florida for a job and not 6 months into it the company had folded and I was somewhat stranded in a saturated job market with very little opportunities and getting MCSE certified didn't open as many doors as I'd have liked. So that whole 2 year period was basically a wash for me and I barely got out of California with enough money to get back home. I ended up working my last few months out there at both a Hot Topic (yeah... this was before it was trendy, but nearly on the cusp and not a job I was proud of) and Blockbuster Video. From a decent salary to minimum wage in about 9 months... Bad circumstances and all. But then its not like it was an event that a somewhat naive 20 year old me could have anticipated.IamLEAM1983 said:
That's what she said.Pallindromemordnillap said:
OT: Those unrefrigerated Hot Pockets can not be any good to eat now. And Rad Panda continues to be cute. Please don't change that.