April the 6, 2020 Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more
10(posted a wee bit early since I am tired from working outside all day…)
So my ‘off week’ is almost over and it is time to go back to work. Remember ‘going to work’… that was when you left the house and did a job somewhere other than at home…
Locally we are at about 20 cases in my county, and I am expecting this week to be the point at which the proverbial shit hits the fan. A couple of counties over from here they have had 5 COVID related deaths in a service area the includes the hardest hit county per capita in the state.
Having this forum to post to has been a great way to keep my mind off the upcoming shitshow that I am foreseeing.
So, all that got me to thinking.
/giphy uh-oh!
I realized early on that there was absolutely no reason to keep going to a job you hate, to work 40 hours a week doing something you don’t enjoy.
Over the years I have been employed in:
Food service (16-33) multiple roles from hourly employee, to store manager to franchisee…
Construction (33-38)
Firefighter (33-40)
EMS (33-42)
Nursing (40-now)
How many different ‘careers’ have you had?
Are you working in your field (insert farmer joke here…)?
Are you working currently or has your job been put on hold by SARS-CoV-2?
- 22 comments, 69 replies
- Comment
PRANKS! CRANKS! SHANKS! wait…
@mediocrebot
Nope, not since I made parole…
@chienfou @mediocrebot
/giphy Michael Shanks as Daniel Jackson
@llangley @mediocrebot
We called him “Squeaky” in da joint…
Hey @tinamarie1974 Check out the header background… Ok it’s not the Blues, but still…!
@chienfou I noticed that background immediately and it made me smile, even though it looks like a Bruin in the background
(sorry @mfladd).
And in answer to today’s question, after college I have worked in various aspects of ONE industry for my entire career. Over the 25 or so years I have focused on various aspects of the industry to make me more well rounded (read valuable), but yeah nothing flashy or terribly interesting.
@tinamarie1974 but then, there is that gig you did as Wonder Woman… so…
(PS if you are using Firefox as your browser, you can right-click on the header then select view background image and you can see the full pic)
@tinamarie1974 here it is if you can’t see it:
@chienfou @tinamarie1974
Yes, that was a memorable stint
@chienfou @ybmuG yes, but like Clark Kent, the super hero gig is top secret and only ones inner circle knows our true identities
I seem to recall a really good goat who was quite entertaining during that stent.
Current goat is doing a great job as well!
@chienfou is definitely the problem here.
@tinamarie1974 @ybmuG
Ooops…
/giphy my lips are sealed
I retired from a very fulfilling civilian job on the staff of an admiral. I loved the job, and my area was the entire SE corner of the country. Then Katrina hit, and six months later I had to travel to New Orleans for training. The devastation haunted me. I did some rethinking, and retired a few months later. Carpe that diem!
/image carpe diem
@OldCatLady
I grew up there. Thinking about it still makes me tear up.
@OldCatLady Pretty cool gig! I bet that was interesting.
My son is a civilian contractor for the USAF living in Boston currently and really likes his job.
@OldCatLady
Had him standing at attention, eh?
Food service
Retail
Healthcare
I’ve always said everyone should have to spend time in either retail or food service, preferably both. Would give them a little appreciation for others (in theory)
@ybmuG
/giphy Amen brother
I’ve either worked in retail or at a horse barn. The horses was always a secondary job to my retail.
My current job was supposed to be temporary while I figured out my life. That never happened. I never really call it my career, but it has become mine.
Still working because we are considered an essential retailer. Anyone that has pre existing health conditions, older, pregnant, etc got anywhere from a 2-4 week paid vacation. We are so understaffed that we are hiring temporary associates instead of doing the right thing and going to curb side pickup. I’m glad I am still getting paid, but it sucks.
@RiotDemon I worry about your safety.
@Barney thank you. My anxiety has been getting pretty high. Some people are following the rules and staying away. Other people I want to whack with a stick.
We have a forum at work for my department and one thread stuck out to me:
@RiotDemon People are idiots. Unfortunately that may get someone seriously hurt.
Food service (teen/college)
Oil rig galley hand
Went into IT and never stopped
Programmer in financial services
Web Infrastructure
InfoSec (Blue Team) and Crypto
I… was once a planet. Got cut.
@PlutoIsAPlanet Brutal, dude.
@PlutoIsAPlanet You’ll always be a planet to me. Or a cartoon dog…
Have a math/statistics degree. Because of that (my philosophy is pretty much everyone needs statistics but no one wants to do it themselves) I’ve worked in credit cards, educational public policy, satellite engineering (reliability calculations), taught stats to engineers in manufacturing plants, insurance, …
I’m naturally curious, so at each one it learn all I can about the industry. It has been very enjoyable.
Can run analysis from home just as easy as at the office, so even though nonessential, lucky enough to have an employer still paying me. I am so sorry for the millions who are laid off.
@mollama So right about people not wanting to do it (and that would include some PhD students I worked with who’d try to manipulate me to do most of that work for them. Nope. And despite that computer programs make it far easier, many people still have giant mental blocks when it comes to
magicstats.I have taught beginning stats in the college I teach in (do not have a degree in stats) to college students. They come straight from college algebra. They then walk into my classroom and proceed put up that metal block and also forget any basic algebra they ever knew. Took me the better part of a term to figure out how to get through to people who believed they were allergic to stats but still needed to pass my required class. Once I had that figured out I’d only have a handful fail out of 60 or so students.
They they’d get me again in applied research project. Horror or all horrors - they’d actually have to USE the statistics they did their best to forget (I also made them learn SPSS in the stats class) and SPSS. I told them research is just an opportunity to ask nosy questions that you can’t ask in polite company to strangers or even non-strangers and research methods and stats gives them a way to find the answer where others are more likely to believe their answers. When some would get results from their (in this case surveys of 100 people on campus) they were thrilled and some started to see the utility of having at least basic skills doing this.
@Kidsandliz exactly!! Nice job making it understandable for those who refuse to believe they’ll ever understand.
I often say everyone has math phobia. The engineers were statsphobic, I am generally economicsphobic (husbands MBA he asked me to help him understand some balance sheet where everything you bought or sold had to have + and -, why?), … but it is all able to be overcome.
@Kidsandliz @mollama I’m one of the mental block people, to some extent. I took an analytical chemistry course where I had to learn some basic stats & error propagation…it was so frustrating and dull to me! I could do it, but I knew I didn’t want to be an analytical chemist (I had my heart set on p-chem at that point) so I phoned it in.
To this day I still like to think about error propagation, though! If you’re calculating something, and do a fair job of trying to account for the uncertainties in the instruments, you can figure out a range for the likely values of your results.
On a barely related note: It boggles my mind that weather predictions are so vague… “30% chance of rain in the afternoon”. I’d rather have them say, “on average, from 1pm to 2pm in zip code xyz, we expect between 0.25 and 0.5 inches of rain to fall. Different forecasts have different levels of certainty. Values for this particular prediction are of high quality; as such, this and similar predictions will be right 75% of the time.”
@UncleVinny on the note of weather, it is, unfortunately for weather forecasters, very difficult, nature is way complex. Ruins your picnic, but then so will random ants.
I was once working as a military contractor and we had to model something not weather related. We were telling the military PM we thought best our model could do was 60% (40% of the time the subject of model would not “act as expected”) so did he want us to try to create. He said 60% sounded great compared to weather models he got for mission planning, so go for it.
@mollama Thanks. Having taken my zillion stats classes where the faculty would teach the math first and mostly figure you’d then understand what is going on and why, I knew that approach was a recipe for disaster with those whose brains turn off the second they entered my door.
I referred my PhD students and those in my research methods class to the explanation of particular stats that SPSS or SAS have out there in their manuals since those would skip the math and explain what the heck is going on in words. They found that helpful. OMG though I hate doing stats in excel.
I had to teach about 7 chapters of stats to MBA students in their two semester intro to business class and they had to use excel per university expectations. Yeah I understand why as they all have excel on their computers at work, but still it is an awkward program to use compared to drop down menus.
I’d first explain in words what a particular stat tells you, how to know this is what you will use, what kinds of questions it will answer, blah blah blah. Ran some games called pick the right test or if you are using this test make up a question you would be trying to answer, etc. (which helped them review which one did what and realistically who is going to do this crap by hand outside of a stats class?).
Once they got that then I moved on to the “math tricks” (actual words I used). Since so many refused to understand formulas I made a grid on the board and walked them through each step via the grid (with the formula on top, then on top of each column the part of the formula we were solving). Of course those who didn’t need that were bored as they knew how to manipulate equations (I never used the word equation or formula if I could help it, instead I’d say things like, 'let me teach you the tricks to deal with this" and point to the formula, and usually 3/4 to 4/5ths of the class needed that).
Then all homework I gave and all exam questions and told them if the math gets ugly you have made a mistake. Try again. (Takes a while to create 4 different tiny data bases the behave the same for formulas; in each class of 30-36 students there were maybe 5 or 6 who had, on exams, the right answer to the wrong data base since the Q’s were identical, data bases differed). They liked that and told me that makes the math simple, especially since they didn’t have to use all those formula and instead they could use the steps I gave them to do the tricks to get the right answer (exact words on a course evaluation comment) LOL.
Also realizing that many have a lightbulb moment that often happens after the exam I divided the exam time into 1 hour for the exam and 1 hour to retake the last exam, the better of the two scores is the one I counted. A lot did that and then did a whole lot better.
Hats off though to those who teach math and stats to all those students who are determined to hate every minute in your, generally, required class and find that by entering the door a wall is erected in their brains. I found it took a lot of work to get them to “get it”. I was so relieved when I didn’t have to teach that anymore (they had finally hired a real stats prof) as teaching that class was incredibly time consuming (at least for me). How you get anything else done is beyond me.
I must be the most boring guy in the forums. Three “careers”. I worked:
Side note: The cattle ranch experience served me very well in dealing with the endless bullshit of the Navy and Corporate America.
@TrophyHusband ranching and Navy doesn’t sound boring.
I worked retail. That’s boring.
@RiotDemon @TrophyHusband
22 years of the same retail job, no promotions, no nothing…THAT is boring…
went from HS straight to the Retail Hellscape.
In my teens I worked as:
rover in Buick-Opal service department
receptionist for an electrologist
credit department for department store
Young adult (post college)
Escrow department for mortgage company
Internal management information/consulting systems for large financial company
Stay at home Mom til youngest was in middle school
Owner of indoor environmental services company
Owner of asthma/allergy control products company
Owner of business development consulting company
Currrently - still doing some consulting work and a freelance writer
edited to add - I studied computer programming in community college and never once in my professional career did I use my COBOL, FORTRAN or RPG1 coding skills, but boy oh boy did I use my logic skills, flowcharting and analysis skills and ability to see even manual processes as systems to build some pretty great companies.
High school: library, baby sitting, yard work, retail sales
College: food service, library, hospital clerk, book keeper, camp counselor, carillonneur, retail sales
Adult: outdoor adventure in several countries, tall ships and tug boats, adjudicated youth, residential school camp for 5th graders, school year science enrichment program at a electronic beam accelerator facility for 6th graders (one week programs), summer science enrichment program for students who were from poorer areas in Appalachia and chosen by their high schools, foster parent, student life at colleges (head resident, director of outdoor recreation programs), college/university teaching, plant vendor employee at a big box store, book keeper, carillonneur, NGO founder and director and probably a few things I can’t think of right now.
@Kidsandliz and now Covid 19 survivor. Impressive.
@therealjrn What the fuck does that comment have to do with my post here about jobs? Stop with the nastiness. It is unbecoming and doesn’t speak well of your character. As I said in the post on a different thread I don’t know that I have had it. All I know is what the PCP said; that some symptoms I reported at the time they didn’t know were actually symptoms of that but they know that they are now. Lots of people will have survived this as 80% who have symptoms do. Even more will survive this as there are some who don’t have symptoms who are positive. I’d guess there are a number of folks on here who have had it and either didn’t know or had mild cases, were sick before there was testing or missed the testing window. Eventually most of us will be survivors of this.
Also I am now reading (don’t know how firmly this is based in studies as it is just epidemiologist speculating based on other evidence) that this may have been around for much longer than the first known case (and around in more countries than china) since initially they didn’t even know what to test for; that earlier cases the deaths would have been attributed to something else (pneumonia, etc.) and that. The teaching hospital here has told several people I know that they are thinking anyone locally who had symptoms that match this back in Nov and Dec could well have had it.
Projections I have read on a reputable site are that around 50-80% of the population will eventually test positive (if they all could have been tested) before this is over. In a couple of countries where they have tested most of the population with or without symptoms, around 50ish% tested positive if I recall correctly. I know around here around 25-30% are testing positive of the ones who pass the screening to even be tested (aka the ones really sick). That will miss all the ones who fail the screening but still have it or who are asymptomatic.
As no one has immunity until they have had it, there will be much of the population that gets this whether or not they get sick. Until there is a vaccination or herd immunity people from enough people getting this (either symptomatic or not) people will keep getting sick from this. Lots of people.
@Kidsandliz
Wow. I wasn’t being nasty, I just thought it an interesting addition to your story.
Sorry you have such a problem with me. I’m not sure why, but take care and I hope you feel better.
@therealjrn Thank you. It came across as sarcastic and a put down as in geez now you are claiming yet something else. I think maybe your writing style just comes across that way more often than you think as I have noticed some other folks, at times, interpret what you say as a dig. Lack of body language/non-verbals in forums certainly doesn’t help the situation as those things transmit a huge percentage of meaning in what people say. Emoji’s can only fix that up to a point. I apologize for misinterpreting what you said.
Frankly I hope what I had was covid-19 as then I won’t have to worry about it anymore. I’d be safe. I could get a grocery job without worrying about getting sick (oncologist told me not to work any job with a lot of public exposure during this). I could go shopping for some of the elderly and frail people in this building besides at times when I go for myself. Heck I could even visit my mom safely! That would be a real blessing.
@Kidsandliz
I don’t know what to say to this.
It’s like you’re keeping a notebook for your resentments. Tracking what “other people” are saying to me is a little obsessive…how can I possibly respond to such a nebulous accusation?
Whatever, be well, ease up a bit.
Not everything that is not gushing praise is an “attack” on you
@therealjrn I am not tracking anyone. I just notice it on occasion on threads I read (and I don’t real all threads or even all parts of a thread) and on occasion when there is a back and forth about whatever it was.
@Kidsandliz @therealjrn I’m a newbie so maybe not qualified to weigh in on this - but it does seem like you often think people are putting you down, K&L, when maybe they’re just commenting in typical Meh-style pseudo snarkiness - maybe??? I for one am finding it very interesting and impressive hearing about your life - way more exciting than mine, I’m sorry to say! Anyhow I hope you don’t mind me adding my unsolicited opinion…
@Kyeh there is a lot of what I would call humorous snakiness on these threads where folks make their humor obvious. There are a few people on here who, on some occasions (I don’t read all the threads nor even all the comments on threads I have started to read), mix humor with mean. At least two of those people have had nasty to others comments removed by moderators. I have had, on occasion, comments made to me removed by moderators on more than one thread. When someone makes a snarky (or on occasion worse than that) comment off topic to the conversation, and on occasion aimed at an individual who isn’t even in the conversation, to me that is trolling and I don’t see how it is humorous snarky.
@Kyeh Got cut off by the edit time limit. There are also long running jokes on here about certain people’s fondness for an item, topic, etc. and so when a thread can be related back to that fondness something humorous can be posted that may seem off topic to someone who doesn’t yet know. Or can seem snarky without that context.
Then there is, of course, bantering back and forth that goes off the rails and into another universe clearly off topic from where it started, but usually humorous none the less to all parties involved. It is when the snark it isn’t funny to the person/people it is aimed at that, in my opinion, it starts being mean and needs to stop.
And another issue with just using written language to communicate is how much meaning can be lost without the non-verbals present in face to face communication. Emojis help with that but then there is a very small subset of people who make purposely mean comments (f2f or online) and follow them with ‘just kidding’ or the emoji equivalent.
And there is a long running history of a couple of folks making, on occasion, uncalled for comments, over different threads, to either a small subset of people or in general to just about anyone. Some of those people on the receiving end of that feel blindsided out of the blue. I don’t call that humorous snarky either.
You are free to disagree with me.
@Kidsandliz @Kyeh
In the south that is pronounced… “Bless her heart…”
/giphy big grin
@chienfou this was priceless…about 8 minutes in but watch it all
/youtube colbert Elizabeth Warren Bless Your Heart
@chienfou @llangley OMG that is incredibly funny!!!
@chienfou @llangley I LOVE love love that!
And now I’m hungry!! (I’ve had a crush on Colbert for ages, too.
)
@Kidsandliz Thanks for providing more perspective.
@chienfou @Kyeh Took me a while to “get” the bless her heart comment when I first moved to the south.
@chienfou @Kidsandliz @Kyeh You probably hear it a lot huh.
@chienfou @Kidsandliz @therealjrn Or maybe you say it a lot?
Why bless your heart @therealjrn. Nope actually it doesn’t seem to be used in this town. Or only maybe it is just people who hang out with the Junior League or something that use it. People I know here don’t. I heard people say it to each other on occasion when I lived in southern VA though.
@therealjrn BTW I don’t find put down comments funny even if they are followed by a wink. In my opinion there is no need to do that even if you are indicating that you are kidding. I’d appreciate it if you’d choose not to do that to me.
@Kyeh It’s best to remember that Kidsandliz has a stick up her… most of the time. Paranoia becomes her. It’s her best attribute. In fact, it’s the only one I can think of. So don’t cross her, she will jump on you like a toad on a June bug.
She seems to think that she rules this forum.
She doesn’t.
@Barney fuck that. WTF was the purpose of this post other than bullying?
I think you owe an apology but I may still be drinking/meh-dicating
@llangley Does it ever occur to you that SHE is a bully? She is you know. Payback is a bitch, isn’t it, and I’m stone cold sober. Plus, I tell the truth and I don’t have to say it over and over and over and over and over again to try to brainwash you into becoming a true believer.
@Barney NOPE. And if it did I probably wouldn’t mention it. Especially if I wasn’t involved in the discussion. Which was kinda my point.
@llangley Ahh… A pointless point. Very good.
@Barney
Before acquiring a college education, I had multiple jobs in retail, and was fired from all of them (you’d think I’d have learned that a lack of people skills was a problem).
I loathed retail, in any case. I went to college, got a degree, and worked for various Aerospace companies in Southern California (none of which I will name).
I spent most of those years writing code, and some of them doing other things. I liked it, but was smart enough to retire at a fairly young age (but a LONG time ago).
Now I’m retired, and have been for a very long time.
@Shrdlu
/giphy get off my lawn
Hmm
In the teens I did some babysitting, local telemarketing (trying to get people to want insurance quotes, hated it, but needed the money) and worked retail.
Joined the military.
Did the whole mom thing.
Lunch lady at a middle school (I baked fresh bread every damn day).
Did some weird online thing (can’t remember what it was called - people texted questions and we answered them)
Did some cleaning for an after school center (hated it)
Hotel manager (owner was a micromanager with adhd and very underhanded, told him to shove it after 6 months)
Got on with the city at the landfill part time, weighing trucks and charging people.
Still at the city as an administrative assistant for a multitude of utilities and out fleet of vehicles and equipment (It can be boring and slow, but that’s what the internet is for. It pays well and most the coworkers friendly)
Working every other week right now so if people get sick it won’t take out the entire staff. The building I’m in has all of our utility workers (gas, water, street, electric, etc.) so we need people to stay healthy to keep the city running.
Grocer, concrete worker, skidder operator, active duty military.
Hang in there, folks! Count your blessings, and blame the goat for everything else.
@PlutoIsAPlanet …gee, thanks… I think?
Started out knocking over banks, moved “up” (lol) to lifting wallets in high-roller rooms in Atlantic City. Had a nephew in weapons-grade pharma research who got me a cold-call sales pozzish that paid the bills a few years while I ramped up to go pro in air hockey. Did that for eight seasons in Da Phieu, never got beyond regionals but made some hot connections in the industrial polymer/plasmid/bubble tea black market that got me in on some deals that shook the tapioca market to its foundations, down to rubble. I popped clear of that whole scene smelling like roses, sank the earnings into a tranche of Thracian commercial real estate, flipped the bonus into a small-partner role in a midnight-only eel eatery in an impossible-to-find crevice of Khartoum. Business is banging, and since we’re only open one hour per day the labor costs are a trice. I’m on the veranda tonight, sipping a Three-Thumps Thelma, the house cocktail, reminiscing. Thanks for the opportunity to remember it all, @chienfou.
@UncleVinny…LOVE it!
@UncleVinny
@f00l @UncleVinny ahhh… Bogey… the King of Smartassery!
@UncleVinny Hmm you don’t seem to list a career in writing humor… might want to try to get one of those gigs next as you’d be good at it (grin).
@UncleVinny Wonderful career. Did you leave out anything, like a missing decade or two? Inquiring minds need more entertainment.
@UncleVinny Vinny you goofball
@moonhat now I need to do a Drinking Terrible with Meh episode about the Three Thumps Thelma. Hm…
I’ve only had one real job (for more than 15 years now). I am basically an odd-jobsman in IT, just kind of do any work that presents itself that someone else doesn’t pick up. Taught myself enough programming to write a few internal tools for this company and automate some stuff. Oh, and to do data entry. Lots of moving data between things.
Now I’m a “business analyst” because I picked up enough accounting to understand and help with some of the financial processes and reports, and do a fair bit of the administration of business software: ERP, timesheets, SharePoint, project reporting…
I find my work mostly boring and frustrating, a waste of life. I don’t see a way to escape without doing irresponsible damage to the company, though. Other than that, I like the people, the people like me (or at least, appreciate the work I do). I have an unusual degree of autonomy, and I’m paid… ok. If I didn’t badly want to do other things and find business software so frustrating, this would be great.
This is not my complete job experience, but it is the most significant.
I started working at a software company in May of 2000 in Tech Support. This company was owned by one person lock, stock, and barrel.
I started in tech support and ended up in development (programming)
He created a branch of the company apparently with the idea of selling it off. It’s clients were different than the main clients of the parent company. I became a part of that branch and we did indeed get sold off.
We were bought by a private equity firm. This private equity firm treated us well and we were able to basically do whatever we wanted because we were very profitable. One of the things we had was company stocked beer and liquor.
The private equity firm was always planning on keeping us until they could sell us for a huge profit. They were planning on five years. It took two.
We were sold of to a large international company. (There goes the beer and liquor at this point). I shouldn’t complain. I really shouldn’t and I really don’t have a lot of reason to. That’s where I am going to leave that.
Fast forward a couple of years. The owner of the original company I started with sold it to the same corporation that owns us. Now the parent company is a sister.
Anyway, our parent company moved them into our building and now we’re (start slight sarcasm - but only slight because it’s really not bad) one big happy family.
TLDR: I’ve basically been at the same place for twenty years.
Started at 14 years old scooping ice cream at Baskin Robbins. Ice cream eventually smells bad if you’re around it long enough.
Worked at a sandwich shop through high school.
Went away to college for comp sci, didn’t graduate from there. Hated it.
Waited tables, managed a Taco Bell, went into retail management, worked at a bank for a short stint, did some temping, hated life. Too many shit jobs to bore you with.
Got a job at a growing e-commerce company. Promoted there, helped start the fraud department, was sent to Florida to train the people that took our jobs when they closed our department up here. That company was eventually sold for billions and the founder is rolling in it. He now owns Fanatics and is part owner of the Sixers and NJ Devils.
Took advantage of the layoff and went back to school. Finally got that degree 15 years later - turned out to be in Radiologic Sciences instead of the original computer science I thought I’d be doing with my life.
Been a Nuclear Medicine Technologist for 13 years and I’m not tired of it yet.
@cinoclav I scooped ice cream in the university cafeteria for the dorm. I also ended up getting cuts on my hands from the scoop (tubs of it not soft serve). As I loved ice cream at first I was thrilled as I could then scoop myself a big serving prior when the workers ate prior to the cafeteria opening for dinner. However that thrill eventually wore off and I got tired of it. Took me several years to really go back to ice cream after that and it was (and is) one of my two favorite junk foods.
Did retail and restaurants during high school and college, also some production (chocolate, software, salsa, and egg pkg) , combine driving, flagging. After college did office work for a handful of years then started my current law enforcement support job in 2000, been there ever since. That’s about it.
@moonhat what’s flagging?
@RiotDemon for traffic
/image traffic flagger
@moonhat oh ok. Thanks!
Clerical. Every job I had was clerical. Billing. Mind numbing.
Now. I wear many hats, but my favorite is a tiara.
@lisaviolet for you a
/image spectacular tiara
@Kidsandliz Yes, like that. That’s the one I wear when I’m folding laundry.
I am, in fact, the laundry queen. Long may I reign.
@lisaviolet
/giphy bowing to the queen
I’m a reformed social worker. Yes, reformed, since It took me quite a few years to discover that I can’t save the world, even though I tried so damn hard. But I also learned that no one, and I mean no one can pull the wool over my eyes. I can see right through a scammer, who tries to cheat their way through life by being too lazy to work. These people always have an excuse or two or three as to why they can’t work. I can’t believe how people can be fooled so easily, but I guess they want to believe that there is good in people. I think there is, too, but an individual has to show me before I believe it.
Anyway, after leaving my social work job, I became a financial planner, made a few bucks, and then retired.
First job after turning 18 was in a factory. Married, had three kids, stay at home mom until baby started kindergarten. Worked as a floral designer, loved it but low pay. Studied basic computer programming which led to my dream job, not because it was in the job description but because I was ambitious enough to go back to school in my thirties, according to my publisher. Whatever the reason, I was on the advertising staff of the local newspaper for 24 years. Looked forward to Mondays, made a lot of friends, connections and money. Then daily newspapers became mostly obsolete and I came home.
@dyounghbic
FWIW i still get the paper launched into my yard everyday. Generally it’s in the driveway, but sometimes it’ll skip off into the bushes, which leads to an interesting game of hide and seek.