it is yet another week at the Beehaw factory so it is time for yet another of these threads…
It’s going. I’m really tired of working in IT and I want an exit from this career field so bad. I’ve been doing this since 1995 and IT has become the bane of humanity. In the '90s we all had pie in the sky dreams about the ways we were going to make the world better with computers and programming, and it’s just turned into lots of complicated ways to take money from people.
I learn languages very easy so I’m going to go to a local community college and just start taking language classes. I can speak three languages right now, but for the next semester I’m going to go back and take Latin. That will give me a reading boost for Spanish, Italian, and French.
Will I ever do anything with it? Who knows. But I’m so tired of IT that I am almost thinking about going to the airport and working a ramp job.
I can really empathize with this. I only spent a bit under 20 years in IT and I fucked off a couple of years ago, after I realized I’m going to jump off a cliff if I don’t. I unironically think that the Internet has turned out to be a huge mistake and that our plains ape brains just aren’t ready for any of this, and that IT in general is largely making things worse for humanity.
I still really like computer science though, enjoy coding (but only personal projects with questionable utility, more code-as-art than anything goal-oriented), and think that computation as a phenomenon is absolutely fascinating. Went back to university a couple of months ago with the plan to maybe nerd out on things like cellular automata and evolutionary computation, but very quickly noticed that – thanks to some newly acquired autoimmune problems which led to things like me having to get a fairly relevant internal organ yanked out – I can’t concentrate worth shit and eg. studying mathematics just isn’t happening even with ADHD medication (which I’ve been using on and off ever since my diagnosis in the early 00’s).
I’ve been living off savings for the couple of years I’ve been out of IT, but I really have to start thinking about how the hell I’m going to keep on living and I’ve also thought about just doing pretty much any job that wouldn’t require anything except rudimentary cognitive input from me, something like sorting mail or whatever.
I hope you find a new path for yourself. Explore the language idea? Maybe there’s something there
This week is going great actually. I’m on a beeline for graduation this December and so I’ve mostly got my head down currently. Hoping to get admitted into grad school to keep going after this.
Some interesting things about my week: I spent most of yesterday modeling aquifers and aquifer systems. I know most people probably don’t know much about aquifers or how they work but it’s a lot more complicated than being an underground lake.
And anxiety is getting to me about graduation. Mostly because of family. Half of which do not know I’m bisexual and are pretty homophobic, so I’m thinking it won’t be worth it to have my boyfriend in attendance. Which is really rough on me. I know I should just tell them and they can pound sand if they don’t like it, but at the same time I don’t see them often and it puts my bf in an awkward spot. So he’s urging me to just let him stay home so he doesn’t have to be around that. And that’s a lot to process. I’m also inviting my dad who hasn’t talked to me since May when he found out. Who knows if he will show up.
And before anyone worries too much, I’m not like heartbroken about this. Homophobia just confuses me. All I can do is mitigate its effects but I’m always very confused why I even have to deal with it.
On day 8 out of 8 in a row at work. Got 3 days off starting tomorrow and Cities Skyline 2 to dig into.
Let’s see … in the past week, I
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finally moved out of the hotel and into my van at long last after finding the parasitic drain on the starter batteries came in the form of an exploded (and not in a diagram sense) until-then-unknown auxiliary battery, hidden under the floor, that was keeping the whole system at 9V on account of the destroyed cell causing constant balancing by a secondary solenoid
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got a gym membership, as one needs to bathe … it’s weird walking in and hearing what I guess is hypey, “driving” beats to some, but I just turned off trance in the van, so it’s more the Kenny G of dance music
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built a very elaborate bedframe with the help and under advisement of another makerspace member, finished the wall insulation, including new bulkhead; cut and crimped everything to get the house batteries to stop being very expensive paperweights (I’m hoping to test my first device tomorrow after work), and actually organized the cargo/living area for a few blissful hours
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had a couple of pretty depressing conversations with friends; it seems we’re all resigned to the world getting worse as the only realistic direction given the breakdown in voter control of pretty much anything and the economy giving up any pretense of trying to benefit society
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leaned that laundry can be done in an hour at the laundromat instead of being the all-afternoon affair it was at the apartment … load washer, play a large kakuro, transfer to dryer, play another, fold and depart
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realized I’d had so few options for so long, being holed up in my apartment saddled with too much debt to do anything, that I don’t actually know the answer to “if you could do anything right now, what would it be?”
I keep having anxiety attacks whenever I decide to look/apply for jobs. I am so tired and I don’t feel that I even have the right to complain about it because so many people have worse than me. Knowing I have to humiliate myself to recruiters also doesn’t help. I hate this.
