Last time I said this everything I've ever worked towards turned out to be a lie, and a waste of time and that got me thinking. Hear me out on this one.
Way back when I was in primary school, probably somewhere around grade 5 or 6, I remember someone saying that you need to work hard at your schoolwork or you won't be able to get a good job. So I worked hard, probably to the point that I missed out on lots of things children should do. Basically I worked my ass off, and at the time I felt I was more mature than my peers, or at least had to grow up faster because I had to be ready for the big bad real world sooner if I was to succeed.
But
Knowing what I know now, this was a complete waste of time. Now I find myself regretting things I could have, and should have done, when I had the time and ability, and that working so hard at school doesn't ultimately lead to success.
Case in point: No one has ever asked to see my BSc(CS) degree, basically I could have lied on my resume all this time, and STILL been in the same job. Granted I did learn lots of skills at university that I use each and every day at work, (or used to) but these skills I could have learned myself (either from books read on my own time because I used to be self motivated or from the school of hard knocks, where I used to learn lots).
Another case in point: somehow I seem to have a large ability for remembering random unrelated general knowledge stuff (ok, only IT type general knowledge), and this only comes from being part of the whole IT scene over the last 10 years or more, but there's people at work, in more important positions than me, with substantially less knowledge about their own area than I have. About 2 weeks ago, there was an amusing conversation about the difference between Mozilla (Seamonkey) and Firefox. Basically the decision these 2 cloth ears arrived at, was Mozilla is the cross platform version, and Firefox is for windows. Even though these guys are dealing with Linux and Solaris boxes each and every day, they've never noticed that the browser present is Firefox (at least on RHEL it is).
This lead me to think, why bother, since no one recognises my ability in areas that I have ability, and I get shafted left and right onto the floor sweeping mindless tasks, while some asshat gets to fuck up something fun and gets rewarded for it. Ok maybe my metaphors are getting mixed again, in this case the asshat isn't one of the former pair of cloth ears.
Ok, right now I don't have the motivation to get out of this hole I've managed to somehow dig myself into, but I really need to. I'm now thinking the job thing is just a diversion to keep me occupied so I miss out on more stuff.
I went for another therapy session. New therapist. I'll go back for more. We started off with my work issues, and then I'll get onto my other problems.
And a rent inspection, perfect timing too. Playstation 3 came out but I had to clean my house for the WHOLE WEEKEND and hardly touched it. Based on previous inspections the things I focused on cleaning (ie INSIDE THE HOUSE) will be overlooked for some petty excuse to make it look like they actually manage the property, which they don't. It took 2 winters to get a rotten gutter section replaced, 2 WHOLE winters, then a further summer to get the downpipe fixed. Fortunately for them I'm a low maintenance tenant, I don't ask for things to get fixed (unless they need to like the gutter and down pipe) or improved, so they don't need to go out of their way. But sadly I still get shafted for it. Lovely case in point: They upped my rent without the 60 day notice period. That is illegal and they should have jumped all over that one to fix it and appologise before I took it further, but they didn't. To make sure I knew where I stood, I calculated my rent back to the day I moved in, taking everything into account (keeping receipts makes it easy), and by doing this I learned a few oddities about their useless software, especially around rent increases. Due to their software being crap, I had to calculate rent on a daily basis, otherwise it wouldn't work out exact. A side effect of this is I now know exactly how much rent I've paid to live where at my current place. HOLY FUCK it's lots. It makes me want to give up at everything and live in a cardboard box in the mall.
Playstation 3 launched last friday, I'm yet to have a decent play with it, but I did pick up 2 blu-ray movies and I've watched one. Quality is nice, but that's what I expected. It hooks up to the psp for various things but I'm yet to have a solid go at stuff. I think I need to take a month off just to hack and play games. At least my house is clean, except now I can't find anything. I was third in the queue outside the city store of game traders who opened at 6.30am for the launch. Later in the day we learned my vans capacity was 50 PS3's, and I have pictures to prove it. Some days owning a van is so useful and cool.
Right now I'm having second thoughts on my decision of work. I wasn't successful in my application for the network engineer position, despite all the positive build up, and I'm contemplating calling up the place that gave me the best offer and asking if they'd reoffer it to me, because I'd accept on the spot.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I feel like my life is over. Day after day is pain.
The ratio of people to cake is too big.