Clarence "Sparr" Risher

A friend in search of a job in a field somewhat related to my career path recently posted that they are looking for a new job. They described themselves as "mid-career" in their field with ~2 years of job experience and ~1 year of education. This irked me, in a lot of ways.

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So, in summary... No one with 1 year of school and 2 years of experience is "mid-career", no matter how good they are at their job.

Unless they are a rabbit.

Today I'm going to talk about how awesome my new job[0] is, and a few slight caveats.

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[0] Linux Systems Administrator 2 at Peer 1. I take phone calls and emails from customers, people who pay us for dedicated computer servers that are installed in our data center and run software for their websites and databases and email and such. I troubleshoot their issues on our network and software problems on their servers.

[1] This is ignoring the fact that actually using that many days would defeat the purpose of them putting me on that schedule, since they wouldn't actually be effectively filling the Saturday slot that needs filling.

[2] It weirds me out that they wouldn't tell me about these things when offering me the position. I was considering competing offers, so I was well into the territory where they wanted me more than I wanted them. All of this information could have been the deciding factor, and they didn't say a word.

[3] You have to be daft or crazy to not contribute to a retirement account with matching funds. Even if you are unreservedly anti-investment and anti-banks, you can put in $10 and get the matching $10, then immediately take out the $20 and take a 40% tax hit and still come out with $12 instead of the $10 you put in.

[4] Cleaning up at/around CoLab? Teaching origami? Working tech or whatever else at a convention? I am sure I can fit SOMETHING that I do into those two days, and save two days of vacation time.

[5] My bike got stolen from the street/martaescalator-side racks at Peachtree center. MARTA refused to release the surveillance video to me without a subpoena, which wasn't worth pursuing. It's nice to never have to worry about that again.

When I started working here, the rule was that you can't access the company's ticket tracking software from Firefox. ( and it only got worse from there )

Christmas working in a tech support call center. Most. Boring. Christmas. Ever. If I am very lucky I might get two calls during my 8-hour shift. We currently have Hall and Oates playing, it's that bad.