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It's been years since I really talked to any of you all, with a couple of exceptions.

So (y'know, without going to uncomfortable amounts of personal detail I guess), what does everyone do? How's it going? Do you like it?

Right now I make and sell jewellery. In non-Covid times I usually work in retail stores or call centers. I need to work on not quitting once the job loses its novelty before I get super old and people don't want to hire me anymore.

I've been considering going back to school (again again), this time with supports for the, ahh, issue I was recently diagnosed with (it's ADHD. I was going to say learning disability but it's not technically a learning disability I guess, so I dunno what to call it. I brain a bit different from some, I guess). Maybe I'll actually finish with proper awareness and coping mechanisms.

So what's up, fellow humans? Talk to me.

Hi, Sades!

I’m still slogging along part-time at our local College Customer Service Centre aka the switchboard. Been here four years now while fellow support staff gradually bled away during C-19 and were not, for the most part, replaced. We’re a small team in a remote building on one of the campuses and have found ourselves seriously overworked since the summer. We all still have our home-working laptops on standby in case the lurgy returns (hem-hem).

Son #1 has returned to College to study photography and, today, son #2 is off to University. I’m skint most of the time and my husband continues to be a complete Richard. Other than that? I’m ticking along day to day. I have my Kindle and WoW and... not much else, really.

Welcome to the ranks of the ADHD/INTP normal people. We do indeed think differently to the rest of the world and, if the rest of the world can’t cope with us, squish to them!

Clogs wrote: ↑Sat Sep 18, 2021 9:12 am Been here four years now

Okay, how do you do that? Do you not get bored?

See, I prefer working certain types of retail jobs even though the pay is usually sh*t, because there's a higher rate of novelty involved. I might be doing the same thing every day but at least there's usually a little bit of variety. I much prefer the pay from call centers (is fairly decent here) but the job is basically the exact same thing, every day and past the initial novelty stage, it f**king crushes me, lol.

Welcome to the ranks of the ADHD/INTP normal people. We do indeed think differently to the rest of the world

Well, I've always known I was a bit different. ADHD seems very common. Or perhaps it's just instances of autism-adjacent disorders that are common in general. There's a large pool of people that seem to think in very similar ways to the peculiar way I do, which is comforting.

I've been several of them, but last I did the whole Myers–Briggs thing I came up a ISFP, though I don't remember which type.

I'm now manager of Logistics for a small plastics company. I would have said no when I was offered the job except for 2 reasons: I've been here long enough that I know the way things work around here and I'd have wound up as a 'temporary' fill-in, and after a brief stint away for health insurance reasons(I needed it and they didn't offer it at that point), the job I wound up initially getting hired back to do was driving me nuts(Why they need paperwork filled out that never gets used is beyond me, and mixing two or three tons of plastic and concentrate by hand is as much fun as it sounds), an office job sounded ideal.

As for the place I went to, if anybody ever gives me Darn Tough socks, I will burn them. They fired me by letter because during the plague apparently people didn't want to pay $65 for a pair of socks. That being said, I gather they let a lot of people go. I'd still rather eat broken glass than go back there.

Do I like what I do? For the most part, yes. I would have loved more training(my Boss' wife and daughter told him he was going to retire, and while I think he figured he'd have at least a year of house hunting and getting his house sold, etc, etc.... he and his wife bought the first house they saw and the first people who looked at his house bought it, so his wind-down/training replacement period went from a year or so to a couple of months), I'm not quite the "Everything has to go through me" type that he was so I've been able to shuffle off some of the other stuff to other people in this department who know how to do it, but I did wind up taking over the ordering of raw plastic materials during the worst Force Majeure the industry's ever seen. And don't get me started on international shipping. At this point I'm willing to start an international incident by building a Gauss Cannon and firing the shipments at other countries. There's less paperwork.

Got fired during Covid, been at the customer service for a year now. Send help, nudes, or a sniper to end my suffering there.

Sades wrote: ↑Sat Sep 18, 2021 7:07 pmOkay, how do you do that? Do you not get bored?

No time to get bored, believe me! We handle 650+ enquiries plus emails plus live webchat a day with just 4 full- and 6 part-time staff. The job requires a HUGE amount of knowledge and tact, especially when we’re fielding fallout as a consequence of curriculum areas sending mass ‘please call us’ texts without extension numbers to the wrong recipients, for example. Oh, and we regularly have to defend ourselves from accusations of lying students...

...but last I did the whole Myers–Briggs thing I came up a ISFP, though I don't remember which type.

You’re the Artist, I believe: introvert sensitive, good at observation, a fast thinker and great at sport as you have fantastic spatial awareness.
I hate labels, actually, but sometimes they’re useful and can get you extra help; I hope you find the support you deserve.

I'm still doing the same; handling complaints for water and sewerage company I work for. It's been an unbearable year and a bit, from that point of view. At one point, we were the only team still doing our full hours, as everything else got massively scaled back. Levels of contact from our customers went through the roof, as everyone suddenly found themselves furloughed or out of work - so a really good time for us to shut off the phones for about 3 months and only concentrate on core activities and emergency work (making sure everyone had water and wastewater was taken away and not much else).

Any goodwill customers had during the pandemic (which has definitely stopped now...) has evaporated and patience has worn very thin. We're still not back to working full strength, and the vast majority of us are still WFH with that unlikely to change anytime soon. So, things are taking us longer to do as we grapple with a load of legacy systems we've never updated/ upgraded which aren't really suited to cloud-based working.

That said, staff have really stepped up and been incredible over the period, with everyone adapting well to WFH and doing waht they can to help people, so it's not all doom and gloom! I'm proud of how quickly we managed to get things up and running when remote working was never much of a thing for us.

The only major downside has been the business taking the down time to review the 200+ different types of contract staff are on to try and get everyone on the same terms and conditions (basically, anyone office based got a good deal, folk doing the nuts and bolts work on shift patterns in the field not so much). Went down like a cold cup of sick and the response to that has been to then ask for voluntary redundancies, as suddenly we're told by our CEO that our finances aren't looking good! It would be very uncharitable to point out that the way our business is now structured and financed was known by our CEO in their previous role as ...finance director. Sigh.

I'm a programmer!

I think I mentioned a couple years ago that the company I worked for had been bought up by our largest competitor? I'd had about five different roles there and no space to advance in any of them at the old company, so it'd been looking like time to move on for a while. Moving to a bigger company could have been the answer to that, but they shuffled me off into the least-exciting of the roles I'd had and siloed me there. You can imagine how well that went over. Many a resume was sent out and many a promising interview was had...and then COVID happened and suddenly no one wanted to do any hiring.

Since then, there's been very few opportunities out there that look even remotely interesting and a lot of unemployed people competing with me for them, so I'm still stuck in a job that I find extremely boring about 1/3 of the time -- an ops programmer only has stuff to do when the salespeople are selling, and that can be really hit or miss. The company moved all of us to work from home last spring, which has helped some. At least there's stuff to do here when there's no work! But overall, it's not very exciting or engaging, and now that the economy is starting to pick up again I'll be looking more aggressively.

For the last couple months I've been seconded to our corporate tech team to work on some of the company's internal software and the difference has been like night and day. There's never any shortage of work there, that's for sure! And I've learned a lot. If they wanted to keep me full time I'd be all for that, but honestly I doubt the budget is there for another full-time developer right now.

As of a couple of months ago, I'm a college professor. I'm teaching a full time load of freshman composition classes. It's... exhausting, but fun.

Public answer; playing an internal auditor type role for the last decade plus. Mainly IT and fraud. There's variety, we manage to stay on speaking terms with the customers. Lot of politics. Somewhat burned out in general.

Not because of the working arrangements, though. Working remotely is far better for this sort of thing: cuts out travel time and pointless polluting rather than bouncing around to different sites, and screen sharing's ideal, but not being surrounded by noise is the key point personally.

Not sure if I'd feel different if younger, I think to an extent that's overblown claims from the usual billionaire commercial property linked wankers like Sunak plus less-than-healthy nostalgia. Today's kids have grown up with the tech and I think are quite capable of jumping right in and getting into routines of checking in with co-workers, etc.

^Agreed. We're definitely looking at WFH as long term thing, with hybrid working and that - like many businesses, we've quickly cottoned onto the potential savings if you don't have buildings you don't need anymore (our head office building is pretty much empty these days). I've not minded WFH when I've done it (apart from how slow some programs are) and in a strange way, it's easier to interact with people across our organisation over Teams and that.

I work for the NHS in an office role, since Covid hit I work from home permanently, and I kind of like it... Its just a job though. For fun I supplement it with other things; for the last 10 years I’ve been co-presenting a food & drink programme on local radio. I do radio news for the blind & partially sighted, transcriptions of people’s life stories for those in palliative care and volunteer at a computer history museum.

The NHS is the paid role; the others are voluntary but I really like doing them; especially the radio role because I get to meet all these people who are passionate about their businesses and really put their heart and soul into them.

I'm disabled and can't work been that way my whole life and it's not going to change. Probably get worse as I get older. Yay.

NHS in systems administration. Sounds more glamorous than what it is and is way more stressful than what it sounds

Clay wrote: ↑Fri Oct 01, 2021 7:51 pm As of a couple of months ago, I'm a college SEO professor. I'm teaching a full time load of freshman how to use the best SEO tools like the ones from Rush Analytics. It's... exhausting, but fun.

I also used to be a teacher. True that is is very exhausting. For some reason people think that you just listen to students and give them marks, that's all. But in fact only a few persons can teach out of 100, my opinion.

Now that's a stealthy bot!

Sades wrote: ↑Sat Sep 18, 2021 5:37 am It's been years since I really talked to any of you all, with a couple of exceptions.

So (y'know, without going to uncomfortable amounts of personal detail I guess), what does everyone do? How's it going? Do you like it?

Right now I make and sell jewellery. In non-Covid times I usually work in retail stores or call centers. I need to work on not quitting once the job loses its novelty before I get super old and people don't want to hire me anymore.

I've been considering going back to school (again again), this time with supports for the, ahh, issue I was recently diagnosed with (it's ADHD. I was going to say learning disability but it's not technically a learning disability I guess, so I dunno what to call it. I brain a bit different from some, I guess). Maybe I'll actually finish with proper awareness and coping mechanisms.

So what's up, fellow humans? Talk to me.

Right now, I work at a well-known grocery supermarket store chain here on America's East Coast as a bottom-level employee. I change trash bags, clean up spills and retrieve used shopping carts. It's not my dream job, but it's a job. (At least I don't always have to deal with fussy, rowdy and rude customers like the Customer Service Desk Personnel and/or Cashiers do! - Scott Seiss!) My Sister has a computer job working at home - I'm trying to get to her level as soon as possible.

I have never had much luck with long-term employment or getting into a job I actually liked. In June of this year, I entered my dream career in IT. I've started as a WFH Level 1 support tech for a Managed Services Provider with a lot of potential to move up in future into any specialty. In the same month, I got into a Diploma of Web Development that I am studying online part-time. Two amazing opportunities that have changed the course of my life, and they happened both at the same time.