Okay, here's a job you don't want

Photo found (and available a little larger) at The New Shelton Wet/Dry.

my name is lisa

Watch with caution. This short film may make you cry.

"The real world is really tough"

This year's "whiny college graduate unprepared for the job market" letter to the editor is in the Buffalo News.

Upon graduating, I was helplessly launched headfirst into the “real world,” equipped with a degree in history and $32,000 in student loans. Before ricocheting back home, I would learn two important lessons: 1) There are no well-paying — let alone paying — jobs for history majors. 2) The real world is really tough.

(That should be "there are no paying — let alone well-paying — jobs for history majors". That's how the "this, let alone that" structure is used: The first example is general, the second more specific. Otherwise it makes no sense. But then you're a history major, not a language major, aren't you?)

Desperate times called for desperate measures, and I had no intention of living in a society that was as unfair as this one. To seek a haven devoid of the ruthless 9-to-5 ebb and flow of contemporary America, I moved to Alaska.

As a liberal arts major, I dreamed of making a profound difference in people’s lives.

Doing what, exactly? What kind of life would you judge your history degree has prepared you for? What did you have in mind?

Instead, for a year, I lived in Coldfoot, a town north of the Arctic Circle that resembles a Soviet Gulag camp. My job as a tour guide for visitors...

This "Soviet Gulag camp" of a town has a tourism industry? Why, yes it does. It isn't the bustling metropolis Cicely is, but it has its charms -- apparently lost on Ken, here.

I've read this letter five or six times now, and it keeps getting funnier every time I read it. I just wish the paper had done a sidebar interview with his parents.

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See also:

• Life Lessons (Shawna Gale, the grad from Yale)
• Does this mean I come with course credit?

Why people hate tech support

There is nothing unusual about this tech support call. Thousands just like it happen every day.



From The Consumerist.

Time is broken

Sun Dial, Kew Gardens
Originally uploaded by bluedwarf.

Did everyone remember that the new, improved Daylight Saving Time begins today?

I did remember, and spent the last half-hour or so before bed last night changing clocks. We have cheap battery-powered wall clocks in almost every room: Those would have to be changed manually. So would the clock on our oven, and the one in the breadmaker (we have a microwave, but it doesn't have a clock), and alarm clocks in my son's room and on my wife's side of the bed. Oh, and the clocks in our answering machine and thermostat, and my analog pocket watch.

I missed the VCRs. I confidently expect I'll have to change them four times this year: Once when DST now is, and once when DST would have been. I'll see if I can disable the auto-settings for that, while I'm in there.

My alarm clock, my daughter's alarm clock, and the wall clock at my wife's desk all get atomic timekeeping signals: They all updated themselves. So did the computers and cel phones. (Exception: My iPaq, an older model, didn't update. I wonder if there's a patch for that version of Windows Mobile. Why, yes, there is.)

Outlook, of course (and those of you who use it should be aware of this), jumped the gun and went wonky a couple of weeks ago. My all-day events spanned two days, because they begin and end at 1am instead of midnight, and my timed events drifted forward an hour. Downloaded Microsoft's Time Zone Data Update Tool: Worked just fine. Although I am amused that Windows itself can update automatically and Outlook can't.

Note to myself: When I replace clocks of any kind, replace them with clocks that receive atomic timekeeping signals. I shouldn't have to do this.

Ah, well, it could be worse. I could live in Indiana.