I agree with you, however as always, context is key.

I’m speaking from the other end of the usual timeline - I wrapped education up after getting fucked about at my further education college. I’d lost interest and continuing my studies in my youth would likely have resulted in extra debt, burnout, or failure (or even the triple crown if I’d stuck it out). I went into employment instead.

Twenty years later, I’m back in part time study and I’m in year five of a six year degree programme - literally taking twice as long to do a normal BSc pathway because of the part time element.

I’m doing it for funsies. I felt like I had unfinished business with it, I really wanted to continue the study at least through undergraduate level, but I’ve done it for my own reasons rather than for a job or extra coin. The skills I’ve learned along the way - critical thinking; how to credit people for their work; and the general study material have been more than enough to consider this decision to be a success.

That said, I know I’m in an incredibly privileged position to do what I’m doing, and I’m quite sure that a lot of folk couldn’t spunk £160-180 per month for six years, particularly when wages are stagnating and cost of living keeps rising. I’ve gone in to this wanting to learn about the field I’m studying, and not to hang my hopes of a job on that bit of paper the hopefully comes at the end of it. If nothing else, this course has shown me how little I know about the wider field and the world in general; and also how easy it is to game most systems including educational establishments for the most part - so in terms of employment, I can see how postnominals or a fancy certificate mean fuck all to employers.

I look at it as another formative stage in life - I’ve learned, I’ve developed, I’m a few grand lighter, but it opens new exciting doors to be able to get closer to the cutting edge in my current study field, or even pull the handbrake up and turn the wheel at the same time on my study career and pick another topic to read with more confidence.

I think the key is to at least enjoy what you’re doing in general. If you hate your field or you’re doing it because your job’s pinned to it, then you’re going to have A Real Bad Time™️ and I can see why people would be bitter about it when things go sideways after all that work.

Now that’s something I’d have expected to see a wave of now, and a comm called jesuswithajob or something. lols.

In the late 90s, there were some monitors in our school library that had some serious grounding problems. You could literally touch the screen with one finger, touch your victim with the other hand, and have your pal repeatedly turn the monitor off and on rapidly at the physical spring-loaded switch - and at some point, they’d get an uncomfortable-but-not-painful shock.

Highly entertaining, guaranteed a bollocking, and after that it was back to the degaussing CHUNNNNNNNGUNGUNGUNG sound. Satisfying as fuck.

The HAMBOTVER of the 2000s!

That’s beautiful. I love a bit of personal standards to fuck someone else’s day up.

I typically change my responses on the form to Calibri if using MS Office. It’s not enough to pique anyone’s interest, but it’s different enough to spot what I’ve added to a form rather than the usual Arial additions if you’ve been told about it.

Someone at my office tried to say I’d said something on a form when I hadn’t, and took great delight pointing out the slight difference in typeface on the field that wasn’t my edit.

It’s satisfying as fuck coming back at someone with receipts.

James Pond 2 springs to mind.

Didn’t one of the Spring Yard acts in Sonic 1 have a spreedrunner-friendly red spring too?

Fuck me, that’s kinda awesome… buuuut…

For fuck’s sake, Limited Run Games? Will the discs be on CD-Rs and the floppies be of the 5.25 variety just to really fuck people off? I really like the idea of Limited Run but their attitude to consumers is fucking awful.

I’ve got a massive id collection (up as far as Quake 4 anyway), but I’m really torn on this one.

A colleague of mine is a nice bloke, but proper stuck in his ways.

He’s done well for himself, lovely family, and has saved enough to treat them all to nice holidays across the world… but all he does is eat burger and chips while he’s there.

He’s been across Route 66, been to Rome, Paris, and some of the Baltic states… even been on cruises to faraway places, but trying some of the amazing local cuisine is just a step too far for him.

It’s wild. That said, he enjoys himself so good on him I guess.

Or worse, the US telecom franchise 😭

e: obligatory Sinclaaaaaaaiiiirrrr

what about now bruv?

déja vu intensifies

On the topic of sharpeners, those battery powered pressure sharpeners are satisfying as fuck. They’re shit and invariably snap the nib, but they’re the sharpening equivalent of shoving a Q-tip in your ear and having a good rake about.

Or if you’re all about the procrastination, spending a few minutes every lesson at the classroom sharpener like this one brings back the nostalgia:

Every day’s a school day.

In fairness, it’s nothing short of sheer voodoo what they managed to do with the simple copper loop. As usual though, it was the rural communities that felt the pinch (and the gains) more than most though.

Yeah, people using mobile phones to contact businesses wasn’t really a thing, partly because mobile usage was still taking off when I was in the biz, but mainly because calls to freephone numbers weren’t actually free (or included in package minutes) at the time.

The chances of it being the filter were stupidly low, and I don’t think I ever had a case of the filter being at fault - but it was one of those potential issues that would make a customer look stupid (and £120 lighter) if BT tipped up and declared it a customer equipment fault.

In newer homes (at the time), there were NTE faceplates that had a filter built it, with individual ports for telephone and for data telephony cables. They didn’t last long though. Maybe they were stupidly expensive in comparison, maybe BT could see the fibre future and stopped producing them.

When I did tech support for a UK telecoms firm, that was the easy way to fuck off an awkward customer with any kind of connectivity problem - stability, speed, whatever. Generally, people’s routers were connected to the same NTE as the landline.

“So what we’re going to do, is replace the ADSL filter, see if it’s a gubbed filter, it’s a nice cheap and easy fix. Can you remove the filter from the wall socket please?”

click

Beautiful.

It’s like the SQL creators designed the syntax to achieve maximum fuckery for those where “test” and “live” are different words for the same thing.

I bet they were pissing themselves laughing when implementing the finicky ROLLBACK command, knowing it that it would be only ever be used in anger as a “hail Mary” from a dev halfway through writing his own resignation letter.

It’s not real deployment if it isn’t pushed straight to prod.

Test boxes are for communists and the French.

I was talking to my primary-school age kids about their teachers, and one of them says their next teacher will be Mr Smith.

“He’s old,” they said, “he must be at least fifty”.

I said “nah man. Mr Smith is probably only a few years older than me, early forties I reckon”.

They had me with “no he’s like really old. He reads a newspaper”

I love modern printers.

We have a super fancy one in work that requires one to log in (or fob in with an NFC-style tag), to enable access to their own virtual print queue or printer services.

Weirdly, if it doesn’t shut down correctly (software failure, power cut, flicked at the wall switch etc), it reboots but with some quirks like not enabling the 10 second auto logout.

It’s satisfying as fuck walking up to a printer that’s still signed in, scrawling a comedy dick in red pen on a bit of A4 paper, and using the cloud scan function to scan it and have it directly emailed to the user as a PDF.

I’m pretty sure there’s some serious security issues there but it’s funnier to hear someone’s “new email” tone, and their eyes widen when they’ve got an email attachment from themselves making a suggestion that they crudely be elsewhere, or who see a masterpiece drawing of a hairy rocket with a helium leak manifesting itself from the very top.

I miss those toolbars. Static, everything in it’s place, easy to remember.

These dynamic “ribbons” do my head in. Thankfully, I only really have to use Office in… well, the office.