And so, over a score of years since that small town paid host to his birth, Nicholas ‘Aquarion’ Avenell hit the wall of Real Life, and slid down it into the deepest and blackest pit of depression he could think of. The conclusion he reached was this: If those people he knows with decades of experience in computer security and user assistance, topped with degrees and industry qualifications, cannot find a job in the IT sector, what hope does a 20 year old with a HND from a university in the bottom 7% of the world stand?
I know, qualifications are not important. So people keep telling me. They are wrong. The first thing anybody is going to look at on my CV is the qualification and schooling. The Numbers. And the numbers don’t look good. Then they will ask me what I’ve been doing with the last four months.
“Well”, I can tell them, “I spent the first two months panicking over the results of my exams. Panic that was proved valid when I got the slip of paper telling me I’d failed. I spent the next month trying to Unfail, and all the while I was busy writing the new engine for a website”
“Oh”, they will say, “You have experience in designing content driven websites? Can you give us an example”
And of course, the answer has to be “No”, because the soul result of six months work in PHP is the Klind/Klide/Kewl engine that drives Aquarionics and the sites that are part of it, and I can’t give this site to prospective employers, simply because it’s my diary.
And employers don’t tend to go in for year-and-9-months of extended self pity.
“You could take out all the bits that look bad” Yes, I could. But what is left of the site then? Aquarionics, all 50-odd pages of it, is about me. It’s a personal site. So I have to create a *new* home site that looks cool and doesn’t reflect badly on me that I can both put my CV on and put on my CV. Fun.
On the other hand, dispite this lack of future, Lonecat is coming down for the weekend, which is always A Good Thing.
On top of this, AFP is now going though an extended period of Nastyness, involving black spots, billy goats gruff, and Metathreads. This is bad.
*sigh* never rains.