Piroca wrote:
Spoken like a true Loser.
Spoken like a true dickhead. Kick a man while he's down, why don't you.
Most of us have been there at one point of our lives, out of work or for some other reason discouraged, and so should know how it can feel. That barely gives us a clue of how bad it is for people like GT. I work in a area that is closely allied to I.T. and know first hand how bad it is for people in that line of work.
These are not just like the blue-collar workers of yesteryear that have been laid off from one place and can easily transfer to other fields. These are highly trained individuals accustomed to making large salaries and since the burst of the internet bubble have found demand for their expertise drastically shrink. A good part of it is low-cost competition and out sourcing to places like India, but it goes much deeper than that.
Some have found re-employment in their field BUT at significantly lower levels of pay. Others are driving cabs or doing other such low-paying jobs just to get by. I know several other former programmers, like GT, who are either working for much less, still trying to find work and close to giving up or have gone into formal retirement. Bush likes to brag about the million or so jobs he created, and glosses over the 3 million jobs that were lost first under his watch. Its sort of like Kerry's I voted for it after I voted against it, only MUCH more serious. He completely ignores the fact that so many of these new jobs are in low paying service areas (like McDonalds), part-time or temp work (which lack any benefits such as health coverage) or that unemployment figures have declined because of the discouraged worker effect (people who have been out work so long they've exceeeded their unemployment benefits and have given up looking).
I'm not going to offer any platitudes to GT either, like keep a chin up. But I will offer some practical words of advice. As I recall your experience is with mainframe systems. Its no wonder you can't find work. If you want to continue to work in the IT field, you need to retrain. You should have been doing this all along before your money ran out, but its never too late. Secondly, you need to bite the bullet. Accept the fact that the chances are you might never regain the position you had in the industry or any position and do whatever it takes to get by. If that means going to work for Wal-mart and giving up your trips to CR, so be it.
I've seen far worse living conditions than anything GT has experienced. I used to do business in Haiti. Talk about abject poverty. Since that time, however bad it may have seemed to me, I have never ever felt sorry for myself. We live in a land of opportunity and at least for now, until the so-called compassionate conservatives manage to tear it apart, we have a social safety net. GT shouldn't have to starve and although he might want to move into a tin shack with one of his chica novias he still could always get a doublewide like Circus. No, our boy is going to be just fine, as long as he doesn't let this stuff he's going through get him down.
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. if you think you can... your right 
"
.........hope you are more positive to-day,easier said than done, right,..........
