job – Andrew the Hopeless Techie

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Andrew the Hopeless Techie > job

Update: July 6, 2013

July 6, 2013 0 Comments

It’s been a while since I updated my blog, a lot has changed since last time I updated it. Hopefully, this post will serve as an abridged update for the past several months.

School

As many of you reading this are aware I was enrolled in a college for several years pursuing a bachelors degree and network administration, however with some of you may not be aware of is that I was unable to finish my education. I was however extremely close to finishing my degree, that is until I ran out of financial aid and was forced to withdraw with only three classes remaining.

One of the three classes I had left was a summary class basically re-encapsulating everything I learned up to that point, the other two were actually new classes. I had a measly $3500 left my tuition before my financial aid ran out, unable to raise these funds in the given amount of time I had, there was no other alternative but to withdraw.

Concerned with all the money that I had spent thus far, and my education being for nothing, I inquired about whether or not, I would be able to pick up why I left off should I raise the necessary funds. The response I got was not very reassuring, whether or not I’ll be able to pick up and only take the three classes I was lacking would be dependent on when I would be able to return and how much the program would have changed since I was last enrolled.

Should the degree program have changed drastically since the last time I enrolled, then I will be forced to start the program all over again as if I had just started. This would mean that basically all the money I had spent from student loans on my education would have been wasted, not to mention the new student loans I would have to take to start the program over again. So for me the faster I can raise the necessary funds to take those last three classes, the better chance they have of continuing the program I started.

Employment

Sadly, my employment situation has not fared much better than my education situation.

I have filled out several applications every week from places that are known like Lowes to places less known like mom and pop locations, where the issue comes in for me I think is the gaps of unemployment I have. Now, I am sure a lot of you out there have had times when you were not able to work for long periods of time weather for reasons could or could not control, in this case it is largely out of my control.

Originally I took time off from work to help with my Father in law during his fight with cancer, while I have held jobs here and there during this time, I largely went unemployed. When my daughter was born things changed, I was needed more at home to help raise our daughter and at the time this was doable. We were living in my In-laws house so that we could be there 24/7 should my Father in law need the assistance, it was not until he passed that it became clear one if not both of us needed work badly.

There was some financial things that come with the death of a loved one that hit my Mother in law hard both emotionally and finically, these I will not bother to go in depth on as they are rather personal, but I will say it hammered the point home just how much we needed our own place and work.

At this time I was still in school and rounding the half way mark to what I thought was my ultimate destination of a degree, I managed to work out a deal with family and friends to help us stay afloat while I finished out my degree and could get a career, all the while still looking for work on my own.

This brings us to last summer (2012) when I received the notification that my financial aid was exhausted and that if I wanted to finish my degree it would cost me $3500! Having borrowed money and relied on friends and family to a degree that I felt uncomfortable with I declined to pursue help from them at first. I tried to find other ways to get the funds to make up this small amount of cash, in the end I swallowed my pride and asked for assistance, but much to my expectation was denied both from friends and family.

I felt like we had exhausted that avenue with the money we borrowed already (mostly from family very little if any from friends), so I re-focused my efforts to looking for work full time. I am still not employed but I refuse to give up, I have a desire to work and provide for my family, if only given the chance to do so I would be the best I could be to my employer.

I will continue to look for work and hopefully soon will find some.

Books

I can name only a few things I can do that let me escape the stresses I have in life currently, one of the things I do when I get a chance is read. I have been slowly reading the Steve Jobs Biography lately and while I am only half way through it (I like to read but I can not read an entire book in one sitting), I really enjoy seeing this side of a man so many looked up to for inspiration.

I admit I do not read nearly as much as I would like, but when I do I usually sit for hours reading digitized books on my Android Kindle app. Terry Brooks is one of my favorite sci-fi authors by far and recently I find myself going back and re-reading the first series of books I ever read from him. I still to this day enjoy every page I read, the ironic thing is that this man used to be a Lawyer someone notorious for writing documents in such jargon that only another Lawyer could understand.

Gaming

Its not to hard to imagine that with my given situation that gaming, or playing new games would be hard to do. While I have not personally bought any game recently (aside from Shadowrun Returns), I was given a slew of games for free from AMD recently just for being on their newsletter!

Ultimately if I can not play a game I tend to enjoy watching others play a game I can not afford so I can get a sort of feel for the game without having to shell out that much money on it. I find it just as enjoyable at times and its a lot cheaper then shelling out $60 for the game Smile

I did re-install a game I bought some time ago, Fable 3, in an effort to try and get my mind off a lot of what has been going on lately. I forgot how much I enjoyed this game, its very easy to loose track of time when playing something like this so I usually will only play it late at night when our daughter has gone to bed so I can get a few hours to myself.

Additionally I had in the past pre-ordered several games which I forgot about until they were released and I got emails telling me as such. Some of these are Mass Effect 3, Starcraft 3 Heart of the Swarm and even further back Diablo 3. I am a huge RPG fan have been since the days of Dragon Warrior on the Nintendo, I remember Joe (older brother) and myself playing that game for hours and admiring the graphics and game play! Now when I go back and play it on an emulator (I own the actual game cartridge so its not stealing as it was bought when released), I must say slipping back into that game was a real joy, it reminded me of my childhood.

Well that is about it for this update I know it all sounds like rambling and may not make the workings of a good article, but then again it’s a blog entry so I am sure those interested enough in my life to read it will not mind Winking smile

Books, General Stuff, Other

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Still Unemployed – why does credit have to affect an employment decision!!

April 27, 2011 0 Comments

Bad Credit = No Job!

It has been just over a year since we moved into this house, yet I’m still unemployed. It’s not that I’m not looking for a job, it seems to be a combination of my severe gaps in employment and the Lack of Necessary Credit. So far, we’ve been lucky enough to use money that was set aside, though not for this type of situation but still helpful, however as this money is slowly drying up I find myself in a tight spot. I honestly thought that finding a job would be fairly simple, especially if I’m willing to do just about any job I could find, this however would prove to be a foolish mistake as made evident by the fact that I’m still unemployed.

I decided it was time to look into why I wasn’t being hired, after applying for hundreds of jobs and not getting one interview, when I found out was credit as well as my gaps in employment were the two number one factors for me not getting a job. I should mention that a majority of that time that I was unemployed was spent helping to care for my terminally ill father-in-law, we’ve been living with my in-laws since 2004 but it wasn’t until late 2006 and my father-in-law started to take a turn for the worse. During this time I felt it was important for me to be available 24 hours a day, as my mother-in-law was not the best of health either (though she was not terminally ill). Sadly, my father-in-law passed away late 2008 at which point we continue to live with my mother-in-law for some time, about 1 1/2 years to be exact.during this one a half years we lived with my mother-in-law, she began to have financial trouble, and it was time for me to start looking for work again. well, no work came and my mother-in-law continue to have financial difficulties, so bad did these become in fact that we were forced to start looking for new place to live as was she.

Rushing thinking we had a limited amount of time to find a new place to live, we begin apartment hunting, only to find the price of bread and, way up since last time we were renters. With no disposable income other than the government disability money my wife receives, we had no income and next to nothing saved up.we did have investments and other assets which netted us an extra bit of money every month to help with the bills, but due to not having a job a lot of those investments have had to be liquefied, and the extra money we have every month is running dangerously low. Before I go any further, you might be asking why I’m so willing to share this much personal information, the answer is simple I have nothing to hide and it makes me feel better to get it off my chest. I will say right now, despite what you might be thinking this blog post is not leading up to me asking you for a donation so don’t even get that in your mind, what I’m truly hoping to achieve by writing this blog post is for employers that happened to be checking my social networking sites to get a glimpse a snapshot if you will of where I currently stand so that they can understand why I’ve been unemployed as long as I have. I have no preconceived misconception that this in any way will improve my odds of finding a job, but it was least give an employer perspective, something they may not have otherwise.

Fast-forward to the current day, things are starting to sort of look up, if that doesn’t sound too reassuring let me explain. I have made it no secret that my wife has cerebral palsy, while I consider us both blessed and lucky that it doesn’t hinder her to the point that it does some, is still causes her difficulty. In fact I would be willing to say that the only advantage to her disability to either one of us could see, would be the fact that it qualifies her to get Social Security disability, this is meant the difference between us being able to pay the rent and not being able to pay the rent. All that being said my wife is currently enrolled, or hopes to be enrolled in a program set up by Michigan called Michigan rehabilitation services or MRS for short. Now there are a lot of benefits associated with her being enrolled in MRS, I’m not exactly sure what they all are so not going to mention too much about it here, what I will say is that I’m pretty sure they have a program set up to aid her in finding work. As weird as it sounds for me to say this, she made be employed in a part time job before I can ever land an interview.

So you might be asking what if I done recently to help improve my odds of finding a job, I recently pulled a copy of my credit report along with scores for all three credit bureaus, without going into specifics here, let’s just say that my credit is not as bad as I thought it was, in fact my father who has been on the opposite end of the hiring table told me that these scores should not affect most employers decision to hire me.I can in fact see my credit report were several employers have queried the report, I seem checking my credit for pre-employment evaluation, or in my case the pre-interview evaluation. Something on that credit report must be spooking them because usually, after looking at my credit report the application process stops dead in its tracks. While I might not be able to do anything about the gaps in unemployment,I am hoping that I can do something about the credit issue, in the meantime I can only hope that my wife’s appointment with MRS proves fruitful.

Ok, I think that’s enough of me rambling on for one has to at least be two pages (or maybe not), was hoped this blog post at least as enjoyable for somebody to read. At the very least this blog post will give somebody better insight into me personally what my current situation is (if somebody’s actually interested enough to find out more about me which I doubt).

Comments are welcome, suggestions are also welcome, but please don’t be a jerk about it, in fact if your jerk about your comment will even be posted.

General Stuff

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Droid X and Possible New Job Prospect

July 4, 2010 4 Comments

Job Prospect

Those of you that know me personally or even on a chatting basis, know that I have had one heck of a year with all that has been going on. One among many other things in my life that are less then fortunate, is that I am currently unemployed.

Enter Monster.com, I updated my resume on Monster and did the normal daily grind of late which is find 4-8 jobs and apply for them. Out of the blue one day I get a call from a company looking for someone to represent Sharp Electronics for their Marketing company basically helping educate customers on Sharp HD technology, I passed the initial pre-screen and anxiously awaited the interview.

The following Monday I got a call from who would become my manager should I get the job, The interview seemed to go really well and I am confident that the Interviewer got a similar feel for my experience. Now I should mention I have had experience in this type of job before, I sold Cell Phones for the 3 major carriers (not going to list them here you know who they are) wit a company called Mosaic Sales Solutions, This job i interviewed for was very similar to the cell phone one minus cell phones add HD tvs.

At any rate the interview was last Monday and I followed up on Thursday with a phone call re-emphasising how interested I was in the job and what it entailed. Now comes the waiting game, I should know by the end of this week (hopefully) if i got the job or not.

This job should I land it will require me to get rid of my pre-paid phone and get a regular posting plan phone which will be needed to keep in touch with my boss since I am completely solo on this job should i get it.

This brings me to the Droid X part of the post.

Droid X

Given that I would need a regular Phone and not a pre-paid phone, I began to look into which phone I would get and the more I looked the more it occured to me that if I had a smartphone I could be far more productive in several areas with relation to this job. For one customer questions I could not answer could be easily answered using the phone to do a quick internet search and pull up the information. Second I could use this phone to track my sales and log required information for the daily report at the end of the night.

So knowing I would need a Smartphone I began to narrow down which phone I wanted, would work for what I wanted. I tending to prefer anything other then Windows mobile was left with Palm WebOS phones or Android Powered phones. Having done a little research i found Palm was recently acquired by HP and while i have no beefs with Hewlett Packard, I felt with the buyout things might be a little late to be updated/fixed. Android was my choice of OS, then I began narrowing down Verizon Android powered phones as a means to get the phone I really wanted. Talking to several people and researching bit I found that the upcoming Droid X to be my phone of choice. It was not till after I chose this that I realized just how cool this would be, I could download apps from the Android Market to allow me to use this phone for non-work stuff as well.

True with the above things I researched which apps I would install off the bat as soon as I had network access, Some that came to mind were Seesmic, Bank of America for Android, WordPress, shopsavvy and Blizzards Authenticator app. I am sure I will install many more but for starters these are apps i would consider must haves.

Also Android is obviously powered by Linux which to me is one the best things out there. I use Windows for some things i can not get to work under WINE but for the most part Linux is my OS of choice so a phone powered by Linux just seems to be a logical choice.

All that being said, I will most likely not get a phone should I not get this job (at least not at first) since another monthly bill with no job is not the smartest of moves.

If you know a good (useful, or fun) app for android post it in a comment.

Android, Fedora, Linux, Non-Specific, Ubuntu

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