What a waste of time that was. I wish I never done it.

[DrFishnets]

In your life what was the biggest waste of time for you?

Mine was going to college and being a student. Spending four pointless years of my life getting into debt by the Student bastard Loans company, graduating and as a result spending nearly all my bloody life on the dole because there was no jobs out there

I wouldn't of minded being into debt and paying it back if I was in a great job that I was qualified in doing but it turns out it was all a pointless waste of time and money and college only got me into bloody debt for nothing

Doc

[Night Haunter]

Chin up Doc! Look at the end of the day you have something many people don't - A Degree - I know being in debt and on the dole can be soul destroying, but use your qualifications to your advantage, whatever your specialised field is, go for it and you will succeed, just don't let yourself get caught in a endless loop of depression and boredom, and hey, you've got VEF to look forward too!

Good luck and all the best

Haunter

[DrFishnets]

I wouldn't of minded if I had just recently graduated but I have been graduated for the past 15 years and still no hope for a job. What pisses me off most of all is the fact that Student Loans are demanding money even though i am in the dole queue.

Doc

[haldane4]

I sympathise. I graduated 1993 with a degree in something or other. The Student Loan Co hassle me every February to repay the mammoth 2 grand I owe them. At first I was rather pleased to send them my deferment form; nowaways it's something I dread - as though I have to inform some bureaucrat every year that I'm an utter professional failure.

It might be wise to start looking for some sort of work now - part-time or low paid, it doesn't matter because the upcoming alternative will be much worse - Workfare. I don't much fancy walking the streets holding a poop-scooper and wearing an orange day-glo jacket with 'I am a leech' stitched on the back. The only good thing to come out of it will be that a lot of low-paid private sector workers who seem to have harsh opinions of the unemployed will soon find themselves out of work too - after all, why should their scumbag sweatshop employer pay them the minimum wage when he can get Jobcentreplus to send over a couple of long-termed unemployed who'll do the job for the price of their dole.

We live in a society of very stupid, short-sighted people.

[yutz]

I sympathize and am in the same boat in some regards. I went to night school so I didn't require the loans. It took me 3 years to get a Computer Systems Technology Diploma from NAIT here in Alberta Canada and what a fucking disappointment that was. Three years of hard work AFTER work, excellent grades, 1 year of "work experience", etc, etc, etc. In the end I found sporadic work in the industry but it was so lousy and paid so poorly I eventually went back to driving a truck. What a crock!

As someone on another forum said education has become the Bullshit of the 2000s. I heard of a Shipper/Reciever that took a 1 year course to get his job. What SHIT! What used to take 3 weeks of on-the-job training is now a "position" that you need an "education" for. Hey, at least it's keeping the loan shakers and "career" makers rich, right.

This rant has nothing against those who worked hard for their education as I'm one of them. Let's just cut the shit about the job prospects when you graduate. Stop feeding crapola to people that want an education. The place I went to didn't have any reality based information on what graduates would face, just highly exaggerated graduate placement statistics and a bunch of RAH, RAH shit.

[Dekoda]

Like Bill Cosby said on one of his comedy albums. "When I graduated from high school, I went into the military because the dropouts had all the jobs."

I studied electronics when I was in high school, and continued studying it in college. I went to a community college for a year and decided I wanted to work, so I got a job at a steel mill. That lasted 4 weeks before they went on strike, so I got laid off.

Because I had some knowledge of electronics, I was able to land a job as a service technician repairing office machines. That lasted 2 years as the company sold out to a larger company. Before I got laid off from there, I applied and was accepted at an apprenticeship school. It was a union construction apprenticeship, so I stuck with that. Once I became a journeyman, I worked for about 11 years before work became scarce. When that happened, I found a job working in a factory.

While at the factory, I went to night school and got a two year degree (an associate's degree). The company paid for it, so I figured why not. I never used that degree as I worked at that factory for over 20 years before the economy went in the dumps and the factory closed. Because I was there so long, I get a pension from them.

I went back out and tried to go back to construction, since I still carried a union card. I worked at it for 8 months, but I finally had to quit because I have too many physical ailments from having done blue collar work for 35 years. I was forced to go on disability.

The thing is, I was always open to take a job that wasn't what I really wanted to do, even if it paid less money initially. If an opportunity opened up in some other field of work, I took it. By doing that, it opened up new opportunities.

Because I had studied electronics in school, I was able to land the job servicing office machines. When that job looked in jeopardy, I happened to service the machines at the apprenticeship training school, where I asked about the apprenticeship program. I applied for the apprenticeship, and having a mechanical background from servicing office machines, I got in.

Once out of the apprenticeship and becoming a journeyman, the 11 years I worked at that gave me the background I needed to apply for the job at the factory. Once the factory closed, the work I had been doing there allowed me to go back into construction, and be sent to a specialty job that very few people could do.

If someone had told me when I was 16 that I'd be doing blue collar work for 35 years, I would have thought they were crazy. I don't think that anything I did was a waste of time since everything I did helped me somewhere down the road. In life, sometimes you have to go with the flow.

[trailmaster]

Because my grades were not that good during the regular high school season I often had to go to Summer school to make up the credits. This meant I missed all the good things that most of the other kids enjoyed during the summer school vacation: going to the local beach, biking all over the neighborhood with my friends, staying at home reading comic books. I really hated regular school, all school is a waste of time. You don't need anything other than learning how to read and doing basic arithmetic and sciences, and learning your basic history for your nation. That's all you need to get a regular job.

[9876543210]

You know, back when I was a kid in the late 60's and early 70's I lived in a town that was almost entirely manufacturing for Detroit or the aerospace industry. At that time there were "Help Wanted" signs everywhere so if you decided you didn't like a job in the morning you could have another by that afternoon.

How times have changed.

[Sir Honkers]

Gone to see The Revenant. You think I would have learnt after Interstellar and Her.

[Maglover]

Learning Latin at school - did it ever help anyone?