I'll pretend you didn't post that.

I'll back Peltz, considering I'm still taking college classes.

Btw, got back my first test results from my statistics class (this semester's endeavour). 94%....eat that, liberal arts majors!

Pff, I once had statistics too. For like one hour every week, for one semester. Haha!

Congrats tho boyyy!

On Derf's comment...I somewhat sympathize. Not in regretting having studied, but in regretting having studied something useless. Should have done engineering or physics or something like that. Even biology, for all I care.

The problem is that I spent 3 years in college doing courses that would get me to uni, then at uni I only came away with a foundation degree after 3 years. Didn't fail or anything, just got bored.

I could have done a 3 year vocational course at college which would have given me more or less the same level qualification. Thus having saved 3 years to actually work.

But then I wouldn't have had the "character building" benefits of university. Meh. I dunno. Suppose I had to try it to find out what I wanted and what i liked.

I would have probably chosen something more practical, not IT/Business. Engineering. Runs in the blood anyway. Meh. I guess I should concentrate on being practical at home and theoretical at work to balance stuff out.

Totally with you on that Derf.

Unfortunately, any 'real' degrees (like a full-time, 5-year master) are usually inaccessible to people who don't have both the time or money to do them. In Belgium, there isn't even a self-study or evening classes program for, say, engineering. The only way to get an actual degree in that is to put in 4-5 years of full-time action. So yeah, once you're nearing 30 and supposed to be having a career of some sorts, or you don't have the cash, that's pretty much impossible. And since you need a job to get money, one excludes the other pretty much. Even unemployed, about 70% of my monthly unemployment cash goes into paying rent and monthly costs. The enjoys of the single rent-payer.

On top of that, there's the fact that for my particular educational background or work experience, any practical 'loose' classes I may want to do, say in math or physics or whatever, are completely useless to me outside of personal interest. Yay. I wish I had a time machine so I could warn my younger self against doing a shitty pointless degree.

Hey Mole, don't you work at GAME?

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/02 ... lay-co-uk/

Hope this doesn't affect you.

Yeah GAME is not doing great atm, but they're hanging in there. So glad I'm gone, the hours were terrible enough when I was there but now I know a guy in my old store does 4 hour shifts each day (or rather gets PAID for 4 hours) but actually works 6 or 7

Used to work at Game on weekends when I was a wee lad. They tried keeping me on 30 mins after the end of my shift. Apparently they HAVE to do this because it's company policy that everyone remains in the building (doors locked) while the tills are cashed up. Ie, "No one goes away until we count the money and we prove that you have not stolen anything today."

Apparently that had been something ALL the workers before me had sympathetically complied with. One guy even justified it saying... "yeah about that, the way I see it, they give me employee discounts on games, I stay behind 30 mins. You scratch my back I scratch yours. It's worth it."

I know my rights. They didn't pull that shit on me. Pulled the manager aside for 5 mins and explained to him on very basic ethical and legal grounds how I was entitled to leave when my contract specified.

A couple of weeks later the manager quit.

LOL no one was ever that creative in my store; in fact in most stores they didn't keep you back, just West Bromwich. Of course as the company got more desperate coz the profits were going down (only £9 million in profit the last year I was there, awww poor company) the hours got cut and staff got cut, stores got closed so more customers and of course we still had to do just as much marketing/price changes/tidying/pushing pointless add ons to every customer so we ended up forced to work over more and more. And threatened with the sack if we didn't.

Ah well, good riddance. Better paid job with less responsibility

Go government! Doesn't sound like anyone was hurt by the adventure either... so good for the guy with the Chutzpah to show up to work for 25 years to become a millionaire.

That is pretty amazing. The genius of it all is the ticketing machine - without that the zoo or the council may have actually started questioning who this guy is and why he's handing out handwritten tickets or asking for parking fees. But that machine makes it looks so very legit haha. I wonder how much that thing set him back.

But it must have been a little nervewracking to know that, for 25 years, they could have come in and shut him down at any moment and probably even sue him for millions of pounds in illegitemate parking fees. But more power to him for pulling it off. Note: as long as it is confined to jobs where you can't possibly do any harm like this (instead of a nurse or even a security agent or whatever), I totally sympathize. Apart from him not paying any taxes whatsoever, this is close to a victimless crime.

Ok, pretty cool, but I don't understand why he wasted 25 years of his life when he could have stopped after 10 with a few million in his pocket.

I guess he had his reasons...besides, if he quit after 10 with 2.5 million he still had to bridge a loooong time to get to his retirement. So buy a place abroad, pay taxes there (on the house, maybe car), pay bills, food and general living expenses. I'm not sure 2.5 million is very rich to live off for the rest of your life then (let's assume that he would have been 35-40 after working for 10 years). Especially not if he has children.

But I understand what you're saying, why work to 7 if you could just work to 6?

Man i'm so fucking jaded about life right now.

My job pays shit and it sucks. My GF's job pays shit and it sucks. In about a year we should have the means to buy a house, but we both need to change jobs since they're turning our brains to shit and they pay crap.

For many months we've been looking for jobs in our town, but nothing has materialised.

Our town has no real cultural identity, so in order to enjoy our weekend we need to drive elsewhere. But at least the houses look ok and are priced well.

The weather in our country sucks and is uninspiring.

There could be a job opportunity in the next city, but the houses are too expensive and those available at our price are 1930's terraces and look depressing inside and out. English residential architecture is truly shambolic.

A salary in that city that offers £5k more would imply £250 more a month, but that gets spent on petrol for the commute. So a worthless payrise. It's a 1 hour one-way journey btw.

Train tickets for the commute would cost £20 a day, or £400 a month. Why the train costs most than driving myself, I shall never understand.

My GF in the meantime would have to try to find a job in the same city before be decide to move, and chances of that are slim. For her to buy her own car for the commute to a separate town would mean hundreds of additional quid down the shitter.

Why are the affordable houses nearer to the city totally shit?
Why are train fares so ridiculous?
Why doesn't the company help out with commuting? Ie, train fares or petrol?

I feel no institution facilitates my life.