Jyek

I had a forklift certification and got a job at an ewaste recycling facility moving pallets of equipment meant for refurbishment and resale. That job had a lot of down time so when I wasn’t moving the equipment I took up working on the computers, then the laptops, then the servers. I got so good at it that they gave me an ITAD client to handle. It was military servers that had been decommissioned. My job was to identify and sanitize/destroy any data storage before refurbishing the equipment to be resold at a profit share with the organizations I was working with.

IT is a super broad field. Many IT jobs just want you to have some certification level to get into (no degree required) or some number of years in similar work. My first “IT” adjacent position, I secured because I had a forklift license. Some IT positions want you to have bachelor’s or higher in a specific IT niche.

I like to tell some of my clients, that I’m like a general physician, I can tell you what’s wrong, fix quite a few things, prescribe fixes for the bigger issues, and refer you to specialists for things I have no business touching.

It was a social norm to call black people the N word for generations… Social norms do not define good or bad behavior. They define what people find acceptable. Socially, the word you wish to be acceptable has made more and more people uncomfortable and has in fact become less and less socially acceptable to use casually. Many words you used to use are weird now. Growing up we used to say “frick” unironically. These days it would be a little strange to toss that in as a filler word. It’s the same concept except for the fact that the word has not become a slur, it’s just been outdated in its use.

Language evolves and words become acceptable and others become unacceptable. It’s the way it goes and is not a sign of sensitivity, instead a positive sign of progression of language. You are fighting against the nature of how language develops.

The phone makers want your data just as much as the government does. Data is money and power.

I do this from time to time but with bison. I will casually slip “flock of bison” into a conversation hoping someone corrects me to “herd of bison”. So I can say. “No I hadn’t heard about your bi son. You must be so proud.”