I’ve been interested in tech for as long as I can remember, best gift I’ve got was this cheap screwdriver with 7 different bits in the handle and shit, did I love that thing. Duck doctor Whos sonic variant, mine let me open up a whole new dimension to life as I knew it, that dimension being the insides of every machine I could get my wings to. It started simply, I had few toy guns and cars, I simply removed everything unnecessary and figured how everything interacted with each other, I didn’t have the knowledge, tools or access to resources to do anything more with those, but I liked opening them just the same. I was maybe 7 years old.
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Can you imagine how awesome it was for this quacker to get their very own PC with removable gizmos and gadgets and the ability to somewhat freely swap between those to get different functions or more power? I was enamoured of the parts, anywhere from the triple-C thiccc PSU power harness with the locking clips and designed not to go in to the wrong slots, the number of pins in cpus, most being necessary for it to function, the raw power you get when switching from integrated graphics to.. basically anything,the sheer heft of those things, they could kill a quack if swung like a weapon, even the computer case was brilliant with its cable routing options and the tool-less drive cages, I was 13 and my love for electronics had gotten an upgrade, this was before actually learning about software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So there I was, in the 7th grade, smallest of the big peeps, but still there, shy lil duckling quacking around with the classmates’ calculators, making friends by showing how cool the insides of electronics looked like. I did the tiniest bit of gaming, I had the PC and it could reasonably run minecraft with freaky low render distance, but other than that I really had no reason to to duck around with software, I was happy with the hardware side and hoped that I could get some tech repair type of job some day and wanted to work towards that. This was the reason why I went to study ICT. I think I nowadays mostly regret that choice, I’ll let you know if I get any clarity on that while writing this. (I don’t think I do, I had fun even if the diploma has been worth squat)
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First few months were ducking miserable, can you imagine how mind-numbing it is to listen for two months about how to use office (I had done ECDL<\/a> – modules 1\/2 year earlier in primary school as optional subject), learn generally about computer parts (once again, I had been toying with electronics’ insides for half of my life and few years of exploring PCs), and the regular lessons that I had already done for 9 years (those were bearable, at least there I got new info). The general “not giving a quack” lasted longer than the first 2 months and eventually I figured that quack damn, I don’t know what we’re doing. I missed most lessons on about server environments, the only thing I knew I had to focus to get to my ultimate goal – being part of the I.T crowd. I figured that quack this, no use in me being in the classes wasting everyone\u2019s time. I crammed my fluffy feathers off and came back when I had gotten back on track, I didn’t do great in that class and have felt that I don’t know enough about windows server or active directory, but I passed. As a small-town duck, there wasn’t much work in IT, at least not enough for everyone studying it, but everyone is okay with free work so the on-the-job learnings weren’t too hard to find. My first year I was “selling electronics” at a local tech store. That was sitting in a chair most of the days, every other day giving the shelves a wipe, occasionally helping make deliveries and “getting to know the warehouse” = duck around in the bomb shelter and look for old products that never sold. There was one interesting week, that was when the town had something going on that required everyone to search for channels on the TV (maybe non-HD channels were finally replaced with HD variants?), In practise that was me getting a list of customers with addresses and phone numbers and driving around the town and having SO MUCH coffee while I waited for the channel searches to be done. This was few years before GDPR was a thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I also did a stint in nearby elementary school and set up laptop cart for the students, fixed bunch of old transformer books (swapping parts from broken ones, upgrading them and being the first unofficial step in it-support (the IT department was located in another office and easier for me to see that everything is correctly plugged and configured before putting a ticket forward).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Third year I was just doing odd jobs in school and setting up “smart” 3D-printing setup before the smart ones were a thing. (but to my discredit, by smart I mean it was livestreamed so I didn’t have to climb floors to check the prints. 34 views peak and 27 followers, my 15 minutes of fame B)) Odd jobs were videoing and editing a short “ad” for healthcare students working in an elderly home, doing some WordPress guides for local art supplier so they could sell pieces online and emptied the backlog of non-posted pieces and doing some site admin work for a beauty parlour and taught the owner FaceBook – marketing. After this we can skip a year forward, half a year I was doing some culinary work with defence forces and the rest I was looking for a job and ended up assembling roof struts for frankly quackp pay and with quackp working times. But money was money and most of the workers there were bearable, at this point I had bought my current workstation but software was still mostly just games, I did toy around with linux a bit never commited. Thanks to said games I started to dig in to coding and programming by looking closer into AutoHotKey, that was mostly just remapping hold buttons into toggles and vice versa, and slightly offensive accent shitposts (fOwOw exampwe n’ya, I UwUwUwUified my keybOwOawd n’yaa~ :3). The year was 2023, sometime during the first half I moved back to Helsinki with the hopes that I could find some work there, It took me seven months but eventually I got a government backed job, helping around in an office. That was me sitting for maybe 35 hours a week, rest of the 5 hours actually having something to do, the job was fun when there was work because the work had so much variety, from helping with moving, keeping warehouse stocked, driving around Helsinki for supplies, setting up workspaces, bicycle maintenance, it had everything but only maybe 20% of the time, rest was waiting for something to do. It took me 4 months to say that I’m going home and coming back when I get a call that something needs doing. To no one’s surprise I wasn’t employed for too long after that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While tinkering with those I continued the adventures of unemployment, still hell-bent on me finding ANYTHING to do with electronics, be it phone\/laptop repair, selling said tech, IT-support for every place that I could find postings for but nothing was a hit, most of the time I didn’t even get the “thank you for your application, we regret to inform you…” (fuck every one of you doing that, nothing crushes the spirits like hearing nothing from the job you thought you were the perfect for.) I found 8 month long course for IT which supposedly includes on-the-job learning, the exact something I could use to get my leg between the door and find some contacts for job hunting, naturally I applied as soon as possible and got invited for an interview. Fast forward to the start of school and it’s clear as day, I’m in the completely wrong place and soon without benefits no matter what I do. (if you found this website from a job application, you’ve read 2071 words already, you’re clearly interested, let me show you my skills, I know I’m capable as long as there’s something I can fall back on, be it documentations and more knowledgeable guidance, I wouldn’t have bothered with sending my application otherwise.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Quack quack,<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Quacker starving for knowledge (and food before too long employers hmu <3)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been interested in tech for as long as I can remember, best gift I’ve got was this cheap screwdriver with 7 different bits in the handle and shit, did I love that thing. 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The rest of the school went okay, I didn’t much care for photo\/videography and did the bare minimum on those, editing was kinda cool and could myself doing it more, never just got around to learning more than the basics. The Lego robot was my first introduction to programming, but we also had few classes for HTML, CSS, C++\/#. We also had a group project where we made a video game. (Our group used AGS in case anyone is curious.)
To this day I think programming is the suckiest part of tech but I’m aware that it’s mandatory and at least there we have incredibly detailed documentation. Nowadays my programming is mostly AutoHotKey scripts, small Bash scripts for Linux environment and few Raspberry Pi Pico projects using MicroPython (I haven’t had the need to write the files, but I’m not running any lines of code on IoT devices without understanding what I’m running). I have few programs that uses custom CSS scripts for appearance, it’s bit of trial and error but doable if I have access to internet. I understand enough HTML to generally look at what site is doing, but I haven’t written it in years and even then it was only simple sites as homework. There was also few classes of C++\/#, but I couldn’t tell you a thing about either, I’m currently trying to look for small projects that would work as introductions for those.
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Late 2019 I moved to Helsinki with the hopes that I could find some work there, I’m sure most remember how quacking great timing that was. Long story short I moved in November, paid 3 months in advance as collateral and heard duck-all from the scammer after that. I was homeless from early November 2019 to early February 2020. I found no work, but had the few week long class that is on my resume. Few months after that I had to move back to Lapland, where I was once again stuck looking for work, this time it took few months to find, again with just as little to do with IT as the last one. I delivered mail for ~1.5 years and gave Helsinki another try. (Pop quiz, what’s the definition of insanity?)
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After the office job I ended up saying duck it and installing arch Linux (btw) next to my windows install, this was just because I wanted to get a deeper understanding about Linux machines. Nowadays windows is only for school, 3D modeling and printing. (Current tools are not yet functioning in Linux, Autodesk Fusion mainly but slicing software has its issues too, I’ll find alternatives\/fix the issues for those eventually, haven’t had the free time to do that yet.) While learning Linux by essentially blocking access to everything I hadn’t set up myself, I figured that another workstation is just what I need and found used one for cheap, with the plan that I’ll start homelabbing. Said workstation is currently running ProxMox VE, virtualizing NAS for the QuackFam and Debian installs for Docker and for testing software, V2 of that I think is going to be bare-metal TrueNAS Scale install with few applications and move the proxmox\/debian installs to other machines so I can have more SATA slots in the NAS, that is so far in the planning stages but not time critical.
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I think I aced the interview, I can’t know for sure but I got accepted, guess I did okay enough. The interview was mid May and maybe a week later I found out that I got accepted, school would start at a date at 9am, meet up in the lobby. at this point all I knew that this is likely going to be the exact type of stuff I ducked up 6-ish paragraphs above, I heard about Cisco equipment, Windows server 2022 and Active Directory. All of 3 months I’ve waited for some information about the courses, some pre-course reading, anything really.
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The studying ended up being following tutorials and writing down everything I did, end result ending up being basically identical to the tutorial, and learning office for the 3rd time (which I’m somewhat okay with when there’s also help accessible for job applications, some of the skills are transferable.) I still have no idea about Windows server or Active Directory except for now I know how to share directories to certain groups, make sure that passwords are secure for all and to change the desktop. I’d like to know the conceptual operations before going to specifics, without the concepts the specifics just glide off my back. And why are we watching YouTube in school? It’s enough that the links are there, everyone can go watch them on their own time and we wouldn’t need to waste hours of our school days with it and instead focus on the actual concepts, that would be the perfect commute activity in the land of truly unlimited and somewhat affordable data during the age of the smart fridge. Those without said commutes would not have those times but they also have more hours in their days.
Even if the schoolday would include the perfect way for studying for me, I would still be, well frankly, I’d be fucked.
During the work week I’m usually home at around 3:40pm and it takes me few minutes to make some food, feed the Quack Men<\/a>, eat said food and deal with every other issue that’s there from being a human (yeah, there’s few duck puns in the text but I’m still a human, surprise :P). Reasonable time to start actually focusing on the applications is usually somewhere between 4-5pm.
The issue isn’t necessarily the time that I have left making the applications, but the fact the I’m simply not employable on paper. The resume is hole after hole, basically zero relevant work, the only one I can think for recommendations comes from one short project that I can’t add to my resume (I have simply nothing to write about it, it was just fixing bunch of product descriptions in a WP site that I did on my free during the time I was delivering mail as a favour to friend more than anything and I didn’t feel the reason to look into what plugins I wasn’t interacting with). I’ve also never thought my writings as anything good, but even if I was good at it without realizing, clearly not good enough to make up from the lack of content in the resume.
What I am good at is basically bullshitting a good impression when talking to people (there’s a non-negative way to say this, this will get edited when i figure out what it is), perfectly tranferrable skill to doing the same but behind the magic pocket square. that does basically require some notes and a place where I can be without interruptions and comfortable in. And that place rarely is anywhere in public.
I don’t simply see a way of juggling “studying” at school and actually having a realistic chance to get the learning position and if I’ve written well enough then we are all thinking the same thing – they are online courses that you’re able to do on your own time, learn the concepts that you don’t get at school while learning the specifics, but use earlier working hours into looking into postings, taking notes and making the good impressions and hope it makes up for the lack of relevant work history.
And that would be the case, and finally we’re at the root of the problem; the Government. (sorry I wanted to make that all dramatic for comedic effect but really, that’s at best like a half-joke.)
Are the Poors really so fucking 2nd class citizens that they don’t deserve a voice when figuring out the best way to get employed? The problem is [L\u00e4Sn\u00c4oLoPaKkO].
I have good enough diploma to show, it is 8 years old but it’s there and I can promise that I have the skills I haven’t had the chance to show yet. (hopefully this site and writing about my projects in detail help with that at least partially.)
Every class is either something that I already know and use day-to-day, specifics from software without actually going into details, online tutorials and videos I can look at and do whenever I feel and without exception during the time I would much rather use to actually look into jobs and learning opportunities.
I’m getting booted either now or eventually, either case I’m without benefits, might as well not care about when, take the learning materials we’ve given, get some use out of them on my own but actually look into finding work, two months is not fun to do without funds.
At least I finally learnt that there is no use in joining any study program employment agency doesn’t force, it’s good-bye for food if the place ends up being actively harmful for your employment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n