On college and employment (2 of 2): A path forward?

At the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, there's this (mildly lower class) (white) couple who I recognize from them being in a few times, a (bigger) guy with a beard that shoots out all over his face in big tufts, and this (smaller) (thinner) (drawn face) (younger-mom-with-kids-at-home-looking) lady.

And, we were chit-chatting, and it turns out that the guy had worked in restaurants as a chef for years, and then someone he knew had gotten out of it and into industrial solar, and he basically could go through training and start right away, and now he's making like $65 an hour doing multiple jobs, primarily surveying and staking out the postholes where they put in the stands for the panels.

And, it was all around the area, so you don't have to commute far, and they didn't work you to death with overtime, and training was like one town over in some conference center in a (notoriously rundown) (nearby) town.

So, I got his email for my neighbor, who had also been telling me that he was looking for something more outside that might be good.

"And do they drugtest?", I was like, mentioning that that was important to my neighbor, since he was a recreational marijuana user.

"No," the guy was like, and he said he smoked too.

"No way," I was like.

So, like the next day or maybe the day after, I handed that information off to my neighbor, and he was impressed that it seemed quick and that training was nearby, and he said that he had been thinking of looking into trades classes at the nearby community college.

I also said that the guy had said that some people he knows do windmill tech, and that that supposedly pays like $80 an hour after you get your thousand hours in at like $25 an hour during your apprenticeship.

. . .

(Just think of this, by the way, that here you have a kid going to a top-tier nationally-known school with everything paid for, and he's still so dispirited about the economy, and couldn't figure out a path forward in college over the span of multiple years as things were falling apart, and he has now been looking to bus driving and air traffic control and now maybe trades... Just not good.)

On college and employment (1 of 2): A backstory.

The other week I had been reading out on the porch of the fronthouse in the one (college) town where I live now, and I ended up chit-chatting some with one of the upstairs neighbors, the (longer-haired) and (less jumpy) one.

Basically, he did end up graduating, and he had quit his job at a local national retailer a few months ago so he could take a short international vacation for a few weeks, and now he's back to looking for a job again.

He had gotten into retail through warehouse work during the pandemic, and then entered a managerial role where he was making $23 an hour, but he was saying that all his friends he had worked with had left, and there was no reason to keep on.

"You always have to quit and go somewhere else to make more money," he was like, and he was telling me that he had seen a few long-term employees who had managed to rack up like $3 more an hour from multiple raises, only to have wage inflation mean that new hires were suddenly making as much as them, but their wages never changed, despite that.

He was also saying that city bus drivers can make it good -- his dad is one and has put his years in and can now pull in over $120K with overtime -- and that maybe he would be an air traffic controller for a few years, and grab that money and then get out.

"So did you graduate?", I was like, and he said that yes, he had, the last semester, finally.

(A while ago he had told me that his degree really didn't do anything, but he was committed to getting around to graduating, so his grandmother could see him.)

I also asked just a little bit, and it turns out that he did bio because he thought it might get him somewhere but he didn't really like it that much, and then he kept applying for internships and kept getting turned down and so he could never get a lab job, and then after a while he just stopped applying by like his second or third year, and a bio degree like he has is pretty useless without lab experience, but he finished to finish, especially since he had this "college prepayment" thing from his dad where back in the late 1990s his dad had paid like ten thousand dollars down, and that meant all his college was paid for now, even for his degree that doesn't really do anything.

"It's just so freeing to give up," he was like.

And, I had to agree.

And, I told him the multiple professions where I had had leads or had made inroads or had tried to configure and reconfigure to maybe get somewhere, and how it was just endless frustration, and then wage compression and short staffing in eldercare was just horrible to find yourself in the middle of, especially realizing that it wasn't coming back on any timescale where you could salvage a decent job like you had anticipated when you had gotten into it going on 5-6 years ago, now.

And, when I listed the different type of jobs where I had had leads or had made inroads into over the course of like twelve years, he just gave this sharp dark laugh and was like, "Those are all the areas where they don't need anyone."

. . .

(I did agree with his sentiment, though I mildly corrected him, saying that you could walk out the door right now and get jobs there, they just worked you to death for no money and no real sure advancement, and so weren't worth having.)

A dream of something slightly off.

The other week I dreamnt -

I'm somewhere reclining on my side a bit like a (Roman) would eat on a triclinium, and my mouth is half open and my orange-flavored fish oil capsules that I take pretty regularly for health reasons are starting to melt in my mouth, and I can taste this oily and somewhat orange flavor start to pervade my mouth...

And then, I wake up.

. . .

(My fish oil capsules really are orange flavored, but I've never actually kept the gel cap in my mouth long enough for it to dissolve through so I can discover what's inside and what it tastes like.)

Separate genesis of ideas.

The other day at work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker told me that her and my (new-ish) (younger) (tall) (Thai) coworker had been talking about (South Asian from South Asia) customers, and they had agreed that they probably were so badly behaved because of the caste system.

"No way," I was like, and then I told her that I had been thinking the very same thing, a while ago.

And, we talked about how often one requests something like a mug of hot water, and then after you bring that someone else makes a request for the very same thing, and then after you bring more a third time someone else wants some too, and they do this even if you check each time if anyone else wants anything else, and even if you confirm immediately afterward that you only need to bring like one whatever to the table.

"But it could be the caste system in a different way," I was like, then, floating the idea that it's not some entitled behavior because they know they're from a rich person caste, but rather because maybe back home in (India) people from the servant-whatever caste don't dare push back even tactfully like a waiter would here, when they ask if anyone else needs anything else. And so, their bad behavior goes unchecked and gets ingrained.

At least, that was my idea.

Two recent doings at work...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) The one (new) (Chinese-American) server who's been a hostess before but not a server was like, "Yeah, there really are cultural differences in how people behave," and she was telling me that she was frustrated at this table of mostly (South Asian from South Asia) (undergraduate age) students and a few (South Asian-American) (undergraduate age) students, because they were all talking over one another and not really responding to her when she was trying to finalize their order, as they kept the one menu out on the table maybe for later, like people from that culture(s?) often do.

2) During a slow day, I taught my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker and my one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker Exquisite Corpse, and we took turns passing each other the little drawings that we were making on the back of old receipts that we keep under the counter and staple together to make the little booklets that we take customers' orders in.

And, when I told my one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker in (Spanish) that Frida Kahlo played this game, her eyes got big for a second and she was like, "Ohhhhhhhhhhhh," and you could tell that she was very pleased that we were doing something that Frida Kahlo had also done.

(My one [chubby] [Thai] coworker didn't know who Frida Kahlo is.)

A few of our drawings were quite good, but we had miscommunicated and so the top person had drawn down through the neck to the shoulders, and then the person below them had started with the neck and then drawn a second set of shoulders again, and together it just looked off.

So, when my one (younger) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker was saying that we had done really a good job on two of them, I pointed that out and said it didn't look right, and she was like, Hmmph, and then it was like a lightbulb went off and she suddenly took those two drawings and folded them to hide the second set of neck and shoulders, and then the drawings really looked stellar.

Preliminary finding response...

...to my giant discovery:

1) Hundreds of hits to my short blogpost and a minor uptick in activity to a few of my professional webpages;

2) A couple questions on social media (one which seemed to minimize what I did a bit, and which blew past a distinction that I had forcefully introduced and should have already been intelligible to anyone who's done work in the language);

3) A comment on social media from a guy who studies a different branch of the same language family, where he says the overall finding makes intuitive sense from what we know of other related languages;

4) Some new social media followers, mostly randos but maybe like one grad student at a top program; and

5) No real discernible reaction from people inside the "profession" itself.

My guess is that anyone inside the profession is sitting tight and biting their tongue, and don't know what to make of it, to the extent that anyone has noticed.

It's like they're all looking for cues on what to believe, though, G-dd-ss help them, I don't know if the people they're looking towards have done the baseline necessary work to build the minimal skillsets to offer a competent evaluation.

A springtime diversion.

As everything is blooming, with sprouts and bulbs and buds of light green filling the trees, I'm looking for the first signs of what I call "the demon trees," that is, that invasive species "the tree of heaven" that's everywhere around me and which my landlord removed a big one of them from the yard by my cottage like last year or maybe two years ago.

There, the bark around the stump is rotting and starting to peel away, and I can already easily kick some off, after the winter.

And, though it was sending out shoots last year, this year there don't appear to be any, yet.

But, like last week, I had the curtain open in my kitchen, and looking out into my neighbor's yard where there's an old falling-apart garage that no-one uses, I could see the outlines of the thin long woody shoots of the demon trees that have grown up by its walls over the past several years, and the very tippy-tops of them seem to be throwing off their palm-fronds, again.