I got a speeding ticket for doing 50mph in a 40mph zone on Thursday night (St. Patty’s Day) while I was heading home from the store – westbound on Austin Bluffs near the storage shed place. I didn’t see the cop until he already on his way to pulling me over. Oh well – $120 fine & four points.. Almost 4 years of being traffic-violation free is quite the feat for me 😉 Of course I’ll reschedule the court date like 23890 times and try to get out of it. Maybe a DA will be nice and let me plea to something lower so my insurance doesn’t go to hell. I’ll update on that when it comes, but it’s not too big a deal. I had a helluva Friday; totally swamped from 9am until 1am. I started feeling like shit around 4pm, and it got worse for Saturday morning. I slept from ~5pm Saturday night unil ~1am here and there, and then from ~1am until almost 1pm today (Sunday). I never sleep that much, so I’m going to guess my body is not pleased. I have a sore throat and a stuffed up nose, which isn’t too bad. Hopefully it’ll pass quickly. I’ve talked to quite a few people recently about College VS The Working Life and people don’t believe me when I say I’d give almost anything to have a degree. They always point out that I’m successful, own a business, yada yada. That’s nice and all, but I don’t think they’ve had the opportunity to enjoy the artificial ceiling that I get to pound on — no degree means very little easy vertical movement. In a typical corporate environment, you get your degree, you get your job, and if you don’t totally fsck it up, you advance. Put in your time, take out your pay. For me, that doesn’t work … I can’t even get in the door to a MegaCorp without a degree, thus I’m stuck with small businesses, which invariably have low salary caps and don’t offer all the cool shit big business does. Woe is me. In summary, if you have a degree don’t /EVER/ wish you had done something else with those 4-5 years of your life, or else I might come slap you for being incredibly stupid. There are a bazillion people out there — myself included — that would give up everything they have for a degree, even if it came along with living in your parent’s basement and $50k of debt.
Ticket and Being sick
2005-03-21 15:30:35 – realbighead
Actually, having gotten a degree and worked for a corporation, the whole glass ceiling thing isn’t quite true. The bigger issue is age discrimination, in that corporations are unwilling to give much responsibility to young people in general, degree or not. That being said, having the degree is still useful every now and then. Especially once you move out of the parents’ basement.
2005-03-22 16:19:06 – Master Ha-reed
Does CO Springs have any sort of "deferred sentencing" program? The hippies in Boulder do, which worked out well when I got a ticket a little over a year ago. Basically the way it works is that you plead guilty to the offense, pay $100 to the court, and they hold off telling the DMV. If you go a year without anything more than parking tickets, then they wipe your record clean and the DMV (and therefore your insurance company) never finds out.
2005-03-22 19:35:39 – rand0m
Yea, here they usually let you take a driving program or something to reduce the points. I got the deferred sentencing thing when I was en route to Santa Fe doing 96 in a 75, and it worked out great. I’ll have to remember to ask about that.
2005-03-27 00:53:22 – Hellbent Rob
Humanities degrees are worth less than the TP you wipe your arse with, and I dare anyone to disagree with me. Randy, look into an executive program at your local college/university. They usually have pretty liberal allowances for counting job experience as credit hours or will put you through a series of equivalency tests. I knocked-out about a year of my B.A. doing that. The University of Pheonix has a pretty good business program but anything else is taken at your own risk. Quite a few decent schools, however, have online degree programs where you can pretty much complete an entire degree, particularly computer related. If you do go back to school, I know several people that got these dual business/computer degrees and are make crazy money without any experience.
2005-03-28 15:37:41 – Master Ha-reed
The value of a humanities degree depends a lot on what you want out of it, and more importantly, where you went to school. I would say that an English major at Columbia is worth a helluva lot more than an English major at CU. Further, if you’re going into education or law or politics, a humanities degree is perfectly fine. In fact, even in medicine, a humanities degree can work better than a std. bio/chem degree, since it sets you apart from the crowd. $.02