Fear The Caseworker!
Note that this piece is unfinished, but at some point I liked the startBefore anything else, I have to point out that I have been on some form of government assistance for the much larger portion of the last ten years. Because of that I also am aware that ALL of the social services and entitlement rewards are full well beyond capacity with people who are not quite as presentable as some of the case workers (Though certainly not all of them). But my righteous indignation comes because they are in a field that theoretically should involve some level of compassion and empathy as opposed to anger and hostility for the clients.
In the last ten years of my life, I can count using both of my hands the number of helpful and resourceful social workers assigned to me. And when they were good, it made it seem worth the effort necessary to fulfill the mountains of paperwork and severe degradation one must go through in order to become the amazing 8th class citizen collectively known as recipients of entitlement aid.
The attitude of the vast majority of these self-made martyrs for the government cause seems as though they feel that part of the immense benefits package they receive should include a bubble that will save them from the gases that surround you and cause your poverty. As if they believe that poverty is some form of airborne illness that will cause them to suffer as they have made so many others suffer. While it is true that Medicare is accepted in many places, those places have been scary enough to keep me away, despite having had some serious illnesses. Why, You may ask? Because I am tired of the derisive sneer, the grime of the office (doctor's or case worker's), and the inescapable secretary who never once looks at you while he/she/it pours landscapes of paperwork into your arms. All the while getting hostile over the phone they never hung up with while whomever DARED to call ahead to find out about what papers they might need gets an earful of the finest bureaucratic hatred a state employee can provide.
My question for them is this, Why go into a line of work if you simply cannot find the gumption to care about the HUMAN being on the other side of the desk? Become a dentist, or a proctologist, or if you have to work as a civil servant, go work for the IRS. At least people are expecting to get bent over for the anal probe from the tax man. At least there is a modicum of truth in advertising with these government issue demon-spawn
This rant prematurely ended.
This is almost certainly from some kind of journal. It has been edited for your sanity.
A collection of thought patterns
What fun I have. The past few days have been rough. Actually the past six months have been rough, but it got better for a bit. Then the poop hit the wall. All these realizations I have come to and I am getting a little tired of it actually. People spend their entire lives not having a clue as to why they do what they do. Never understanding that the drugs and alchohol are nothing more than ways to run away or escape the pain. And as I get older and more experienced I realise that everyone's life sucks. Some people manage to delude themselves into thinking that all of it means something, or that it's all great snuggly bunnies and paper-mache dinosaurs. Guess what, buttercup? It's not. It's pain and blood and suffering and anguish and occasionally you get a break. Every now and then you get a glimmer of hope that turns out to be a rapidly approaching train at the other end of the tunnel.I don't mean to say that everything sucks, happiness is an illusion, and the only reward is death. It does balance out. Great things happen in life, things you enjoy and remember forever. But it's like newtonian karma, for every force there is an equal and opposite force. For all the pleasure there is pain. For all the love, there is hate. And after a while it all sort of blends together.
I suppose that this thought process has something to do with my knowledge of being Bi-Polar. Every time I go up I know I am going down. Which probably gets reinforced by the knowledge of it's existence. But it seems like it's becoming more obvious. Maybe I'm just not quite right in the head.
I'm through coulda shoulda woulda been a has been
through pretending never ending stories of a hundred years gone.
worthless purpose used up vessel
muscle contraction spine reaction
divine assinine twelve inches of vinyl satisfaction.
never here cotton ear twine bind tie me up
keep me away from humanity, ideas are dangerous
never try always cry attempt to fly never ever question why
impaired and scared and daring to believe in all you say"
This one is severely dated, but it very much makes me laugh to read it
Why windows sucks and lives to tell about it
An observation from a non-punditIt should be pointed out from the start that I am a Macintosh user. But that was probably obvious from the title alone. Maybe a little history will say why…I always had the “artist’s vision”, but couldn’t express it properly. At a pivotal point in my life a friend showed me how to use Apple's Mac OS. This was way before Mac OS X, and even further before iOS. At the time windows was not a viable GUI option, couldn’t do art or graphics, and sound capabilities were utter crap. So the obvious choice was Macintosh for me.
As time has gone on and I have learned more and more about my choices, I felt it was only fair to give the other side a fair shake. I do my best to keep an open mind to the competition because My mom always told me you can’t say you hate tomatoes until you’ve tried them. That stuck with me as a philosophy I should keep.
Not quite ready to make the financial commitment to a pc, I got a copy of virtual pc. It was slow and a huge waste of cpu cycles, but it gave me a taste of what to expect. I tried a few audio programs as games were out of the question. I wrote some neat stuff, thought Acid was amazing. The OS (windows 98, Second Edition) was similar enough to a mac that I was still comfortable. But the speed was so crappy that I thought there had to be more. And the mark was left on me, it was in fact stable as hell compared to the buggy Mac OS I was used to.
So for my 28th birthday my dad gave me his old Laptop. It was only two or three years old, and most important: It was a real PC! Not some virtual creation that had to emulate an entirely different chip structure! But, at the same time, my mom gave me a Macintosh Powerbook for my birthday. And here’s where the fur flies…
The Pc was:
Toshiba Satellite series running at 333mhz.
- 64mbs of RAM,
- 4 gig hard drive.
- 2mb VRAM on a PCI chip.
- Yamaha sound card.
- 56k modem.
- Floppy drive,
- CD-ROM,
- serial port,
- external vga monitor.
- Single USB port.
I know, weak.
The powerbook was:
powerbook G3 series also running at 333mhz.
- 192Mbs of Ram.
- 4gig hard drive.
- 8mb ATI mobility graphics.
- No sound card.
- 56k modem.
- 10/100mb Ethernet.
- 24xCD-ROM.
- SCSI Port.
- 2 USB Ports.
- 2 removable media bays. - External VGA Video, S-video.
Now granted, the powerbook has some better specs. But, at the time I was familiar with using a Desktop G3 Mini-tower Yosemite(blue and white) of about the same specs and It was buggy and slow to say the least.
The powerbook is a lot more stable than the Yosemite. It is slower, and doesn’t have the graphics capabilities of the minitower, but it is way less likely to lose info. If I apply the same concept of laptop safer than desktop to the Satellite I fear for my life if and when I get a desktop pc. The satellite almost seems to enjoy freezing up, crashing and generally being a failure. Because of it's "aggressive" specs I have an amazing choice of games. The only one I have found that runs on this pc is baldurs gate. Games either require way more graphic ability, or you have to move back a few versions to windows 95. I had acid pro 2 working, I bought acid dj 3.0 (a consumer version of acid pro 3.0) brought it home and found out I needed Internet Explorer 5. No where on the box did it say that IE5 was not included on the disk. So I had to borrow several Cds from a friend to put explorer 5 in. Now despite the fact that the Satellite exceeds all the requirements, the program has frozen in some way every time I have used it.The headphone jack on the pc is also a miracle of modern failure. To get a signal loud enough to transmit through a standard stereo, you have to crank the volume all the way up. When you do this, the hiss is almost deafening. So, the main reason I wanted any kind of pc was a bit of a bust.
And then there’s the software selection. I will be the first to admit that in comparison the Macintosh selection of software is almost non-existent. When you walk into any large computer store it is glaringly obvious. The Mac is always back in a corner, with maybe twenty square feet of space. The PC software is so pervasive they have it coming out of the ceilings! There are so many choices it is almost dizzying just to choose a media player. But pc software is a lot like friends who own pcs, always more than willing to tell you they will help, but unable to when you actually require it. Sure, PCs have all the choices, but Macs have all the quality.
I know that a lot of my prejudice comes from the fact that I am finally getting familiar with the Mac format. When something goes wrong, I usually know how to fix it. But moving to a new platform means learning new terminology. Windows is an obvious rip off of a Mac. Too many things are similar, but just different enough that a lawyer would not quite be able to make the argument stick. So when I go to look up the answer to the problem, I can’t find the solution because I am using the wrong terminology.
Any argument regarding micro$oft being a monopoly is silly. And of course Microsoft used unfair business practices. They wanted to win at any cost. The obvious thievery from apple should be a big red sign. The market shares are only more proof. Macintosh I know was at 7% recently. Linux is not a viable option, so I don’t imagine it having too much of a slice of the pie.
Again, Rant ended prematurely.
