Serious Advice Needed

Paying for College
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<p>How much is tuition for Ash, Thumper? The wife could get up to $18K combined in Staffords and Pell. The COA would include what Ash considers reasonable living expenses for a student, on top of tuition, books and supplies. If the OP also takes 2nd bachelors courses, he could also get Staffords. Between the two of them with what is left after tuition, fees and supplies are paid, there could be enough to eke out living expenses. </p>

<p>I am listing this as a possibility, because it is. But the problem with taking this course of action is that unless OP and wife find a directed career path that pretty much guarantees a decent paying job such a medical equipment operation, what can easily happen here is that they come out of this just older and owing money AND STILL BE UNEMPLOYABLE. The one thing they have going for them right now is that THEY DO NOT OWE STUDENT LOANS. That is one heck of a monkey to have on ones back in addition to being unable to find a job. </p>

<p>So whatever the issue is about not being able to keep a job is a serious one to address, and just taking courses and getting another degree is not going to solve it. You can end up in more trouble than now if it is not addressed. If there is something about the OP that makes people reluctant to hire him and if he cannot find or keep a job now, even a directed job degree or certificate is not going guarantee employment.</p>

<p>OP, at present, writes well, has care experience, is married,is in his 40s, has an English degree. If he has no criminal record or other major issue, he should be able to find some kind of employment.</p>

42

<p>

I’m not sure that’s a good idea if you are trying to maintain Ohio residency, which seems a little sketchy as it is, what with being homeless and all.</p>

<p>cpt tuition seems to be about $6K a year.</p>

43

<p>I would like to second what cpt said above. At this stage of their lives it is best not to obtain any student loans.</p>

<p>David, please follow the advice given on this forum. Even if it means being in a homeless center for a little bit. Also, while you still have valid mailing address, please apply for welfare benefits. I don’t know the law in your state, but you might at least be eligible for some food-stamps. You might be reluctant to do so - I understand the feeling from first hand experience - but this will be a temporary situation. Once you register with the social services, they might also help you get a job - to get you off their program.</p>

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<p>Okay…college is out at present, as the overall financial picture is not amenable to it. We talked with a rep from Blue Ash on the phone today. We plan to stay here for a month longer until my mother should be physically able to be back to her normal routines including driving. If college is a consideration again in the future, and I am not saying that it definitely will be, we would probably lean more toward the social work side of the psychology field. Within this month left here, we will exhaust every job possibility that we can. My wife is talking with a travel agency for a telephone solicitation job right now, as she has had experience with that sort of thing in the past. They said they don’t care about references and spotty job history, which is a plus. They do quotas, but if it lasted even a while it would help. I have definitely considered free-lance writing. Thought I had one started a couple of months ago, but it turned out to be a scam. I will continue to look at others, including the one mentioned.</p>

<p>After the month, if there is still nothing, we will move on to a homeless shelter somewhere…pick the one that seems the best.</p>

<p>We are receiving food stamps at the moment.</p>

<p>No, there was no criminal record.</p>

<p>A couple of other jobs I had were Wal-Mart, where they were demanding overtime with no pay (the court case over that is well-documented and affected a ton of employees all across the country), and another motel where the problem was completely ignoring safety procedures where blood-borne pathogens were considered and lying about recycling.</p>

<p>The problems with potential employers has always been work history and lack of references.</p>

<p>Depending on the particular homeless shelter, and its affiliations, the fact that my wife is an ordained non-denominational Christian minister may open up avenues and allow her to help people from that standpoint, as she has always wanted to. She changed religions for a while because of negativity that she found in Christianity, but came back to it with the feeling that the only real negativity in it comes from people and how they twist it for their own ends…it is all about intent. And I am right there beside her with that, too.</p>

<p>I believe that we will be okay and that we will be on a good track before long.</p>

<p>My thanks to everyone for the advice and kind words.</p>

<p>I will leave here with the hope that the posters who have a tendency to jump to conclusions will take a step back and realize that it is very difficult to synthesize one’s entire life down into a few paragraphs and make it accurately understood for those who have not lived it themselves.</p>

<p>If you are committed to giving advice and assistance on this board, please have patience and understanding and don’t be quick to make assumptions that may have absolutely no foundation in fact.</p>

<p>In order to be effective and well-received, you have to extend your thinking beyond your own personal paradigm.</p>

<p>Peace and Thanks</p>

<p>David</p>

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<p>If you go back to school, seriously consider directed career track courses, not general ones. Social work is a field with more people looking for jobs than there positions open. That situation makes for difficulties in attaining such work, and low pay for those positions open with exceptions to relatively few living wage opportunities. The same as ministries and other such jobs. You are at a stage where you want a skill, a certificate, a niche on the job market where you are in demand. You and your wife already have the education, you–the degree even, and the experience in fields where there are just too many applicants for the positions available. Your experiences, though on the extreme are typical of such a situation. </p>

<p>I also recommend that you talk to a job counselor or a minister or someone who can give you face to face advice as to how to act, make decisions, judge nuances of a situation, so that you can deal with the situations that you faced without ending up jobless and homeless. These are challenges that we all face and have to learn to swing. Somehow, you have not mastered how to deal with them. You are still relatively young, but once you get older, you risk being totally shut out of the job market if you do not figure out how to deal with these everyday issues. Your own advice in your last post really applies directly to you. I say this, not to be mean or high handed, but in hopes that you get help. You have all of the pieces needed to be gainfully employed, and you do have some good options before you, but you need to know how to deal with them by extending YOUR thinking and behavior beyond YOUR own personal paradigm.</p>

<p>Good luck to you.</p>

46

<p>How about truck driving? There are inexpensive community college courses or trucking companies that will train you. The pay is decent for home every night delivery drivers and better for over the road drivers. You could have a decent job in two months giving you time to figure what else you want to do. And your wife could do it to.</p>

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<p>cptofthehouse, my wife and I are very adaptive people who also have basically dedicated our lives up to this point to looking at things from all sides and being especially sensitive to the outlook of others. We have always gone very far out of our way to be understanding and give others the benefit of the doubt. We are very introspective people who always engage in self-analysis to see what we might be able to improve within ourselves. We are friendly, have pleasant manners, and we have encountered many instances in which total strangers will approach us and start talking to us about their problems and asking our advice.</p>

<p>There are two things that I want you to especially take into consideration:</p>

<p>1) We have learned that today, more and more, employers are using computers as their first step in sorting employment applications. A lot of people may not be aware of that fact…that the first one that ‘reads’ an application is not a human being. Beyond that, many human beings themselves are exhibiting behavior that resembles automatons. Therefore, if your ‘situation’ differs from what is considered to be the ordinary, average, or ‘normal’ it is a strike against you. In other words, if there are any ‘markers’ that stand out, then you are not seen as having ‘all of your ducks in a row’ and you are likely to be screened out early on in the process. Time is money and time also runs on percentages. The percentage of people without their ducks in a row (no matter the reasons) that are likely to be good risks to hire is low. That method kicks out the good people as well as the bad, without prejudice. That’s just the way it is and that is what we have been facing. Most businesses simply do not have the time to ‘care’ because of the way society and its complex interplay of facets are structured in this day and age. We know that we will have a better shot at getting something with a smaller business that might operate more in old fashioned ways. The problem with that is that the smaller businesses have started taking their cues from the larger ones because they believe that is the path to a more effective way of doing things and thus a healthier profit. We can fine-tune ourselves endlessly in the approach from our end, but when we simply do not have the positive markers…stable employment history and references…it’s not going to make much difference. Obviously, because we have done it. All along the way.</p>

<p>2) Near the end of the volunteer experience in Tuscaloosa, there was a job opening that seemed ideal. We had been volunteering in a donation distribution warehouse. It was a former Foodmax grocery store that had gone out of business three years before. At some point, part of the building had been either purchased or leased by Tractor Supply Corporation. The restrooms in the former grocery store were no longer functional, so all volunteers had to walk next door to TSC to use the restrooms there. Doing so was how I found out about the job opening, as it was posted on the front door. TSC sells tractor supplies, tools, feed, etc. That is right up my alley, because of my own farm experience. I submitted an application and I let the one who collected it know that if the manager so desired, he could have the rather rare opportunity to easily see a prospective candidate at work firsthand, by simply walking a few steps next door. After a reasonable amount of time had elapsed with no response, I inquired and was told that the manager refused to do that! When I asked why, I was told “He is temperamental.” This was his own employee saying it. Later, I sent a letter to the CEO of TSC and brought the entire matter to his attention. The company’s home page on the net has a lot of public relations information on it to the effect that the company values diversity and understands that different people have different situations in life. I can tell you that the PR words are evidently just a show to try to maintain a good image in the public eye, because the CEO passed the letter down to the company’s human resources manager who just fluffed the whole thing off.</p>

<p>Please do not attempt to lay this all at our feet and make it out to be our fault, or that we have extensive shortcomings in our approach. We have always been extremely pro-active in our attempts to improve matters from our side of the spectrum.</p>

<p>The more that you harp on that, the less understanding and more arrogant you make yourself appear to be.</p>

<p>David</p>

48

<p>David,</p>

<p>I do not believe cpt was dismissing the fact that it is really hard to find a job right now. Based on your situation, you might have a distorted view of people’s actions. Cpt was trying to help. </p>

<p>Based on your response to cpt (and some previous posts), it appears that you might not be aware of how your actions might come off to other people. In your example with the equipment company, you don’t mention how exactly your conversation with the employee ended, but I wonder if you tried to persuade the employee to arrange a meeting with his boss. </p>

<p>I am puzzled what you expected to happen when you sent that letter to CEO. You had nothing to gain by contacting CEO of that company. This kind of behavior does not make you look good in the eyes of the employers. You need a neutral third-party to give you an honest assessment of how you are perceived by other people and what you can change.</p>

<p>I also encourage you to go back and look for through the advice given so far (church, community organizations, government services, temp agencies) to see what resources (in addition to what you’ve been doing so far) you can utilize to help you lend a job.</p>

49

<p>lerkin, I feel that you are reading things in that are not there. </p>

<p>Take a step back and really consider what you are saying.</p>

<p>How can you say that a letter to the CEO of a company has no purpose and that it represents some kind of questionable behavior? Are you making assumptions about the tone and the content of my letter? It seems to me that you are. Because the fact is that I was completely cordial and worked the facts of what happened with the manager of the store into the content in such a way as to simply express a bit of surprise that the individual approached things that way, in view of the company’s stated way of approaching customers, employees, etc. People write letters to CEOs all the time, for all kinds of different purposes. Do you have it in mind that every time they do so it is from a combative, confrontational standpoint?</p>

<p>One thing that I have learned very well is that the media has a great tendency to focus on negatives. Positive stories are a much smaller percentage of the news that we receive.</p>

<p>Don’t fall into the trap of hearing X number of reports of people being in some form of conflict with CEOs and starting to believe that every contact goes that way.</p>

<p>The media needs to be viewed with a critical eye. Not ‘critical’ in the sense of coming down harshly on everything that is reported, but rather with balanced discernment that keeps one from believing any one thing is true merely because it is heard in greater repetition than something else.</p>

<p>Adolf Hitler said, “If you tell someone something long enough and loud enough, pretty soon they will start to believe it.”</p>

<p>It’s that method that earned him a lot of followers. While he is an extreme example, the media can influence people’s thinking much more than they realize.</p>

<p>It simply may happen in a slower and more subtle way.</p>

<p>David</p>

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<p>For the record, the employee whom I spoke with at TSC, who was second in charge, made it very clear that her boss was completely unapproachable. Once he said something, that was law and the end of the matter. She seemed very uncomfortable even speaking about him. I can only imagine what she had to endure every day. She seemed to be very personable and mild-mannered. She expressed what came across more as fear of him rather than animosity toward him.</p>

51

<p>David,</p>

<p>I did not think you wrote rude or belligerent letter. What I did think is that your behavior was not appropriate given the situation (and not productive).</p>

<p>While people write letters to CEOs, your situation was not the one that warranted the letter. The manager did not do anything wrong. He deemed that you are not appropriate candidate and did not think that he should go extra step to change his mind. The manager did what he felt was best for the company. As long as he did not break any employment laws, his conduct was appropriate. </p>

<p>I am still not clear what exactly you wanted to gain from sending that letter. There is no way the company would make the manager to reconsider. Getting a job is as much about chemistry as it is about job skills. Your letter certainly would not endear you to the manager.</p>

<p>From my point of view, if the letter is a representative example how you react to things, than you might come out to people the wrong way. The way I see it, our behavior is shaped by our experiences. Don’t you think the desperation of your situation affects how you react to things?</p>

<p>I don’t think we will ever agree on this matter. Contrary to what you think, I really do wish you the best. Given your circumstances, I also don’t blame for reacting the way you do.</p>

52

<p>

Did they ever contact you regarding your application, or do you feel that it just went into the circular file?</p>

<p>BTW, have you ever heard of Godwin’s Law?</p>

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<p>I did not feel that my letter was inappropriate because I addressed issues that were beyond the scope of my own situation. The employee whom I spoke with effectively conveyed that there was quite a problem with that manager. It was very suggestive of poor treatment not only of employees, but also of customers. She may very well have been fearful of losing her job if she attempted to go over his head and bring the situation to the attention of someone at a higher level. I felt that regardless of whether or not I were hired, something needed to be said for the greater good. I was not just thinking about myself. If the roles were reversed and I were a CEO, I would certainly want to hear about such a matter because keeping such an individual in such a position reflects poorly on the company as a whole.</p>

<p>I had not heard about Godwin’s Law, but I did take the time just now to read about it.</p>

<p>There is a principle that I try to adhere to at all times. I don’t always succeed, but I really do attempt to keep it in mind as much as possible:</p>

<p>If you encounter something identical 1000 times, you still have to keep your awareness sharp because number 1001 may be only superficially similar and not in fact identical.</p>

<p>In other words, 1000 people may bring up something to do with the Nazis in a conversation, with an identical motive but person number 1001 might have an entirely different motive that is completely benign and without an ulterior component.</p>

<p>Godwin’s Law lumps everyone in together and shuts everything down. It is as if to say, “I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what each and every person has in mind when they mention Nazis in a conversation.” </p>

<p>All patterns have exceptions. You can’t legitimately say something like, “Here we have a pattern and there can not be any exceptions to this pattern whatsoever, at any time.”</p>

<p>That would require omnipotence.</p>

<p>I can see where Godwin’s Law could be seriously abused. See a pattern of X number of examples of something and then say “aha!” and stigmatize anyone afterward that mentioned the same thing.</p>

<p>That could extend beyond the Nazis to virtually anything.</p>

<p>Where would it end?</p>

<p>I feel that Godwin’s Law is extremely arrogant and presumptuous.</p>

<p>I equate it with the college professors who make the claim that they know exactly what was in the minds of the writers of literary classics. They can get right inside the heads of people who have long since passed away and tell you just what was going on at any given moment and what they tell you about it is unassailable. There are no other possibilities and no room for debate, because they know.</p>

<p>There is a word for that. It is egomania.</p>

<p>I can honestly tell you that when I mentioned Adolf Hitler, I had no ulterior motive. It was an example that came to mind and I mentioned it. Nothing more. I even said that it was an extreme example. I did not absolutely need to use it, but neither do I feel that false assumptions should be made just because I did use it. I could just as easily have said something like, “Little Johnny knows that if he screams long enough and loud enough in the grocery store, his parents will likely believe that the easiest way to get him to be quiet is to buy him the candy that he wants.”</p>

<p>The simple point is influences on behavior…whether one mentions Adolf Hitler or a much less extreme example.</p>

<p>David</p>

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<p>You have come to a point in your life where if you and your wife do not become self sufficient, it could become a major problem. You need to focus on that point and not on other issues in order to gain a handle on the situation. When you are in a position where you are taking care of yourselves adequately, you can take the luxury of addressing other things. You have been distracted by too many thing in your life so that you are not in the position of taking care of yourself now and you are getting up there in the age. Some things that you are doing are clearly not to your advantage, given where you are. Please do get help from counseling from someone who can see you and directly give you advice on your interactions so that you are more able to get what you want out of life.</p>

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<p>

Godwin doesn’t say anything about what people are thinking or about whether using a Nazi/Hitler analogy is appropriate. Just that there is a high probability that sooner or later someone will use one. i.e. regardless of which direction the discussion approaches the point from, sooner or later it tends to approach the point of one particular analogy. There is nothing arrogant or presumptuous about pointing that out.</p>

<p>And it is the use of the analogy itself which tends to shut down a discussion, any opponent not wanting to be seen as being on the same page with Hitler and all.</p>

<p>/return to topic</p>

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<p>DBanner1, the amount of time spent on this forum could be used more productively. Perhaps that is your problem, an inability to prioritize things and manage time?</p>

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<p>If people do not feel confident in the ability to further a discussion and distance themselves from anything to do with Hitler and the Nazis, that is not the fault of the one who has brought Hitler and the Nazis into the discussion. Any discussion has a full range of history to draw from.</p>

<p>I could say that as of today, a great many discussions sooner or later bring up the subject of South Park. If people have an aversion to that show, and don’t want to appear to be like one or more of the characters, does that mean that they should just let it shut down the discussion?</p>

<p>Godwin’s Law seems like an observation that has no real function. The same thing could be said about a great many things, not just Hitler and the Nazis.</p>

<p>Prioritization of time? People make it sound like that letter that I wrote consumed a great deal of time. It did not.</p>

<p>I have always done very well with managing time. I can get a lot of work done in a very short time. There was a day at the donation warehouse in Tuscaloosa when I was told that I did too much work and did not leave enough for a passing volunteer group coming in the next day to do. There had been a lack of communication from the top and up to that point the message had been that if there was work to be done it did not matter who did it, as long as it got done.</p>

<p>It is very true, however, that I have more important things to do than to continue attempting to address all of the wild assumptions that are made and kept no matter what is said.</p>

<p>Consider this thread closed.</p>

<p>David</p>

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<p>There are some implicit issues suggested by the OP’s posts, when read as a group, which seem well beyond the scope and function of this forum, and beyond the expertise of the posters, to address further. I have followed the thread and believe that there are clearly diminishing positve returns on these discussions. I will add that the gratuitous mentions of Hitler by OP in this context are problematic, at least for me.</p>

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<p>This thread has reached the point of diminishing returns.</p>

<p>Closing.</p>