Is that a bad thing? Just try and be happy with yourself. If that's you in your avatar photo, you have one of the best "Fuck yea!" expressions I've ever seen.
Yes, that's me in my avatar. Glad someone likes it, I was quite happy with how it turned out (it's actually a photo that was taken for my new work badge when my job title changed).
I've been reading through this thread and I guess I feel a bit guilty about how boring my life seems, given that everyone else seems to have it way way WAY rougher than I have. I mean OK, I was never a pampered rich kid but it's not like I had a hard knock life or anything. And it seems like largely, the bits that were sucky were entirely my own fault anyway.
Most of the schools I went to were either male single-gendered or only had girls in the Sixth Form (that's Years 12 and 13 to modern Brits, or grades... 11 and 12 I think for Americans). The one school I did go to that was fully coeducational, I was there between age 6 and age... 10 or 11 maybe? Anyway,
it looks like they have a snazzy website now. As you can see, it's a choir school, attached to the nearby Chichester Cathedral. It's a boarding school, so during term-time I was living there as well as going to school there.
My time there was marred by two significant incidents (there were others I think but these are two that particularly stand out). The first one, which got me suspended, happened in our dormitory. For some reason one of the other guys was throwing a slipper at the window - it was an old style sash window and was open just a little at the top, it seemed like he was trying to get the slipper to go through the gap. At the time, I thought this seemed like fun so I gave it a try myself - but there must have been some old putty or rotten wood or something in the window, because when the slipper I threw hit it, one of the small panes of glass fell out and crashed onto the street below. I'm led to believe nobody actually got hurt, but although I tried to make myself scarce I got caught (I think someone reported it) and got suspended.
The second incident, which resulted in me being "asked to leave" the choir, which had the knock-on effect of me losing my scholarship and having to leave the school as my parents couldn't afford the fees without the scholarship, was rather more prosaic. I found the sermons that took place in the cathedral to be incredibly boring, and would often try to amuse myself by looking at the numerical tables and whatnot in the back of the
Book of Common Prayer and trying to figure out when Easter would be for the next few years or whatever. On one particular occasion, when the Bishop happened to be the one giving the sermon, I fell asleep, and consequently was still sitting down when everyone else stood up and started singing. Obviously I rectified this as soon as I realised but the damage was already done, so this incident resulted in my eventual departure.
I went to a couple of different schools after that, both of which only had girls in the Sixth Form at the time (though Reigate Grammar School apparently went fully co-educational a couple of years after I left). Having never had a girlfriend and no real opportunity to get one, at the time I dismissed the whole concept of "relationships" as being unimportant and ended up concentrating on my studies (it probably didn't help that I got introduced to pornography while I was at Durham School). I got a boatload of GCSE and A-level qualifications which allowed me to easily get in to university - and this was back when there were still grants that paid your tuition fees, so I really regret this next part.
The university I went to was the University of Edinburgh, who also now
have a snazzy web site. Things went pretty well for the first year academically. Socially, on the other hand, things went... much less well. I joined the science fiction society (who also have a web site, but it's not snazzy and it apparently hasn't been updated since 2011) but due to my complete lack of social experience and previous dismissal of the importance of relationships I was a complete emo whiny asshole, and for my sins I am
persona non grata. Looking back on it, it seems like I felt depressed due to my lack of friends (as opposed to "people who would tolerate me" and "people who thought I was an annoying emo whiny asshole") but at the time I could not understand the problem at all. I bought a lot of books during the few years I was there.
Edinburgh was also the place where I got "proper" internet access. The UK didn't get any kind of broadband until 2001, so prior to my university time my only experience of the Internet was through metered dialup modem connections, which ended up costing my parents a bomb. I was already acquainted with USENET, but in my second and third years at Edinburgh I ended up just giving up going to lectures entirely and became a sort of Internet addict. I got introduced to IRC and MUDs and spent the vast majority of my time in #ircnewbies on DALnet (where I eventually became an op, though I left that behind a long time ago now) and on Aardvark MUD (which at the time was hosted at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and is now called Aardwolf MUD and hosted somewhere in the USA I think). I wouldn't say that I hacked the university's computers, because in those days security was pretty paper-thin or non-existent, but I had a pirated copy of PartitionMagic that I used to make an extra partition on the hard drive of one of the computers in the lab, with a drive letter that was normally used by a network drive (the beauty of this was that if anyone else logged on to it, they'd only see the network drive - the local drive didn't become visible unless you disconnected the network drive), which I used to store bunches of postage-stamp sized porn videos I downloaded from USENET until I could transfer them to my
Iomega Zip drive. I also downloaded erotic fiction and fanfiction which I printed out on the lab's printer when nobody else was around.
Eventually my lack of attendance at everything got me booted out of Edinburgh. Attempts were made to salvage the situation by my transferring to an HND programme at Sunderland University, but a similar thing happened after the first year there and I ended up exiting the university system with a bunch of student loan debt (which I still have), a bunch of credit card debt (I stupidly signed up for a credit card while at Edinburgh, as they started releasing anime on DVD in the USA and I wanted to import it, but my regular bank card was Switch which was totally useless outside the UK, so I needed a VISA or Mastercard. I finally negotiated a debt consolidation loan in January 2012 to get rid of the credit card debt and I should have the loan paid off in the next 5 years or so) and no real qualifications other than my A levels. Needless to say this did not bode well for my job prospects.
Back then the DWP (or whatever it was called, I forget) was not quite such a useless monster as it is now. They still had their stupid quotas, but they also had placement programmes which actually stood a chance of getting people into work. My first real job came out of one of these. I remember the start of the placement quite well; I went in for an interview, things seemed to go pretty well, and then I went home again. On the way home, a car crashed into the side of the bus I was on. After a delay while another bus was called, I eventually got home and was immediately on the Internet and was like "guys guys guys, you'll never guess what happened to me on the way home, my bus got hit by a car!". Nobody cared though, because the date of that interview was September 11th, 2001. They were like "terrorists blew up the World Trade Center" which really rather put my little incident in perspective (and probably explained what caused it, too, now that I think about it. Maybe the car driver heard it on the radio and was like holy shit what).
Anyway, I was accepted on the placement and it turned out I had a knack for building and fixing computers. A few months later when the placement ended I was offered formal employment at the place - it was an independent computer shop in Sunderland. I was ecstatic to finally be in a paying job, though it was nowhere near enough for me to be able to move out of my parents' house (my father started charging me rent though). I bought a modded PS2 with my first paycheck (not because I wanted to play pirated games on it, rather I just wanted to play import games, as by this point I was an old hand at importing stuff). I still have that PS2, and although I haven't used it in years, as far as I know it still works.
My credit card debt continued to grow as I kept buying things with it and the bank kept putting the limit up, and I kept only paying the minimum payment each month. At the time my parents did not suspect due to the fact that I had a job, but things soon took a turn for the worse. A few years on and the computer shop went under, leaving me unemployed again. I signed on, but virtually all the dole money went to pay the credit card bills (again, still just the minimum payment). I had to tell my parents about it at this point and my father was very angry, but accepted that I could not contribute even a token amount to the household in that situation.
During the period that followed I got short periods of work (usually 3 months) followed by longer periods of joblessness. One of my friends moved down to Cambridge, where he did very well for himself and is now living in London. I decided that as the job market up North was completely dead as far as IT jobs went, I would also look for work in Cambridge. I went to a few interviews in Cambridge (thankfully I was able to claim the train fare back off the Jobcentre) and eventually in late 2008 I got my current position, as an IT Technician at a Sixth Form college. I started out crashing in my friend's spare bedroom, but at the beginning of 2009 myself, my friend and one of his buddies from work moved in to a shared house, with the rent and bills split between the three of us. Stuff happened (I'm not going to go into detail; I find it very difficult to talk about, even after going to therapy for a couple of years - though, just so you know, it wasn't anything like a falling out or abuse or anything like that, just emotional and mental problems on my part), he and his friend got girlfriends and moved out; I moved in to another shared house, this time with a couple of other guys from my friend's work, but then one of them got a girlfriend and moved out, and having been unable to find a replacement I had to move out too, this time to somewhere where the rooms were contracted individually so I wouldn't be impacted by someone else moving out.
It was a small room, a square about 3 metres on a side, and there certainly wasn't really room for all my stuff, the majority of which stayed in boxes (some of it still is in boxes, even where I'm living now). I had some problems while living there - night terrors being the main one - and eventually got served 2 months' notice from the landlord due to the other tenants being disturbed. I tried to argue it was discrimination due to a medical condition, and while the doctors were prepared to back me up, the landlord used a Housing Act Section 21 notice which basically meant I had no recourse. I had some hope that the notice might turn out to be incorrectly served, which would render it invalid, but sadly it didn't turn out that way.
Anyway, I am well rid of that place, and the room I've been living in for the past 15 months is probably twice that size and has a much higher ceiling and is just generally much nicer.
As for social life, well, I actually have one now, which is more than I did before (as you can see, I didn't move out of my parents' house till I was 30). I go to an anime club on Wednesday evenings. I have occasional evenings out at another friend's house, either for board games events or our semi-regular dinner and Fringe nights that a small group of us have. But... despite this seeming cornucopia of social activity (well, compared to what came before, at any rate) I find my life ultimately pretty boring. Nothing ever seems to change, I work and I work and I work, and then it's the weekend, but then just as I am getting wound down and relaxed, it's Sunday night and then it's Monday again and it's back to work.
I'm 36 years old, and have never had a girlfriend or a date, and have no current prospects of getting one nor any idea what I would do if I did get one. I tried putting myself out there on dating sites/apps such as OKCupid and Tinder, but so far have had no results. I've also not been out of the country for nearly 30 years now (I've never had an adult passport; my parents have my old child passport filed away somewhere), with no prospects of being able to do so until my debt consolidation loan is paid off. For the last several years my only "holiday" other than visits to my parents has been long weekends in August to go to anime conventions. And then in December 2012 my father had a stroke and is now in a care home, and while both my mother and I believes he understands what we say to him, we've gotten absolutely nowhere in our efforts to try and get him to find a way to communicate with us (he lost the ability to speak, he can only make "la la la" noises now).
Well, this turned out way longer than I intended (and took way longer than I expected to type) but there you have it - most of the story of my life. Feel free to discuss or comment as you will.
EDIT: holy shit WALL OF TEXT after I clicked post... sorry people!
EDIT 2: forgot to mention, in 2007 or 2008-ish, I managed to get the Jobcentre to pay for me to go on a course at City of Sunderland College called "IT Technician Level 3"... which was actually a pair of Microsoft Certified Professional qualifications (Server 2003, 70-290 and 70-291), wrapped up in a couple of other bits of junk so that it qualified for government funding. This time I didn't fuck things up; I passed 70-290 on April 30, 2008 and 70-291 on July 17th, 2008. These qualifications (I believe) are what ultimately got me my current job in October 2008.
