NAFV_P

Yesterday I finished a job in Cheltenham, England. The post was 50 weeks long. The commute to and back from work came to around two and a half to three hours. Often I would feel physically sick on the bus due to insufficient rest. I would go to work even though I felt unwell. This includes dealing with a trapped ulnar nerve which means my arm and shoulder ache all day, and is aggravated by using a laptop.

I pushed myself too hard, but this can occur when you are expected to work till you drop dead from exhaustion. This is what my first supervisor expected of me, because she thought I was a low life piece of shit. I had hardly any experience in insurance, especially claims which a lot of people in the building considered to be the sharp end of the business. Administration on a new claim was estimated on average to take around 90 minutes, it took me a day and a half. I was furnished with written procedure notes (about 40 pages worth), a laptop with no mouse and told to get on with it. I didn't consider this to be unfair, because this is the attitude I have experienced in most of my jobs. I had been in my new role for two days when I was given this task. All the thanks I got was a casual remark from my supervisor "Well, that's our Christmas bonus gone isn't it."

I was often shouted at in the office. Being an open plan space this behaviour was witnessed by about 80 other people. If my queries were not understood at first, the response I would get is "WHAT?!". When the day ended and the office was mostly empty, my supervisor's behaviour became very hostile.

The experience was incredibly stressful. My ulnar nerve issue worsened, so now it feels like I have a knife stuck in my little finger. Also I became so nervous about making a mistake (because my mistakes were over emphasised) that I worked at a rate about 4 times slower than my colleagues. Trust in my proof reading ability was lost, so I would check every single lexicon in a letter of correspondence and rereading my work nearly a dozen times. Some people would recognise this as OCD. I was considered incapable of performing my role, a bit offensive I might add.

I have a suspicion that I was treated like this partially because I am genetically male. My hope is to get a new job in the company's call center, and occasionally I would dress as a woman (or most of the time). I would like to see how I am treated by my ex supervisor/torturer while wearing a skirt, and how someone who is quite religious reacts to someone slowly coming out as transgender. I recently referred to her as a "fucking bitch" in a conversation with one of my other work colleagues. I regret that a lot, because (s)he isn't a real woman, and I'm more of a woman than she'll ever be.

> Hackers think of themselves as dangerous.

The other day a work colleague of mine described me as "so meek and mild", and I couldn't agree more.

This could be an extreme version of "Where's Wally".

> But c? c is basically portable assembler.

I wouldn't call myself an expert, but I avoid calling C portable assembler. I tend to think of C as having low level data manipulation and high level flow.

> A the lowest-level, you have doctors who're just assholes.

I was physically assaulted by a doctor around six years ago, I would use a much harsher term than asshole.

The excerpt from "The School of Venus" in the article > Coufin, I confefs my ignorance

"Confefs" ? The old and the new in one word.

I usually rely on LibreOffice, but I was tempted to get OpenOffice back on my machine just to try out the bug.

Anyway, thank you for the link.

That has sated my curiosity, thank you.

Cheers for the reply. I went to Github to look for <a programming language> koans, and they exist for a lot of languages - oddly I couldn't find one for C.

Anyway, recently I decided I should try to be more multilingual, Javascript with Eloquent Javascript.

My experience: C has a spartan standard library compared to other languages like Python. Even something like getting a scheme going for decent memory management can take a lot of work. I found it to be a good way to get my head round using pointers, now I don't find them so scary.

Just curious, is there a particular language you were thinking of learning?