I know this is showing my age bad.. but i left school end of ’87. Our unemployment rate rose rapidly following the ’87 crash at about 5 percent to peak at 10.9 percent toward the end of 1991. Those are the years i should’ve been at uni, but instead i kinda floundered around. Sure, i did a year learning programming. Unfortunately i didn’t have a clue how bad “business computing in COBOL” could get. My view of the business world had totally soured even before i had entered the marketplace. My childhood hero, Bill Gates, had become my nemisis by the time i could afford a PC and internet at $5 an hour. Microsoft now dominated the PC market, languages, and the entire local job market to boot. Being anti-M$ in the mid ’90 was kinda rare. Heck, if anyone had bet against me during that whole decade they woulda got rich on that alone.

Things had finally just about turned around this year, and sure enough, we’re now entering a bigger crash than ’87. Fate has some measure of poor timing, even cancelling years of bright young enthusiasm, and well, ya just gotta swing with it however you can.

Could I suggest a career in dark comedy perhaps?

-Dredd.