Why Im Better Then You

If you've ever been late at night, watching old movies on television, you're familiar with the kinds of commercials they run in the wee hours: tarot-reading psychics with affected Caribbean accents and unaccredited community colleges train you for a high-paying career in the "electronics" field. Did it ever occur to you that people actually buy those things? All over America, dopey fat thirty-year-old losers are pestering Miss Cleo and getting started on their PC repair degrees.

... one thing leads to another.

I can't fathom how even the most desperate of dolts can believe, even after a Tarot reading, that they can learn in six months in the convenience of their own (parents') home what an MSEE studies for as many years, and have any chance at a corner office at Intel. Sure, they might figure out which end of a soldering iron they ought to hold onto, and the best and brightest (among their fellow studunce) might even figure out the inner workings of a calculator, but how much of a future can there be in repairing them when you get one for free in every box of cereal?

Guess we know what that "certificate" certifies.

I should probably be more forgiving of anyone who's willing to make an effort, however feckless, at improving themselves--but I really can't muster much appreciation for a person whose expertise in cathodes, capacitors, and other bits of equipment so retrograde it belongs in a 1950's sci-fi spoof is "certified" by crooked photocopy that's signed with a ball-point pen, and I can't help being offended that he considers himself a member of the high-tech industry and keeps asking me to put in a good word for him, when all I want from him is to put the fries in the bag and give me my change.

...