Rearranging the furniture has already paid off. The bottleneck was cords and cables. It was taking up to a half-hour per session to swap out all the cables because the computer and peripherals were on a desk that sat against the wall. Now, I can walk on either side of the work table, but sadly, I have to eat at my desk because there is no kitchen table any more. There will be after I get that scanner working. It now takes only seconds to move cables, which encourages me to get a lot of smaller projects cleaned up. For the first time in months, my digital voice recorder is blank. I’ve also successfully mixed files on top of each other but that is finicky to do with Windows. The longer recording forces the shorter ones to start over again and so on.I took the video computer in to school, and also had a quick discussion about the way the course is going with the instructor. It had gotten back to him that I was dismayed about the lack of real lab time so far. I assured him my criticism was not of his teaching (which is exactly to spec), but the fact that for a computer repair course, I was not learning to repair computers.
This was confirmed moments later when he opened the video computer. The expansion cards were not seated properly, a condition caused by 100% lack of experience – yet I am supposedly half way through the course! I am still uncomfortable with pressing cards into slots so hard that it bends the motherboard. How can you repair computers without learning the correct pressure to apply on a video card? He sees my point.
Here is the answer. Tuition gouging. This is an old technique that was dying, but reared up again in the 80s. There are three ways a school gets undeserved tuition out of you. They disallow credits from other schools (Princeton), demand phenomenal course prerequisites (Broward Community College) or have restrictive residency requirements (Washington). As for Broward, to take a single evening course in C++ you would have to quit your job and attend there full time for a year or two first – which is exactly what they want but don’t say. There are some fields where it makes sense, because the school ought to be concerned with the caliber of its own graduates. Generally, however, I doubt it really matters where you took a math or history course. Either you know the stuff or you don’t.
PC Professor follows the dreaded Microsoft formula. Instead of a laminated reference card you are expected to memorize charts, at least part of whose purpose is to convince you that Microsoft is king. It is, for now, but even they don’t have their act together. They have yet to put out an operating system that leaves well enough alone. That is, they always tinker with some feature that makes each version behave and look differently, with non-intuitive learning curves.
Well, same with this course. It turns out the lab time is spent all at the computer. That is fine because I know that is a clean way to charge people good money, but I already knew most of that. The second face of the problem is the course title. It is called computer repair, but in fact it is not. The hands-on course I really wanted is called technical repair. Both have the same course description and outline in the college calendar, no wonder nobody knows what is really going on. Since computer repair is a prerequisite for technical repair, I think I will still be in school in the middle of June this year, after I’ve started a new full-time job.
[Author’s note: Again, I was correct in feeling ripped off by this school, PC Professor. They advertised the course to repair computers, which should take around three months to get competent. It was a come-on to get you into the school for a three year program. Also, as follows, within a few years, Washington Mutual instituted a $5 fee to cash checks for anyone without an account. It is more than just chance that I pick up on the bad guys.]
Washington Mutual did it again. They got me for a $5 fee on my no-fee account. The reason for it was a policy change. When you have automatic transfer from your checking to your savings (as I did), if you do not have enough in your checking account, they take $5 out of your savings! This, from a bank? So, they have stung me for 250 times more interest than the account paid last month. Their savings interest an annual rate of .18%, that is about one-sixth of one percent per year, but they will crank that up if you are dumb enough to put $10,000 in the vault. I am just so weary of assholes that you have to deal with.
You know, I suspect that the bank could easily accept third party checks the way they used to, and could make ordinary checks very secure. The reason they don’t is they rake in millions convincing people you need to go to a bank to cash checks, and you should have an account open at that bank to do so. True, there are some bad guys out there, but go catch them. Don’t punish everybody. If you do not have that automatic transfer, they definitely take the $5. They ‘have to’ take your $5 because the competition is doing it, see, and they don’t want to be left behind…
