Daniel Spisak on Technology

I’m 31 right now, not a bad age to be supposedly. I guess its ok.

I live with my parents. I have for the past 3 years , maybe a bit longer then that while I worked on going back to school to finish up my computer science bachelors degree I stopped back in 1998 when UC Santa Cruz kicked me out because I allowed myself to get depressed over a woman (my first girlfriend) and let things slide academically. After that I went to work at various technology companies before and after the dot com bomb. I always wanted to go back to school to finish what I started  but never had the time or the money. Then when I was at Cox Business Services down in Rancho Santa Margarita they had a major restructuring in which they made the position I was in redundant and let me go.

When this happened the tech market for jobs looked like Dresden after the bombing. Orange County and LA were horrible places to find work in due to all the failed dot com’ers looking for work in addition to other pressures that were on the market back then.

At that time my parents offered to help me go back to school to finish my degree, provided I moved in with them and made sure I stuck with the program. As part of this I also had then began to start working occasionally as a consultant for a firm up in Pasadena. This brought in a decent amount of money, but not enough to pay all of my bills and cover school expenses. So my parents and I agreed that they would cover the tuition and I would cover the rest.

I have tried very hard over the past 3 years to stick to that division because for two reasons. One is I really hate being this old and having to get financial help from my parents. Second is that I wanted to be responsible for my share of the bills. I guess you can call it a sort of pride. I feel bad if I have to ask others for help with money, it just is the worst feeling ever. I’m not stupid, I may sometimes be scatterbrained because of something I am dealing with however.

Right now, I am in the final stretch of classes towards graduation. This quarter alone I had two senior project level classes both of which are not trivial to do.  Then throw in a class on artifical intelligence and a fairly involved world history course and you have a pretty full schedule. I still have two quarters left to go, one this summer and then my final one in the fall. In there I have one more senior project level class to do and about a 50/50 split of computer science related classes verses humanities classes to finish one or two breadth requirements I have left over.

Now add into that working a job as a consultant where the hours are not on any known schedule. I dont work part time or full time, I work whenever I can and there is a client that has work needing to be done. This means my income is not predictable, not reliable. But for the past 3 years I’d managed a decent balancing act of my bills verses my income. And lets not even go into the fact that all my income is 1099-MISC reported so come tax time I have to make sure I have cash in the bank to pay taxes not withheld.

This quarter in particular has probably been the hardest one I have ever had. And it’s almost over too! But I had classes and labs so densely packed that I hardly had time to sleep, let alone be available enough to work enough to cover costs of things that happened.

Now throw in scatterbrained things like forgetting you’re cars registration hadn’t ever been taken cared of for the year. Like worrying about whether or not your father is going to still have a job (single income household). Like trying to ignore the fact that you havent been with a woman in years. Add it all up.

Then try to tell me with a straight face you NEVER forget to do something, even if its simple.

Sometimes, you forget to do something. Sometimes, you really dont want to have to ask to borrow money from your parents when you are 31.

Next time before you try and tell me something, try to walk a few miles in my damn shoes, it might help you from sticking your foot in your mouth. If you’re having a bad day its no excuse to take it out on me. Lord knows I try to make sure I don’t do that to my friends.