Je m'en trompe.
You know, life is tough. It just blows all over the place.
The guy up the road just a little ways is taking care of his fifty-something Momma, maintaining two separate households doing so on his meager salary because his sister has disappeared, his brother is in jail, nobody else gives two shits and this state has no social services to speak of. Her declining health leaves her unable to fend for herself, and if anything bad ever happens to this burdened young man, she can look forward to all of maybe a couple years’ residence at the dumpster behind the abandoned warehouse on 8 Mile Road before the elements or the other streetbound metro Detroit denizens kill her.
The girl who lives just the other way down the road has to live the daily nightmare of a man who can’t keep his fists off her kidneys. God alone knows what his problem might be, but hers is pretty brutal: she can’t take him to court because her history of drug abuse and prostitution pretty much guarantees she’d never see her son or two daughters again. You have to understand this: she first has to survive long enough to get to court, even if she could. With no marketable job skills and no other family, his money (and his house) are the only things keeping her from taking up residence right next to the 50-something Momma. This young woman’s life ended before it ever properly began: she’s all of maybe 25 years old.
The folks on the other side of the track don’t have any reason to be worried about where their next meal is coming from, either now or at any time to come. The biggest crisis where the basic necessities are concerned is in trying to figure out which store to get them from, and if they should try to catch the 24 hour stores on the way to work, or face the hideous lines in the other stores after work - and who should do the getting. The Department Manager Husband’s schedule doesn’t always mesh well with the Systems Analyst Wife’s, you see. Looking at the brand new brick and glass house they live in, with a huge SUV parked next to a sleek BMW in their three-car garage, or the quarter-acre swimming pool in the back yard, you’d think they never miss a wink of sleep or a minute of their favourite primetime sitcoms. You’d trade in your soul to live their lives even for only a couple of years until you learn that their oldest daughter is on round-the-clock suicide watch at the local laughing academy, their younger daughter favours music with strongly nihilistic themes, wears baggy dark clothes and lots of metal on her face, breasts and they don’t dare ask where else, and their son can’t seem to keep from being expelled from school once or twice a year. All three kids’ ages total to less than their 40 year old mother’s. Neither Manager nor Analyst can figure out where they went wrong. They haven’t the slightest idea how to approach their children, or whom to turn to for help. They do have a fairly huge fear they’re going to be burying at least one of their children, probably before the younger daughter is legally old enough to get a learner’s permit to drive a car.
You know, life is tough. It just blows dead moldy goat balls, and if you think the toughness of life is reserved exclusively for adults over 25 with bills to pay, mouths to feed and mortgages or social service idiots to grapple with, you’re wrong. I can’t cite specific examples (because I promised not to) but can allude rather strongly to the kinds of desperation young people can feel by pointing to some pretty grim suicide statistics for people under 20. Contrary to popular belief, young people do not deliberately end their lives on a lark. Fear this: the children who’ve died by their own hands represent a fraction, probably a tiny one, of the children who’ve wished earnestly and often to be able to do the same.
So, anyway…
Me? Heh - by comparison, I don’t have any serious problems. Most of my problems are quite literally just in my head. They’re stilly, they’re stupid… piddly-ass little bagatelles compared to the Kafkaesque prisons most people I know live in.
See, I’m a 45 year old man with nearly twenty years’ experience designing and manufacturing all sorts of different mechanical thingummies and whatchamacallits. This is to say, I used to be a factory worker who became a machinist; a machinist who became a diemaker; a diemaker who became a person who uses a computer to make blueprints under the supervision of an engineer (a CAD operator/drafter/detailer); a CAD drafter who became the designer who takes an idea from an engineer and breathes it into life both as a computer simulation (a CAD model) and as an actual physical device - and the designer to whom you can say “Listen, make something that pushes this up when you pull down on this lever”. If some kind soul were to considerately stick a computer into it, I can even program it to perform given tasks at given times or in response to given stimuli.
That is to say, I am an engineer in all but actual title or degree.
It’d be sexy and fun as hell if I were still doing it.
See, I’m also an unemployed 45 year old with a high school diploma from some forgotten mud puddle in the Great American Heartland. I’ve been out of work officially now for about nine months, and unofficially for almost exactly a year.
Thing is, what’s worse is, I’m an idiot. A moron. Tard. Dimwit. I’m the slow-witted dullard who never gets it, never knows what’s going on, the guy nobody wants on his team because that team is sure to lose. I’m the guy no girl wants to be with because God forbid something should happen and she gets stuck with drooling brain-damaged kids. I’m a freak. A Creep. Retread. Feeb. Hell, for all I know or can remember, I’m a bit tetched. I DO seem to remember a speech therapist having to explain to me that my name isn’t “Ninny” when I was… what? Seven? Eight?
If you want some clue what it is to be born and grow up with hearing loss THESE days, the deaf and HOH communities (deaf and hard_of_hearing, respectively) won’t have much trouble furnishing one. The time and place where I grew up was Long Ago and Far Away, where hearing loss and intellectual deficit were basically indistinguishable. The vagaries of growing up in such a time and place may be for another rant, but probably not. Let’s just say I grew up honestly believing myself to be all these things, and probably worse, maybe more so than the current generation or two of people with “challenges” like mine. They have the advantage of having access to services administered and staffed by people with training very specific to the kinds of problems growing HOH and deaf people face. These kinds of services - these kinds of PEOPLE - simply did not exist in my time.
Let’s also say, just for the sake of (hee hee) brevity, I can’t see the faces calling me those names anymore, but can very clearly hear their voices. Most of those voices sound very much like my own.
How do you do, my name is Binny (that’s “Benny”, in Binny-speak).
So, anyway, I look at the want ads. I’m out of work, and almost out of money, so looking for work would be a good idea, don’t you think? And, I keep my eyes open when I’m out and wandering around for stores and restaurants that might have “help wanted” signs in the windows.
Trust me, there aren’t very many. The entire southeastern part of this state and the northern halves of the two or three states immediately south of this one are in a condition pundits are pleased to called “recession”, which means that there’s something like ten or fifteen people for every part-time job opening, regardless of the type of job. This also means that employers can be pretty damned choosy about whom they hire.
The Meijer just down the street a few hundred yards from here recent put some Help Wanted ads in their windows: “Wanted: full and part time Store Associates. Must have minimum 2 year college degree in Business Administration or closely related field, or minimum 5 years’ experience in retail. Must be able to lift eighty pounds. See store manager for details”. This means that you have to have a two-year college degree to get a job stocking shelves. Does this mean the cashiers have baccalaureate degrees in business administration and master’s degrees in international economics? Does this mean the girl selling the cigarettes and other tobacco products in the little booth off to the side is a fully qualified pharmacobotanist? Let me guess: the store manager himself is a PhD. In precisely which field would be something of a mystery, then, but I’d put a small amount of money on Political Science, since I smell the foetor of spin doctoring.
Well, so, anyway, I watch the job ads, and email or post resumes wherever it seems reasonable to do so. I won’t apply for jobs like plant engineer because I don’t know dick about engineering a plant, or jobs like manufacturing engineers because being a machine operator doesn’t teach you much about engineering a manufacturing process. I also won’t respond to ads where one of the requirements is having a minimum 5 years’ experience in some software package that’s only been released nine months ago, because it means Human Resources doesn’t know its ass from its elbow, which implies I’d be trying to navigate my fragile ego between a bunch of degreed idiots who don’t know a sex bolt from a clevis pin.
I’ve long ago lost count of how many resumes I’ve sent out, and gotten exactly three tentative nibbles, all three from headhunters. It’s been a year, now, and I’m guessing I’ve effectively handed out about a thousand resumes one way or the other. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised - my latest 6-year stint at Synthesis, Inc (a pseudonym) includes five years of working under a supervisor who made quite certain I understood that I was too slow, too expensive, and clueless; that I had no idea what the company needed. It seems I have no idea how to draft, I’m worthless as a CAD modeler, I don’t know the littlest thing about machining processes and I’m for damn sure worthless at conferences.
An expansion of this experience forms the core around which a future Rant will revolve. Suffice it meanwhile to say that my separation from Synthesis left me with absolutely no confidence in my ability to draw so much as a straight line or determine which material to use for a heat shield.
I was suicidal (and in therapy) when I left that company a year ago. I still am (but can’t afford the therapy anymore).
See, I know what a lot of these ads are really saying. The engineering game has changed dramatically over the past ten years. With most of the country downsizing, or “rightsizing”, and cities like Flint and Pontiac (in Michigan) getting to look more and more like naval artillery practice sites, most companies doing any hiring these days want engineers who can design a car from the ground up, do all the needed research and development for new technologies being incorporated into it, order all the parts for it, build it, test it, write all the technical documentation that goes with it (a user’s manual is just a tiny little smudge of a footnote in that mass of paperwork, you have to understand), design and make all the boxes and crates all its parts get stored in, budget machinist and assembly line time, produce lifetime testing result data and keep materials cost down to the price of a bag of rice and make sure all the materials, parts, design and manufacturing procedures conform to a bewildering array of standards - and do all this in less than a week. He gets absolutely no support whatsoever.
I’m the man who tends to focus on a single problem to exclusion until that problem is solved. Sometimes, that takes a few minutes, sometimes it takes a couple of months. To be fair, it’d take _anybody_ at least a month to solve some of these problems. My lack of formal education means I can sometimes pull off some pretty damned unusual solutions, but they work. About as often as not, people can improve on my work in detail, but not in concept.
What I’m not is the man who can run a telephone, a keyboard and mouse, and be talking to two or three people in front of me at the same time. I can bounce back and forth between different problems with little enough trouble, but getting back into a complex problem can take some time, and the current workplace environment in the engineering field simply won’t support that. The thinkers are no longer allowed to think.
This means I’m now not only an old tard, unqualified to do the job I did for six years, I’m now also a dinosaur with a handicap and a history of mental illness.
If you’re interested, there’s a slightly sanitized version of my resume at http://www.rm-f.net/~sauvin/resume_sanitised.doc. Folks who know me and know the work I’ve done over the years claim it’s understated. I honestly feel it’s far better to understate than to be fanciful. I never lie, and in my own admittedly humble opinion, that resume is *slightly* overstated in some regards.
So, life is tough all over. Unlike the poor guy with a 50something momma on his back, or the frail young woman with small children in her arms and a raging gorilla on her back, or the poor Manager and Analyst couple with children seemingly determined to destroy themselves, all my problems are in my head.
Their problems are real. Mine aren’t.
I mean, other than the very real possibility that two months from now I’ll be listing my address as “Garbage dumpster, #4 dock, abandoned warehouse on 8 Mile Road, Detroit, MI”, quite literally my entire problem situated squarely and ironclad between one completely deaf ear and the other ear that can sometimes hear a fire engine coming.
I’m too old and too weak to manage working as a stock boy, especially in a job market where the next guy can probably stock six shelves to my one, and it’s a pretty safe bet I won’t function well in a burger joint where good hearing is vital to the establishment’s smooth functioning. Either scenario necessarily assumes a man of my age and background could even survive an interview in such places: “Why would an engineer want to do this kind of menial work? It’s ABSURD!” I’m pretty much stuck looking for more work in the same vein as what I’ve been doing for some time now, however remote the possibility of obtaining such work might seem.
The solution to my problems is simple enough in concept, and I _have_ been practicing it: tell myself to shut the fuck up. I see a position for a designer who can execute _this_ kind of design in _that_ kind of environment, and catch that voice richly laced with derision “You know you can’t do that job, Ninny, because you’re a TARD! You’re just too damned CLUELESS!”, and I’ll usually manage to suggest to that voice where it can put its Schadenfreude. It helps somewhat that this particular voice sounds an awful lot like my old boss.
Still, the problem with the problem is that simply recognizing it doesn’t do anything about it. I’ve become afraid to even send out any resumes, because - believe it or not - I might actually GET one of those jobs. And… do what? Face five more years of the same kind of discouragement and belittlement that made me practice my skill at crafting a hangman’s noose? Even if the level is only ten percent of what I’ve just recently left, I won’t survive two weeks. I am quite literally terrified of my own shadow.
Still and all, I should count my blessings. I think I’ve another couple months to go before all the money is gone, if I’m careful and I’m lucky. I have no children to feed, no wife to have to try to comfort as all this shit goes down. Nobody’s physical survival directly depends on mine.
Meaning, if I fail to face my demons, if no employer ever looks in my direction favourably, I go alone. That, too, is horseshit in a very real sense, but it’s not real at all by comparison to the three sets of folks this Rant started with: people who have material responsibilities for other people’s health and well-being.
Life is tough. It just blows everywhere. Isn’t it a good thing my problems aren’t real?
The guy up the road just a little ways is taking care of his fifty-something Momma, maintaining two separate households doing so on his meager salary because his sister has disappeared, his brother is in jail, nobody else gives two shits and this state has no social services to speak of. Her declining health leaves her unable to fend for herself, and if anything bad ever happens to this burdened young man, she can look forward to all of maybe a couple years’ residence at the dumpster behind the abandoned warehouse on 8 Mile Road before the elements or the other streetbound metro Detroit denizens kill her.
The girl who lives just the other way down the road has to live the daily nightmare of a man who can’t keep his fists off her kidneys. God alone knows what his problem might be, but hers is pretty brutal: she can’t take him to court because her history of drug abuse and prostitution pretty much guarantees she’d never see her son or two daughters again. You have to understand this: she first has to survive long enough to get to court, even if she could. With no marketable job skills and no other family, his money (and his house) are the only things keeping her from taking up residence right next to the 50-something Momma. This young woman’s life ended before it ever properly began: she’s all of maybe 25 years old.
The folks on the other side of the track don’t have any reason to be worried about where their next meal is coming from, either now or at any time to come. The biggest crisis where the basic necessities are concerned is in trying to figure out which store to get them from, and if they should try to catch the 24 hour stores on the way to work, or face the hideous lines in the other stores after work - and who should do the getting. The Department Manager Husband’s schedule doesn’t always mesh well with the Systems Analyst Wife’s, you see. Looking at the brand new brick and glass house they live in, with a huge SUV parked next to a sleek BMW in their three-car garage, or the quarter-acre swimming pool in the back yard, you’d think they never miss a wink of sleep or a minute of their favourite primetime sitcoms. You’d trade in your soul to live their lives even for only a couple of years until you learn that their oldest daughter is on round-the-clock suicide watch at the local laughing academy, their younger daughter favours music with strongly nihilistic themes, wears baggy dark clothes and lots of metal on her face, breasts and they don’t dare ask where else, and their son can’t seem to keep from being expelled from school once or twice a year. All three kids’ ages total to less than their 40 year old mother’s. Neither Manager nor Analyst can figure out where they went wrong. They haven’t the slightest idea how to approach their children, or whom to turn to for help. They do have a fairly huge fear they’re going to be burying at least one of their children, probably before the younger daughter is legally old enough to get a learner’s permit to drive a car.
You know, life is tough. It just blows dead moldy goat balls, and if you think the toughness of life is reserved exclusively for adults over 25 with bills to pay, mouths to feed and mortgages or social service idiots to grapple with, you’re wrong. I can’t cite specific examples (because I promised not to) but can allude rather strongly to the kinds of desperation young people can feel by pointing to some pretty grim suicide statistics for people under 20. Contrary to popular belief, young people do not deliberately end their lives on a lark. Fear this: the children who’ve died by their own hands represent a fraction, probably a tiny one, of the children who’ve wished earnestly and often to be able to do the same.
So, anyway…
Me? Heh - by comparison, I don’t have any serious problems. Most of my problems are quite literally just in my head. They’re stilly, they’re stupid… piddly-ass little bagatelles compared to the Kafkaesque prisons most people I know live in.
See, I’m a 45 year old man with nearly twenty years’ experience designing and manufacturing all sorts of different mechanical thingummies and whatchamacallits. This is to say, I used to be a factory worker who became a machinist; a machinist who became a diemaker; a diemaker who became a person who uses a computer to make blueprints under the supervision of an engineer (a CAD operator/drafter/detailer); a CAD drafter who became the designer who takes an idea from an engineer and breathes it into life both as a computer simulation (a CAD model) and as an actual physical device - and the designer to whom you can say “Listen, make something that pushes this up when you pull down on this lever”. If some kind soul were to considerately stick a computer into it, I can even program it to perform given tasks at given times or in response to given stimuli.
That is to say, I am an engineer in all but actual title or degree.
It’d be sexy and fun as hell if I were still doing it.
See, I’m also an unemployed 45 year old with a high school diploma from some forgotten mud puddle in the Great American Heartland. I’ve been out of work officially now for about nine months, and unofficially for almost exactly a year.
Thing is, what’s worse is, I’m an idiot. A moron. Tard. Dimwit. I’m the slow-witted dullard who never gets it, never knows what’s going on, the guy nobody wants on his team because that team is sure to lose. I’m the guy no girl wants to be with because God forbid something should happen and she gets stuck with drooling brain-damaged kids. I’m a freak. A Creep. Retread. Feeb. Hell, for all I know or can remember, I’m a bit tetched. I DO seem to remember a speech therapist having to explain to me that my name isn’t “Ninny” when I was… what? Seven? Eight?
If you want some clue what it is to be born and grow up with hearing loss THESE days, the deaf and HOH communities (deaf and hard_of_hearing, respectively) won’t have much trouble furnishing one. The time and place where I grew up was Long Ago and Far Away, where hearing loss and intellectual deficit were basically indistinguishable. The vagaries of growing up in such a time and place may be for another rant, but probably not. Let’s just say I grew up honestly believing myself to be all these things, and probably worse, maybe more so than the current generation or two of people with “challenges” like mine. They have the advantage of having access to services administered and staffed by people with training very specific to the kinds of problems growing HOH and deaf people face. These kinds of services - these kinds of PEOPLE - simply did not exist in my time.
Let’s also say, just for the sake of (hee hee) brevity, I can’t see the faces calling me those names anymore, but can very clearly hear their voices. Most of those voices sound very much like my own.
How do you do, my name is Binny (that’s “Benny”, in Binny-speak).
So, anyway, I look at the want ads. I’m out of work, and almost out of money, so looking for work would be a good idea, don’t you think? And, I keep my eyes open when I’m out and wandering around for stores and restaurants that might have “help wanted” signs in the windows.
Trust me, there aren’t very many. The entire southeastern part of this state and the northern halves of the two or three states immediately south of this one are in a condition pundits are pleased to called “recession”, which means that there’s something like ten or fifteen people for every part-time job opening, regardless of the type of job. This also means that employers can be pretty damned choosy about whom they hire.
The Meijer just down the street a few hundred yards from here recent put some Help Wanted ads in their windows: “Wanted: full and part time Store Associates. Must have minimum 2 year college degree in Business Administration or closely related field, or minimum 5 years’ experience in retail. Must be able to lift eighty pounds. See store manager for details”. This means that you have to have a two-year college degree to get a job stocking shelves. Does this mean the cashiers have baccalaureate degrees in business administration and master’s degrees in international economics? Does this mean the girl selling the cigarettes and other tobacco products in the little booth off to the side is a fully qualified pharmacobotanist? Let me guess: the store manager himself is a PhD. In precisely which field would be something of a mystery, then, but I’d put a small amount of money on Political Science, since I smell the foetor of spin doctoring.
Well, so, anyway, I watch the job ads, and email or post resumes wherever it seems reasonable to do so. I won’t apply for jobs like plant engineer because I don’t know dick about engineering a plant, or jobs like manufacturing engineers because being a machine operator doesn’t teach you much about engineering a manufacturing process. I also won’t respond to ads where one of the requirements is having a minimum 5 years’ experience in some software package that’s only been released nine months ago, because it means Human Resources doesn’t know its ass from its elbow, which implies I’d be trying to navigate my fragile ego between a bunch of degreed idiots who don’t know a sex bolt from a clevis pin.
I’ve long ago lost count of how many resumes I’ve sent out, and gotten exactly three tentative nibbles, all three from headhunters. It’s been a year, now, and I’m guessing I’ve effectively handed out about a thousand resumes one way or the other. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised - my latest 6-year stint at Synthesis, Inc (a pseudonym) includes five years of working under a supervisor who made quite certain I understood that I was too slow, too expensive, and clueless; that I had no idea what the company needed. It seems I have no idea how to draft, I’m worthless as a CAD modeler, I don’t know the littlest thing about machining processes and I’m for damn sure worthless at conferences.
An expansion of this experience forms the core around which a future Rant will revolve. Suffice it meanwhile to say that my separation from Synthesis left me with absolutely no confidence in my ability to draw so much as a straight line or determine which material to use for a heat shield.
I was suicidal (and in therapy) when I left that company a year ago. I still am (but can’t afford the therapy anymore).
See, I know what a lot of these ads are really saying. The engineering game has changed dramatically over the past ten years. With most of the country downsizing, or “rightsizing”, and cities like Flint and Pontiac (in Michigan) getting to look more and more like naval artillery practice sites, most companies doing any hiring these days want engineers who can design a car from the ground up, do all the needed research and development for new technologies being incorporated into it, order all the parts for it, build it, test it, write all the technical documentation that goes with it (a user’s manual is just a tiny little smudge of a footnote in that mass of paperwork, you have to understand), design and make all the boxes and crates all its parts get stored in, budget machinist and assembly line time, produce lifetime testing result data and keep materials cost down to the price of a bag of rice and make sure all the materials, parts, design and manufacturing procedures conform to a bewildering array of standards - and do all this in less than a week. He gets absolutely no support whatsoever.
I’m the man who tends to focus on a single problem to exclusion until that problem is solved. Sometimes, that takes a few minutes, sometimes it takes a couple of months. To be fair, it’d take _anybody_ at least a month to solve some of these problems. My lack of formal education means I can sometimes pull off some pretty damned unusual solutions, but they work. About as often as not, people can improve on my work in detail, but not in concept.
What I’m not is the man who can run a telephone, a keyboard and mouse, and be talking to two or three people in front of me at the same time. I can bounce back and forth between different problems with little enough trouble, but getting back into a complex problem can take some time, and the current workplace environment in the engineering field simply won’t support that. The thinkers are no longer allowed to think.
This means I’m now not only an old tard, unqualified to do the job I did for six years, I’m now also a dinosaur with a handicap and a history of mental illness.
If you’re interested, there’s a slightly sanitized version of my resume at http://www.rm-f.net/~sauvin/resume_sanitised.doc. Folks who know me and know the work I’ve done over the years claim it’s understated. I honestly feel it’s far better to understate than to be fanciful. I never lie, and in my own admittedly humble opinion, that resume is *slightly* overstated in some regards.
So, life is tough all over. Unlike the poor guy with a 50something momma on his back, or the frail young woman with small children in her arms and a raging gorilla on her back, or the poor Manager and Analyst couple with children seemingly determined to destroy themselves, all my problems are in my head.
Their problems are real. Mine aren’t.
I mean, other than the very real possibility that two months from now I’ll be listing my address as “Garbage dumpster, #4 dock, abandoned warehouse on 8 Mile Road, Detroit, MI”, quite literally my entire problem situated squarely and ironclad between one completely deaf ear and the other ear that can sometimes hear a fire engine coming.
I’m too old and too weak to manage working as a stock boy, especially in a job market where the next guy can probably stock six shelves to my one, and it’s a pretty safe bet I won’t function well in a burger joint where good hearing is vital to the establishment’s smooth functioning. Either scenario necessarily assumes a man of my age and background could even survive an interview in such places: “Why would an engineer want to do this kind of menial work? It’s ABSURD!” I’m pretty much stuck looking for more work in the same vein as what I’ve been doing for some time now, however remote the possibility of obtaining such work might seem.
The solution to my problems is simple enough in concept, and I _have_ been practicing it: tell myself to shut the fuck up. I see a position for a designer who can execute _this_ kind of design in _that_ kind of environment, and catch that voice richly laced with derision “You know you can’t do that job, Ninny, because you’re a TARD! You’re just too damned CLUELESS!”, and I’ll usually manage to suggest to that voice where it can put its Schadenfreude. It helps somewhat that this particular voice sounds an awful lot like my old boss.
Still, the problem with the problem is that simply recognizing it doesn’t do anything about it. I’ve become afraid to even send out any resumes, because - believe it or not - I might actually GET one of those jobs. And… do what? Face five more years of the same kind of discouragement and belittlement that made me practice my skill at crafting a hangman’s noose? Even if the level is only ten percent of what I’ve just recently left, I won’t survive two weeks. I am quite literally terrified of my own shadow.
Still and all, I should count my blessings. I think I’ve another couple months to go before all the money is gone, if I’m careful and I’m lucky. I have no children to feed, no wife to have to try to comfort as all this shit goes down. Nobody’s physical survival directly depends on mine.
Meaning, if I fail to face my demons, if no employer ever looks in my direction favourably, I go alone. That, too, is horseshit in a very real sense, but it’s not real at all by comparison to the three sets of folks this Rant started with: people who have material responsibilities for other people’s health and well-being.
Life is tough. It just blows everywhere. Isn’t it a good thing my problems aren’t real?