Rate My Arse

MTC Work “NO” Solutions: Targeting Very Little.

My story starts around the end of 2008; there I was a 29 year old man living in a studio apartment in Potts Point Sydney. I worked in an industry which some might call very dirty and dubious but nevertheless I was employed in a certain capacity, enough to pay my way and not be a burden on the taxpayer. Despite suffering a horrific life of alcohol abuse, domestic and sexual abuse and various other kinds of trauma. Things that would leave some people emotionally crippled, and lacking any self-esteem of any description, and subsequently living in the gutter so to speak. Despite these things I showed a little determination and I managed to find a job and a place to live, even if there was no running hot water for 8 months. There were cockroaches some the size of hideous creatures from sci-fi movies, plus the neighbours were all people you might suspect would have rotting corpses in their fridge, but nevertheless I had a place of my own, that I paid for with money that I earned. I worked hard for 2 and ½ years and I ended up having a massive mental and emotional breakdown, and as a result was hospitalized twice, the second time in Caritas the psychiatric wing of St Vincent’s hospital. I was drinking in excess of 20 standard drinks per day and the deep depression, and extremely confronting issues I had to face at the time caused me to collapse in a heap. The details of how this happened are somewhat irrelevant to the story at hand, but let’s just say I was let go from my job, and placed on Government benefits. After being absent from Job network services due to the fact I was drinking 4 litres of red wine a day, and was in such a deep depression didn’t leave my house for weeks upon weeks only to the bottle shop and back. Plus even awaking was a major thing, I was sleeping for 16 hours straight and just lost all motivation, hope and had just wanted to curl up and die in a ball of red wine and self-pity, depression, and a feeling of total injustice at humanity. I was sent to a specialist job finding service in Bondi Junction for mentally ill, drug addicted individuals who struggle or at least that’s what I gathered, I cannot remember the name of this place. Xlret Employment I think it was, some name to give of the notion “They will find me work” and “They care”. I had around 3 maybe 4 appointments at this place with a man who I thought was brilliant, he wrote me a resume that got me interviews at Cash Converters, Storage King, Caltex and I personally thought this resume was exceptional. Due to some Government tweaking, or should we say corporate whoring of the Job network system this place was closed and I was sent to MTC Work Solutions in Redfern. I was sent to this place 3 times and on all 3 occasions was simply told to go home, the man in Bondi sat with me and spoke to me. The people at MTC Redfern when I arrived, fiddled around on a computer for a few minutes and said nothing, then told me to go home. My time was completely and utterly wasted by these people and I have never felt so insulted. I felt like a third rate member of the community, like MTC didn’t give a shit, and the explanations I was given were lame.

“Rate My Professors” is Completely Unbiased (My Arse) « Stressing ...

Preparing for college means a lot of things. You might be living on your own for the first time, so you stock up on the Ramen, microwave ovens and flimsy IKEA furniture. You have to buy textbooks, which burns a fat hole in your already starving wallet while bookstores laugh at your student poverty. You register for classes, get your photo ID, contact your hopefully sane and not freaky roommate, etc. It’s a lot to do!

And then, when you get your schedule, you scan down the list of classes and think “Wow, freshman year is going to be great. My class is going to be super easy and my teacher is going to love me!”

What? Who am I kidding? You’re probably thinking “Holy shiitake mushrooms, how am I going to handle this schedule?! And…”

And then you look at the professor’s name beside the class name…

“… What the heck is my professor like?”

Cue the chorusing angels and ethereal light beaming down on your head through fluffy parting clouds. Here is where the beauty of the Internet comes in. It’s a pretty popular site and I just had to check it out. It’s so popular, a lot of people schedule/change their classes based on the site’s reviews. Plus, there’s even an app for it. So I couldn’t resist. In general, I try to be an open-minded person, who takes hearsay with a grain – more like a vat – of salt. To really understand something, you have to experience it yourself, yes? This is my philosophy.

However, because I have Antzin-Pants syndrome, which I touched on in this article , I couldn’t help checking out my professors to see what others have said about them.

Boy, did this make me laugh and cry at the same time. 

What I have gathered from this site is that most of the people who leave reviews either really love No professor is “one size fits all.” You have people who will go into an ALL CAPS RAGE about a professor and then you have people who will confess a somewhat inappropriate amount of affection for a professor… Seriously, did that review really call the professor “hot?” See, this is the part that makes me laugh. The part that makes me cry (aside from laughing so hard), is the person in my head saying, “But what if it’s all true?” Extremely opinionated reviews are easy to ignore if they’re scattered, but when there is a pattern of reviews indicating a general consensus, you can’t help but wonder if the masses are right. The reviews for the statistics teacher are largely negative. The nicest review was that second one above. The reviews for the computer science teacher are largely – overwhelmingly – positive. There are only a couple of negative reviews and those reviews aren’t even that harsh.