If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism.”
– Dr. Stephen Shore.
Preamble
For years, I knew that I was different to the rest of my peers. I didn't know why, but lots of things just seemed different. I wasn't interested in the same things my peers were, and many didn’t seem keen on me either. This is a blog post that I have been planning for some time but have never been able to complete. It will take several updates to get my head emptied of everything, including the trauma.
I have been thinking about what I would like this site to offer; I am not talking about goods and services but more about what it can be used for. Do I want it just to be zany and out there, documenting whatever I feel about bitching about for that day, which is what it currently is? But I don't think that is what I want. I want this site to have a purpose, to become a collection of articles, possibly poorly written by myself, that offer either insight or knowledge that I have gained, to allow me to feed this knowledge back and hopefully stop someone from making the same mistakes I have made.
I thought that I would start of with an overview of my life, and we can experiment from there.
Early Life
My pre-school life was pretty simple, I did not attend a preschool as a child. My mother was a stay-at-home mum at that stage of her life and she took me to a playgroup once and for whatever reason we never went back. Looking on my later life I feel that this would have been very useful with my later diagnosis. But she was not aware of my issues and as I was the first child she had nothing to compare me to.
I enjoyed the time, I played with my sisters, I had a ripper sandbox, and did some:question: of the things that kids did. We went to the beach, the pool and we went on holidays
Primary School
In primary school, I never really had any friends, I floated around the playground trying to find my people, but I was in a smaller school, we were the biggest class with 30. So needless to say, my people were not at that school. During primary school, I don't remember doing anything to bad, execpt once where I was given the cane by the headmaster. As with most of my punishments, it was well deserved, and I took it without complaint, and then kept my mouth shut. If my mother had found out she would have shit kittens.
Whilst in primary school, I was not the smartest kid, nor did I try to be. I rested on my ability to learn and think quickly; there was no beating Karen, the girl in my class, as she was wicked smart. I never did homework, as I could not see the use of it. Why would I want to sit inside looking at books when I could be running around the backyard making a shit-tonne of noise and annoying the neighbours?
High School
When it was time to go to high school, due to where I lived and the primary school I attended, I was given the choice of what high school I would like to attend. One was the one that most of my classmates would attend, and the other was not. For reasons, I cannot explain, the more favourable choice for me was the school where I could start over again. Perhaps it was that I would be able to try and not be that weird guy who had no friends.
“My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me. I am what I am, and I do what I do. I expect nothing and accept everything. And it makes life so much easier.”
– Sir Anthony Hopkins
It didn't work like that, as apparently, you cannot take the awkwardness and weirdo out of the autistic weirdo. However, as this school had over one thousand students, it allowed me to find a group of four other awkward weirdos, and we became close friends in high school. Once again, just like in primary school, I did the bare minimum to pass the subjects.
I was an absolute turd of a child in high school. I was bored, and I didn't see how some of the subjects I was forced to take, so I would spend my time disrupting the learning that was going on. But I was a cunning turd. I knew how to push people's buttons, but even though they knew I had done something, I was shrewd enough not to get caught. My two all-time favourite escapades were:
- stealing all the balls from the two computer room's mice. What made this even better was that to stop this from reoccurring, the school superglued the mice closed; thus they could no longer be cleaned
- finding a master key to left in a teacher's desk and then spending the entire lunch break finding all the unlocked classrooms and locking their desks. I got caught having locked one of them, and when I was questioned by the gestapo (I mean Deputy Principal) I would not admit to locking any other desks. I even told him that whoever did it was doing the school a favour, as all the classrooms should be locked when unattended. When the referral arrived home from the school, it has ""locking the teachers'desk.
I loved having student teachers and casuals, this was the time for massive tomfoolery. We had one student teacher who came to the school every year and was doing her pracs. My friends and I would take great delight in when she had her back turned we would flip the transparency upside down and back to front to image the mirror, and thus no one would be able to write down the work.
When the same student-teacher became a casual at the school, it was time to step up our game. On the bottom lens of the prism, we would put doughnuts made from paper onto the projector so that all you could see was the small spot that came from the portion that was not covered by the paper. However, there was also some of the horrible shit that we never should have done.
In year nine maths for two terms, we had a casual teacher, as our teacher had taken some of her long service leave. The new teacher was an absolute bitch. and there were five of us that were pains in the arse, and as soon as we walked in she would send four of us to face into the corners and the fifth would be sent outside. Apart from myself, there was another student that she didn't like, and he held no love for her. Come the end of the year, she thought that she had the last laugh with Dennis when the teacher handed out all the results, to everyone in the class, except Dennis.
Well, Dennis was arguing his point, but she did not have any interest in giving Dennis his mark. He would have to wait until his school report was handed out. However, Dennis' parents were migrants, and Dennis played his trump card.
"You're just not giving me my mark as you are a racist."
Now this was the mid nineteen nighties, and as a teacher, to be proclaimed a racist by a student was the biggest slap in the face that can be handed out. So Dennis started, and the other four of us took his lead, chanting "racist!! racist!!". To this day I am not sure how it happened, and whether more of the class didn't like her or it was just good ol' mob mentality, the entire class was chanting it.
Eventually, she left the room in tears and would never teach again. I wish I could say that I felt some guilt over it, but I don't; as far as I am concerned, she never had the qualities of someone working in education.
From year 9 onwards, I had decided that I was going to go to school and have fun, I only had one tilt at school, and I could either work my arse off and not have any fun, but I much prefer the fun and leave the unnecessary subject with just a pass. Around this time, I also found my love for anything technology I loved industrial drawing (no CAD, t--square and set-squares for me), as mentioned earlier, Electronics and I found Computers.
Looking back on my resume after leaving school, I included the last three years of school reports. Most of the comments were the same.
"Stephen could excel if he applied himself"
By the time I reached the end of year ten, I wanted out of school, I had enough and wasn't enjoying it, except for electronics. I lived and breathed for that subject; it was logical and spoke to me the subject had before in a way that nothing had ever before. However, my mother put her foot down and insisted that I complete my Higher School Certificate, which was just another piece of paper I did not need to have. I was eager to join the Air Force as a radar technician. So I continued with my education, however, continuing with my I am only going to do the fun stuff I did not study. As they always said, the Higher School Certificate is just a test, and so I treated it just the same.
University
Once I finished high school, I enrolled in university. This was honestly the first time that I felt down by my mother. She thought that I should not go to university, and she told me that to my face. But being the stubborn individual that I was, I ignored her. She refused to have anything to do with assisting me. When I started late, I asked if she could drive me to Uni on her way to work, and I was told flat-out no.
I got a job delivering pamphlets that paid about $20 per week, and I talked to my uncle and borrowed his push bike. This allowed me to ride to university for most days, and on the days that I started late and finished late, I had the money to catch a bus to and from uni.
Starting In Information Technology
High School
I had mates who did computers as a subject from year eight through to year twelve, but I never did. The school subject of computers was boring and taught by maths teachers that did a subject at uni or distance, and voilà, they are now computer teachers. I looked at the course outline, and I already knew everything that they were going to teach from year eight to ten, so no fuck that, I did computers my way. I read books, I broke shit, I reinstalled MS-DOS 3.3 so many times that I had the installation down to an art.
I was also good at repairing computers that I broke, I didn't ask people how to fix them, and this was before the internet. It was fixed with good old elbow grease and a hope and prayer. Learning this way, it helped my troubleshooting skill set in later life, and I could fix anything by knowing a little bit about it and brute forcing my way to a solution by finding out what didn't work.
I can also remember when the school got the internet in 1995 it was on a 14k baud modem to a single computer, and it was text-based, no slip or PPP. was allowed. It was through the University of Newcastle, and being the cunning people that we were, we worked out that once you had logged into the Unix shell (good old alinga) you could start up a slip daemon inside your console and then complete the connection with Windows 95 and get GUI-based internet. Once I was onto the Internet, I was hooked, I dug into how it worked, the protocols behind it with the desire to work as part of it.
First Job - High School
My old high school came to me in the second semester of university. It offered me two half days per week supporting their two computer rooms, library computers, and a couple of Novel Netware servers. I wasn't an employee, but a contractor, and I was being paid about $20 per hour, which at the time was not to be sneezed at.
Whilst this was not a network engineering role, at the time I was happy to be what was termed a network administrator. During this time, I increased my knowledge of Red Hat Linux, squid, Apache and Novell Netware. During this time, the NSW Department of Education rolled out 56k dial-up permanent internet, and along with this I rolled out a squid proxy server that cascaded onto the Department's Squid Proxy. This allowed us to share the internet with all computers in the network.
Internet Helpdesk
The next job that I picked up was a job at a local ISP called Aljan Internet. I was to man their ISP helpdesk on Saturday mornings and backfill any days that they had staff off for holidays. I had actually been chasing this job for a couple of years, it took a lot of emails, and I thought that it was never going to happen. As this was on the weekends, I kept my two half days at the school.
About 3 months into the job, the business owner won a lawsuit against Telstra, who were selling multiple 2mbit unconstrained wholesale internet links in Newcastle which all underperformed as they were actually constrained. As part of the settlement, I understand that the owner agreed to sell the business, which he did. When I next turned up to work on the weekend, I went to put my alarm code into the panel and set the alarm off. I called my boss and told him that I had activated the alarm and it was not accepting my alarm code. After trying to put it in a couple of times he told me to wait there whilst he drove to the office. When he arrived at the office, we used his alarm code and I went to work.
However, my happiness was short-lived. The next day my manager rang me up and apologised about what he was about to tell me, but as the new owner had taken over, he had decided that there would be no helpdesk on the weekends, and he refused to pay me for the shift that I had just done, as I wasn't meant to be there. I was gutted, I didn't know what I had done wrong or even if I had.
I changed my internet to another carrier, and I was not surprised that the company bled customers and shut down within the next six to twelve months.
High School - Increased Hours
The next year, the High School came back to me and offered me two and a half days per week, at the same pay rate. I enjoyed this job for the next six years. It included setting up the school's first NT4 network with a Domain Controller, Exchange 5 server and a ISA proxy server. We also installed our first Novell Netware 5 server.
I rolled out a group policy that locked down students’ ability to damage the workstations, as this seems to be something still kicking around from my time. During this period, the Department of Education also massively increased its role in providing computer hardware for the schools, and there were no computers in every staff room, and the school had 4 computer rooms. As these machines were now made of 3–4 models we were able to build up ghost images and a ghost server. This allowed staff to PXE boot a failed workstation, and it would be re-imaged, added back onto the domain, and back up and running within 60 minutes. Not bad when the edge switches were 10Mbit/s with a max backhaul of 100Mbit/s.
Over the next 6 years, I worked on automation before automation was cool and DevOps didn't exist. There were websites that ran VBS scripts to reset passwords, and email passwords either to the class teacher or, if it was a teacher, to their head teacher. I implemented a bespoke PHP intranet, that was also at one stage published to the internet, until the department withdrew the option.
I had automated so much of the job that the network looked after itself, and most days, I would pull the blinds down and recover from going out on the town all night. I was bored and needed a change. At about the same time, I heard rumblings that the Department was looking at removing funding the schools were using for support and bringing that in-house, so I started hunting for other jobs.
Internet Helpdesk - Take two
Unfortunately, I was about 5 years too late to fall into a job in the industry as the industry in Australia had left behind the small garage-based industry and had become very corporate. I eventually got into a role with one of these corporates, but the job did not progress any further than the NOC, It was not what I wanted, and eventually, the ISP was sold to a British Superannuation Fund, and they closed down our account and technical support departments and off-shored them to Malaysia.
However, I got to have the last laugh when they could not use Malaysia to support the top-tier customers and partners and eventually had to advertise the job roles back in Australia. This was the beginning of the end for the company, and within a couple of years, it was bought by Telstra global](https://telstra-global.com).
“when I was diagnosed, it just gave me permission to be kinder to myself, to not always take responsibility for being a bit clumsy around other people, and allow me to start to tell people, “I’m clumsy, but I [don’t] mean to be.” And being more open about, “I need you to tell me what I did wrong, and then we can move on from there.”
- Hannah Gadsby
Whilst working the ISP job above, starting as Hunterlink / Pacific Internet and Pacnet, there were multiple times that I overstepped the mark, and there were times that I did things that, if an ordinary employee had done, would have been performance warned and looking back, at it on at least one occasion fired. But I was looked after by the management, which shows the sort of place that it was, as the people at the brunt of my antics were the management team The workplace in Newcastle was very relaxed, and I have never had a workplace that had the same camaraderie since.
The giant blow-up was when the Big Wig managers in Melbourne did their annual rate the company survey, and the staff slammed the upper management and how the company was slow to follow up with anything to do with the teams. The management team decided that they would put stuff in place to try and rectify it. I can't remember exactly what the trigger was, but I had asked HR for some pay information and then went on leave for a month. When I returned from the leave and checked my e-mail, there was still no answer from HR. So I emailed the HR Manager and gave her a piece of my mind. This did not go down well on my following performance review, and I received a 0% pay rise that year. For years on, we would all meet up on the days that we were made redundant and have beers, but since that time, our lives have pulled us apart.
Some time off
For the first time since getting my first job, I didn’t have to be somewhere, and this would not change in the immediate future. As we were made redundant in mid-December the job market had become stagnant, but I didn't want to be unemployed, so I pounded the pavement for all the IT-type companies and used the contacts I had made at Hunterlink. Although I had some promising leads, none of these ended up panning out, so I bunkered down over christmas playing guitar hero until I got my next role.
During this time, it was also the first time in my life that I felt sheer terror and anxiety, and it wasn't because I was unemployed. I was about to ask my girlfriend to marry me.
Cirrus Communications
The following job I got was the first time I had achieved a job role in network engineering. Cirrus Communications was a regional wireless carrier that had multiple sites across Australia. They started their network servicing Gosford on the New South Wales Central Coast Region. Once the government changed its broadband guarantee, it expanded its network by purchasing the networks of carriers that could not continue financially and went into administration/receivership.
However, at the time, was the first time that I ever felt anxiety over a long term, but not being aware, I thought that I my heart was all fucked up, and I was dying. The main cause of this was the Cirrus was also suffering from the reduced broadband guarantee, and they were having liquidity issues. As such, at least once per week a site would be down as they had not paid a carrier / tower / something else.
The travel also sucked; I was getting the train from Newcastle to the Central Coast, which was about an hour. However, as time dragged on and track work seemed more constant, the time blew out to two hours plus at some stages, which would continue for weeks. I decided it was time to move on and see if I could get a job back in Newcastle.
The company has recently been turned around and is now listed on the Australian Stock Exchange as the primary wireless backhaul provider outside the three mobile companies.
I was disappointed in finishing up with this company, as I knew that this would be the end of my chances of working within an ISP, as to achieve that, I would have to work in Sydney and that either meant a 2-hour drive each way and up to $100 per day in parking or moving permanently to Sydney, and that is not something that I wanted to do, as the rise in rent would swallow any salary increase.
Newcastle Computer Wizards
The next role I picked was for a small MSP called Newcastle Computer Wizards. This was the first time I had job autonomy where I could schedule my days and had no targets. My role was to look after the business customers. Most of these were small business customers; this was my first time working for a small business. While I enjoyed the work, I was not too fond of the micromanagement that sometimes occurred with them. This is part of working for a small business, but I decided to jump ship. I sometimes wish that with what happened with the next employer, I had just stayed here.
The other reason I decided to jump ship was that most of this was server admin, and whilst servers can be fun, it was not something I wanted to do in the long term, and I am justified with the advent of cloud computing. This was still going to be some time off before it eventuated.
Regional IT / Sabervox
I worked at Regional IT, later rebranded to saberVox, for over ten years. I was initially employed as a technical generalist, once again supporting Wintel servers. Initially, I loved working here; the company was small and agile, and I was given a target that I had to hit: 30 hours. I was not told whether this was per week/fortnight or month, and rather stupidly, I decided it must be per week. It made sense to me as I was working 38 hours per week.
Later on, during my first performance review, I found out that it was supposed to be 30 hours per month; needless to say, I got three pay raises over the next 18 months, and I loved the work. As the company grew, and we took on larger customers, my workload shifted towards networking, starting with ADSL services and then towards fibre and data centre work.
Life was good for the first five years, and everybody was happy and hitting their targets. But then the boss (once again, I will never work for a small business ever again) started working with a business consultant who sat down (from what I was told informally by someone in the know) if you set the billable hours for your technicians at 85% then you will make bank. This person told me he was told that the business owner wanted to purchase an investment property every year with the increased funds that this move gave.
Further unannounced, but evident in retrospect, there were no more performance reviews (once again confirmed by the same source) as if you have performance reviews, then the staff may ask for pay raises. The other thing I noticed around this time was that the owner needed someone to pick on. It could be an underperforming staff member who stuffed up a job and cost money to fix. The latter was one of his pet peeves; all the money was his money.
I just wanted to attend work, do my job, go home, and do it in a manner that I felt safe. But this was going to be different. At the same time this ordeal started to go south, two sales reps were employed. One was a spineless being who could not work his way out of a paper bag. The other was the typical sun shines out of my arse whilst it is overcast personality.
One of his things was "cover arse and maintain employment", so he needed a scapegoat. As I was the person who was involved with most of the installations, and others in the team had worked with him before, I was that scapegoat. It was always my fault that the installation wasn't scoped correctly, even when I was not involved with the scoping. I pushed back when the product was missing.
The business owner also started personally attacking me and other staff behind my back when I wasn't in the office. There was a stage where he wouldn't even say hello to me in the morning.
After my two children were born, the stress of trying to jump through hoops that I did not know existed. I was the primary breadwinner for the family and stupidly kept on trying.
One of the jobs that pissed me off the most with the latter was a server install that I was tasked to do for one of my customers. I had worked with the sales team to quote hours on the job, and it was tight, but I could complete the work in time. For whatever reason, I can't remember. It was decided that I needed to be babysat by another team member, and the deal at the time was that his time would not be billed as it was out of the project's scope. The boss changed this decision and deemed that he would bill the customer for the time the second engineer was available on site.
At the same time on this job, the sales team, who had quoted all the licences without liaising with the technical team, totally screwed up the licencing model and missed terminal services licences. The customer wouldn't pay for them. The customer stated:
"This job was quoted, and we accepted it. We are not IT people; that is what we pay you for. If we stuff up a quote for a customer, we don't go back after the fact and attempt to bill them more; we either advise them that we stuffed up and see if they will raise a variation, or it's tough, and we wear the loss.
- a customer
This job ended with a letter from the company's board of directors highlighting that the installation of the new platform had been seamless and singing my praises. Still, because the owner lost substantial money (both genuine and made up), he continually referred to it as our worst job ever.
As this debacle ended, I was hauled into the boardroom and told I would no longer do customer project work. I had most of my customers taken off me. This was due to my inability to complete the above job on time and within budget. I was devastated; as far as the customer was concerned, the installation was flawless, and they were over the moon. Fortunately, I could hold on to my three most prominent customers, of which this was one. It always bemused me that I had completed the worst install ever, but the customer was not interested in moving to a different technician. In the years following my leaving this job, I could even use them as a reference for job interviews.
Then, some people could do no wrong, even when the installation that they were on was the worst install ever. This real estate customer had multiple sites, and the installation that the tech completed was rushed and garbage. The customer was having numerous day outages, and every technician myself except had been pulled off days' worth of billable work to attempt to save the customer. Eventually, we did, but it did urk quite a few technicians that their involvement was whitewashed over, and the installation was branded as our best.
As time went on, the backstabbing within the team continued, and my anxiety (still with no idea what it was) was through the roof. And I felt that I was a marked man and that everyone was out to get me whenever they could, and I could do nothing right. I had seen others go through this and eventually get terminated because the boss set them up for failure. I am sure that it is the stress and anxiety from this role that ultimately caused my marriage to break down.
On top of my main workload I also was the engineer looking after our data centre offering (1 server and a Cisco 1841) left I took that over and over the next five years built a resilient SAN built on HP Lefthand / StoreVirtual appliances along with DL360 servers. I told the company that virtualisation would be the future, and we stopped selling bare metal and started selling virtual machines. However, as this platform became more successful, growing pains would emerge, and they would once again go back to cost… Examples include:
- I wanted to use VMWare as the virtualisation platform, but I was overruled due to hyper-v and Windows clustering being “free”. This caused significant outages, and we could never get the solution to scale correctly.
- We were also constantly butting our heads against the purchasing style of the business owner. He would not purchase anything until a customer paid the total cost. This is a lofty goal that many business owners providing services would be aiming for. But the LeftHand storage had a weakness. If the storage utilisation increased beyond 80%, the performance of the SAN would be impacted. If utilisation exceeded 90% (i.e. 90.01%), then to protect itself, the SAN would go into read-only mode. What is sad is you think that the business would have learnt that storage growth is organic, but this issue occurred at least two times that I remember…
- The use of correct routers with enough ram to maintain a full routing table
I had had enough of the stress, as I was the only person with the skill set to maintain the environment, and this meant that even when I was on holidays I had to take calls from work when something broke. I had voiced my preference to be removed from the environment and just go back onto the tools.
At some stage, the business owner had a third-party consultant come in to look over the environment and to make recommendations on how to improve it. I took my chances and I told him all of the above and that as the environment was non-billable, I was unable to reach my extremely difficult to hit targets.
Some time later, the business owner got together with the consultant (who was a real nice guy), and decided to buy out his small business and the consultant was going to be taking over the running of the colocation, along with his offsider. I was excited to be able to get back to the job that I wanted to do, and not have to worry about the stress.
However, the freedom was short-lived, due to the way that the business was run, and the extremely high targets, the offsider decided that after a couple of months that he was sick of it, and handed in his resignation, and went to work as IT for a local building society. I was told that I was now back working for the hellhole colocation team, was handed a whole heap of server hardware and told basically there it all is, go and make it all work for a new site that was about to come online.
At one stage, a user from a customer for whom I was asked to do helpdesk logged a complaint to the business owner. I don't know to this day what the actual problem was, but I was told by other employees at the company that if she didn't have something to complain about, then she wasn't living life to the fullest. Apart from the minor department they headed, the rest of the company seemed happy with my work on-site.
The main problem with this customer stemmed from the business model the company ran. Whilst most of our competitors were entering into all-you-can-eat service desks for a set fee, we were running a different business model. To seem cheaper than the rest, the customers were told that we could reduce their overhead cost, and this was done by limiting the frequency with which we were available to fix their issues. Instead of 5 days a week with a resource assigned to them, this changed to 1 half day per week.
While the executive teams were happy with the available cost savings, the end-users (quite rightly) saw that we could not service them like the incumbent company did. They would complain more when the business owner emailed me a terse email asking me what I needed to change to make the customer happy.
I responded with a long email laying out all the issues that were seen at the company and what we could do about it, including:
- Increasing service levels,
- renegotiating the contract,
- supplying access to more resources and
- having their management reset end users' expectations
It was a long email, and I put my heart and soul into it as I did believe that we as a company were not doing right by the end-users, and were basically attempting to gouge the non-profit for what we could get away with.
In this email, I was told that I had misunderstood the question and the correct question was
What was I going to do differently with the clients?
It threw me for a six, and I had a long, hard think about what I could do differently, and there was nothing. I was following our company policy to the tee; I:
- Reported to the site contact on time and greeted her by name;
- Made idle chit-chat about the weekend/kids/whatever;
- I laid out the tickets that I would be working on;
- I asked where I would be sitting that day;
- Asked if any critical tasks needed to be done that day;
- Did the work;
- Logged any tickets for unfinished work for tracking;
- Closed completed tickets; and
- Before leaving the site, report to the site contact advising what work has been completed.
I did not understand what I was doing wrong, which has always happened to me; I get along doing a job well for some time, and then it all turns sour. I asked the employer for suggestions on what I could do differently, but I got the same question back. So, being the typical autistic person that I am, I replied honestly with a one-word answer.
Nothing.
I was removed from the site and told I would only be doing the internal helpdesk for the rest of the time. It gutted me because I was having clients who had been with me for over eight years taken away. But, I thought fuck you, I have a fully paid company car, and you want me to do 1st level phone support. I can log tickets like the best of them, and as there was no financial penalty other than the lack of overtime (boohoo), I just took calls and logged tickets.
It was at this time that I was a wits end on what I was going to do; I had a feeling that I was autistic, as by this time, both my children had been diagnosed. So, I started down the path of getting a diagnosis with the hope that once I was diagnosed, I would be able to gain access to somebody to advocate for me. However, time ran out on me.
I ended up becoming suicidal and was admitted to Hospital (first the Mater in Newcastle, and later Warners Bay Private hospital.), for an extended 3 months of treatment, both via medication and psychology. I was that cooked that I enjoyed my stay in the public system, my partner thinks that it is mental that I thought it was a holiday.
During my stay I also completed my testing and gained a brand-new fresh Autism diagnosis, and it has been helpful.
As I was injured at work, I obtained the paperwork from my doctor and put in a claim for workers compensation. It was stressful and draining, but it allowed me to focus on my work, whilst still having income to pay the rent
And that is how I ended up working for HPE...
