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( My working experience in America vs. the World, and why other countries are doing better. )

My stage 2 job interview the other day left me feeling nervous. However, I did "pitch" to them my self-improvement plan for the next few months: earning a CCNA, Improving my Chinese(with new certifications), earning Linux+, etc. etc.

Although the company was based in Prague, my interviewer was from Ukraine. My Ukrainian interviewer's accent was a little bit thick and I started the interview by speaking to her in my broken Russian. I believe she was impressed also seeing that my Chinese was "relatively" fluent according to my resume. I told her that I made some "homework" for the bash-scripting that I was learning over the past seven days. She requested me to email the bash-scripts that I wrote, and so that is what I did. I hope that she can see the potential I have vs. other candidates.

The company hopes to get an office set up in Texas one day. Me and my wife also hope that this is one of the states where we will relocate to one day. I may also get the opportunity to travel to HQ one day, but I don't think that is likely.

The starting salary? 2500. But I get a contract. And if I'm getting terminated, I will have a 30 day notice.

Stage 3 interview should be scheduled with the (software/firmware) product manager at the company ensuring that I know what I am talking about when it comes to our product.

As of yesterday, I picked up my Russian Language textbook. Started learning again. did 4 pomodoros with it. I wanted to do 8 with my Chinese yesterday, but something came up and got in the way.

I am slightly nervous. I will provide as much information as I can without talking too much. I believe during the stage 1 interview I might have talked too much.

But since this is a company based in Prague, Czechia, European Union, etc. There are employee protections available: contracts that explicitly state termination terms, written explicit salary, written explicit sick leave, etc. etc.

Salaries are not as high as what you would find in America, but there is no room to complain if a company is protecting your employment rights...

Finished learning the basics of bash-scripting. it was an 18-lesson-long video series on youtube from the channel "Learn Linux TV." Linking this with studies from a CompTIA Security+ Sy0-701, someone could learn how to get root and then create a "logic bomb."

The job interview is still on the cards for tomorrow. Approximately 28 hours after this post goes live is when the interview begins.

Me and the wife started going to the gym again lately. I dropped a teeny bit of weight, but it's not a "new record" for 2025 just yet. My "New record" was at the end of Ramadan, hitting 84.9 KG. We go to the gym together regularly, and I start my day with a whey protein shake. I tend to wake up earlier than the missus, so maybe a veggie protein shake would be good for breakfast.

I think a reasonable "weight loss goal might be 80 kilograms at the end of May 2025.

My father has been calling recently and has been asking us if he can come to visit. I don't have many objections to this, except the area where we live is a slightly boring place. There isn't much to do here. There was an odd suggestion from my father: "Can I stay at the guest bedroom in your house?" Um, what? Hotels here are cheap and they give better breakfast than what me and my wife could offer at home.

I told my mom to call me yesterday when my dad is out of the house. She did just that. I asked her, "When is dad heading back to the middle east?" And the date range that she stated was just a couple of weeks before his proposed visit to us. I asked her, "Did he mention anything about visiting us?" She said, "Nope."

I told my wife about this and both of us immediately thought of one person: "Ahmed." We are already taking precautions against this. Extreme precautions that no one else should have to take. Like, I'm thinking of sending my wife to a country where she can travel but he cannot, then picking up my father at the airport and taking him with me.

The end of Ramadan arrived on March 31st. We have been getting guests visiting us from time to time.

I had a stage 1 job interview that went much better than I expected. The company is based in Prague. I may be more fit for employment with them than what I initially anticipated. Stage 2 is scheduled for April 11th. Hopefully I can ace this one. The company informed me that I don't have a lot of competition.

Day before yesterday I took my A+ part 2 exam. I passed it, giving special attention to each question on the test.

Got a phone call from my father a few hours ago. He was pretending to be all high and mighty about the position he was in. Unfortunately, he has no idea what he is talking about. He colluded with Ahmed to send me back to America. I lost money going back to America. Here I am 1 year later and I have more debt and less savings to show for the shenanigans they pulled on me.

Before Ramadan began, I was 205 pounds (92 kilograms). I am now down to 187. On my most recent CompTIA A+ Part 2 practice test, I scored a 90%. I scheduled part 2 for April 2nd, approximately 70 hours from now. I was able to pass Part 1 on March 25th.

Once I pass CompTIA A+ Part 2, I hope to start studying for my CCNA, and also commit 3 hours of study daily to mandarin and another 3 hours of study daily to Russian.

I might have found my "groove" in my wife's country (at least, my daily routine, anyway). But to tell the truth I know I will never be viewed as a local person. While I think that is just fine, there are moments when I feel alienated.

I passed Core 1 of the CompTIA A+ 220-1101. Minimum acceptable score is 675. I got 712. A pass is a pass. I'm hopeful that I can study six hours each day for Core 2 of the same exam after two weeks. I will probably schedule that exam to be taken 2 weeks from today.

There was a fitness plan that I followed back when I was 28 years old. It was called MFT28. The author of it died in early 2015 because the guy was crazy. Gregg Plitt. Former Army Ranger. I want to follow this plan for 84 days (that is, 3 sets of 28 days), to show people I am not weak and if you are going to try to harm me or my spouse, you are going to be in for one hell of a fight before you do.

Full playlist to the workout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkaIdWDSDl4&list=PL2TvViJHdRxVI5a6L9BlebmFNVewBbUlk

I told my wife that the situation with Ahmed is the reason why i want to be physically stronger and I want people to be able to see the definition in my muscles and think twice before they tell me anything disrespectful.

I talked to my wife yesterday about our plans for the next six months. It seems there may be some plans we can or cannot execute on. The economy doesn't seem to be doing well right now. Employers are hiring for the lowest salaries possible, and we are both stuck in my wife's country at the moment. I'm looking for bottom-of-the-barrel Remote IT support jobs, but even those are not available, or extremely competitive right now.

Practice tests for my A+ exam are going well. 3 of them I scored 80% or more on. I feel like I need to practice with some performance based questions, however.

I think it was my first blog, I mentioned someone named Ahmed. He was a family friend who slowly began losing my trust in fall of 2024. He lost it completely 2 months ago. Unfortunately, I feel as though his hand is pushed so far up my father's posterior that he is manipulating my father's vocal cords and prefrontal cortex. For brevity, I made a cut to this post, and we can skip to my fitness / education aspirations further below if you are not interested.

( rant 2 about Ahmed )

It is because of my interactions with people like Ahmed, and because of some future career aspirations, that I think I would like to get physically fit again. I want to have muscles with definition that tell people like Ahmed to back the fuck down, and respect my boundaries just by looking at me. I lost 7 kilograms since the beginning of Ramadan. In pounds, that's about 14.

I think once I pass the CompTIA A+, my educational priorities will change to refining my Mandarin, brushing up on Russian, and then earning a few other CompTIA certifications.

I remember a sociology professor saying somewhat bluntly, "If everybody in America had a Harvard education, then there would not be enough jobs to keep up with the demand of highly-educated individuals."

I feel as though this is a strong reflection of where we are now as a society, but slightly neglects the economic woes in America, Russia, and China.

To draw an analogy, in China, for nearly two full millenniums, the most sought-after education was a degree / certification / stamp known as the KeJu (assuming you were male). This certification stated that you were educated in the Confucian classics. At the height of the Ming Dynasty, there was a massive surplus of literate people studying for the KeJu. It is estimated that up to 30% of Nanjing's male population was literate. That is a high number, given that back in those times you didn't have a surplus of paper and printing that anyone could access. My Chinese history professor cited a statistic that she somehow came across in her research, and somehow the math came out to 500 properly educated people were available for 1 job posting by the Ming royal court in both the capital and the provinces under Ming dynasty control.

If we compare this to pre-colonial Vietnam, which did use the Chinese writing system for messaging between nation states, the literacy rate was estimated to be 10-20% for the urban population.

( progress pics: schedule and outcomes. )

I started learning SQL back in mid-February. However, some of the broader concepts just did not stick with me in the beginning, so a lot of what I was doing was just copy/pasta without the time to allow it all to resonate within my mind. The new course in the screenshot above does some fine-tuning to muscle memory for me. It's a bit like "riding a bicycle" or learning to play that competitive game you learned a long time ago. Your skills slowly get better and your hand/eye coordination also improve.

For a daily time budget, well, typically people sleep 7-9 hours a day. So in a healthy day, the average person has 15-17 hours to spend living life. Me and my wife, we live together in her home. I have my own dedicated study space, I'm looking for work, but many of the job posts I am looking at want somebody who knows SQL and HTML, and have other certifications.

As far as my CompTIA A+ studies are concerned, I scored an 85% yesterday on my Core 1 studies. I began studying for this test on March 9th. I moved my test date up to March 25th. This means I took 16 days to study for a test that I only really needed 12 to study for. And for Core 2 of the exam, I think I'll give myself two weeks to study for it.

The "Pomodoro" learning technique has been very effective so far and has served me well.

disappointed_lesbian

I don't know if you can see this or not. We have more in common than you might think.

Honestly speaking, I've been looking into Bhutan a bit myself (but not holding my breath) because I see some jobs relevant to previous experience in that country. Albeit, most of those jobs are in bitcoin mining.

However, for now I'm in my wife's country. I have just about given up on America myself given what Elon and Trump are doing to the jobs market. I can only wonder what next month's unemployment rate will be.

Still studying for CompTIA A+ 220-1101. I'm using the official study guide released by CompTIA. However, I have this feeling that it goes a little bit too in-depth into every single detail about PC hardware. Some parts probably won't even be useful. For example, the predecessors to a USB cord.

I began relearning python 3.0 on codecademy. But I wonder how useful is codecademy as the platform to learn? The only "coding" language I can compare is HTML - between learning and real world applications.

And weight loss... Yesterday I weighed in at 87.1 kilos (192 pounds). Before Ramadan began, I was at least 92 kilograms (202 pounds). I strongly suspect a lot of this weight loss is simply water weight, but on the whole, at the end of this month I expect to be no lower than 84 kilos (185 pounds).

My daily routine usually consists of waking up at 1:30 in the morning and either A) looking for a job or B) studying using pomodoro technique. There is no particular intention for me to wake up at 1:30 in the morning. I'm just jet-lagged and intentionally not changing my sleep cycle. I notice the more time I am alone, the more time I have to get things done. Typically, more of my concentration tends to arrive after I have breakfast around 4:30 in the morning.

There's two major sources of Trauma I have. One is a family friend called "Ahmed" who I do not trust at all any more. If you want to see how ridiculous he is, I suggest you rewind a few journal entries. I might add more to that one just to articulate all of the problems I have with him and get the entire trauma dump out of my system.

Another source of trauma is from my most recent employer, how I wasted nearly a year of my life, and only accumulated debt in the process. One reason why I left America is because of all the "distinct" issues you could find in the American work place.

My last employer was a data-center-deployment company. They needed a guy who could speak Mandarin, so they hired me in May 2024. I flew back to America to pursue employment with them. I chose to be separated from my wife to do this work. August roles along, and I look at my supervisor and say, "Hey, next week is the end of my probation period." He responded saying, "Don't you worry, you passed with flying colors." About 3 weeks after that, I broke a bone in my ankle. Couldn't work for 12 weeks.

During this time I got two certifications. One of these certifications is something our company CEO explicitly stated the company could pay for. I am appalled that he contacted me to ask how my leg was doing a few days after I was injured, but didn't ask me why I was travelling to another country to see my wife who - at the time - I had not seen in seven months' time, and the main reason why I went to visit her was because she was denied a tourist visa to America.

Shortlist of my grievances:
1. Told me they could take care of a certification. They did not.
2. Two-faced CEO. Fake attitude. Fake concern.
3. Middle management will get angry for you making a mistake, but they don't have proper documentation on how to avoid these mistakes and you will have to make the documentation yourself.
4. At one point, my supervisor nearly called another coworker's wife a bitch, but he stopped himself at the "bit" part.
5. The circumstances of my termination.

At the end of my vacation, I messaged HR and said, "Hey I'll be back home in 48 hours. I would love to work through jetlag." HR said, "We'll talk about your future with our company in 4 days." 4 days later, I asked HR, "Is there any new information available?" They said, "We'll reach out to you at a later time." 19 days later I was told to go to the office at an odd hour and, unsurprisingly, I was fired.

The real mental block that I have to deal with now is that it is so damn difficult for me to focus on studying knowing that I am unemployed. It's a little more frightening knowing that I can be fired by any American employer at any given time.

What is this world coming to?

In the month of October, i was able to earn two CompTIA certifications because I was of the mindset that eventually I would be going back to work. The main point is I was thinking I would be returning to work, so that's why I was able to focus enough to get those certifications.

Now, I am unemployed and focusing on studying for new certifications is difficult because I have no guarantees of being able to return to work. I have no job interviews lined up. What is scarier is, I've applied to over 50 different positions online and not a single one of them has wanted to interview me...

Am I thinking too much? or is America headed in a bad direction...?

Since I'm unemployed and the job market right now seems somewhat difficult, I think it would be a bit nice to make some goals. In the next six to 9 months, I hope to make good progress on the following fronts:
1. Get to CEF C1 / ILR 3 for Chinese.
2. Get to CEF B2 / ILR 2+ for my wife's language.
3. Get to CEF B1 / ILR 2 for Russian.
4. Earn CCNA and CCNP.
5. Learn a few coding languages.
6. Potentially earn some cybersecurity certifications.

All of these things literally take hours to achieve. I'm still jetlagged. I try to use this to my advantage. I don't particularly like to "go outside and play" while in my wife's country because when I do people stare at me like I'm an alien. In a sense, my return to my wife's country has turned me into a character reminiscent of Act I of Old-Boy, where the protagonist is trapped in some kind of hotel room for 15 years and is teaching himself how to fight. But I'm not teaching myself to fight, I'm just teaching myself new skills.

I think the only difficulty to be encountered this month is that it is Ramadan. And during Ramadan, we can't eat or drink anything (medicine included) from sun up until sun down.

Started studying for my CompTIA A+ a couple of days ago. I am unemployed as of January this year, but luckily me and my wife have a ton of savings and we can go a year or two without employment and we would be just fine.

( took a practice test for CompTIA A+ today, this was the result )

In the short term, I'm hopeful that once I take the real CompTIA exam, I will be able to work remotely as a help desk professional or a remote IT professional or something like that. It's just that, to be entirely honest, I feel as though the A+ is -at least in my case- a waste of time. It doesn't make sense for me to take this exam because I worked for the companies that built people's personal computers and laptops, and getting fully certified with the A+ costs just shy of about 1000 USD. For every product I marketed in Taipei, I had specialized training that tells us what the product is capable of. I've had specialized training for every single product with the exception of CPUs. Alas, I digress. I'm studying hard, and I'm gonna get certified. I'm hopeful it will be worth my time. After I pass the A+, I plan on going for the CCNA, and then the CCNP.

I am presently, and passively, searching for remote work. Not to sound arrogant to any passers by about my situation, but pretty much everything you suggest is something I have already thought of when it comes to employment. It's been almost 2 months since I was terminated just for taking a vacation to see my wife in another country.

This is probably going to be a long story. If you would like to skip it, the long story short is, "If you've seen 'Worst Roommate Ever' or 'Worst Ex Ever' on Netflix, then this story would be called 'Worst Family Friend Ever' and it has consumed over 15 months of my life.

It all started 3 days before me and my wife had our first wedding in the country where we were both living and working (Taiwan). A family friend, let's call him "Ahmed", approached me and said, "Your mother told me if you do not go back to America, she will take you out of the inheritance." So I made plans to go back, but only after our second wedding in my wife's country.

Let's take a moment to talk about who Ahmed is.

( Rant about Ahmed )
Ahmed, after everything discussed so far, is a sociopathic liar and has caused me and my wife more damage and more strain in our lives than we deserve. After all of these things came together, I've been living with the trauma of following this lie, and it repeats itself in my head again and again and again on a daily basis. There are times I'm stairing off into the void and I'll shake my head because I'm thinking of the bull shit that Ahmed told me.

There might be someone who asks, "Why didn't you ask your parents about the inheritance?" To be honest, such a direct line of questioning is not the relationship that I have with my parents. Ahmed visited us twice while I was injured. The first time he visited us was just as my injury took place. The second time was 10 weeks-post injury. During this time I got two academic certificates. I could have gotten a third one that would sharpen my resume if he didn't show up and start bossing me around.

However, I'm also on a road of mental recovery. My wife is there for me every day. Although I'm unemployed, I'm looking for jobs and applying daily, and we are hopeful that I could have something soon.

Current Mood: grumpy

This is one of those self-conscious posts I would like to make where I try not to come across as a douche, but at the same time I need to make an introduction for myself.

I don't want to put my real name here or too much of my real information. We can say that, I live in a part of Rural Asia, I come from America, just got married a year ago and me and my wife have a house in her country. Right now I'm studying her family's language, I speak fluent mandarin, and I'm learning other languages that may increase my employability if I ever choose to go back to America.

My journey with journaling platforms began on greatest journal in the early 2000s. Then I migrated to livejournal when GJ died.

If I have suddenly followed you, then the reason for it is simple: I just think you're an interesting person, and I would feel comfortable sharing bits and pieces of my life with you while reading on how yours is going. In the meantime, you're welcome to follow me back.