My most awkward recruiter interaction?

Just graduated college and got 'suckered' by an programming position ad that turned out to be a recruiting company. It was fine since they charge the company for their services and not me.
After a couple of weeks of waiting (they initially promised I would/could have at least 3 interviews a week, which hadn't happened.) I decided to start looking again on my own, found a position, and I was hired.

About two months later I get a phone call:

<skipping the pleasantries>
R: "I see you are working for D, congratulations. I've started the paperwork for our reimbursement."
Me: "Reimburse for what? I found that job on my own."
R: "D is one of the companies we work with and when we submitted your resume, they told us you were already hired."
Me: "And?"
R: "And you signed a contract and now its time to pay. The fees only start at $500"
Me: "Not me. I have the contract, it states, in the second paragraph, I am not responsible for any hiring fees."
<couple of seconds of silence>
R: "Yes, but that is only if we negotiated the contact. Since you went behind our back, we couldn't start the process"
Me: "And?"
R: "And its a breach of contract."
Me: "I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand what you're saying. It says right here on the contract I signed, I don't pay any fees. No where does it say I'm not allowed to look for a job on my own. Right?"
R: "Um..yea..right..right...but you were hired by one of our contracted companies."
Me: "No way I would have known that. Maybe you should have set up an interview long before now."
<R is getting pretty angry at this point>
R: "I'm sure we gave you list of companies we work with. Contacting those companies is a breach of contract. Unless you want our lawyers to get involved, the fee is only $500. Failing to honor your side of the agreement and we'll be forced to contact your employer and begin garnishing your wage until the fee is paid. You don't want that, do you?"
Me: "There was no list and I am allowed to find a job on my own. Again, I'm not responsible for you not setting up an interview so do whatever you think you can do. Have a good night"
<I hang up>

About a week later..

Boss: "Got a phone call from XYZ Recruiting requesting a wage garnishment. Do you know anything about that?"
<I explain the situation>
Boss: "Oh good grief. We've worked with them a couple of times and we contact them on an individual basis for new hires. You're fine"
Me: "You're not going to garnish my paycheck?"
Boss: "No no no, that's not how this works. He was probably trying to scare you into paying their crazy fees."
Me: "What if they get their lawyers involved? I don't want to cause any trouble"
Boss: "Ha ha...XYZ Recruiting is a couple of guys in an office and we have lawyers on the 3rd floor who eat and breath this shit. They know that and you won't hearing from them again."

Boss: Our customer's data is not syncing with XYZ service anynmore!

Me: Ok let me check. Did the tokens not refresh? Hmm the tokens are refreshing fine but the API still says that we do not have permissions. The scopes are fine too. I'll use our test account... its... cancelled? Hey boss, why is our XYZ account cancelled?

Boss: Oh, "I haven’t paid since I didn’t think we needed it" (ad verbatim)

😐

List of benefits given by some random company to its developer,
1- Medical, Dental, AD&D
2- Generous paid time off and holidays
3- Free fitness center in our building
4- Flexible schedule
6- Mac or PC, your choice
7- We and our customer don't use IE
8- Starbucks on the 1st floor
9- Generous 401k match
...

But I like 7th one the most!

A few weeks ago I stepped onto the grounds of lovely Canada. Back then - coming from Europe - I was surprised. Free WiFi everywhere without all the bells and whistles of creating an account and such.

Well ... at least I thought so ...

Today I went to a location where they actually charge you for their wireless services - fair enough the coverage area is pretty huge - and provide you with an access coupon. All good my optimistic me told me but once the login page loaded...

There are a lot of things about UX I could rant about but let's put that aside. The coupon came from the office where they KNEW all your contact details but it required you to create an account with all of them again to redeem the coupon.

Not only that but it asked for things like the phone number - obviously asking for a Canadian landline number since hell who uses mobiles anyway with numbers longer than ten characters?! - and even though it had a nice country selection it kept the states field there even when selecting a country that doesn't have states ...
Oh, and on a regular phone screen (which would be the target user for WiFi on a campground I suppose) the input fields for state and zip were occluded by the margins of the input rendering the content invisible.

And if that weren't enough after creating your account they made you watch an ad as if the personal data and the 4$ you paid them wasn't enough for the lousy 400 KB/s you get for 24h ...

Gets better though! After creating the account they display your password to make sure you remembered it ... over a non-secured WiFi network ... and send you an email afterward ... password via unencrypted mail via an unencrypted WIRELESS connection ... not that it protects anything that would matter anyways you can just snoop the MAC of your neighbor and get in that way or for that sake get their password but oh well ...

Gosh, sometimes I just feel the urgent need to find the ones responsible and tell them to GTFO of the IT world ...

Is it just me feeling like this about crappy UI/UX design? Always wondering...

So we're hiring for a new junior dev and for the most part it's been going great! We have some promising candidates and I am so glad to finally have a new dev on the team!

However, I would like to take a moment and offer a few suggestions to the people who wish to work for this great and illustrious company:

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE APPLY FOR THE JOB USING THE METHOD INDICATED IN THE AD. Please use our fancy, top-of-the-line, whiz-bang, cloud-based "talent acquisition" system that we paid way too much money for. I promise you, it's easy! Please don't send in your application by email, mail, telephone, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, telegram or carrier pigeon. But most importantly...

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS BEAUTIFUL IN THIS WORLD DO NOT SHOW UP AT OUR OFFICE UNANNOUNCED RESUME-IN-HAND. Believe it or not I do have an actual job that I spend my day doing! If I'm not in a meeting or at lunch or working from home, the best possible scenario is that you'll get 30 seconds of awkward small talk and be pointed to our whiz-bang, top-of-the-line "talent acquisition" system which you should have used in the first place (you did read the ad, right?). And at this point whatever you do...

DO NOT DEMAND AN ON-THE-SPOT INTERVIEW WHEN YOU SHOW UP UNANNOUNCED TO OUR OFFICE! Like, really? Do you think that you've wowed me so with your 30 seconds of awkward small talk that clearly I cannot wait to see what you will do with an entire hour? Look, I prepare for my interviews. I research you, your previous employers, your school and the hobbies you list on your resume. I check out your GitHub and LinkedIn. I may even Google your name! If that is all in order, I try to hassle some people into sitting in with me, find a time that works for everyone, and hope that there is a meeting room available. I'm not going to interview you at reception at 4pm on a Friday afternoon.

Please submit your application through our whiz-bang, top-of-the-line online "talent acquisition" system. Once I figure out how to log in, I promise I will spend an evening and read through all your cover letters with the utmost care. If you seem OK, you'll get an interview. There aren't that many developers in this town.

Company : Posted a developer job paid ad with proper JD and all info.
Candidates : Sent CV and applied for job vacancy.
Company : Called them to arrange interview.
Candidates : Accepted the appointment.

*Interview Day*

2/7 showed up on time.
1/7 requested to postpone.
4/7 disappeared.

Me : 🤔 🤷 🤐

TL;DR: A freehoster got a redesign!

I remember when I made "my own website" in wix and sitey. It sucked working with them for me. I hated having an ad for them fixed at the bottom of my screen. I hated WYSIWYG-editors and wanted to paste my own code, a pro feature.

Sometime later I found bplaced, a free german based (also English language) hoster. And I use it for all my "official" test project. My first ever published self-coded website is still on there.. When I want to show someone what I've been working on (locally) without putting it on my domain, I use their services. They always looked oldish like from 2000 but their redesign puts them at least in 2015 :D

Give 'em a shot if you want.
Sadly, I am not paid to say this. I just really like them.

!dev

This may be a petty rant, but It's been grinding my gears for a few months now... I fucking hate ads, it's starting to be incredibly ridiculous. You start a video... 2 ads... you watch for 2 minutes, another 2 ads (and no, adblock isn't a solution, that only works on PC, not devices)?!!! You start an App... ads, you listen to music... ads... you go to google... ads, you click a website... ads... you look out of your window... ads... you walk down the street... ads... ads.. ads...
Seriously, what the fuck have we done?!! As a society we fucked up so badly... Look, no matter how many times you offer me an ad for a furniture, I'm not going to buy a fucking furniture on just any random day. You are completely wasting my already limited time... If you don't have any ads to show me, then don't show me ads, fuck you, you fucking piece of shit software... How is it that it used to be enough to click away one static, non-intrusive ad, but now 6-8 15-20 second ads, popups and intrusive, mid-content ads are the norm?! And then a piece of shit like MoviePass DARES, FUCKING DARES, To work on some sort of camera-enabled check that you actually LOOK at the ads?!!!! ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?! WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE YOU RETARDED PIECE OF BLACK MIRROR SHIT, FUCK OFF WITH THIS BRAINWASHING BULLSHIT, I'M ALLERGIC TO IT, FUCK ALL OF THIS.

I fucking promise that any software I'll make will be either free and open source, or paid only by alternative means, no ads, not ever. I will never fucking add to this retarded bullshit. Never fucking ever will I lower myself on a level where I need to actively waste the time and psyche of thousands or millions of people to get money. Fucking hell.... As if the world doesn't suck enough already, we treat humans as cattle, and It's pissing me off... In the past I used to just delete any app that annoyed me with ads, but what the fuck do I do about youtube since it's the de-facto content source on the internet? And worse, my friends and family watch youtube.. even if I avoid it that doesn't mean the problem is solved... There needs to be an alternative, and paying subscriptions for every single fucking service on the web isn't a solution. Even worse with the current economy... I'd rather eat real food, than buy shit like premium on ShitTube, Fuckify, all the random news website I might read and every app or game I start once every two months... Shit like ad-less premium accounts aren't giving me an alternative, just a way to shoot myself in the foot longterm...

Godbless everyone that releases open source software, apps, tools, websites and such. I hope to god decentralized alternatives to youtube need to happen and not in the web3 way, because that's also retarded...

Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Shit, Fuck Shit, Piss, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Retards, Fucking absolutely disgusting pieces of shit... ... alright, I got it out of my system, but It's gonna be right back the next time YouTube forces me to look at 20 seconds of something I already skipped 48 times today...

2020 still comes up with new ways to hurt me badly...

A bit of backstory...

I have been the sole dev at my organization for awhile now (other two left for other jobs), so I have been maintaing and writing new code to support the business.

Our company was recently acquired by a larger entity and it has been very strange so far.

1. It has taken 5 weeks to acquire local admin rights on my own machine (I work remote) as well as a visual studio license.

2. We have known for a few weeks now we are getting a jr dev who will need the SAME procedures done on his machine/account and it has been two weeks now and nothing has been done. (Tickets have been put it - the issues have been escalated etc etc)

3. All of our code from our old company is in Azure Devops (which is connected to Azure AD) for some reason I haven't been able to add an external account (for my new account and org) to move the code elsewhere. I don't have the authority (I don't think) to place all of our code in a new location (GitHub,GitLab, self hosted solutions, etc)

4. All of our production VMs are billed through our old org located in Azure, so eventually that bill will stop being paid since we transitioned - I've brought this up to my manager (more non technical) who wasn't terribly worried about it.

5. I'm feeling slightly unfulfilled in this position. Earlier in my time here it was new and exciting, but there isn't much direction, not many goals, or interesting problems to solve.

Just wanted to express some issues that had been going on. Feel free to add ant feedback of suggestions 😄

This week I’ve been reinstating IE11 support.

OMFG WHY!? I hear you ask.

Is it due to critical legacy integration dependencies? AD Intranet logins? Draconian Group Policy rules?

Nope. This ONE user just prefers it! 🤯

How much are we getting paid for this nonsense? Sweet FA!

#cognativedissonance 😢

TL;DR: Stop. Hating. On. Ads. Here are 5 reasons why:

1. "No one likes ads"
I love seeing *good* ads before I watch a YouTube video. Or I looked up videos that YT recommended because they sounded fun and they were fun:
- Coke - Hey Brother is an amazing and touching short film
- Fressnapf (="food bowl") had an incredibly enjoyable "things you didn't know about cats" video I clicked on purpose and it was good.
- I found JetBrains through ads (free for me, student perks. But tbh I use atom)
and I could name more.

2. What are the alternatives?
I know there are some non-profits and that's cool but you wanna be paid in your job, right? So ads are why Facebook (I know, Facebook isn't enjoyed here but), YouTube, stackoverflow, etc. Wikipedia asks for a few million dollars of donations each year because they don't run ads. Smaller businesses can't do that really. Hell, even codepen has a "sponsored" section. Imagine you would have to pay for all of those services.

3. "Manipulation"
isn't a bad thing unless you abuse it. I manipulate you when I say that I love codepen in the same way an ad does. No one forces you to use a product or watch an ad (you can look away and often times skip).

4. Adblock
What if everyone did that? Adblock blocks happened a while ago and the war between adblock and ad-senders is still ongoing. The moment you see an ad, you are using/watching etc something which the creators thought is worth making money off. If you don't think so, leave the site. I am an adblock user but if the site politely asks me to disable it and I enjoy the content - I will disable it with pleasure.

5. Targeted ads
Yes. The internet is a huge data-crawling piece of shit. But there are many more questionable or even dangerous ways of data-harvesting online. I am glad to see ads I like and not the ones my sister might like. Some services allow you to disable personalized ads. Or use vpn if you really want to.

TLDR: I need advice on reasonable salary expectations for sysadmin work in the rural United States.

I need some community advice. I’m the sysadmin at a small (35 employee) credit card processing company. I began as an intern and have now become their full time sysadmin/networking specialist. Since I was hired in January I have:

-migrated their 2007 Exchange server to Office 365

-Upgraded their ailing Windows server 2003 based architecture to 2012R2

-Licensed their unlicensed VMware ESXi servers (which they had already paid for license keys for!!!) and then upgraded them to 6.5 while preventing downtime on hosted VMs using tricky transfers and deployments (without vMotion!)

-Deployed a vCenter server to manage said ESXi servers easier

-Fixed a three month gap in their backups by implementing Veeam, and verifying its functionality

-Migrated a ‘no downtime’ fileserver to a new hypervisor host, implemented a ‘hot standby’ server as a backup kept up to date by the minute with DFS replication.

-Replaced failing hard drives in a RAID array underlying their one ‘business critical’ fileserver, which had no backups for 3 months at that time

-Reorganized Active Directory and Group Policy deployment from a nightmare spiderweb of OUs and duplicate policies

-Documented the entire old network and now the new one as I’ve been upgrading this

-Audited the developers AWS instances and removed redundant machines, optimized load balancing on front end Nginx servers, joined developer run Fedora workstations to the AD domain and implemented centralized syslog monitoring on them.

-Performed network scans and rewrote firewall exceptions to tighten security

There’s more, but you get the idea. I’ve now been tasked with taking point on an upcoming PCI audit which will be my first.

I’m being paid $16/hr US, with marginal health benefits. This is roughly $32,000 a year, before taxes.

I have two years previous work experience managing a third party Apple repair facility (SimplyMac) and every Apple certification for warranty repair and software troubleshooting. I have a two year degree in general sciences, with about 4 years of college credit (Two years of a physics education and two years of computer science after I switched focus) I’m actively pursuing a CCNA and MCSA server 2016 with exams paid for and scheduled.

I’m going into a salary negotiation in two months. What is a reasonable salary to request, from your perspective, for someone in my position?

Thanks in advance!

Here is a little story about why I do not like to have to purchase developer tools and libraries..

Long story short it has taken at least 10 people more than 3 months to purchase two licenses of this component library which we still do not yet have licenses for.

It all starts with this guy who works here and has the job title 'solution architect'. He saw an ad on a website about some html component library. Then he asks me and the other developer here to look at it. He is super excited saying things like if we save only x days of time the cost is nothing in comparison to developer time..

The other developer and I both spend a few days reading the docs and trying some sample code. It offers some things we can use but I suggest not bothering with it.

Despite my suggestion he goes to the technical manager and they write up a business case. After about a month our receptionist cc me on an email chain from the it commercial manager who is asking for the licensing information so they can add the component creator as a vendor in the purchasing system. I send them a link to the component website which lists all that.

Jump forward two more months to last week and I got a spam email from the component company saying they have some new version out. I am wondering what has happened so I ask our receptionist she says it is with accounts payable and waiting payment - but it is marked urgent and she will find out.

Today I am cc in an email saying they have paid for it two weeks ago. So where is the license info? Nobody knows.

best ad services to use? I really don't want to use google. even if they paid double, I wouldn't use them. anyone know? I'm talking about for websites and/or apps

Trying brave browser. So far so good. A few buts though.

Importing bookmarks, saved passwords and such works fine but you can't import stuff saved in the storage, which is a bummer.

Also, advertising it as a browser where you get paid/rewarded for viewing ads is a bit disingenuous. At a rate of 2 cents per ad (max 5 per day), it's like saying a breadcrumb is equivalent to half a slice of white bread.

Haven't been able to enable picture in picture mode, which is also a bummer.

An integrated torrent client inside the browser is kinda cool though!

That aside, it does run faster overall.

Oh, my worst dev experience.

First of all everyone know it, people who ask you to repair there computer 🤦‍♂️
Or people who say: "Hey Windows Media player is not working now. Fix it"

But the best moment and worst too is a moment where I present my new website and a friend start to refresh the site with F5 on his browser. I ask him why he do it and he answere "Yeah, you will be rich when I do it"

I don't get it. Why rich? So I ask him and he answere that websites are paid by web request an "clicks" "views" counter.

That was the stupidest thing I ever hear. Okay when I would show ads than maybe it's "true" but without them🤦‍♂️

But that's not the end after I explained him that it's not so he fucked me up that I would be very stupid because I don't register on a service which pay you for it. I explained him that the only service could be an ad service but no he don't understand it and try to discuss with me that a service like this exist. I ask for a link to the service and he could not answer.

For me it was the worst experience because for me it was the most stupidest thing ever and he try to discuss with me and really we discuss 1 hour about it🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

I feel like premium content should be available via paid (ad-free), free (ads), or through web user small scale crypto mining, at the users discretion obviously.

I don't get why we have to have these ad blockers and ad creators trying to one up each other. The *option* for low-performance crypto mining while on the page would be cool to have as a choice.

This is why we can never have enough software developers

It's true. No matter how many people learn to program, there will never be enough people who know how to program. They don't have to be very good at it either. It is now a required skill.

Minimum wage in first world countries is way above 5$ per hour. A Raspberry PI 3B costs 40$, or at most 1 day of work for the worst paid jobs. And it will run for years, and do routine tasks up to thousands of times faster than any employee. With that, the only excuse that people still do routine tasks, is the inaccessibility of coder time.

Solution: everybody should know how to write code, even at the simplest level.

Blue-collar jobs: they will be obsolete. Many of them already are. The rest are waiting for their turn.

Marketing people - marketing is online. They need to know how to set up proper tracking in JS, how to get atomic data in some form of SQL, how to script some automated adjustments via APIs for ad budgets, etc. Right now they're asking for developers to do that. If they learn to do that, they'll be an independent, valued asset. Employers WILL ask for this as a bonus.
Project Managers - to manage developers, they need to know what they do. They need to know code, they have to know their way around repositories.
QA staff - scripted tests are the best, most efficient tests.
Finance - dropping Excel in favor of R with Markdown, Jupyter Notebooks or whatever, is much more efficient. Customizing / integrating their ERP with external systems is also something they could do if they knew how to code.

Operations / Category Management - most of it would go obsolete with more companies adopting APIs as a way to exchange important information, rather than phone calls and e-mails.

Who would not be replaced or who wouldn't benefit from programming? Innovative artists.

A lot of it might not be now now, but the current generation will see it already in their career.

If we educate people today, without advanced computer skills and some coding, then we are educating future deadbeats.

With all this, all education should include CS. And not just as a mandatory field or something. Make it more accessible, more interesting, more superficial if needed. Go straight to use cases, show its effectiveness in the easiest way possible. Inquisitive minds will fill in the blanks, and everyone else will at least know how to automate a part of their work.

I need some advice. A year ago, one of my former colleagues got a job at one of my dream companies. We weren't besties but we had a good relationship. When I learned about her new job I congratulated her and told her that I'd like to work there too. A position at that company has been open for quite a while but I'm hesitating to apply because:
a) If I apply without telling her and the recruiters see that we used to be colleagues, it will seem strange that I didn't ask her for a referral
b) If I ask her for a referral she might sabotage me because she's probably grooming one of her friends for that position or she thinks that I was a horrible colleague and doesn't want to work with me again. If she liked me, wouldn't she tell me about the position?
On the other hand, the ad for that well paid position has been on their site for months so I'm starting to think it's either fake or they're looking for a special unicorn(which I am not)
Should I apply or is it a complete wasted of my time? (I already have a job)

So, I browse to a video livestream and an annoying ad starts before the livestream is shown. Furthermore, the page jumps around because of a cookie notification that also blocks some UI elements at the top.

Note: this is the website of a public (government-paid) national news website with very high standards and a good reputation.

Action 1: refresh page; I hope the ad is skipped. Nope, annoying ad restarts. Page jumps around again because of the cookie notification.

Action 2: accept cookies to remove notification blocking the top UI (it's OK, I know it can't actually save any cookies on my machine). Instead of some nice JS doing it for me in the background, the page refreshes because you know, HTTP requests and whatnot.

Annoying ad restarts again... FML 🤬

Lessons to be learned from this for any web dev: these annoyances can and *will* exponentially get worse if used simultaneously against your users, instead of being used to help or inform your users.

As a user of you website, I want to watch a livestream. I don't care what stupid legislation forced you to shove a fucking cookie notification in my face. Make sure it is not annoying me to the point that I close you website and take minutes to rant about it!

Also, give me the freedom of choice to watch an ad or not. You and I both know that some ads simply are not for me. Better save yourself and myself the bandwidth.

And go get good at web development. You're a news site. That's more than just text and images. If you want great apps, social media coverage, videos, live streams, blogs, etc. go get some better web devs. Your current web frontend devs only qualify to get fired.

Why the fuck is everyone behind this whole privacy thing . I mean what did you expect , servers do cost... you know . No one wants to provide you a service to chat with your shit collecting butler in the adjacent room unless it's going to benefit them .

Stick your face on the internet and want people to date you ?

Understand that your virtual social needs need to be supported by a ridiculous amount of electricity and man power which wouldn't be required if you could just throw out your rotting willie nilles in the open .

All this isn't fucking free .. wait were you shocked ? Oh so you just thought there were a few thousand servers powering buckets of pictures of horse poop that you for some reason thought your girlfriend was interested in . NO!

IT'S PRIVACY you are paying with your gaddamn privacy !! Information pays just like the time you paid a 100 bucks to the boyfriend of your girlfriend to find out more details .

Ridiculous . You people don't like ads . You don't like paying . You don't like providing information . THEN DON'T USE THE DAMN INTERNET .

IF YOU'RE REALLY THAT CONCERNED ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY THEN SPEND SOME VALUABLE TIME TO ACQUIRE ENOUGH OF A SKILLSET TO SETUP A VPN AND STOP POSTING YOUR PHONE NUMBER ON YOUR EX'S WALL ASKING HER TO CALL YOU.

One more honest thing to rant about is ads . As much as you hate them they're an easy way out . I'm not sure why a 20 second ad would bother you on mobile and not on television and I'm not sure why you wouldn't buy the ad company and shut it down if 20 seconds were so costly to you .

I want to rant even more on uninstalling services like Windows and Google for stupid reasons but I'll take a break here . My frustration has touched low levels.

No matter how much i think i am sorted out regarding my career, one small shit happens and i am again confused.

I previously interned for 2 months in a company as an Android dev(it was a 4 month internship, but i got it reduced to 2 because of my college exams)

It was a nice ad based company. Their main focus was on their web products and had no Android product or team( they just had a thought for expanding in Android) . So clearly i was their first recruit/intern

I worked their, all alone, at my pace, without any external help. It was a picnic for me as nobody bossed me around or gave me deadlines as nobody knew my work, and i got paid. They would just wait me to report my daily work, i would write my stuff honestly, but i know they understood jack shit

I was told that once the alpha product is liked by the investors we will recruit a team, but i made the product in 1st month and never got info about any recruitment going on. I was just told to fix the bugs and work more on it.

When my internship ended , i was already bored out getting stuck at a place without any senior help . Plus they damaged relations with me on other reasons( halted my stipend for last month for 60 days, that's another rant, but it was mostly the stupidity of hr dept)

So now i started applying for other companies. My original company called me afterwards but i made an excuse to be out of state and talk after new year(it was honest)

Other companies are now showing interest with a lower pay , but now am feeling like a stupid person going from a decent pay and comfortable environment to a lesser pay but aggressive environment .

Should i contact my original company again? I feel guilty leaving them this way, but to be fair i was wasting my time there (quite literally, i was making my assignments and writing blogs there when stuck)