If you know me, you know how much I hate inequity. You have even have seen me handing a blanket to someone that needed one when it was cold, or attempting to when I was a boy and lacked authority over blankets. I mention this because it illustrates one of the fundamental aspects of who I am, credit for which goes to my grandmother and my daddy (may he rest in peace): I don't view people other than me as less than, especially when it comes to matters of money. In my day I've done all sorts of jobs and I was even pretty good at a couple of them, like tending the right bar, or short order cooking, or and this is the one that hurts the most, programming computers.

You see, fairly early on programming computers was mostly what I wanted to do with myself. This was an upshot of a lot of things, but mostly I seemed to have a talent for it and I needed a way out of where I grew up. I started programming computers professionally when I was 17. It was my second job, my first having been flipping burgers when I was 16. Since then, I've managed to make a decent living (at least for a kid from small town America with nothing but a Kindergarten Diploma for credentials) with a few exceptional periods during which I was consciously exploring other options. I was horrendously broke during those periods and even had to move back in with my saint of a mother each time.

The lesson from this was learned, like all the other lessons I've learned (as anyone who knows me can confirm) the hard way: I'm not very good at things that aren't computer programming that also allow for a decent living. And once that sunk in (~13 years ago or so) all of my time and energy has been programming computers and hopefully being paid to so that I don't have to move my network to an alley downtown where I have to steal the electricity to run it from a local restaurant and the other unhoused in the area don't mess with it because I play movies for them nightly and they know that the computers in my network have no resale value.

As of Liberation Day, the man who builds ballrooms, or as I like to refer to him "Hey Stupid!" has set about systematically destroying (with some assistance from Scamy Sam Altman and his ilk) everything in society that allowed myself and my entire class (senior or higher level computer engineers) to exist in a remotely comfortable way. Two weeks after Liberation Day the engineering department at the job I had (and really liked, they had a lot of fun problems to solve) was summarily dismissed. Since then I've been descending the circles of hell as my life savings was completely destroyed, my days became filled with conversations with the odd recruiter interspersed with mostly obvious scammers purporting to be recruiters so they can steal my data, other recruiters calling me up to tell me about jobs that I've either already been submitted to and rejected by, or already been submitted to and interviewed with then humiliated and rejected by all of which pay about 1/3rd of what I was being paid less than a year ago, past that we've hit the point of no return on having to move from the house I'm typing this in, which had been something I viewed as quite an accomplishment even though we're only renters, I worked very hard to make it possible for us to be here as long as we have, and it's going to be gone by March. In short, it is not a good time to be me.

Worse than any of this personal discomfort, though, is that my beloved wife is now working two jobs to help support us, and that sucks because it's my job to support us and I can't do that anymore.

I still program computers every day, and for my entire adult life, this one thing was enough to at least keep me employed and housed, but since Liberation Day, along with my life savings, my ability to think positively, and my self-respect, I was also liberated from my ability to make a loving. I need help, so I'm asking for it. Please help me pay bills, contribute to moving expenses and hopefully find someone that's willing to pay me to program computers.