Isolation...

These uncertain times have driven me nuts. I’m stuck at home no what I’m doing whether it’s working remotely or talking to loved ones. All you get is virtual interaction, but it’s not the same. You can’t feel people vibes behind a screen, it’s just a flat representation of them.

I have to stay home all the time. I want to see my family and sometimes I take risks even though I shouldn’t see them. I’m tempted to go to my friends’ domiciles. I want to give gifts but they might be contaminated. I don’t know.

I can’t host my meetup anymore. Other meetups that I join are all online instead of being around a table. My part-time driving job has come to a halt because everything non-essential has been closed and people are trapped at home. I get no riders and I’m scared they’ll pollute my car with the illness. Your appointments are virtual too, and even worse sometimes on the phone. How are they going to see your facial expressions and body language to know how you really are. How will they feel your pain when all you have is sound.

Going outside is scary, it feels like a taking a risk everytime and I have to admit I’ve taken big ones. It makes me anxious. People don’t seem to know how to protect themselves or others. Few have read what the experts have recommended to us. I feel unsafe because the rules aren’t being followed.

You never know when someone has it, maybe I do but I’m not reacting to the monster. Someone else may be the same but the reaction on me might be severe enough to send me for admission.

People with conditions are getting tired of all of this. Even healthy people are developing anxiety and stress because of this mess. I want my life to go back to normal and everyone does too. Even health care workers are getting sick of all the extreme protections they have to do, and even with that, people get hit with it anyways.

The timelines are uncertain and picking the wrong time might cause everything to spread again. Maybe in a few months, or next year, no one can give me an idea. How do we control something that spreads so quickly.

Scientists are doing their research to find treatments and other forms of protection from this disease. Yet it is not something that is discovered in a few months. There’s a ton of paperwork and trials needed to get things approved. It’s not going to be tomorrow.

I can’t put on my calendar when we’ll all be free again because no one knows when.

A closure on my past...

I’ve been haunted by my own past for so long. It’s not something I wish the reveal but I believe it’s finally time to put it aside and leave it only for only opportune moments when it’s warranted. I’m a drama queen and sometimes I talk too much about it, but in reality, it’s a balance between past and future.

My thinking patterns often revolve ruminating about the past with the inability to let go of what happen. Feelings of anger, regret and sorrow haunt me again and again. I subject myself to pain that I felt beforehand and no matter how hard I try to bear it, it hurts just as much as it did before.

Sometimes life presented me with surprises that I didn’t expect. Events and happenings that I would have never pictured in my past self. I can never tell if it’s emotions, my circumstances or just people that cause me all this pain. Actually, it’s an intangible mess of the way our world works. We clutch onto controlling it but the truth is, we are submitting to it. Philosophers have constantly argued on who’s the master of our fate: us or the Universe.

The past ten years have pushed my patience to the limit and made me realize how vulnerable of a person I truly am. I always assume that people have good intentions and it comes back to bite me. I hold steadfast onto hope until the very end despite all signs to the contrary. As a result, the anguish holds me down as I try to recollect the pieces of hope that just shattered in front of me.

I was lied to and accused of being delusional to statements that turned out to be vivid and looked past into the future. I was assigned titles I didn’t deserve and convinced of having things that I did not possess. I became so desperate that I desired to end my misery in any way possible.

When the whole adventure was put to end, I realized how bamboozled and how unduly tested I really was. Gullibility was my weakness and it drove me so far into psychosis. Disbelief made me blind to the obvious evidence that something was indeed wrong and a conspiracy was hidden right under my nose.

I’ve learned my lesson: I should listen to my gut. Toying with emotions are a sign of weakness and leave someone into insanity. I regret not following my intuition as it may have saved me from being abused and tortured. Next time, I need to submit to my unconscious mind.

I have chosen to change as much as I could in my daily life; every detail. I’m trying to gain a new perspective on life, one where the past is on the floor. A new chapter in my life has started where the pieces of the puzzle are starting to fit again.

Anger...

After some deep thought, I decided to finally write something about myself, but I’m keeping it vague on purpose until I get more comfortable with myself. I can’t keep a veil of perfection hiding what’s inside me. I’m broken, flawed and troubled; that’s the truth. I can proudly cope with this big mess and function like a ‘normal’ person, but I have to hide everything and pretend nothing is wrong with me.

A few years ago, I learned that my primary emotion is Anger. It’s not aggressiveness or the desire for violence, but rather a tightness in my chest caused by memories that still haunt me. It’s self-criticism, self-hate, self-everything. I never know how to express it but one odd thing it does is make my creativity explode.

The past week I’ve gone through a swath of emotions ranging from sadness to disappointment to discomfort to anxiety to depression and everything in between; mainly due to recent life circumstances. It exhausted me so much that I became emotionally numb, but in an odd way: able to feel negative emotions but not positive ones. I’ll just say it’s a chemical problem than emotional or cognitive.

My past life circumstances have been against me and the bad memories are really starting to seep in. I hate myself for it and my capacity to ruminate endlessly about it. I’m programmed to see things in a dark light and any lightness is simply dimmed until it is simply obscurity. Why?

People tell me to think happy thoughts but it’s not in my capacity. My brain isn’t wired for optimism but rather pessimistic anxiety. I’ve developed my own coping techniques but they only numb the pain rather than get rid of it.

Yet, I know why I am angry and I’m not going to talk about it. It’s going to spoil my image of ‘perfection’ that the world has taught me to keep. I reveal my troubles to so few people and the stigma behind them scares me so much. Help is everywhere to deal with it and I’m seeking as much as I can.

I’ve been dealing with a monster for over 10 years now. It’s stuck with me for the rest of my life. I know I can cope, but sometimes the emotions get to me and all I want to do is seclude myself.

One day, I’ll write about what’s it like to be me, but it’ll be buried under a swath of prepared blog posts so it’s not the first thing on my page.

Get ready to read away…

I'm afraid to write about my personal life here.

My blog has explored a huge mess of subjects from the technologically related, to the automotive focused, to some obscure aspects of gaming and even a few laughs. However, one thing I always avoid was talking about my personal life, I’m too scared and here’s why.

At one point, I had an extremely long blog post about some misadventure in my life that was very personal and honestly revealed secrets about my past and my present condition. I decided to eventually remove it despite its popularity and relegated it to an unlinked part of my website only accessible by a certain URL. I only share it with those who are curious or in the appropriate communities.

For many, their blog is a journal of their life; what they’re struggling with. Like me, they’re brave enough to put their full name on it but there’s a really big caveat: Employers.

My entire perspective can be altered and skewed by those who creep up the most on me, those who are considering to hire me. I don’t hide my website on my resume, it’s right there on the corner. I can see in my analytics when a potential employer browses through my website and honestly they spend more time than the average reader.

My blog has an angry vibe to it, which is honestly my primary emotion before I fall into anxiety and depression. I consider myself a vocal and passionate person and whatever I’m going to write is going to be worded strongly and boldly.

I want to write about my life desperately yet I’m afraid that those who will guide my career will judge me for who I truly am: a broken and troubled person. I’ll be thrown out of the choice pool because I decided to express my freedom and complain about what ails me.

I didn’t realize how much employers search you from your LinkedIn profile to your Facebook account to anything else with your name. My name and username show my website as one of the first results in addition to other searches. If they could get a hold of your reddit account and dating profiles they would.

I don’t know anymore what criteria employers and clients use to judge their potentials. It’s been from experience to my volunteering and unfortunately a ‘background check’ of my online presence. Sometimes I wonder how an album of a trip to Cuba has anything to do with your performance and skill set, but let me tell you, every picture will be looked at.

Working my first customer service job - My experience with Uber part-time

I started working for Uber in January 2019 when I left a software company and was looking my next foray into my software development adventures. I usually take a month break between jobs or contracts but at the time I was facing some financial troubles making it difficult to pay for my living expenses. I searched for easy to get jobs but I knew I wouldn’t get something right away. Eventually, I settled for Uber, initially by necessity. Uber requires a lot of paperwork to start picking up riders including a safety inspection. You’re considered self-employed so you’re responsible for registering a business and handling taxes.

I was working long shifts. Starting from 5 AM in the morning until 10 PM. Then another 4PM-9PM shift. This was on the weekdays mostly to serve people going to and from work. On Saturdays, it was usually from 4PM to midnight to satisfy those enjoying outings on the weekends both sober and drunk. Sunday was my break day and work was slow anyways, few people seemed to go out on Sundays.

I gained quite a bit of respect for taxi drivers and bus drivers. Driving for 8-10 hours a day was really difficult with the constant concentration and physical activity. I came back home with cramps all over my body and pain medication was my best friend. I took weeks for my body to adjust and the after shift pain went away.

Navigating a city was much harder than I though even with Google Maps. I actually asked my friend who was a bus driver how I could know the city better. He suggested to purchase the large maps from the gas station and start plotting routes on it. Eventually, the road network in Ottawa became more and more lucid in my mind and I started to rely less on navigation.

The most difficult part for me was actually finding the rider after the request. Incorrect addresses, misplaced pins and imprecise GPS positioning made it really hard. Sometimes I got the name of a venue and in tight downtown Ottawa sometimes it might be hard to find that particular restaurant. Pickup and dropoffs required me to stop sometimes in the middle of the road and I started to realize how impatient Ottawa drivers could be with frequent honking and overtaking.

When commuting to work you see only common driving situations. However, when exploring the city you get to see how wild drivers can be. Sudden lane changes, people going against one way streets, accidents, etc. Safety becomes much more paramount and require diligent attention. It didn’t help that you had a stranger passenger on board, you feel more obligated to protect them.

The amount of multitasking was quite overwhelming. First, you had to find and drop off the passenger in a safe location. You were to drive the car more smoothly and carefully than usual. Navigation was difficult too as you had to pay attention to both your phone and the street looking carefully for street names and not getting distracting missing an intersection. You had to talk and entertain the rider while doing all of the above. It didn’t help that I was driving a manual transmission car and all my limbs were busy.

After a month, I was back into my field. My car took quite the beating running thousands of kilometers. Within a month I need an oil change and a thorough brake job. Most of the driving was in the city and the heavy stop and go pace meant heavy fuel consumption. I started to understand why many Uber drivers purchased hybrids.

However, I realized after starting my new contract that I actually missed working for Uber. I decided to become a part time driver working on Saturdays only from 4PM to 1AM.

Uber was my first customer service job and it was totally different from anything I’ve done sitting in an office. Honestly, it was quite the relief from the isolation in being in a cubicle. It wasn’t about making a big company bigger, but rather serving people. It felt way more fulfilling than anything I’ve ever done. I actually felt like I was making people happy and providing them a service they needed. Intoxicated people were no longer driving, instead I was sober able to them home safely.

It didn’t help that I’m extremely passionate about driving. The part I look the most forward to in the day is my commute to the office. Every Sunday, I take my car for a 100 km stroll. I find driving very satisfying and engaging. Although I’m not a car enthusiast in the sense that I want to collect them or know how they work very well, I’m a driving enthusiast.

The job became more of a hobby for me rather than work. I actually looked forward to every Saturday more even then the weekdays with my day job.

I don’t think Uber is a good full-time job as it seems to make little money. However, if you’re interested in the social aspect and driving, it’s a much more interesting proposition. For those who work in an office all the time, I highly recommend trying a customer service job just to see what it’s like.