Television. I cannot understand why anyone would willingly pay money to be advertised to constantly.

I’d go to school and take every course I possibly could for the rest of my life or until I couldn’t.

From when I worked in IT:

-In your ticket, do not give a vague description and a time you want the problem fixed and then expect anything to get fixed. Often times we very much need to work with you directly to understand your problem thoroughly to investigate and fix it thoroughly.

-If you have some weird problem, it might be just as weird to us when we first look at it. We are not omniscient. What we are good at is researching possible fixes, applying them, and measuring the effect they have in actually solving your problem.

-If we didn’t install it, don’t expect we know anything about it. You might really like to install and use Fusion 360 over AutoCAD or something, but that doesn’t mean I know where Fusion 360 is storing its configurations, or that I have a phone number to call to get support from that company as a vendor, or that I have ever troubleshot this application.

-If you’re really nice to us, we might be able to offer you suggestions for problems on personal computers, but sorry, we cant usually touch it, especially if we are outsourced IT. The moment we touch your personal computer it opens us to a shitload of liabilities and it could lose me my job.

-We understand very much that typically the only time you’re talking to us is when you’re mad because some shit is preventing you from working, but we don’t want that either so don’t be mad at us about it, we would prefer you never had to put in a ticket for anything except configuration change requests.

-Pay attention to our recommendations. If we say you have to have your laptop on at a certain time of day weekly for updates, we aren’t just asking for our benefit, we’re asking this because if you ignore it, eventually when you power on your laptop, windows is going to force all those updates to push at once and suddenly you’ll be without your computer when you’re supposed to be doing an important presentation because its going to take 4 hours for a years worth of updates to apply. We have little control over this.

I kind of imagine it will be the same thing every rockstar game has become. Some pretty ok story with every mission just devolving into a shooting gallery.

My counterpoint to that is that if you’re a good security professional, you wouldn’t take such risks because your entire job revolves around mitigating risks.

If you break into a network, or have someone do it for you, it’s very difficult to completely remove all evidence of that having occurred, and because there’s just so many variables, there will always be a non-zero percent chance of it being traced back to you.

Your company can hire an entire security firm of security professionals to look for this evidence. I don’t care who someone is or how good they are at their job, very few people, unless they have narcissistic personality disorder, would trust that their individual skill completely outweighs the combined skill of an entire team of people who do that every day as their occupation.

Furthermore, taking such extreme risks with ones future just screams that they have some mental problem which they should probably be talking to a professional about, because a typical person would consider taking any risk of being imprisoned for years for computer crimes too big of a risk.

Hmmm yes I suppose that is true.

Nonetheless I’ll always opt for the course of action that has the smallest potential negative impact on my personal life.

Yea I don’t trust the opsec of some random 4chan user to cover their tracks and therefore mine in that scenario.

I’ll just take the option that guarantees I can’t go to jail and ruin my entire fucking life lol.

Yes I understand the intention, but in one of these scenario’s I’ve covered my ass legally and if something happens where the company gets ransomware for example, I likely get paid thousands of dollars in overtime restoring backups and the user ends up updating anyway, and in the other I can go to prison, lose my job, and never be able to use my time at that company as a reference on a resume let alone probably easily get a job again because now I have a criminal record.

I know this because I have lived scenario A probably 6 times in my life.

Forgive the audio, recommend muting, but I expect it might have been similar to this video of a woman who does not know how to jump:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1EVWeek7Kk

You understand that legally speaking this is approximately the same thing as telling your boss that the front door isn’t strong and thieves could easily kick it in, and then when they refuse to fix it, the response you’re suggesting is “show up at 3 am and take a sledgehammer to the door, but just dont steal anything from inside” right?

The point is to cover your ass, not pull your pants down.

Money.

Truly, what they care a lot more about in the industry is IT certs over a diploma so you’re doing just as well as you would have if you graduated anyway.

You did the right thing by getting a second opinion regardless of whether the first person you saw was legitimate because it was the wise decision in the sense that its important to be comfortable with a diagnosis and the person helping you.

Do your best to be strong and don’t let the fear and frustration get the better of you, you can do this.

Whatever might be up, whether it is schizophrenia or something else, it is treatable.

It can take time working with a psychiatrist to figure out what works best to help you be the best version of yourself, but a solution does exist for you so don’t give up.

For a lot of treatments for this, it can take time being on treatment for a while before you notice a difference (some times a few weeks of being on treatment). If you still aren’t noticing a difference after a few weeks, just continue to keep your psychiatrist up to date on how youre feeling, and if the treatment does not seem to be working, they will alter it to try something else to see if it works for you.

I can definitely see how this can be frustrating, I myself experienced a long period of anxiety problems where I probably went through 10 different treatments before I found something that worked for me, but in the end it was worth the fight.

I wish you the best of luck, always remember that you can do this and that you are a strong person.

I’m over a decade away from 40 and I grew up with it.

Furthermore the context of the use of younger is in:

“In my experience, younger people who grew up with the internet write their texts and emails as if they are instant messaging, because they grew up with AOL and MSN messenger etc when it comes to text based communication.”

Which is replying to a post titled:

“What is it about the text messages and emails sent by older people that make me feel like I’m having a stroke?”

The use of “Younger” here is not an absolute term, it is a relative term, meaning it refers to people younger than the older people the original poster is referring to, who are in my estimation likely to be anyone under the age of 60 based on what OP describes and my informed experiences having worked in the IT industry supporting users of all ages.

But then why buy the ticket at all? How are foreign agents going to get your credit card purchase? Just leaving the car in the airport should be enough

This is an excellent point and someone else also pointed out that it wouldn’t be necessary.

I would agree if it were domestic agents, but if airlines will comply if a foreign agent just asks for it, then that is somewhat concerning since its a multinational corporation freely handing over information on private individuals to authorities that don’t have local jurisdiction without so much as a warrant.

Like unless the foreign agents are working in cooperation with the local government, I don’t think for example, an agent of CSIS could walk into an airport in Tokyo and just ask them where Marcus D. Walton flew to or to see their security tapes and expect to get an answer from Japan Airlines without a shit load of red tape.

More likely, that would get them arrested and questioned as to why they’re conducting an illegal investigation of a private individual on foreign soil and probably be seen as an international incident creating a lot of friction between the two nations.

I expect you probably missed that the question denotes foreign agents so no worries.

Valid point, good thinking.

There are many resources to research for inspiration here as similar concepts exists outside of science fiction.

Read up on the concept of the astral plane and by extension, astral projection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astral_plane

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astral_projection

Grab my always packed camping pack and rifle case + ammunition, get in car, drive to airport, call 911 on the way and inform them that armed individuals are breaking into my house providing the address and hang up immediately, park car at airport parking lot and pay with card, take taxi back into city with cash, get bus ticket with cash which takes me out to the woods/mountains, camp there until I can’t.

It would also be wise to immediately book a one way ticket to anywhere on the way to the airport and then not use it.

Even if they have access to my payment details, the last things they would see are parking for the airport and buying a plane ticket.

They would need access to the airports CCTV to determine that I did not actually board the flight.

If they had access to this, and were able to get access to the city CCTV as well, the best they could possibly determine after many hours or days is that I was last seen taking a bus west.

In my experience, younger people who grew up with the internet write their texts and emails as if they are instant messaging, because they grew up with AOL and MSN messenger etc when it comes to text based communication.

Older people who communicated over text before the internet only did this in one way - writing letters.

As a result their style of texting or emailing is often very long form in comparison.

When writing letters you are limited by how much room there is on a piece of paper.

This leads to using some shorthand which used to be fairly common, but has fallen out of public knowledge for younger people.

You could argue that some of the stuff that younger people email or text informally can be just as cryptic because there is entirely different shorthand that millenials and generations Y and Z use.

If you closely examine how you casually communicate with your peers of a similar age, you will notice it can be just as odd as what you experience from communicating with generations on either side of you.