Education is a good thing

[GovermentCheese]

I was thinking today about all of the schooling that I have been through over the years and out of all of it which class or classes were the hardest and it came down to these

1) Nuke School reactor theory
2) Machinist Mate “A” school learning the basic steam cycle
3) Financial Statistics in college
4) WEC Winter Emergency Care in Vail
5) UNIX\LINUX admin class over at the Udub.


Now out of that 5, numbers 5 and 4 stand out. WEC was a 4 month class that I had to take over at the local community college in Vail. I took it because I wanted to get on the ski patrol and this was one of the prerequisites. That was a unbearable course as you are basically learning everything about the human body and trying to save a life. Think of it as how to be a “Hospital Corpsman” crash course. The final practical is made up of 8 stations and is done on the hill with real people (pretending to be hurt) and you have to ski to every station and administer some sort of help, one of those stations being a triage station where you have to actually put someone in the sled and ski them off of the hill. You have 2 other guys on your team and you are timed at every station. You are judged by 2 doctors and 10 WEC certified patrollers. Man talk about sweating bullets, I had to take my practical twice before I passed, but it was worth it.

As for number 5, when I took that Unix class, I have to hand it to you Unix guys, that is like speaking Russian to me, I had NO idea of what was going on, I do not think I had studied that hard in a long time, especially when it came to writing Cron jobs and Pearl Scripts. I HATE PEARL SCRIPTS. I still passed that class also but I had to sweat it out. In the end, I got more appreciation for you Unix boys, to me that is “ROCKET SCIENCE”.

[[AK]Nuts]

Let's see. I'm all street smarts but I've got a some:

1. Radioman School
2. Shipboard Firefighting
3. um
4. uh...
Wow. I'm like, ya know, all un-edgamacated and stuff.

Radioman school was easy except for the morse code. I ended up passing 18wpm (send/receive) only because I was able to memorize the messages! Firefighting school was cool. Black, oily boogers are not.