consider me Vocational Rehabbed!

Remember when I said I got GREAT news? So here's how Vocational Rehabilitation worked out.

Toward the end of my 5-week session (which I call 'basic training'), I had a meeting with the head of their IT school, my vocational counselor who drove 3 hours for this, the director of the whole program, and my folks. They don't normally do this, but we asked for it, & I'm getting very used to hearing the phrase 'We don't normally do this, however...'

We came to this meeting prepared to fight the good fight. They were saying I was not a good candidate for their computer school since:
A) I often had to ask for directions around the building in my first week-and-a-half
B) In the first few weeks, I made my fair share of jokes, maybe sometimes off-color humor
C) I'm having difficulty turning short-term memories into long-term memories, such as I MIGHT remember 5 minutes later that phone number you just said, but if my mind turns to a different task in the meantime, I'll probably forget the number. They said that might cause an issue since their computer school runs at an accelerated pace.

BUT:
1) Their computer school is for folks who have NEVER done this before, and I just got a 82% on their PROGRAMMING test, the hardest category they offer.
2) I'm not married to the computer language I know (I'm only KINDA a Java snob), as I went to dinner last night with a Furman Univ. friend, and he made the point that once you know one language, those fundamentals can be transferred to any computer language. (This F.U. friend worked for my last company doing exactly what I did, and when he was leaving the position, he gave me a head's-up that he was leaving, so I interviewed, and I filled his spot, and was there for 5 years) The issue only comes up in that the Voc. Rehab computer school doesn't use this language AT ALL (yet). Okay, so I can learn any language, but that 84% says that my skills in the Java language are pretty strong. ('Oh, so you know English, well then it won't be that hard to pick up Russian, nyet?' Nyet.)

SO... we came into this meeting thinking that I might have to hire a private tutor, as I've done before. BUT they recognized that I want the job I had, and they're committed to helping me achieve that-- that's what they do. So they threw a new beast on the negotiating table, called a 'job coach'. This job coach would be skilled in my programming language (maybe a college student), and help me perform my work. I know roughly 80-90% of the syntax of this language, but where the problem lies seems to be in my problem-solving ability. SO, I would explain to this job coach HOW I would attack a certain problem, and they would help guide me away from errors in my reasoning. AND HERE'S THE KICKER: the job coach would be employed by the state-- NOT ME. Sweet!

So for me, Vocational Rehab is the bomb!!!

Oh, and to throw in a chuckle (someone who overheard this said it gave them a good laugh), in Occupational Therapy, there's always a few patients in there working on separate projects. So one fellow was on the computer doing a memory game where certain sounds are associated with putting the cursor over certain parts of a picture. Then it plays one of those sounds and you've got to put the cursor over the part of the picture that is linked to it. So we're working away on our individual tasks and Dale's doing this program on the other side of the room. The O.T. asks "Dale, how's it going?" He says "I just can't find the boing!" (meaning he couldn't figure out which part of the screen was linked with a 'boing' sound) And I quipped "Dale, that's why we're all here. We're all in Voc. Rehab because we just can't find the boing!" (heh, but I actually have no idea what that even means, it just has a nice ring)

Now, we're totally unclear how this employment coach thing will work out, so stay tuned...

I'm not redundant. And I'm not redundant.