Wednesday, July 02, 2008

It's funny because it's true

So I'm reading the Encyclopedia Dramatica (don't ask) page on "Unrealistic Expectations" (I said don't ask), and I come across these lovely lines:

Unrealistic Expectations about:

High School

In highschool you seriously believe you are the shit, and that taking any kind of drug whether it be nutmeg, DXM, bananadine, Jenkem, or Raid bugspray makes you hardcore.

Being idealistic and self-righteous like any teenager they preach tolerance, fairness, feminism, liberalism and equal rights, only to find out once they graduate that in the real world that all of their beliefs are total bullshit since stereotypes exist for a reason: They are all true.

Although some take the smarter road. They study for hours and pay hundreds of dollars to get a high score on the SATs, only to notice that you have wasted your time on an easy ass standardized test. But that was just a footnote. Wait until you get to college...


College

After college, philosophy and english majors alike go out into the real world, all expecting to get six figure jobs or save the world.

The unfortunate reality for them is that neither will happen. In fact, most are likely to get an assistant manager position at McDonald's.

The result of this reality creates three options for new college graduates:

either

1. accept the fact that you will be stuck in a dead end job for years despite having moar than $50,000 in college loans to pay off, and hopefully get a decent job after working as an overworked secretary at a rundown cash loans office

2. drop a few hundred thousand dollars to go to some sort of post graduate school, or

3. become an hero.

The essential truth of the matter is that all those people who spent all their time studying difficult, in-demand technical subjects have quite reasonable expectations that someone wants to pay them decent money to, say, manage a multi-tiered corporate network.

However, many quite naively believed that there is a magical job market for people with liberal arts degrees to do whatever they did in the process to get their liberal arts degrees -- this form of unrealistic expectations results from sheer laziness, and often leads to bitterly believing that Mexicans are stealing the job you so rightfully deserve.


Pretty much says it all right there eh?