That sounds like a predictable and very expensive lesson to me.

Yep

The problem is that the reactions all have to be done in the gas phase in order to prevent structural collapse of the substrate and that's very annoying and expensive to do.

I work in the IT department of a major university as a "Senior Computer Specialist," which is about the least descriptive title you could have. Summing it all up in one sentence, I do "Uniform Access Linux and Web Publishing Support." Kind of like a shepherd for our servers and users.

I don't have a job. I should probably work at KUMON. Does anyone happen to know how old I have to be to work there?

http://www.job-applications.com/kumon-job-application/

The website you posted was not for high school tutors.

Maybe you shouldn't be really vague and ask oddly specific questions then.

I'm a professional awesome person (aka, SWE at Google)

I do basic retail work for a local swimming pool and hot tub store as well and maintain their website for way less than I should. Good thing its just plain HTML+CSS with some server side includes.

That sounds like it would be moderately fun, is it? Or is it mindless drudgery?

I actually totally love it. It's a good mix of community building, writing, project work, and yelling at users who decide that using an entire server for their poorly coded Perl script is a good idea.

Hehe, at least they're using Perl in the first place. That does sound quite fun, though. What kind of writing is involved in the job?

No wonder the IT department yells at me so much...

That sounds like a most entertaining job.
I wish I could have a job like that. Sadly, I'm too much of a n00b.

You should get involved in IT somehow if you have an interest in this sort of thing! I worked at my school for several years as the system administrator for the EE department, which has its servers, services, and computers overseen by a group of students. It's a great way to learn about doing SysAdmin/IT work.

I'M currently clerk at one of the 6 local supermarkets. I mostly work in the service department, cleaning, brigning shopping carts back inside the store and when people decide to not buy something and it's cold, I bring the stuff back in the shelves. Not really too bad in general since despite being busy most of the time, you don't get as much pressure from bosses as you do in several other stores, although working outside during snowstorms 3 times in one week is rather hectic when it happens, especially if the store is incredibly busy that day, and one person in particular that is stocker is extremly annoying sometimes.

Exactly. All the cool people who are legit enough to actually script use Perl. Some newbs try to do their things in PHP, but it's just lulzy. Mostly documentation and internal project writing.

Nikky, fun stuff. I was once one of those n00bs, sadly. :/ DJ_O, that sounds pretty decent, but at the risk of offending, are there no openings in technology-related fields? I feel that something like that would be better-suited to your skillset.

Well I did, before, but then realized computer programming was just not for me, same for web scripting and I'm not into hardware stuff. The latter could probably be an option in the future, though.

But you have done some pretty cool stuff using technology and programming, and it makes me surprised you don't want to keep it, but it's your life and your choices