i applied for several jobs both work at home and otherwise and have had no luck at all around here. playing games and watching tv everyday can get quite boring. i find it amazing that if a sighted person wants a job whether they are divorced or not they can just go out and get one because sighted folks expect other sighted folks to work. the nfb is so into education and jobs and stuff so why don't we have teachers of visually impaired for college so i don't have to sit at a scanner and scan and scan books for hours on hours in the hopes i will be able to then read the book? i studdied spanish in college and failed. no braille material. in high school i could focus on the work and passing and getting good grades. the braille books were prepared before the schoolyear started. i wish it were the same after you graduate high school, through college and beyond. when the place in louisiana found out about the whole divorce and my wife being so sheltered they decided not to hire me. i don't blame them though. i was required to just take two marriage counseling sessions that was all. it has been nearly five years now. five years of being bored. yes there's moments of fun, going to amusement parts taking my sighted son to local places here in town but i feel i aught to be working. i aught to be doing what other sighted folks do. working. making money. not barely existing on social security. sometimes i think about what it may have been like to work at the place in louisiana what would it be like to make $40000 or so maybe more per year? my resume is 5 years out of date. my a plus and network plus computer certifications are expired. no good. i guess if i really wanted more money i could shut off the cable internet and phone. but i can't do that. then i'd be even more bored than i am now. i can reformat and maintain both windows and linux desktops. do all kinds of stuff regarding fixing computers their hardware and OS maintenance. but no job for me. amazing i have all this ability but it just goes to waste oh well.

oops i wanted to post a poll asking how many of you guys out there are bored and wish you had $40000 a year jobs? but i see no poll option now that i made the post oh well. i'm glad we have various audio games tv and radio. keeps me occupied. still wish i had a good $40000 or so job. i also hope i will be able to manage to save the $500 for the orbit reader 20 braille display when it comes out. Now I'm hungry for pizza.

I write that way when I'm in a hurry. in professional writing I take my time and write more, well, professionally.

perhaps

@Wanderer, while I take your point on writing and understand what you were attempting, when a person is expressing a huge level of disatisfaction with their life, picking at their writing and saying "It's your fault for not writing better" is not exactly the most tactful of things to do. Whatever else, joshknnd1982 is planely not in a good place right now. Plus of course, how a person writes on a web forum is not in any way indicative of how they would fill in an application for a job or write another formal document, (I can assure you my doctoral thesis gets far more checks for gramar, spelling, spacing, and even basic sentence structure than anything I just dash off hear, indeed philosophy papers particularly are extremely strictly marked on such matters).

As to Jobs, well my first question whenever someone says "I want a job!" is "why?" There is a culture (particularly in the Usa but not unknown in Britain), that a person's self worth, even standing as a human being is based on what they are paid, irrispective of what else they do or whether in fact they are being paid fairly or doing something that justifies their tallents.

I know a blind chap who very much wanted a job and got one. He now spends five days a week working 9-5 at a call center. Because he spends so much more energy and extended time working he literally does nothing else with his life. He just sits at his desk all day answering enquiries on the phone, then has a complex commute back, then arrives at six in the evening absolutely shattered and not able to do more than answer his e-mail before crashing at 9 pm. Weekends he spends at home, he sees nobody, has no friends or other interests, he literally just works and sleeps, heck he doesn't even get much chance to prophet from what money he does make (and not much of that sinse it's hardly a highly paid job).

His basic skills like cooking and mobility are pretty bad, sinse he just doesn't have time to learn. Yet empty as his life is, he has a job! he makes some share holders just a little bit richer each and every day, wooo hoo!

Of course he, like a lot of disabled people would be better off working part time, however the government provides no provision for that, sinse the government doesn't acknolidge that being disabled things take different amounts of effort.

Would people who want "A job" be happier with a life like my friend? methinks not.

It often strikes me that people who want "A job" and complain about boardom are more concerned about having some sort of meaning or something worthwhile in their lives, not necessarily getting paid, however that doesn't have to come from a job, indeed given the difficulties of getting any job, much less the even larger difficulties of getting an actually satisfying job, much less the even huger difficulties of getting a job that lets a blind person actually have some sort of life given the energy needed to do that job, I suspect even if someone got a job it wouldn't really solve the disatisfaction anyway.

Personally, I view the fact that I don't! have to go off and do something entirely pointless that just makes money for some share holders somewhere as about the only bennifit of having a disability. I'd feel like a total scuzbag if I did! just sit around and play audiogames and read all day, however I've found much more worth while things I can be doing that do! contribute far more to the good of those around me but don't involve making a coorporation a bit richer.

Working for this site, working on my doctorate (which I'll be finished with soon), writing book reviews, singing and performing on stage, indeed I'll probably be studdying performing arts next year just for fun.
I'd therefore advise anyone who is feeling very disatisfied with their life to look around for worthwhile things to do. Do some volunteer work, get involved with different things, whatever takes your fancy. Don't assume that just because the collective says "everyone should be measured financially" that the collective is telling the truth, heck just look around and you'll see plenty of people with empty, unsatisfying lives who have! jobs, indeed the way the collective values people only according to accumulate fnancially is actually extremely bad for everyone, (accept of course Donald trump and his ilk).

The Collective doesn't care much about anyone, so go and tell the collective to take a running jump, after allwhat right has "The collective" to determine a person's worth.

[edit: was replying to Dark, it took... a while.]
You know? I would have agreed with that 100% 10 years ago, and to the abyss with the Capitalist interpretation of the Puritan work ethic.
So, OK, still to the abyss with the Capitalist interpretation of the Puritan work ethic, but Great Gatsby does going a week at a time without human contact and a 23.¾h sleep schedule wreck one's ability to do any of that stuff I was planning to do. Which was largely "write, research, compose, code, design, build... just create and discover in general"-type things. There was a something-something-physics in there at one point, but that didn't ... ah... happen.
(Oh, poo, it doesn't recognize the ¾ as a number, so it doesn't read the h as hours. *Adds "learn how to contribute to NVDA and comprehend Formant synthesis" to the list of things that should have done 10 years ago* ... Also that sleep schedule kinda broke in the past couple weeks for reasons mysterious.)

I kinda feel like the problem is that there is a time limit that no one ever mentions before it runs out. Miss any of the important skills / opportunities / support system-building in that window where you're expected to be too immature to do certain things but still make a major financial decision in the name of "education"... miss that window, and if the deck wasn't already stacked against you, it certainly will be. How many people have turned their lives around dramatically after their third decade? And that's a generous expansion of the window, IMO.

To tell the truth, I'm not feeling especially great about going to LCB. But as nothing else has helped, I'm kinda out of options.

(And then Loki spake, saying "Thou knowst what would increase the torments in which introverts in an extrovert-favoring society abide? Verily, blindness and spoilage, for in what manner shall they work, save in hourly consultation with strangers? For spoilage strangles their skills in the cradle, and blindness robs them of the axe and favor among the lords of men.")

(I am not having any luck getting any synonyms... or antonyms for that matter, of conscientiousness / "G" / Executive Function / Diligence / Will power / Focus... OK, I guess Focus fits the rhythm, but it feels like it misses a ton of important nuance. -_- this is what I get for not rereading Tolkien for so long.)
(*adds "finish that attempted rant-in-the-form-of-a-Christmas-song-parody" to the list of things to do* ... *If everything on that list takes an average of 10 weeks to complete, it will take 20 years, which would be slightly less daunting had the past 10 years been half of said 20 years.*)

There are many people who work very well without a braille display, but they can be convenient to have if you can afford them or get the necessary financial assistance if not.

Even volunteering is a form of work, and that can lead to paid work.

Hey have any of you guys seen the Star Wars droid tales tv show? its really funny. you can watch it on the kissCartoon website.

I had a job handling end user tech support for Dell back in 2006 before the economy world-wide decided to hit the dirt. Dell, being a US company and a tech company to boot, knew it was about to be rocked hardcore, so took my job and several others and sent them overseas in 2008. I was still hugely qualified, and people were still calling me for interviews, but the economy was on its way down and everyone knew it. I stopped getting callbacks in 2011 or 2012. Not because I stopped being qualified, but because the economy as a whole was at rock bottom then and just about no one who didn't absolutely need to fill a hole was hiring. My last interview was in 2012, and I knew it wasn't going anywhere before I made it back outside. My blindness had nothing to do with it. So in 2013, I started the process to send me back to school - where I'm starting my final semester in a computer systems tech program in September. Throughout that process, I learned a few things very quickly.

thing the first, and related specificly to part of what I think the OP was hinting at: If you don't use it, you *will* lose it. A+ certifications in particular are changing. The A+ cert I go for, assuming I decide to take that route and not the CCNA route, is not the same certification you took 5 or 6 years ago. If you don't renew it every I think it's 3 years, then you are no longer certified and companies will prefer people who are over you whether you're blind or not. It doesn't matter if you can swap out a hard drive in 15 seconds and not leave anything out of place. If it's not on paper, you might as well not have the ability. I can run a Linux server with the best of them, and have on my own personal time for years. but because I haven't done it professionally, and have nothing on paper that says I'm qualified to do it, I can't walk into a job interview and tell them I'm a Linux admin if I expect it to actually get me anywhere. There's an expression we used to use when I was doing the tech support thing. Documentation or it didn't happen. If you call me and say someone did this, this, this and this for you, I'm going to take a look at their documentation. If the person you're talking about didn't put down that they did this, this, this and this for you, then so far as I'm concerned no they didn't. People in HR use the same mentality. If you're going to say you're A+ certified, expect them to want a copy of the certification. If you say you're a Microsoft Windows engineer, expect them to call Microsoft. And if you say you're a qualified Linux admin, expect them to want phone numbers, email addresses and the like for just about every person you've installed, fixed or ran a Linux server for - after you've explained to them what the hell Linux is.

Thing the second: Colleges are not there to make you succeed. They're there to give you the option. One of my professors put it best my first day in this program. "I get paid," he said, "whether you show up and do the work or not. You can choose to slack off, miss every second class, half-ass the work and probably end up taking it next semester, or you can show up, ask for help, show me you know what you're doing, and rock the course. The choice is yours, Make the right one and I can help you. Make the wrong one and you're on your own. Also I'll see you next semester." To me, that pretty much summarizes college life in general. You're expected by the time you get there to be able to stand on your own two feet, relatively and proverbially speaking. By the time you've graduated high school, you know the kind of education supports that work for you. The college or university isn't going to hold your hand and guide you through the process. You got yourself this far, get yourself the rest of the way and we'll meet you.

Thing the third: Speak up, dammit. Related partly to my point above, only you know what exact supports will work for your education. If you need books in an accessible format (be they electronic or, god forbid, braille), it's up to you to say so. Your college/university has got to have something that vaguely resembles a disability services department. Get on them. Be in regular contact with your profs - preferably before the semester even starts. In short, speak up. When I first started with the program, every prof I talked to was more than a little nervous about having a blind student. It wasn't even because of the blindness, per say. I knew exactly what I was doing and every single one of them knew it. But a blind student had gone through this program before me, and ended up flaming out rather spectacularly. Why? Because he absolutely would not speak up. He assumed, because he was registered with disability services, that materials would be provided to him in an accessible format just on basic principle. He assumed the default attitude would be to adapt circumstances to fit him, rather than adapt him to fit the circumstances. Because that was precisely how things had gone on while he was in high school. For that reason, I don't even think he got out of second semester if he even made it that far. And the end result left a bad taste in the professors' mouthes that I had to clean out. Now I'm sitting here with one semester left and in relatively good position, if I play my cards right, to take an additional program in cybersecurity. And now these profs know what a blind person is capable of if he decides he wants to.

And thing the last: Seriously? Never in my life have I heard of someone using a TVI or equivalent in a college/university setting. Not even maybe. I barely used a T.A. most of my time spent in high school - her only real involvement was transcribing my brailled work so teachers could see/mark it, and brailling handouts/assignments teachers were giving out that weren't already in whatever textbook we were using (this was back when it took a special kind of something for a blind person to own both a computer and a regular printer). For the transcription to braille or electronic material now, there's an entire department that handles that - as there should be, as I'm hardly the only blind person who either is attending or has attended that college. On top of that, it's 2016. there's no reasonable excuse why textbooks and other assorted materials can't already be in at least an electronic format, if not an accessible one. If a college in Canada, who doesn't have anything like an ADA to slap people with, can get that, then your people have no excuse.

Long story short: No one owes you an education. No one owes you a job. If you want one or both, then put yourself out there. speak up. Yes, it's cliche, but no one's going to advocate for you except you. You're a fully grown adult. If you want to be seen as one, open your mouth. Do that, and keep the skills you actually plan on using up to date, and there's no reason (*) why you shouldn't be able to land yourself a job that will at least provide you with a paycheck if not an endless fountain of enjoyment. And for the record, I had the 40000/year job. I also had time to enjoy it - or, at least, as much time to enjoy it as anyone else with a job, anyway. And I'd do it all again if given half a chance.

(*): There's no reason for not finding a job, except for perhaps living in the middle of nowhere. If the small town you're living in is anything like the one my parents call home, and it sounds like it is, you shouldn't be too surprised the jobs are few and far between. I moved out of that small town specificly because I didn't want to spend my life working retail, or waiting tables, which was pretty much the only thing on offer on a regular basis.

So because you had your hand held in high school, you think you should be entitled to have your hand held in college. Remind me again why you think you'll survive professionally? the rules for employment are exactly the same, with perhaps very small differences, as the rules for postsecondary education. You are going to be given material. that material is probably not going to be by default adapted to you, particularly if you don't speak up in advance and say you require it that way. You don't get a TVI in college, and you certainly don't get an equivalent if you ever actually land a job. That you're not capable of surviving without one is the fault of the TVI you had for not actually teaching you how to function as a visually impaired person. Your choices now are to learn how or make the best of what you've got. If I were you, I'd choose that first one.

Well, sure, if you don't mind being paid significantly less than someone sighted for exactly the same job because blindness organization. But then, that's why entire cities push their blind population that way...

*writes 8KB response, cuts it when it devolves into misanthropic screaming*
I keep trying to say something, and it keeps coming out as an unyielding torrent of negativity.
Well, that was an hour wasted.