Warehouse jobs in wilkes barre pa

Previous post: https://www.reddit.com/valvereplacement/comments/1363zn2/surgery_in_2_weeks/
Bio: male, early 30s, bicuspid aortic valve, severe aortic regurgitation, severe 6.9cm LVEDD, 3.5cm mild ascending aorta aneurysm, no symptoms other than a significant heart murmur and a visible bounding pulse in my neck. I had the David procedure done, which is an open heart surgery where they repair the aortic valve and replace the aorta root with a synthetic graft. The native valve is placed inside the graft.
Day before surgery: I spent the day hanging out with my wife and daughter. My parents also flew in the night before to help take care of my kid while my wife and I would be in the hospital. I'm quite fortunate to have had essentially no anxiety leading up to the day. From my point of view, I didn't really have to do much of anything so there was nothing to be anxious about :) I tend to only get anxious before a performance or presentation or things like that where I'm responsible for executing something.
Before bed, I washed with the special antibacterial soap and we changed the bed sheets, pillow cases, and my PJs. Chugged a good liter of water before going to bed.
Day of surgery: Woke up at 4:30am. Showered again with the special antibacterial soap. Said bye to my parents and drove with my wife to the hospital for 6am check-in. The surgery itself would start at 8am. They called my up at around 7am to start prep. I hugged my wife in the waiting area and followed the nurse into the pre-op area where they shaved my chest and legs, wiped me down with some antiseptic wipes, and placed an IV. I waited for about 30 minutes once I was prepped, mostly browsing reddit on my phone and sending funny faces to my wife since I was wearing a dorky shower cap thing, before a team of 2 anesthesiologists came and confirmed all the details about the procedure. They wheeled me off into the OR. The last thing I remember is an anesthesiologist apologizing for all the "stickers" (ECG electrodes I think?) they were putting on me. I have no memory of them starting the anesthesia itself (like the mask or IV; no memory of counting down from 5 or anything like that).
A blink of an eye later, I had teleported to the ICU and woke up with a breathing tube, 3 chest tubes, a Foley cather, and like 3-4 more IVs and arterial lines that I had no memory of (left wrist, right wrist, right elbow, right side of the neck, possibly left elbow? Can't recall). It was slightly uncomfortable but absolutely no pain at all. The most uncomfortable thing was that the breathing machine seemed to have its own cadence for breathing and I wanted to breath my own way. I asked them to remove it but the ICU nurse said it was still too early and they wanted to wait another couple of hours. I was still pretty out of it and I'm pretty sure I was falling asleep here and there. My wife told me that the surgeon had come by and said the surgery went very well, and they were able to repair my valve. There was still some mild regurgitation remaining apparently, but nothing to worry about.
That evening, they removed the breathing tube and I had a bit more awareness. The anesthesia was wearing off and I was starting to feel pain in my lungs, which turned out to be from the chest tubes. Initially it wasn't too bad but over the next couple of days it got quite painful if I ever tried to take a deep breath. So I was taking quite shallow breaths and didn't really want to use the incentive spirometer
Woke up in the middle of the night with severe pain in my right lung and summoned my nurse, who administered dilaudid through my IV and it quickly got better.
Day 2: I was surprised to learn that the pain meds weren't scheduled, and they would only administer them if I asked for it. I was approved for 650mg Tylenol every 6 hours, 10mg oxycodone every 6 hours, and some amount (can't recall) of dilaudid and gabapentin. My recommendation would be to set some timers to ask for the pain meds on a regular cadence to avoid it getting out of hand. My right lung was by far the worst, spiking up to 7-8 on the pain scale whenever I took a deep breath, and holding at 3-4 during shallow breaths. No real pain anywhere else, including the incision.
One of the medicines they administered twice was a day was a Heparin shot, which reduces blood clots. It has to be administered subcutaneously which I found to be quite painful, and I grew to look forward the least to this medication. They also had me on metoprolol for blood pressure.
Around mid-day, they removed the Foley catheter which I would miss -- it was quite nice not to have to worry about urination. They had me get up for the first time, drink some chicken broth, and get weighed. I had gained 16lbs in fluids (160lbs -> 176lbs) so they started me on lasix to eliminate some of that. A PT guy came and had me walk to the neighboring unit and back (about 1 minute of walking) and told me to start practicing my incentive spirometer. I wasn't able to get it any higher than 500 before my right lung would start to hurt.
Soon after, they said I was ready to move out of the ICU. A transport person came, helped me into a wheel chair, and wheeled me off. I settled into the new room. Someone came to take some chest X rays with a mobile X ray machine. It shows I had a mild pneumothorax in my right lung; maybe that was why it was painful. They didn't seem concerned about it and said it would hurt less once the chest tubes came out.
Day 3: One of the chest tubes seemed to be done draining, so they came to remove it. It honestly wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. They had me exhale and hum while they pulled it out in one go. Took about 3 seconds and felt funny, but no pain. My right lung pain immediately got better. I was suddenly able to breath a lot deeper than before and was getting my incentive spirometer up to 1000.
After this point, I never really experienced much pain ever again. Except for the god damn Heparin shots.
I kept drinking chicken broth and apple juice as my only source of calories, and the lasix were in full effect at this point so I was getting up every couple of hours to pee. I was something like 168lbs at this point (lost 8lbs of fluids).
I did 3 walks around the nurse station. About 5 minutes each. Had my first bowel movement somewhere around here. By evening time, my doctor cleared me for a regular diet and I ordered a bunch of fruits and a barley soup.
Getting in and out of bed was a chore -- I had to get help from a nurse every time. It took a good 5 minutes to organize all the tubes every time.
Day 4: The other 2 chest tubes came out, and also the pacing wires. Again no pain, just feels strange and ticklish. Easily tolerable. I suddenly had a ton more freedom. Without the chest tubes, I no longer needed the nurse to get in and out of bed. Tried to get in a couple of longer 10 minute walks, but it was definitely a lot harder. My heart rate would go up to 130 and I would need to go back to bed and lie down to get it back under 100.
I also noticed that sitting upright in a chair and eating food would also spike my heart rate, up into the 120s. I would be a little bit out of breath after eating and would need to lie down.
At mid day, they wheeled me off to get my first post-op echocardiogram. The echo results were very surprising: it showed mild-to-moderate regurgitation, and a completely normal LV size -- 4.5cm LVEDD. My surgeon's PA came by to talk about it, and said that the surgeon disagrees with the echo tech's interpretation of the images and would still classify it as mild regurgitation. More importantly, during surgery when direct visual inspection is possible, it apparently looked quite good. They think once the lasix fully drain me of all the excess fluid, there will be less regurgitation. I asked if it's really possible for the LV to shrink so dramatically in just 4 days (6.9cm to 4.5cm) and she said yep, and in fact it's a sign that the valve is working well. I think I wont really find closure on this until my next echo which is probably many months away so I'm putting it out of mind.
They did say they would switch me from metoprolol to hydralazine, which also reduces blood pressure but has the side effect of increasing the heart rate. Apparently a faster heart rate would be good in my situation to help the valve heal (I guess because faster heart rate = lower volume of blood that is pumped?).
To my surprise, the PA said they were going to discharge me ahead of schedule since I met all the necessary criteria. My blood pressure was pretty steady at around 120/80. I was a bit conflicted since it felt safe at the hospital, but I also did not want any more god damn Heparin shots so I agreed to go home.
At home, I had a wedge pillow but it was a royal PITA to get in and out of bed so I impulse ordered an power lift chair rental which they dropped off the next day.
Day 5: The lift chair arrived, which was amazing. I no longer needed help from my family to get in and out of a horizontal position. I did find that it was important to be horizontal to get my heart rate under control with the hydralazine. Lying completely flat, I was at 100 BPM. Sitting up would take me to 110. Eating would get me to 120 and walking would get me to 130. I would need to go lie down after eating or walking to catch my breath and get my heart rate down.
I went for my first outside walk, where I walked about 4 houses down and back (5 minutes).
I took my first shower sitting on a shower stool. I was very cold after -- probably another side effect of the hydralazine as well -- and struggled to warm back up in bed. I was shivering and was worried for a bit whether I had an infection, but my temperature was normal so I think I was just cold.
My appetite wasn't very good and didn't want to eat what my family had cooked for me. I preferred cold, sweet things and ate a lot of honey net cheerios with cold milk.
I filled my hydralazine in oxycodone prescription, and picked up some tylenol as well. I used the oxy once on day 5, and didn't find the need for it after. I was able to get by just fine with tylenol.
Day 6-10: More of the same. Appetite got a lot better and started eating normally. By day 10, I was able to slowly walk a good 15 minutes in one go, about .5 miles. Around this time I also stopped using the lift chair and was able to get in and out of bed solo without too much difficulty. I also no longer needed the shower stool. It was a bit of a regret to spend a bunch of money on the stool, wedge pillow, and lift chair only to use them for 3-4 days, but they did make those few days quite a bit easier so I'm convincing myself it was money well spent.
Day 11-14: Rapid improvement -- on day 14 I was able to walk 1 mile in 20 minutes, and did it 3 times that day. Heart rate is down to 90 at rest now, and eating doesn't really increase it much. I feel good enough to go back to work honestly (just a desk job, and can work from home). I was half thinking I should try jogging, but I have cardiac therapy starting in a couple of weeks so I'll save my energy for that.
I'm still on the hydralazine and tylenol. I have essentially no pain as long as I'm maintaining the sternal precautions. I'm considering stopping the tylenol to see how it goes.
All in all, I have to say it was a pretty smooth experience and wasn't that bad at all. It seems like it's not completely unlikely that I'll need another surgery in the far future, though hopefully it's at least 15-20 years away. But if it's going to be anything like this, then I really have nothing to worry about. My wife tore her ACL in a skiing accident a few years ago and I have to say the recovery from ACL reconstruction surgery was a lot harder than this!

Fellow ADHD here, obviously, tried my hand in the film industry (limited work and even less patience from above), academics (dropped out of 3 schools because the reading just wasn't captivating enough to force me to understand english, my only language, even tho I never seem to have a problem with books and articles I actually find interesting, my homework and study skills are just dangerously non-existent), construction (lots of work but ABSOLUTELY no patience from superiors when it comes to learning a new job thru ADHD symptoms, 4 different gigs same result), and now attempting forestry but went and got myself fat because food=stimulation and idk if measuring trees is my life's calling.
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Would like to move towards conservation, diving, eco tourism, film making (dream job) or writing (also dream job). I understand youtube allows one to carve their own creative path, but I don't know if I want to get caught up in trying to sell dick pills or protein shakes mid-video.
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I basically go full maniac when I'm stuck inside for too long, right now am too fat to do anything overly physical like wildfire fighting, and am fed up feeling and being treated like an idiot when I'm one of the most articulate people I know.
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I've done the shitty cafe job. I've done the sign holding job. I've done the cooking job, the building job, the taxi job, the office admin job, the warehouse job, the tv job, and everything ends IN FUCKING FLAMES because of how much I hate the feeling of being trapped in a quiet little building or around people who very obviously think very little of me after my 20th question of the day because I can't remember what they just told me, where my shit is, how I'm supposed to do my next task, you get the picture. At some point, no matter how simple the job is, I'm just expected to get a grasp on the tasks despite poor managers and supervisors who can't see things from my perspective. It doesn't help that my brain blocks out shit I don't find interesting. Sorry, I can't help it, and it's ruining my life.
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So what do you do? What works for your ADHD/ ADD? And how did you get to that realization?

31(M) warehouse worker here I bought myself a Drone 2 years ago and fell in love with the whole Film/video/editing/photography lifestyle, and in the course of doing little “side jobs” with the drone I realized it’s what I want to do for my career and I want to make a change.
I’m no pro obviously but I know I’m a great drone pilot, I’ve been told I’ve got a great eye for angles/lighting/framing and I’m a pretty decent editor so far (learning more every day). I haven’t had a chance to work with “expensive gear” yet but I’m sure it wouldn’t take me long to pick it up if given a chance. I’m just curious where I would go from here, seeing as I haven’t had the experience of working on a film set yet or anything to do with the industry.
Would a great reel of my drone work be enough to get my foot in the door or what should my next steps be? Thank you for taking the time to read/answer!

31(M) warehouse worker here I bought myself a Drone 2 years ago and fell in love with the whole Film/video/editing/photography lifestyle, and in the course of doing little “side jobs” with the drone I realized it’s what I want to do for my career and I want to make a change.
I’m no pro obviously but I know I’m a great drone pilot, I’ve been told I’ve got a great eye for angles/lighting/framing and I’m a pretty decent editor so far (learning more every day). I haven’t had a chance to work with “expensive gear” yet but I’m sure it wouldn’t take me long to pick it up if given a chance. I’m just curious where I would go from here, seeing as I haven’t had the experience of working on a film set yet or anything to do with the industry.
Would a great reel of my drone work be enough to get my foot in the door or what should my next steps be? Thank you for taking the time to read/answer!

31(M) warehouse worker here I bought myself a Drone 2 years ago and fell in love with the whole Film/video/editing/photography lifestyle, and in the course of doing little “side jobs” with the drone I realized it’s what I want to do for my career and I want to make a change.
I’m no pro obviously but I know I’m a great drone pilot, I’ve been told I’ve got a great eye for angles/lighting/framing and I’m a pretty decent editor so far (learning more every day). I haven’t had a chance to work with “expensive gear” yet but I’m sure it wouldn’t take me long to pick it up if given a chance. I’m just curious where I would go from here, seeing as I haven’t had the experience of working on a film set yet or anything to do with the industry.
Would a great reel of my drone work be enough to get my foot in the door or what should my next steps be? Thank you for taking the time to read/answer!

Hi prephysicianassistant. I am freaking out here a little bit. I graduated with my bachelors with honors with an overall degree gpa of 3.83. After putting all my transcripts and getting my application verified, CASPA has calculated my over cGPA to be 3.75 and sGPA to be 3.56.I am scared because the only thing that truly made me competitive is my GPA, other than that, I am below average with low PCE? Has this happened to you guys? What do schools value more, sGPA or cGPA?
Below are my stats for reference.
PCE hours:
1,200 Medical Assistant Cardiology Practice 600 hours
Home Health Aide 275 Hours
Direct Support Professional for a Special Needs Child
HCE: 30 Hours CNA in Nursing Home
I am also starting a job at a hospital next month as an ER tech and should accumulate a couple hundred hours by Jan 2024.
Teaching Experience- 1,000 hours as a Youth Counselo Assistant Teacher in an inner city school program
Shadowing hours: 30 hours Cardiology PA 50 Hours MD
LORs: From Chemistry Dept Chair Prof, MD and a PA

For context i (f) am 28years old and my brother is 30. My dad started asking for our bank account balances ever since the start of the pandemic and yung reasoning niya is so he could see that we were saving, at dapat we would be htting our goals... daw. We didn't/never liked the idea of even showing it because we're adults. We should be able to use our money freely, the way we choose.
Now, you might be asking yourselves, 'Why not say no?' WELL... here's the back story. My dad is not the best and right now, I cannot even say I love him. Sorry, not sorry.
We have been abused as kids and grew to find it so hard to say no. if we were to even utter that word infront of him, all hell breaks loose. We would be labeled as 'The kids that defy their father's wishes.' My dad quit his job a few weeks ago in Riyadh kasi ayaw na nya and we found it really surprising kasi my sister is still studying. He is the sole provider of TWO families; His own parents, his sibling that suffers from retardation and us.
Although we understand naman his pain that he is alone, mom suggested for him to plan it (stay there for as long as he can, save money while he's there, etc). pero wala talaga. He's hoping he no longer has to extend.
So he suddenly starts joking around with me saying 'Aren't you going to provide for me?' and i didn't know what to say. I was mortified. Then he says, 'just kidding.'
A few weeks later and we haven't given him our balances. My mom tells me that he's asking for it and dad mentioned na he isn't interested daw in our money. She asked me for my honest opinion. I told her, 'Honestly, mom, We don't want to give it anymore. We (my bro and i) never wanted to give it, because it's our money. He shouldn't even know how much we have.' And she's saying na we should at least show the last one we gave. I said no. I also said 'if he's not interested, why is he even asking?'
walang masabi si mom. I'm really disappointed in her kasi she's downplaying the situation. 'para lang mapatahimik si dad.' Which is stupid.
My dad called me earlier and galit sya kasi he's been reminding us to show us our balances. He asked me, 'Are you denying my request??' And lumalaki na daw yung ulo namin kasi hindi na kami nagpapaalam to go out. I got really pissed and wanted to question him as to why i should even be asking. I'm 28 and nawawalan ako ng gana whenever my mom tells me to ask him kung papayagan ako. All my friends are g to go but I have to ASK pa. My friends still live with their folks pero nagsasabi nalang sila na pupunta sila somewhere. They're girls too btw.
Please don't give me the whole 'Ahh, kasi babae ka' shtick because i'm sick of that. It's toxic and sexist.
He ended the call with 'Sorry to disturb you' with an angry tone. Sa totoo lang, I don't feel guilty. I have faced this manipulation and it's the reason i have depression, Childhood Trauma, Anxiety and Stress Disorders. I was called trash by my dad, beaten, and a trash can was placed on my head while my mom did nothing and watched.
I'm not sure what to do. I keep telling my brother that we should just leave and find a place, but he always says 'soon'. I feel he's just delaying it and i'm getting sick and tired of that. We agreed kasi to get a place of our own and half the expenses.
I'm attending conquest this Friday and am thinking of running away, and never coming home because I am tired.

Hello everyone,
I have been thinking of moving abroad pero I have poor confidence because of my educational background.
- Came from SG and moved to Australia way back (stayed for 1 year). Graduated High School (Year 10)
- Went back to PH. Enrolled in College. Did not finish the 4-year course due to financial reasons.
My educational background's timeline is quite complicated iniisip ko baka mahirapan ako mag-apply ng visa dahil dito. Right now I am currently working as a Graphic Designer with 5 Years of experience. I have been thinking of moving to either CN or AU for better work opportunities. I am leaning towards Canada dahil afaik mas maluwag sila compared sa AU pero wala kasi ako kakilala doon. I have been applying sa job bank nila, specifically LMIA. Student pathway is financially impossible for me.
Sa Australia naman, nandoon tita at mga pinsan ko, and I am familiar with the culture since nag-aral na ako before doon. I am just wary sa immigration nila because last I heard nag tighten sila ng policies.
Given my circumstance, am I screwed? What avenues can I take para maka-alis pa-abroad?

I feel like I reach out to the board once a week, so I’ll probably ask this question once they respond to my latest question. I figured I’d ask here in the mean time…
I’ve worked at the same company for 4 out of 5 years since I graduated college. I briefly worked for another company for a little over a year from Dec 2020 to July 2022. I asked 5 colleagues from my current job (also the same job I worked at right out of school), because all of them are PEs and it made it easier on them (PA requires submission of a resume if the reference isn’t a PE).
I just re-read some of the forms and it states all work experience must have a reference. I didn’t bother asking my former manager because she doesn’t have a PE. Technically I have over 5 years experience overall, and 4 years from the date on my EIT, however, I’m wondering if the board won’t approve my application because of this?

Company Name	Title	City
Total Education Solutions	Speech Language Pathologist	Columbus
BayMark Health Services	Part Time Licensed Practical Nurse	Columbus
Materials Science International, Inc.	Production Trainee - $1,500 signing bonus	Columbus
Bluestone Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Hospital	Registered Nurse (RN)	Columbus
Central Ohio Area Agency on Aging	Nurse Case Manager	Columbus
Columbus Oncology & Hematology	Charge/Triage Nurse	Columbus
All-Stat Portable	Vascular Access Nurse	Columbus
CDR Companies	POOL Registered Nurse (RN) - Columbus, OH	Columbus
Columbus Oncology & Hematology	Oncology Nurse Practitioner (NP or PA)	Columbus

Hey guys, here are some recent job openings in columbus. Feel free to comment here or send me a private message if you have any questions, I'm at the community's disposal! If you encounter any problems with any of these job openings please let me know that I will modify the table accordingly. Thanks!

Hello… I desperately need advice.
I come from a military background (Air Force, 12+ years of active duty), but I eventually got out to pursue a degree. I graduated in Dec 2021 with a degree in Exercise Science, but I took some time off to acclimate/settle some affairs at home ( I haven't lived near family for 16 years). My original plan was to continue onto grad school after my B.S., but that didn't happen and now i'm in a rut...
I have been actively trying to find a job for about 6-8 months with absolutely no luck. I moved from LA to an area that is predominantly farmland and warehouses, so finding a job in my field has been tough. I have been trying to find gainful employment here, but so far, i've had no luck. I worked while at my university doing clinical research for over 3 years and have been trying to find something related to that field, but nothing. Despite having a wealth of experience from my time in the military (I was a mechanic, training manager, shop manager, instructor, etc.) and doing clinical research, I can't seem to land a job. Being a mechanic is far from what I want to do and besides, I don't think I could even handle it (I have a back injury from my time in the military)... Most of the research jobs in my area require a degree in agriculture, which absolutely I do not possess and all the remote jobs I found I'm competing against those with Masters and PhDs... As such, that path seems to be a long short....
Now, i'm considering pursuing another career, preferably something that is more attainable. I have the resources to go back to school if need be, but right now, I just feel lost and have absolutely no idea which direction I should head in.
Anyone have any insight or thoughts as to what I should look into? I greatly appreciate it.

-Red-
April 19th, 11:13 A.M., The Sprawl
I sparked a dilapidated Vita-Cig that I’d snagged from Trodes and peered out into the Sprawl; the careful equilibrium of a well-orchestrated black-market had returned; pushers and gangers lined the alleys, watching for signals from rooftop lookouts to avoid the single Peacewatch cruiser that had been stupid enough to enter the dockside. The poor bastard would be dead before the afternoon was over… not that I had much sympathy for his kind. Peacewatch made it a habit to stay out of the Sprawl: unless the Eggheads predictive crime system said something catastrophic was coming, they policed their kind and left us in the hands of the mob. I’d never iced an officer. Not yet at least.
“Your partner should be ready shortly, I think he’s just tying up a few loose ends,” Akari said, snatching the cigarette from my hand and taking a long drag.
“Remind me again why you think I should take the shrimp with me instead of Nico and Roman?”
“He’s smart… and the other two are working on something else. Besides-- you need brains on this one, Red, not muscle,” she giggled, passing the cigarette back.
“Whatever you say,” I paused, grabbing the smoke, “what do you have them up to?”
“There’s a shipment of Xeno-grade weapons coming down from the colonies. Nico and Roman will be liberating them from the Slicers. Or, their share, at least. It won’t be much, maybe a dozen guns, but it’ll be worth it: the force field tech alone will pay for the trip as soon as Fincetti’s goons start trying to take your heads off with plasma cannons and mono blades.”
“What do you mean, their share?”
“The job was too big for us to take on alone. I linked up with another enterprising group of Freelancers. If it goes well, maybe we can hire them on for the heist, we’re going to need more people if we want to walk out of there alive.”
We?
“What, are you planning on coming along now?” I asked, snuffing out the smoke.
“It only seems right; Trodes is coming along, and I’m a better shot than he’ll ever be. Besides, you have a dangerous habit of getting shot, and I can’t have you going down in the field,” she said, winking as if to punctuate the sentence.
“You sure? We can manage, you don’t have to come with us, you’ve done so much already.”
“I know I have, that’s why I have to protect my investment. If you go down out there, then the team is without a leader. A military scale operation like this will go south real fast without someone competent in command.”
“You’ve got me wrong, Akari: I’m no leader. I’m just someone who wants to live in a better city and doesn’t mind taking the trash out himself. Besides, why do we need a leader? We’re all competent adults acting in concert, of our own free will. We all know what we’re doing, if a situation arises and someone needs to take charge, it’ll happen.”
“You’ve got a lot of faith in a crew you just met,” Akari said with a sneer.
“You know why I asked you to put the team together, Akari?”
“Because there’s a bounty on your head that could finance twenty retirements, and you know you can trust me?”
“No, well yeah, but that’s beside the point—I asked you because you’re not a Fixer, you’re a part time street doc that works the front desk at the most popular Freelancer hotel in the Sprawl. If there’s anyone who knows who’s gonna get the job done, it’s you. See, a Fixer is going to be okay with whatever losses they deem acceptable beforehand, but they’re fine with keeping that to themselves. If you thought any of these mooks were going to crack under pressure, or do something stupid, you wouldn’t have set me up with them.”
Before she could respond, Trodes emerged from the stairs leading to the lab. He winced as the sunlight hit his eyes, shrugging on the hood of the oversized sweatshirt that blanketed his meek frame. Glimpses of pain showed through every tremor laden step he took. A cloak of wires enveloped his skull, feeding into an old-world cyber console.
“It’s insufferably hot out here,” Trodes sighed.
“Don’t worry, we’re not going far. Chances are that whatever hole we’re meeting BFU in will have air conditioning,” I responded, clicking my key fob, and signaling the bike to pull around.
Trodes face fell flat when the Supersonic rolled around the corner; apparently, the prestige of carving through the skyway on a state-of-the-art Taffington jet-bike was lost on him.
“Are we taking… that?” Trodes stammered.
“We are. Unless you’ve got a pair of wheels with two seats?” I asked, mounting the bike and revving the engine.
With an exasperated sigh, Trodes boarded the passenger seat. I could feel him behind me, vibrating as tremors gripped his body.
“You good, buddy?” I asked.
He nodded vigorously, clenching the handrails with white knuckles.
Akari shook her head and headed back to the lab.
I heard Trodes mumble something under his breath, but it was quickly drowned out by the jet-bike’s purr. I carved into the skyway. Driving in the Sprawl was pure freedom: almost nobody owned vehicles with aerial capabilities in this part of town. It didn’t take long to reach top speed.
Slummers and gutterpunks walked the streets like zombies in a drug addled haze. The scent of gunpowder, pollution and burning ozone coalesced into a putrid stench that reeked of poverty and violence. Patches of azure moved in militant formation below; the Vorrath had taken to the streets. On a different day, a better day, I would’ve helped them. Most slummers hated the Offworlder Coalition, but not me—at the end of the day I always figured that I had more in common with poor people from another planet than rich people from another district of the city. At least we shared the same struggle.
The bike slowed to crawl; the Neo-Confederates were about, backed by a platoon of Brown-Shirts that looked like a tide of sewer run off, crashing through the streets with reckless abandon. Civilians fled for their homes. Fuck.
The jet-bike careened through the air before finally landing atop a building a few blocks away from the impending conflict.
“Get off,” I said, turning back to Trodes.
“Why? You don’t intend to abandon me at this altitude, do you?”
“Not as long as I survive—I’ll be quick, I just need to ventilate some Nazi fucks, understood?”
He shook his head and muttered a string of curses.
I tore through the air, circling around the impending conflict. I chased a handful of cheap amphetamines with a poorly rolled joint and swooped low, behind the rolling tide of brown shirts. This wasn’t the first time I’d made myself an enemy of the city’s Neo-Nazi’s; I’d killed at least a dozen of them in my career as a courier, but those were isolated incidents, back-alley brawls away from the mob.
This was a whole new ball game.
I fell slack as my Teleoperations module synchronized with the bike. My consciousness faded, reemerging into the HALO-Net’s stylized rendition of the bike’s interior. I wasn’t just the pilot now—I was the bike. Bullets carved twin streaks of crimson into the brown tide. It didn’t take long to hit top speed, 3.7 seconds, to be exact.
The group turned in nearly perfect unison, launching volley upon volley as I passed overhead. The bike’s shields barely held together; I felt every round, like a flock of birds violently slamming into my side—not enough to cause any real damage, but more than enough to get the blood pumping. I slid into an alley a few blocks off and waited for the shield generator to recharge. Gunshots rang out from the streets, alongside the sizzle of plasma meeting flesh. Soon the din was drowned beneath the roar of dozens of Vorrath war cries. I took to the sky.
Trodes was exactly where I left him, nervously clutching a knock off version of a Locust flechette pistol.
“I was beginning to doubt your survival,” Trodes said shakily.
“Wrong again, little guy,” I paused, reigniting a half smoked joint, “it was just a quick hit and run, we don’t have the time or the numbers for a pitched battle. Now, hop on.”
It didn’t take long to find BFU’s base of operations. Black flags and Anarchist graffiti covered the walls of the abandoned warehouse they’d apparently taken up residence in. A field of repurposed Peacewatch turrets were installed atop the roof, complimented by a web of cameras that spread across a three-block radius. Anarchists of all species and creeds loitered outside. The guards ranged from Cyborgs and Vat-Grown, to Vorrath and Vorstihl, each wearing a variant of the black flag with colors corresponding to their ideologies.
As I hovered above the building, I saw a familiar face: the rookie from earlier. Alarmingly, his cruiser was nowhere to be seen. His face was wrought with horror, as a pair of cyborgs led him inside the warehouse.
“They’re certainly less than subtle,” Trodes said.
“They don’t have to be subtle, they’re the biggest citizens political organization in the Sprawl. Peacewatch avoids them if they have anything less than a full platoon on hand,” I explained.
“Red… before we enter negotiations with these hooligans, I must inquire as to what your motivation hitting the vault is? Surely you know there’s a strong likelihood that you won’t make it out, and from what I’d heard about you, I always understood you to be a man who knew how to keep himself out of the line of sight of dangerous people,” Trodes said, nervously.
“Fincetti is the most dangerous man in the city, short of O’Bannon. He controls the black market with an iron fist and is instrumental in all the things I hate about living here. The problem is, I have no way to do anything about it right now… but there’s something big in the safe—there must be—for fucks sake, he iced his family over it. I’m hoping there’s something in there that can give me a little leverage, so I can cross him out afterwards.”
Trodes was silent for a moment, simply reaching as if to ask me to pass the joint. I obliged.
“I have my reasons to want O’Bannon dead too, I’m in,” he paused as a coughing fit seized him, causing the joint to fall to the ground, “there’s something you should know though: I’m working with an entity of great power in the Net; I don’t know what precisely it is, but I know it saved my life more than once. As a matter of fact, it’s the only reason I was able to obtain the blueprint of Fincetti’s bunker, and his security plan.”
“Is it… is it an unshackled AI?”
“Unlikely: it seems to understand compassion and empathy on a uniquely organic level, something that rarely slips past Netwatch.”
“Alright, well whatever it is, you keep an eye on it and let me know if things get shady. I appreciate you telling me.”
Trodes nodded in silence.
The crowd parted expectantly as I landed along the streetside. Dozens of eyes were immediately glued to Trodes and I. A cyborg with a steel double mohawk emerged from a sea of leather, patches, and smoke. A sawed-off shotgun hung at his side.
“Red, I presume?” the Cyborg asked, extending a steel hand.
“That’s right, and who’re you?” I answered, clasping the borgs hand as firm as I could manage.
“They call me Diezel, and I’ll be your host today,” he released my hand and looked me up and down as if assessing whether I was a threat, “follow me, everyone’s here so we can get straight down to business.”
The warehouse’s interior had been renovated drastically; layers of open-faced lofts sat stacked upon each other, consuming the walls. Nearly every non-violent law in the city was being broken in the lofts, from cooking chems and explosives to studying banned literature and Doomguard martial arts. It was beautiful. We followed Diezel through a winding hallway of munitions manufacturing stations, before finally emerging into an immense circular room, with rows of seats climbing the walls. I couldn’t believe it—there must have been two hundred people present.
The lights dimmed as we entered the arena. Diezel led us to the rooms center, ushering Trodes and I onto a great circular platform; he fell into place on a platform across from us, beside a Vat-Grown woman bearing an orange and black flag on her arm, and augmentations that cost more than my bike. Behind the duo a bulbous Vorstihl lurked; tentacles draped down his back, carefully pulled away from his cyclopean eye. A red and black flag was displayed on his arm… it was only then that I noticed the blue and black flag on Diezel’s arm.
The platforms each rose roughly fifteen feet into the air, before microphone stands emerged from the center of each platform. Diezel stepped forward, past the microphone.
“Before we start, I’ll explain how this works: the three of us are representatives of our specific unions—but the people are free to interject. One union voting to aid in your endeavors does not guarantee the help of the other two, as each union demands a perfect consensus. Likewise, if a faction without one union decides to help you, it does not necessarily mean you have the support of the entire union. The only way you’ll end up with total support is cross union consensus. Do you understand?”
A consensus: of course, they needed a damned consensus.
“I do,” I answered, speaking away from the microphone.
“Then let’s get this show on the road,” Diezel stepped back, finding his microphone before continuing, “Red, Trodes, welcome to the Bouleuterion,” he paused a moment as the crowd erupted into cheers, “beside me are my comrades Aria and Korvirex, and we stand ready to hear your proposal.”
“As most of you probably know, Don Fincetti is the most powerful man in the underworld, hell—maybe even the city—what you likely don’t know is that he has a vault beneath the city, guarded by an army of Harvesters. I intend to break into the vault, slaughter the Harvesters and strike a blow to Fincetti that he won’t forget… and I intend to kill him shortly after. What I ask is simple: you help me in what’s to come, and when he’s finally dead, you can all split his turf among yourselves. All I care about is making sure he doesn’t live long enough to poison the Sprawl more than he already has.”
A murmur emerged from the stands. I gazed across the way to see the three representatives huddled together, whispering amongst themselves. Finally, Aria stepped towards her microphone.
“What you ask of us will likely mean the death of many of our people… we need something greater than what you offer—we need a guarantee of mutual aid—you have a reputation in the Sprawl, we would ask that you employ it in helping us when the time comes to resettle the Sprawl. Namely, we’d request your assistance against the gangs that may try to fill the power void you seek to create,” Aria explained.
“That seems reasonable,” I said.
Aria stepped back as Korvirex moved forward.
“Tell me, Red, are you familiar with the Offworlder Coalition?” Korvirex asked.
“I am—as a matter of fact, I aided them on the way here—they were marching against the Neo-Confederates and the Brown Shirts. I insured that they had the element of surprise.”
Korvirex stroked the beard-like tentacles that hung from his chin in contemplation.
“Good. What I ask is that you help us to secure their trust, we have offered solidarity where we could, but our forces are spread thin. The ideology of many of the exiled Vorrath rebels that found their way to Nova City—it matches that of our union. If our help was offered, would you agree to assist us in aiding the Coalition, so that they finally have an opportunity to get on their feet?”
Trodes leaned towards in, whispering in my ear.
“It would be prudent of you to make a counteroffer: proclaim that you’ll help with the Coalition, if they’ll spread the word to other groups whose goals may align with ours. There will likely be at least a couple hundred Harvesters in the Undercity when we strike… unless they’re occupied elsewhere.”
“I would happily help with the Coalition, on the condition that your faction spread the word about what we’re doing to like-minded organizations. As it stands, we could still use more numbers to match the Harvesters,” I said.
“These conditions may be satisfactory,” Korvirex said, before retreating into yet another group huddle.
The audience watched on in silence.
Finally, Diezel reapproached the microphone.
“The representatives have deemed this topic worthy of discussion: you’re free to leave, we’ll get ahold of Akari in a couple days, when all the details are ironed out.”
“A couple days?”
“Reaching a consensus can be a slow process at times—be prepared for a renegotiation of conditions, as there will likely be more stipulations made once the process is complete,” Diezel explained.
I nodded, and the platform beneath my feet began to descend towards the floor. The crowd erupted into cheers.
Hopefully Nico and Roman would beat us home.

This is maybe an odd question, but I'm not sure how or how important it is to accurately capture life experience on CASPA. Appreciate any perspective/advice on this, apologies for the wall of text.
I'm in my 30s and I lived a-- for lack of a better phrase-- non-career-focused life in my 20s. Got a bachelors but then spent years doing many small things, often not paid. I wrote for a hyperlocal blog, reviewed theatephotography/painting by emerging artists, wrote neighborhood guides, lived in an illegally converted industrial warehouse artist-collective that hosted readings/exhibitions/parties, published zines, ran writing groups, helped make/acted in experimental short films, traveled around the world, lived in Argentina and Berlin for a bit, interned at a small feminist press, worked at a gallery, did A/V for events for an artist's residency, managed a paintesculptor's studio, wrote/edited artist writing, wrote grants, co-authored a book length manuscript (not published), and other scattered things of this nature. Paid rent by working at neighborhood restaurants where staff was quite involved in the running and community events.
My question is-- could this go on CASPA or no? I don't include it now because a lot of it seems "unprofessional", scattered, and unpaid. It doesn't fit as volunteer work in the traditional sense. My PS could be a good spot, but it's already kinda long.
To me it seems like these things show a genuine dedication to my artistic community and my 'hood, even if it's not the traditional kind of service. Without including this stuff, it looks like I just bartended for years, which I don't think captures who I am as an applicant. Is this kind of life experience/volunteering not really relevant to apps, counting more as a hobby or something like that? I have a 3.3 cumulative GPA, 4.0 in all pre-reqs & 2k+ hrs PCE.
For example, I lived in Argentina for a while and became fluent in Spanish. Worked in a Mexican restaurant and was bilingual at work. I translate at the hospital every day. My college-aged coworkers applying to PA school have years of college Spanish credits but are not fluent and are not allowed to translate. Another college-aged coworker applying PA is going on a school-sponsored "mission" trip that costs $$$ and the itinerary she showed me looked like a sightseeing/surf vacation. (Sorry I'm old and bitter hahah!) This "experience" stuff is clear on apps. Seems like a miss to show nowhere on CASPA that I'm a non-native speaker who learned the language through experience and translates for the docs in the ER. Can't find a way to put it in that doesn't seem awkward and forced.
Again, apologies for the wall of text. Anyone, especially non-trad applicants, have thoughts or advice on this?
Thank you in advance!

-Red-
April 19th, 11:13 A.M., The Sprawl
I sparked a dilapidated Vita-Cig that I’d snagged from Trodes and peered out into the Sprawl; the careful equilibrium of a well-orchestrated black-market had returned; pushers and gangers lined the alleys, watching for signals from rooftop lookouts to avoid the single Peacewatch cruiser that had been stupid enough to enter the dockside. The poor bastard would be dead before the afternoon was over… not that I had much sympathy for his kind. Peacewatch made it a habit to stay out of the Sprawl: unless the Eggheads predictive crime system said something catastrophic was coming, they policed their kind and left us in the hands of the mob. I’d never iced an officer. Not yet at least.
“Your partner should be ready shortly, I think he’s just tying up a few loose ends,” Akari said, snatching the cigarette from my hand and taking a long drag.
“Remind me again why you think I should take the shrimp with me instead of Nico and Roman?”
“He’s smart… and the other two are working on something else. Besides-- you need brains on this one, Red, not muscle,” she giggled, passing the cigarette back.
“Whatever you say,” I paused, grabbing the smoke, “what do you have them up to?”
“There’s a shipment of Xeno-grade weapons coming down from the colonies. Nico and Roman will be liberating them from the Slicers. Or, their share, at least. It won’t be much, maybe a dozen guns, but it’ll be worth it: the force field tech alone will pay for the trip as soon as Fincetti’s goons start trying to take your heads off with plasma cannons and mono blades.”
“What do you mean, their share?”
“The job was too big for us to take on alone. I linked up with another enterprising group of Freelancers. If it goes well, maybe we can hire them on for the heist, we’re going to need more people if we want to walk out of there alive.”
We?
“What, are you planning on coming along now?” I asked, snuffing out the smoke.
“It only seems right; Trodes is coming along, and I’m a better shot than he’ll ever be. Besides, you have a dangerous habit of getting shot, and I can’t have you going down in the field,” she said, winking as if to punctuate the sentence.
“You sure? We can manage, you don’t have to come with us, you’ve done so much already.”
“I know I have, that’s why I have to protect my investment. If you go down out there, then the team is without a leader. A military scale operation like this will go south real fast without someone competent in command.”
“You’ve got me wrong, Akari: I’m no leader. I’m just someone who wants to live in a better city and doesn’t mind taking the trash out himself. Besides, why do we need a leader? We’re all competent adults acting in concert, of our own free will. We all know what we’re doing, if a situation arises and someone needs to take charge, it’ll happen.”
“You’ve got a lot of faith in a crew you just met,” Akari said with a sneer.
“You know why I asked you to put the team together, Akari?”
“Because there’s a bounty on your head that could finance twenty retirements, and you know you can trust me?”
“No, well yeah, but that’s beside the point—I asked you because you’re not a Fixer, you’re a part time street doc that works the front desk at the most popular Freelancer hotel in the Sprawl. If there’s anyone who knows who’s gonna get the job done, it’s you. See, a Fixer is going to be okay with whatever losses they deem acceptable beforehand, but they’re fine with keeping that to themselves. If you thought any of these mooks were going to crack under pressure, or do something stupid, you wouldn’t have set me up with them.”
Before she could respond, Trodes emerged from the stairs leading to the lab. He winced as the sunlight hit his eyes, shrugging on the hood of the oversized sweatshirt that blanketed his meek frame. Glimpses of pain showed through every tremor laden step he took. A cloak of wires enveloped his skull, feeding into an old-world cyber console.
“It’s insufferably hot out here,” Trodes sighed.
“Don’t worry, we’re not going far. Chances are that whatever hole we’re meeting BFU in will have air conditioning,” I responded, clicking my key fob, and signaling the bike to pull around.
Trodes face fell flat when the Supersonic rolled around the corner; apparently, the prestige of carving through the skyway on a state-of-the-art Taffington jet-bike was lost on him.
“Are we taking… that?” Trodes stammered.
“We are. Unless you’ve got a pair of wheels with two seats?” I asked, mounting the bike and revving the engine.
With an exasperated sigh, Trodes boarded the passenger seat. I could feel him behind me, vibrating as tremors gripped his body.
“You good, buddy?” I asked.
He nodded vigorously, clenching the handrails with white knuckles.
Akari shook her head and headed back to the lab.
I heard Trodes mumble something under his breath, but it was quickly drowned out by the jet-bike’s purr. I carved into the skyway. Driving in the Sprawl was pure freedom: almost nobody owned vehicles with aerial capabilities in this part of town. It didn’t take long to reach top speed.
Slummers and gutterpunks walked the streets like zombies in a drug addled haze. The scent of gunpowder, pollution and burning ozone coalesced into a putrid stench that reeked of poverty and violence. Patches of azure moved in militant formation below; the Vorrath had taken to the streets. On a different day, a better day, I would’ve helped them. Most slummers hated the Offworlder Coalition, but not me—at the end of the day I always figured that I had more in common with poor people from another planet than rich people from another district of the city. At least we shared the same struggle.
The bike slowed to crawl; the Neo-Confederates were about, backed by a platoon of Brown-Shirts that looked like a tide of sewer run off, crashing through the streets with reckless abandon. Civilians fled for their homes. Fuck.
The jet-bike careened through the air before finally landing atop a building a few blocks away from the impending conflict.
“Get off,” I said, turning back to Trodes.
“Why? You don’t intend to abandon me at this altitude, do you?”
“Not as long as I survive—I’ll be quick, I just need to ventilate some Nazi fucks, understood?”
He shook his head and muttered a string of curses.
I tore through the air, circling around the impending conflict. I chased a handful of cheap amphetamines with a poorly rolled joint and swooped low, behind the rolling tide of brown shirts. This wasn’t the first time I’d made myself an enemy of the city’s Neo-Nazi’s; I’d killed at least a dozen of them in my career as a courier, but those were isolated incidents, back-alley brawls away from the mob.
This was a whole new ball game.
I fell slack as my Teleoperations module synchronized with the bike. My consciousness faded, reemerging into the HALO-Net’s stylized rendition of the bike’s interior. I wasn’t just the pilot now—I was the bike. Bullets carved twin streaks of crimson into the brown tide. It didn’t take long to hit top speed, 3.7 seconds, to be exact.
The group turned in nearly perfect unison, launching volley upon volley as I passed overhead. The bike’s shields barely held together; I felt every round, like a flock of birds violently slamming into my side—not enough to cause any real damage, but more than enough to get the blood pumping. I slid into an alley a few blocks off and waited for the shield generator to recharge. Gunshots rang out from the streets, alongside the sizzle of plasma meeting flesh. Soon the din was drowned beneath the roar of dozens of Vorrath war cries. I took to the sky.
Trodes was exactly where I left him, nervously clutching a knock off version of a Locust flechette pistol.
“I was beginning to doubt your survival,” Trodes said shakily.
“Wrong again, little guy,” I paused, reigniting a half smoked joint, “it was just a quick hit and run, we don’t have the time or the numbers for a pitched battle. Now, hop on.”
It didn’t take long to find BFU’s base of operations. Black flags and Anarchist graffiti covered the walls of the abandoned warehouse they’d apparently taken up residence in. A field of repurposed Peacewatch turrets were installed atop the roof, complimented by a web of cameras that spread across a three-block radius. Anarchists of all species and creeds loitered outside. The guards ranged from Cyborgs and Vat-Grown, to Vorrath and Vorstihl, each wearing a variant of the black flag with colors corresponding to their ideologies.
As I hovered above the building, I saw a familiar face: the rookie from earlier. Alarmingly, his cruiser was nowhere to be seen. His face was wrought with horror, as a pair of cyborgs led him inside the warehouse.
“They’re certainly less than subtle,” Trodes said.
“They don’t have to be subtle, they’re the biggest citizens political organization in the Sprawl. Peacewatch avoids them if they have anything less than a full platoon on hand,” I explained.
“Red… before we enter negotiations with these hooligans, I must inquire as to what your motivation hitting the vault is? Surely you know there’s a strong likelihood that you won’t make it out, and from what I’d heard about you, I always understood you to be a man who knew how to keep himself out of the line of sight of dangerous people,” Trodes said, nervously.
“Fincetti is the most dangerous man in the city, short of O’Bannon. He controls the black market with an iron fist and is instrumental in all the things I hate about living here. The problem is, I have no way to do anything about it right now… but there’s something big in the safe—there must be—for fucks sake, he iced his family over it. I’m hoping there’s something in there that can give me a little leverage, so I can cross him out afterwards.”
Trodes was silent for a moment, simply reaching as if to ask me to pass the joint. I obliged.
“I have my reasons to want O’Bannon dead too, I’m in,” he paused as a coughing fit seized him, causing the joint to fall to the ground, “there’s something you should know though: I’m working with an entity of great power in the Net; I don’t know what precisely it is, but I know it saved my life more than once. As a matter of fact, it’s the only reason I was able to obtain the blueprint of Fincetti’s bunker, and his security plan.”
“Is it… is it an unshackled AI?”
“Unlikely: it seems to understand compassion and empathy on a uniquely organic level, something that rarely slips past Netwatch.”
“Alright, well whatever it is, you keep an eye on it and let me know if things get shady. I appreciate you telling me.”
Trodes nodded in silence.
The crowd parted expectantly as I landed along the streetside. Dozens of eyes were immediately glued to Trodes and I. A cyborg with a steel double mohawk emerged from a sea of leather, patches, and smoke. A sawed-off shotgun hung at his side.
“Red, I presume?” the Cyborg asked, extending a steel hand.
“That’s right, and who’re you?” I answered, clasping the borgs hand as firm as I could manage.
“They call me Diezel, and I’ll be your host today,” he released my hand and looked me up and down as if assessing whether I was a threat, “follow me, everyone’s here so we can get straight down to business.”
The warehouse’s interior had been renovated drastically; layers of open-faced lofts sat stacked upon each other, consuming the walls. Nearly every non-violent law in the city was being broken in the lofts, from cooking chems and explosives to studying banned literature and Doomguard martial arts. It was beautiful. We followed Diezel through a winding hallway of munitions manufacturing stations, before finally emerging into an immense circular room, with rows of seats climbing the walls. I couldn’t believe it—there must have been two hundred people present.
The lights dimmed as we entered the arena. Diezel led us to the rooms center, ushering Trodes and I onto a great circular platform; he fell into place on a platform across from us, beside a Vat-Grown woman bearing an orange and black flag on her arm, and augmentations that cost more than my bike. Behind the duo a bulbous Vorstihl lurked; tentacles draped down his back, carefully pulled away from his cyclopean eye. A red and black flag was displayed on his arm… it was only then that I noticed the blue and black flag on Diezel’s arm.
The platforms each rose roughly fifteen feet into the air, before microphone stands emerged from the center of each platform. Diezel stepped forward, past the microphone.
“Before we start, I’ll explain how this works: the three of us are representatives of our specific unions—but the people are free to interject. One union voting to aid in your endeavors does not guarantee the help of the other two, as each union demands a perfect consensus. Likewise, if a faction without one union decides to help you, it does not necessarily mean you have the support of the entire union. The only way you’ll end up with total support is cross union consensus. Do you understand?”
A consensus: of course, they needed a damned consensus.
“I do,” I answered, speaking away from the microphone.
“Then let’s get this show on the road,” Diezel stepped back, finding his microphone before continuing, “Red, Trodes, welcome to the Bouleuterion,” he paused a moment as the crowd erupted into cheers, “beside me are my comrades Aria and Korvirex, and we stand ready to hear your proposal.”
“As most of you probably know, Don Fincetti is the most powerful man in the underworld, hell—maybe even the city—what you likely don’t know is that he has a vault beneath the city, guarded by an army of Harvesters. I intend to break into the vault, slaughter the Harvesters and strike a blow to Fincetti that he won’t forget… and I intend to kill him shortly after. What I ask is simple: you help me in what’s to come, and when he’s finally dead, you can all split his turf among yourselves. All I care about is making sure he doesn’t live long enough to poison the Sprawl more than he already has.”
A murmur emerged from the stands. I gazed across the way to see the three representatives huddled together, whispering amongst themselves. Finally, Aria stepped towards her microphone.
“What you ask of us will likely mean the death of many of our people… we need something greater than what you offer—we need a guarantee of mutual aid—you have a reputation in the Sprawl, we would ask that you employ it in helping us when the time comes to resettle the Sprawl. Namely, we’d request your assistance against the gangs that may try to fill the power void you seek to create,” Aria explained.
“That seems reasonable,” I said.
Aria stepped back as Korvirex moved forward.
“Tell me, Red, are you familiar with the Offworlder Coalition?” Korvirex asked.
“I am—as a matter of fact, I aided them on the way here—they were marching against the Neo-Confederates and the Brown Shirts. I insured that they had the element of surprise.”
Korvirex stroked the beard-like tentacles that hung from his chin in contemplation.
“Good. What I ask is that you help us to secure their trust, we have offered solidarity where we could, but our forces are spread thin. The ideology of many of the exiled Vorrath rebels that found their way to Nova City—it matches that of our union. If our help was offered, would you agree to assist us in aiding the Coalition, so that they finally have an opportunity to get on their feet?”
Trodes leaned towards in, whispering in my ear.
“It would be prudent of you to make a counteroffer: proclaim that you’ll help with the Coalition, if they’ll spread the word to other groups whose goals may align with ours. There will likely be at least a couple hundred Harvesters in the Undercity when we strike… unless they’re occupied elsewhere.”
“I would happily help with the Coalition, on the condition that your faction spread the word about what we’re doing to like-minded organizations. As it stands, we could still use more numbers to match the Harvesters,” I said.
“These conditions may be satisfactory,” Korvirex said, before retreating into yet another group huddle.
The audience watched on in silence.
Finally, Diezel reapproached the microphone.
“The representatives have deemed this topic worthy of discussion: you’re free to leave, we’ll get ahold of Akari in a couple days, when all the details are ironed out.”
“A couple days?”
“Reaching a consensus can be a slow process at times—be prepared for a renegotiation of conditions, as there will likely be more stipulations made once the process is complete,” Diezel explained.
I nodded, and the platform beneath my feet began to descend towards the floor. The crowd erupted into cheers.
Hopefully Nico and Roman would beat us home

-Red-
April 19th, 11:13 A.M., The Sprawl
I sparked a dilapidated Vita-Cig that I’d snagged from Trodes and peered out into the Sprawl; the careful equilibrium of a well-orchestrated black-market had returned; pushers and gangers lined the alleys, watching for signals from rooftop lookouts to avoid the single Peacewatch cruiser that had been stupid enough to enter the dockside. The poor bastard would be dead before the afternoon was over… not that I had much sympathy for his kind. Peacewatch made it a habit to stay out of the Sprawl: unless the Eggheads predictive crime system said something catastrophic was coming, they policed their kind and left us in the hands of the mob. I’d never iced an officer. Not yet at least.
“Your partner should be ready shortly, I think he’s just tying up a few loose ends,” Akari said, snatching the cigarette from my hand and taking a long drag.
“Remind me again why you think I should take the shrimp with me instead of Nico and Roman?”
“He’s smart… and the other two are working on something else. Besides-- you need brains on this one, Red, not muscle,” she giggled, passing the cigarette back.
“Whatever you say,” I paused, grabbing the smoke, “what do you have them up to?”
“There’s a shipment of Xeno-grade weapons coming down from the colonies. Nico and Roman will be liberating them from the Slicers. Or, their share, at least. It won’t be much, maybe a dozen guns, but it’ll be worth it: the force field tech alone will pay for the trip as soon as Fincetti’s goons start trying to take your heads off with plasma cannons and mono blades.”
“What do you mean, their share?”
“The job was too big for us to take on alone. I linked up with another enterprising group of Freelancers. If it goes well, maybe we can hire them on for the heist, we’re going to need more people if we want to walk out of there alive.”
We?
“What, are you planning on coming along now?” I asked, snuffing out the smoke.
“It only seems right; Trodes is coming along, and I’m a better shot than he’ll ever be. Besides, you have a dangerous habit of getting shot, and I can’t have you going down in the field,” she said, winking as if to punctuate the sentence.
“You sure? We can manage, you don’t have to come with us, you’ve done so much already.”
“I know I have, that’s why I have to protect my investment. If you go down out there, then the team is without a leader. A military scale operation like this will go south real fast without someone competent in command.”
“You’ve got me wrong, Akari: I’m no leader. I’m just someone who wants to live in a better city and doesn’t mind taking the trash out himself. Besides, why do we need a leader? We’re all competent adults acting in concert, of our own free will. We all know what we’re doing, if a situation arises and someone needs to take charge, it’ll happen.”
“You’ve got a lot of faith in a crew you just met,” Akari said with a sneer.
“You know why I asked you to put the team together, Akari?”
“Because there’s a bounty on your head that could finance twenty retirements, and you know you can trust me?”
“No, well yeah, but that’s beside the point—I asked you because you’re not a Fixer, you’re a part time street doc that works the front desk at the most popular Freelancer hotel in the Sprawl. If there’s anyone who knows who’s gonna get the job done, it’s you. See, a Fixer is going to be okay with whatever losses they deem acceptable beforehand, but they’re fine with keeping that to themselves. If you thought any of these mooks were going to crack under pressure, or do something stupid, you wouldn’t have set me up with them.”
Before she could respond, Trodes emerged from the stairs leading to the lab. He winced as the sunlight hit his eyes, shrugging on the hood of the oversized sweatshirt that blanketed his meek frame. Glimpses of pain showed through every tremor laden step he took. A cloak of wires enveloped his skull, feeding into an old-world cyber console.
“It’s insufferably hot out here,” Trodes sighed.
“Don’t worry, we’re not going far. Chances are that whatever hole we’re meeting BFU in will have air conditioning,” I responded, clicking my key fob, and signaling the bike to pull around.
Trodes face fell flat when the Supersonic rolled around the corner; apparently, the prestige of carving through the skyway on a state-of-the-art Taffington jet-bike was lost on him.
“Are we taking… that?” Trodes stammered.
“We are. Unless you’ve got a pair of wheels with two seats?” I asked, mounting the bike and revving the engine.
With an exasperated sigh, Trodes boarded the passenger seat. I could feel him behind me, vibrating as tremors gripped his body.
“You good, buddy?” I asked.
He nodded vigorously, clenching the handrails with white knuckles.
Akari shook her head and headed back to the lab.
I heard Trodes mumble something under his breath, but it was quickly drowned out by the jet-bike’s purr. I carved into the skyway. Driving in the Sprawl was pure freedom: almost nobody owned vehicles with aerial capabilities in this part of town. It didn’t take long to reach top speed.
Slummers and gutterpunks walked the streets like zombies in a drug addled haze. The scent of gunpowder, pollution and burning ozone coalesced into a putrid stench that reeked of poverty and violence. Patches of azure moved in militant formation below; the Vorrath had taken to the streets. On a different day, a better day, I would’ve helped them. Most slummers hated the Offworlder Coalition, but not me—at the end of the day I always figured that I had more in common with poor people from another planet than rich people from another district of the city. At least we shared the same struggle.
The bike slowed to crawl; the Neo-Confederates were about, backed by a platoon of Brown-Shirts that looked like a tide of sewer run off, crashing through the streets with reckless abandon. Civilians fled for their homes. Fuck.
The jet-bike careened through the air before finally landing atop a building a few blocks away from the impending conflict.
“Get off,” I said, turning back to Trodes.
“Why? You don’t intend to abandon me at this altitude, do you?”
“Not as long as I survive—I’ll be quick, I just need to ventilate some Nazi fucks, understood?”
He shook his head and muttered a string of curses.
I tore through the air, circling around the impending conflict. I chased a handful of cheap amphetamines with a poorly rolled joint and swooped low, behind the rolling tide of brown shirts. This wasn’t the first time I’d made myself an enemy of the city’s Neo-Nazi’s; I’d killed at least a dozen of them in my career as a courier, but those were isolated incidents, back-alley brawls away from the mob.
This was a whole new ball game.
I fell slack as my Teleoperations module synchronized with the bike. My consciousness faded, reemerging into the HALO-Net’s stylized rendition of the bike’s interior. I wasn’t just the pilot now—I was the bike. Bullets carved twin streaks of crimson into the brown tide. It didn’t take long to hit top speed, 3.7 seconds, to be exact.
The group turned in nearly perfect unison, launching volley upon volley as I passed overhead. The bike’s shields barely held together; I felt every round, like a flock of birds violently slamming into my side—not enough to cause any real damage, but more than enough to get the blood pumping. I slid into an alley a few blocks off and waited for the shield generator to recharge. Gunshots rang out from the streets, alongside the sizzle of plasma meeting flesh. Soon the din was drowned beneath the roar of dozens of Vorrath war cries. I took to the sky.
Trodes was exactly where I left him, nervously clutching a knock off version of a Locust flechette pistol.
“I was beginning to doubt your survival,” Trodes said shakily.
“Wrong again, little guy,” I paused, reigniting a half smoked joint, “it was just a quick hit and run, we don’t have the time or the numbers for a pitched battle. Now, hop on.”
It didn’t take long to find BFU’s base of operations. Black flags and Anarchist graffiti covered the walls of the abandoned warehouse they’d apparently taken up residence in. A field of repurposed Peacewatch turrets were installed atop the roof, complimented by a web of cameras that spread across a three-block radius. Anarchists of all species and creeds loitered outside. The guards ranged from Cyborgs and Vat-Grown, to Vorrath and Vorstihl, each wearing a variant of the black flag with colors corresponding to their ideologies.
As I hovered above the building, I saw a familiar face: the rookie from earlier. Alarmingly, his cruiser was nowhere to be seen. His face was wrought with horror, as a pair of cyborgs led him inside the warehouse.
“They’re certainly less than subtle,” Trodes said.
“They don’t have to be subtle, they’re the biggest citizens political organization in the Sprawl. Peacewatch avoids them if they have anything less than a full platoon on hand,” I explained.
“Red… before we enter negotiations with these hooligans, I must inquire as to what your motivation hitting the vault is? Surely you know there’s a strong likelihood that you won’t make it out, and from what I’d heard about you, I always understood you to be a man who knew how to keep himself out of the line of sight of dangerous people,” Trodes said, nervously.
“Fincetti is the most dangerous man in the city, short of O’Bannon. He controls the black market with an iron fist and is instrumental in all the things I hate about living here. The problem is, I have no way to do anything about it right now… but there’s something big in the safe—there must be—for fucks sake, he iced his family over it. I’m hoping there’s something in there that can give me a little leverage, so I can cross him out afterwards.”
Trodes was silent for a moment, simply reaching as if to ask me to pass the joint. I obliged.
“I have my reasons to want O’Bannon dead too, I’m in,” he paused as a coughing fit seized him, causing the joint to fall to the ground, “there’s something you should know though: I’m working with an entity of great power in the Net; I don’t know what precisely it is, but I know it saved my life more than once. As a matter of fact, it’s the only reason I was able to obtain the blueprint of Fincetti’s bunker, and his security plan.”
“Is it… is it an unshackled AI?”
“Unlikely: it seems to understand compassion and empathy on a uniquely organic level, something that rarely slips past Netwatch.”
“Alright, well whatever it is, you keep an eye on it and let me know if things get shady. I appreciate you telling me.”
Trodes nodded in silence.
The crowd parted expectantly as I landed along the streetside. Dozens of eyes were immediately glued to Trodes and I. A cyborg with a steel double mohawk emerged from a sea of leather, patches, and smoke. A sawed-off shotgun hung at his side.
“Red, I presume?” the Cyborg asked, extending a steel hand.
“That’s right, and who’re you?” I answered, clasping the borgs hand as firm as I could manage.
“They call me Diezel, and I’ll be your host today,” he released my hand and looked me up and down as if assessing whether I was a threat, “follow me, everyone’s here so we can get straight down to business.”
The warehouse’s interior had been renovated drastically; layers of open-faced lofts sat stacked upon each other, consuming the walls. Nearly every non-violent law in the city was being broken in the lofts, from cooking chems and explosives to studying banned literature and Doomguard martial arts. It was beautiful. We followed Diezel through a winding hallway of munitions manufacturing stations, before finally emerging into an immense circular room, with rows of seats climbing the walls. I couldn’t believe it—there must have been two hundred people present.
The lights dimmed as we entered the arena. Diezel led us to the rooms center, ushering Trodes and I onto a great circular platform; he fell into place on a platform across from us, beside a Vat-Grown woman bearing an orange and black flag on her arm, and augmentations that cost more than my bike. Behind the duo a bulbous Vorstihl lurked; tentacles draped down his back, carefully pulled away from his cyclopean eye. A red and black flag was displayed on his arm… it was only then that I noticed the blue and black flag on Diezel’s arm.
The platforms each rose roughly fifteen feet into the air, before microphone stands emerged from the center of each platform. Diezel stepped forward, past the microphone.
“Before we start, I’ll explain how this works: the three of us are representatives of our specific unions—but the people are free to interject. One union voting to aid in your endeavors does not guarantee the help of the other two, as each union demands a perfect consensus. Likewise, if a faction without one union decides to help you, it does not necessarily mean you have the support of the entire union. The only way you’ll end up with total support is cross union consensus. Do you understand?”
A consensus: of course, they needed a damned consensus.
“I do,” I answered, speaking away from the microphone.
“Then let’s get this show on the road,” Diezel stepped back, finding his microphone before continuing, “Red, Trodes, welcome to the Bouleuterion,” he paused a moment as the crowd erupted into cheers, “beside me are my comrades Aria and Korvirex, and we stand ready to hear your proposal.”
“As most of you probably know, Don Fincetti is the most powerful man in the underworld, hell—maybe even the city—what you likely don’t know is that he has a vault beneath the city, guarded by an army of Harvesters. I intend to break into the vault, slaughter the Harvesters and strike a blow to Fincetti that he won’t forget… and I intend to kill him shortly after. What I ask is simple: you help me in what’s to come, and when he’s finally dead, you can all split his turf among yourselves. All I care about is making sure he doesn’t live long enough to poison the Sprawl more than he already has.”
A murmur emerged from the stands. I gazed across the way to see the three representatives huddled together, whispering amongst themselves. Finally, Aria stepped towards her microphone.
“What you ask of us will likely mean the death of many of our people… we need something greater than what you offer—we need a guarantee of mutual aid—you have a reputation in the Sprawl, we would ask that you employ it in helping us when the time comes to resettle the Sprawl. Namely, we’d request your assistance against the gangs that may try to fill the power void you seek to create,” Aria explained.
“That seems reasonable,” I said.
Aria stepped back as Korvirex moved forward.
“Tell me, Red, are you familiar with the Offworlder Coalition?” Korvirex asked.
“I am—as a matter of fact, I aided them on the way here—they were marching against the Neo-Confederates and the Brown Shirts. I insured that they had the element of surprise.”
Korvirex stroked the beard-like tentacles that hung from his chin in contemplation.
“Good. What I ask is that you help us to secure their trust, we have offered solidarity where we could, but our forces are spread thin. The ideology of many of the exiled Vorrath rebels that found their way to Nova City—it matches that of our union. If our help was offered, would you agree to assist us in aiding the Coalition, so that they finally have an opportunity to get on their feet?”
Trodes leaned towards in, whispering in my ear.
“It would be prudent of you to make a counteroffer: proclaim that you’ll help with the Coalition, if they’ll spread the word to other groups whose goals may align with ours. There will likely be at least a couple hundred Harvesters in the Undercity when we strike… unless they’re occupied elsewhere.”
“I would happily help with the Coalition, on the condition that your faction spread the word about what we’re doing to like-minded organizations. As it stands, we could still use more numbers to match the Harvesters,” I said.
“These conditions may be satisfactory,” Korvirex said, before retreating into yet another group huddle.
The audience watched on in silence.
Finally, Diezel reapproached the microphone.
“The representatives have deemed this topic worthy of discussion: you’re free to leave, we’ll get ahold of Akari in a couple days, when all the details are ironed out.”
“A couple days?”
“Reaching a consensus can be a slow process at times—be prepared for a renegotiation of conditions, as there will likely be more stipulations made once the process is complete,” Diezel explained.
I nodded, and the platform beneath my feet began to descend towards the floor. The crowd erupted into cheers.
Hopefully Nico and Roman would beat us home.

Recently, umalis ako sa trabaho ko para magpahinga kasi ramdam na ramdam ko na bibigay na naman ako. I was diagnosed with anxiety disorders back in 2016. Naging okay naman ako as the years go by. Pero bumabalik na naman ako sa dati.
I'm (29yp)very grateful sa company na pinagtrabahuhan ko pero there's no regret na umalis ako kasi sila na din naging dahilan bakit na naman ako nasisiraan ng ulo. Idagdag pa yung kapatid na tila sugo ng diablo.
I'm silently dealing with my demons. Btw, I'm married. Okay naman si mister(28yo), hindi ko lang talaga kaya magsabi sakanya kasi he's not helping at all, I mean hindi nya ko naiintindihan kahiy sinasabi niyang naiintindihan nya ako. I tried naman, pero magkaiba talaga kami ng pananaw sa buhay kaya I chose to keep it to myself.
Recently, kakalaya lang ng kuya ko (38yo). (Drug related issues and threat) We never had a great relationship growing up pero now that we're grown ups things has changed or so I thought.
It's only been 2 months since nakalaya si kuya. First month were great. Pinipilit ko lagi na isama sya sa mga lakad ko kasi I know na miss nya ang outside world. Okay lang naman. Kasama namin in-laws ko. Gala, kain. Kwentuhan. Kasi I know the possibility na mag relapse sya pag hindi binigyan ng attention. I warned our mom din about this kasi may pagka armalite ang mouth ni maderdear which she obliged. Kaya sakin lagi ang sumbong. 2nd month, okay pa din naman halos. Not until recently, nag aaway sila. We live behind our house, and yung butas ng aircon namin eh dinig ang pag aaway nila. I literally woke up dahil nag sisigawan sila kaya tumakbo ko. Asking what happened. Nag iiyak na si mama at sigaw ng sigaw ang kuya ko. Hindi ako high blood pero kanina ko lang naramdaman yung sa sobrang galit ko sumakit batok ko. Kalmado ko nakikipag usap pero walang sumasagot sa tanong ko na "anong problema niyo" nakisali na ko sa sigawan factor. Sinaraduhan ako ng pinto ng kuya ko. Sinipa ko yung pinto buti nalang hindi nasira. Pero natauhan sya dun at natahimik ang kuya. Sabi ko mag pa drug test kami, oo daw sige. Para maisampal daw sa nanay namin na negative sya. Bakit daw sya sinisisi sa mga umaalis na yaya ng pamangkin nya (yes pamangkin nya lang dahil half brother ko lang sya at anak yun ng half sister nya sa tatay - magkaiba kami ng tatay). Sigaw ko kung mag negative ka edi congratulations, ako ang may gusto na mag pa drug test ka. Dahil kilala ko kilos mo sa tuwing nakakagamit ka at bumababa ang tama mo. Nag babalibag ka ng upuan, tinatapon kung ano mahawakan mo. Di na sya nakapag salita, and yes, takot sya sakin but the reason is another story.
Umaattend sya ng counseling (CADAC) on a weekly basis. I reached out to them about the behaviour and they too suggested 2 things. Hair follicle drug testing and/or psych evaluation. I tried to keep my cool kasi lagi ko pinaparamdam sakanya na kakampi nya ko. Pero that time? Napuno ako. I'll gather myself up. Aasikasuhin ko this week yung sa kuya ko. Pero hindi ko alam ano pa pwede mangyari sa mga susunod na araw.
I left my high paying job para sa sarili ko. Pero pagod na pagod pa din ako. Sobrang dami kong problema. Na alam ni mister pero hindi ko alam bakit hindi nya kaya mag effort to help me about it. Or baka nag eeffort sya di ko lang makita. Pero pagod na pagod na pagod na ko. Dapat priority ko sarili kong pamilya na. Pero bakit ako padin kailangan mag suffer dahil sakanila. Sobrang dami kong gusto ikwento dito pero takot ako na baka may makakilala pa din sakin.
Also, kaya sya ang nasisisi sa pag alis ng yaya nung pamangkin nya dahil natatakot sakanya. May autism spectrum yung bata. Pag nag iiyak or whining pinapalo nya. Sinasampal nya, sinisigawan nya. Bakit di ko sabihin sa ate nya? Kasi gusto ko pag umuwi ng pinas ang ate nya. At kumuha ng bahay. Isama na sya. Ayoko na sa bahay sila. At opo, pinakiusap lang ni utol ang ate at pamangkin nya sa bahay ng mama ko. Ang mama ko na minsang pinagsalitaan nila ng masasakit pero tinanggap padin sila.
Grabe yung intrusive thoughts ko. Never ako naghangad na may mamatay na sa kahit na sinong nakakasamaan ko ng loob or nakakaaway ko. Ngayon lang.

To start this has been a long and grueling decision for me. I’m struggling between choosing to work in the medical field as a rad tech then go onto being a Physician Assistant or become a license clinical social worker and be a therapist.
My background: I received my undergrad degree in exercise science/pre-med with a minor in psychology. My goal was always to become a PA. COVID came and senior year was ruined. I ended up staying at my undergrad school to complete my Masters in Biology in hopes of gaining a better chance into PA school/raising my GPA. I finished this in 1 year in 2021.
After school I went to work as a medical assistant in different fields. I loved working in pediatrics and family medicine. I volunteered at a children’s hospital years before and enjoyed that as well. It was working at an urgent care/family practice that made me hate medicine. I was constantly dealing with COVID patients and the practice was run terribly. The turnover rate was high and I was experiencing some medical issues therefore leading me to quit. I thought I needed to find another path besides medicine as that job stressed me out more than I’ve ever been in my life.
After some time off and a lot of soul searching, I ended up volunteering at a psychology practice to see if this was a field I was interested in. I have always loved the human body, how the brain thinks and psychology was my minor. I enjoyed my time here and went on to apply to a graduate programs for this. I was tired of sitting around and not making an active decision for a career choice.
I ended up getting into a MSW program that would allow me to eventually become a LCSW and a therapist. I am excited but I can’t stop thinking that I could be going into the wrong career. I never stopped thinking about going back to school for medicine and whenever there is something medical, I am immediately interested.
I also applied for a rad tech program as well but withdrew my application during the interview round as I thought I made a decision to go the MSW route, but now I regret it. I would need to get 60 more science credits to raise my GPA in order to apply to PA school, hence why I thought being a rad tech would be great experience and allow for the GPA repairmen.
It’s not that I don’t think I wouldn’t like either, I just worry I might regret not pursuing the medical route later in life. I also worry that my medical issues (diagnosed with POTS) could be worse depending on either career. Both careers can be stressful and deal with peoples issues, so either way I will be dealing with that. My main issues is I can’t tell if my inability to let the idea of being a PA go is a sign I should continue on that path or if it’s not being able to give up the goal I worked many years towards.
Any advice from those who may have been stuck between decisions or have changed paths I would really appreciate!

Hey lads! I’m sure everyone by now is pretty aware of the AI and robotics space as it’s literally all over the place right now. People like Elon Musk have been talking about it a lot recently and Tesla also just put out their newest iteration of their bots on LinkedIn which was pretty cool to see. I’ve always been amazed at how robots are able to do tasks in the same capacity we do so seeing it come to fruition is pretty insane to me.
I always do my best to keep up with news in the space to see if there’s any cool advancements or new jobs that these robots are taking on. That being said I saw today that “United Drug” who is one of Ireland’s largest pharmaceutical distributors has just brought in a whole squad of autonomous robots..and when I say squad I mean 21 robots lmao. That’s almost enough for a soccer match lol. The company partnered with LocusBots to make this happen which I found pretty cool because I had heard about them working with DHL and UPS before. Apparently these robots are able to navigate autonomously through the warehouse and assist the human staff (thought I’d add the human part on just incase lol) with handling orders. It’s suppose to increase overall productivity of the warehouse, which I feel like is going to be the case when you add in robotics in any capacity to somewhere. I wonder if robots are eventually going to eliminate a whole bunch of jobs in the near future.. What yall think? I feel like i can easily see robots operating a warehouse.
After reading through the article I wanted to check out LocusBots a bunch more and invest in them. Cause if they are making big splashes like this in major companies around the world I want to be in on them. It was annoying to find out that they’re a private company lol
I did however come across Stack Capital while doing my search into investing into Locus. From what I gathered Stack Capital invests in equity, debt, and/or other securities of growth-to-late-stage private businesses. I seen that in their portfolio they had already invested $8m into LocusBots back in 2022 so this could potentially be a good way to indirectly invest in them right? From the looks of it they have a pretty solid management team with a whole bunch of experience so I’m not super worried about their judgement when it comes to portfolio management.
Does anyone have experience with getting exposure in private companies this way? I’ve personally never done it so I’m not 100% sure on it. I really love the look of Locus so I would really love to get some insight into companies like Stack and if they’re a good shout or not.

Company Name	Title	City
Tzadik Properties LLC	Maintenance Technician - Part Time	Belfield
Home Instead	In-Home Caregiver (Burleigh)	Bismarck
Tzadik Properties LLC	Apartment Maintenance Technician	Dickinson
Tzadik Properties LLC	Maintenance Technician - Part Time	Dickinson
Tzadik Properties LLC	Make Ready Assistant	Dickinson
John Deere & Company	Electronic Design Engineer	Fargo
MacArthur Co	Warehouse Operations Manager	FARGO
John Deere & Company	Engineering Supervisor, Test Desig	Fargo
Prairie Band, LLC	Physician, Registered Nurse, Emergency Medicine, Medical Support Assistant	Fort Yates
Hankinson Renewable Energy	Associate Merchandiser	Hankinson
Hankinson Renewable Energy, LLC	Scale Operator	Hankinson
Novaspect Inc	PLC Programmer	Mandan
Novaspect Inc	Industrial Technician	Mandan
Noble Casing Inc	Shop Hand	Trenton
MacArthur Co	Warehouse Operations Manager	West Fargo
Noble Casing Inc	Floor Hand I	Williston
Medical Resource Group, Inc.	Licensed Psychologist - Williston	Williston
Noble Casing Inc	Dispatcher	Williston
CHI Living Communities	Medicine Aide	Fargo
CHI Living Communities	Director of Campus Life	Fargo
CHI Living Communities	Immediate Openings Resident Care Manager Riverview Place Fargo	West Fargo
CHI Living Communities	Immediate Openings Certified Medication Aide CMA PT FT Or PRN Riverview Place Fargo	West Fargo
CDR Companies	Pool Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN) - Fargo, ND	Fargo
Greendoor	Registered Nurse - North Dakota	Minot

Hey guys, here are some recent job openings in nd. Feel free to comment here or send me a private message if you have any questions, I'm at the community's disposal! If you encounter any problems with any of these job openings please let me know that I will modify the table accordingly. Thanks!

Hey all DEs,
I am interviewing for a Senior DE position at a bank. I currently work at a global retailer where I worked on building a data lake for inventory levels at warehouses and stores. I was a senior engineer so I led the project, but a lot of decisions were already made before I got there in terms of system design and tools. Here is what I plan to say in my interview. Can you all poke holes in it and help me fill in the gaps? Is this a powerful project?
I built a v1 data pipeline for our inventory management team. As we follow a domain driven design, we own all inventory data as that is our business unit. This inventory data is then stored in s3 as our data lake and our data platform team can tap into this data to perform further predictive analysis and inventory forecasting. I created a Tableau dashboard for our business inventory management team to view real-time inventory levels across the world which we had not had before.
System Design: - The various warehouses and stores send the data in different formats. The stores send in CSV, warehouses send in EDI or JSON. We provide them with presigned URLs to drop that raw data into s3. I worked with our business analysts to determine what the structured data should look like that contains some business logic. Once the raw data is dropped, it triggers a s3 notification and picked up by a lambda, which triggers a certain EMR job depending on the source (which warehouse, or store). The EMR job does some filtering and renaming of columns before writing that data back to s3 in a different file key that is partitioned by warehouse/store # and date. At that point, we have a glue crawler that is triggered that crawls the data to build a table so then we can query it within Athena. We provide teams access to this athena table or direct access to the bucket with ACL policies.
Help needed - How can I say I am handling errors and logging and metrics? How can I discuss trade-offs that I made throughout this process?
Thanks!

Hi! I just graduated undergrad and I was initially waiting a year to apply because my stats are in the lower end. However, now I am conflicted. I had some physical and mental health problems starting the summer before junior year, where my GPA took a dip. It bled into my senior year and I got a 2.5 gpa in my fall semester 2022. For spring 2023, I took more science courses and got a 3.9 gpa. I am taking the GRE less than a week. Here are my stats:
CASPA cumulative GPA: 3.404
CASPA science GPA: 3.10
Total credit hours: 132
Total science hours: 87
GPA trend: 3.5, 3.8, 3.1, 3.2. freshman to senior year GPA
GRE score: haven’t taken it yet
Total PCE hours: 1,200 as EMT
Total HCE hours: none
Total volunteer hours: volunteer EMT but no separate volunteer hours
Shadowing hours: 80 (NP and PA)
Other notable extracurriculars and/or leadership: founded healthcare book club on campus, secretary of mental health organization on campus, currently hosting 5th season of healthcare podcast on Spotify
LOR: I have three people to ask (professor, chief of EMT squad and PA I shadowed), but I haven’t asked yet. If I am applying next cycle, should I still ask them this cycle or wait?
Originally I was going to apply in the 2024 cycle but I don’t want to regret not applying this cycle if I have any chance. My plan (had I been applying next cycle) would be to take diy post bacc credits with sciences and build up my sGPA and cGPA as well as gain more PCE. I also intended to get a separate part time volunteer job and possibly a part time PCT job.
If you think I should not apply, please let me know how I can improve. Thank you!!

Update 2
Sorry for being radio silent for the past few weeks, I have been hoping to post the update once the plane was returned to its rightful owner, but that hasn’t happened. My work got busy and this issue is dragging on so there isn’t much to report on. Honestly, if I read a novel where this happened, I wouldn’t have believed it because it’s all just so absurd.
If you haven’t read the past posts, please do. I’ve only posted to Reddit and Beechtalk but others, including the owner, have posted to other sites. As a note, a third party who is NOT involved coincidently has the same name as one of the parties. James Gallagher (Gallagher Aviation) is a Whelen lights dealer in Ohio and NOT the same James Gallagher (Aviation Technologies Inc) in this story. Unfortunately, he’s had some negative emails sent to him and I want to make sure everyone realizes the James Gallagher from this story isn’t the same.
To recap quickly, my buddy hired an avionics shop last year, agreed to an estimated cost, dropped the plane off in early December, accepted delay after delay, paid the $75K avionics bill in early May and asked me to give him a ride to Scranton PA, KAVP, to pickup his airplane after the avionics shop finished their work on his panel. Unfortunately, the mechanic shop in the same hangar hit him with an absurd $18K bill for additional work that they completed without his request and the shop owner went crazy and called the cops and parked a tug in front of the plane. Now my friend seems to be caught up in this argument with the owner of Aviation Technologies, the shop and FBO at AVP, trying to get his plane back. The players in the story are My buddy, the owner of the plane. Matt Jensen, the owner(?) of Airport Radio inc the avionics shop; he’s also the avionics tech and this is the shop that my buddy contracted to do the work; it seems like Airport Radio rents space in the same hangar as Aviation Technologies Inc. Kris Cerretani, the A&P mechanic and employee of Aviation Technologies Inc; he’s the guy who, by his own admission, went overboard in the work he did on the plane. James Gallagher (not the Whelen guy) who owns (?) Aviation Technologies Inc and likes to put his hands on propellers moments before pilots are about to start them.
New to the story are the lawyers… of course. My Buddy’s lawyer is also a pilot and is trying to help get the plane back. Gallagher’s lawyer is Ernest D. Preate, Jr. who, if the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernie_Preate) is correct, was the Pennsylvania Attorney General before being convicted of federal racketeering and mail fraud and sentenced to prison. You can’t make this shit up!
Since the last update, my buddy’s lawyer has been trying to work with Preate and/or get the police to take the case, but the local DA / ADA sees the name of the lawyer on the other side and his credentials and “is scared of the next election.” Basically, James Gallagher and his lawyer seem rather well connected with the local establishment and “the good ole boys club” seems to have no interest in helping out my buddy. There have been threats of charges from both sides, but the police seem to not be involved. According to my buddy, Preate doesn’t answer the phone ever and only replies to email between 4 and 6PM so as to avoid having to answer anything the same day. Seems like a tactic to respond so late in the day as the courts have already closed and most people have gone home for the day.
On Monday May 15th, Gallagher accused my buddy of punching him and the tug driver when Gallagher had his hand on the prop. This was, obviously, a stalling tactic because when my buddy asked for the video of the incident, Gallagher’s lawyer produced it. It shows my buddy push Gallagher off the prop and get in the way of the tug driver but both his hands are clearly visible and he never swung a punch. That jives with my recollection of the incident from the pilot’s seat. My buddy is 6 foot tall, 250 pounds and practices martial arts, if he swung at anybody they would’ve been on the ground for a long time and this story would be very different. I would LOVE to post the video, but it’s not mine and I don’t have a copyright release for it so my buddy thinks it’s a bad idea to post it. If Gallagher gives a release, I’ll link it here, but I think everyone agrees that time is better spent on getting the plane back to its rightful owner.
As to the justification for why the mechanic went crazy and did a ton of work, well that’s another part of the story that is just unbelievable. According to Preate “attached are 2 “quote” documents describing deficiencies of the aircraft, … None of these were specifically objected to by [my buddy] and he knew that the work had to be accomplished for safety reasons, and that Kris Cerretani was an FAA Airframe and Power plant mechanic and FAA inspector. Your client would constantly say “I want my aircraft done right.” And “I don’t want to take chances with my life.” … There is no way Kris, FAA certified, and in this business for over 25 years, could interpret those words as anything but approval to do the job correctly.” So, if you say you want the work done right and safely, you’re authorizing an A&P to do everything in his power to bill you??? What’s interesting is that they specifically forgot that a week after dropping off the plane Kris sent my buddy an email saying “I Won’t go any farther until I hear back from you.” And then went a lot farther!
Here's the way my buddy sees it. He dropped off his plane in early December, and Kris saw him getting a new panel and new interior done and thought Kris should have a cut. When Matt had a family issue in late DecembeEarly January, Matt hired Kris to do some of the original work. Kris figured, incorrectly, my buddy would be paying him also. Kris sent over an estimate for extra work to be done and my buddy told him not to do it and Kris said he didn’t have to have it done for the plane to be airworthy. When my buddy discovered that Kris had already done most of the work without approval, he instructed Kris to stop and told Matt to tell him the same thing! Unfortunately, Matt billed for all of this work also and the two of them just expected my buddy to double pay for the labor because “airplane owner=rich guy,” right? Kris also found a few items which he deemed as airworthiness items and so fixed them. Kris was adamant, all through February, March and April about getting the logbooks for the plane and asking for a few more hours here and there all while Matt took extra time to do the work quoted. When we surprised them with a visit to the shop and found the unapproved work already done, Kris changed his tone on what constituted an airworthiness issue and admitted he got ahead of himself because he figured it would be done. After we left the surprise visit in April, Kris sent my buddy this email: “your belly Corrosion was repaired at No Cost to you, I had one of my part time sheet metal guys available when we were discussing your Repairs and took advantage of having him here before you declined the Repairs, That was Totally on me I jumped the Gun and Assumed you would want that Fixed so That Repair is Free.” Although Kris claimed that was “free” when the mechanics’ bill was handed to my buddy, that item wasn’t on there but things like brake pad changes taking 4 hours shows a clear “padding” in the bill to compensate.
One thing that still makes this all seem like a scam is the fact that the plane was put on jacks and the wheels removed. For an avionics upgrade??? How does that seem reasonable to anyone? Ok, you want to swing the gear, sure, I guess, but why would Kris remove the wheels and inspect bearings if he wasn’t looking for work to do? And as to those brake pads, if Kris had the log books (which he did not), he would have known that they had been replaced a few months earlier and my buddy’s mechanic noted no deficiencies in anything related to the brake system.
I’m guessing that Matt and Kris’ original plan in December was to take extra time and let the annual expire. Then try to force my buddy to do the annual at their shop and fix everything figuring they could get an extra 15-20K out of my buddy since he was already doing 75K of avionics work. Since this was the shop’s plan from December, Kris went ahead and did everything involved in an annual inspection and all of the work to correct deficiencies. When my buddy recognized the scam and complained, they tried to squeeze him for as much as they could.
TL;DR: So in short, nothing much to report besides what seems to me like a scam that’s probably been run a number of times on rich guys who just pay the bill, a false claim of being punched, and a lawyer who’s trying to claim that a comment about being safe and doing work right is authorization for an A&P to do whatever he wants with a plane.