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ElGroucho posted:Hold on; you've never done it, but you have all these criticisms? As for being critical, well, it's a lot more work and for some people it's worth it, especially for SMEs and others who get high hourly rates. It wasn't for me.
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Feb 25, 2015 19:22
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sanchez posted:Are there really any tax benefits for your typical 1099 position that is 9-5 in the same office? Maybe you can deduct your parking or something, but the self employment taxes crush that. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone for $5/hr unless we're talking about $10 vs $15. I did it for a while, it sucked. IANAA but... Honestly I really don't know. When people have a 1099 set up already, sure it makes sense. Would it make sense for a 6-12 month contract in an office? Prob not. But if you're travelling you write everything off, if you use your car or work from home, you write stuff off. Buy a laptop or other technology? Same thing. I'm a bit out of the loop since I just give people options these days as opposed to living it. I don't counsel them on the accounting side. Next time I have a 1099 guy in I'll ask though.
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Feb 25, 2015 19:28
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Dark Helmut posted:
We got a new client a couple of years ago whose office had just burned down(I suspect they did it). Within 6 months of rebuilding it they had promptly poo poo the entire place up with dogs. It loving reeked. Finally fired them since I sure as gently caress wasn't going there, and wasn't going to make my guys go either.
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Feb 25, 2015 19:57
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HIPAA/Government people: have any of you worked with a company that's accredited to do whole-unit destruction and removal of equipment that processes sensitive or protected data?
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Feb 25, 2015 20:12
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CLAM DOWN posted:Okay, I was wondering about that W-2 thing too, I thought it was like a T4 tax form that we have in Canada that's just an income statement, but you have "W-2 employees"? I don't know poo poo about contractor stuff even here though I guess. A "W-2 contractor" is typically a worker that is employed by a company that is contracted by another company. For example, I was a W-2 contractor when I worked for a company that was paid by Capital One for work I did at Capital One. sanchez posted:Are there really any tax benefits for your typical 1099 position that is 9-5 in the same office? Maybe you can deduct your parking or something, but the self employment taxes crush that. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone for $5/hr unless we're talking about $10 vs $15. I did it for a while, it sucked. That said, there wouldn't be many tax benefits for that.
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Feb 25, 2015 20:15
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psydude posted:HIPAA/Government people: have any of you worked with a company that's accredited to do whole-unit destruction and removal of equipment that processes sensitive or protected data? Check with your compliance officer but I'm sure you'd be covered if you got the company to sign a BAA.
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Feb 25, 2015 20:16
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When people say helpdesk, that's usually a 100% phone type thing, isn't it? I'm interviewing (thank god, gently caress 12 day weeks) for a position that is described as helpdesk, but the job description seems more like a mix of phone-based helpdesk and desktop support. Here's the job description: Provide helpdesk support and resolve problems to the end user’s satisfaction Monitor and respond quickly and effectively to requests received through the IT helpdesk Monitor Service Desk for tickets assigned to the queue and process first in - first out based on priority Modify configurations, utilities, software default settings, etc. for the local workstation Utilize and maintain the helpdesk tracking software Document internal procedures Assist with on boarding of new users Ensure each work station has a computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, hard drive, and any additional specialized equipment Maintain inventory of all equipment, software and software licenses Report issues to the Service Desk for escalation Manage PC setup and deployment for new employees using standard hardware, images and software Perform timely workstation hardware and software upgrades as required I've got a few hours before the interview, so I'm planning on doing a bit of glassdoor research. Does that sound like help desk, desktop support, or something else?
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Feb 25, 2015 20:58
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It's help desk.
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Feb 25, 2015 21:00
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Depends on the organization. In bigger organizations, yes, but in smaller organizations the helpdesk is basically just the centralized IT customer service center where users can drop off/pick up equipment and where most of the user-facing support personnel work. That doesn't mean they don't go out to do desktop support.
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Feb 25, 2015 21:00
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22 Eargesplitten posted:When people say helpdesk, that's usually a 100% phone type thing, isn't it? I'm interviewing (thank god, gently caress 12 day weeks) for a position that is described as helpdesk, but the job description seems more like a mix of phone-based helpdesk and desktop support. Here's the job description: Sounds like help desk with a bit of desktop support. Some context is really needed - is this in house IT, or working in a remote office for a company that manages other small businesses etc? If it's the former and you'll be in the same building as the people you're supporting, it's all but guaranteed you'll be dragged to people's desks.
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Feb 25, 2015 21:01
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All and all that doesn't sound like a bad gig especially if you're just starting out.
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Feb 25, 2015 21:04
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Well, I've got a bit less than a year's experience, but it's as a field tech. The most involved stuff I do is printer repairs. On computers, I mostly do HDDs. On a server, I've done HDDs and a processor replacement once, that's it. And like I have said before in this thread, I get stuck doing 12-hour days at least once every two weeks, sometimes more often. The downside of this position is that it's only a 6-month contract, but at least I'll know that ahead of time. I can save up a cushion and start looking for jobs a month or two out. I've also got another prospect, but according to glassdoor, that particular recruiting company is slow as hell, so if I get an offer, it will probably be before I even interview for the other one. As far as I can tell, it's a job at a local branch of a larger corporation.
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Feb 25, 2015 21:09
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If the interview goes well and they offer you a job, why the gently caress not. You won't really be doing anything more intensive than processor/HDD repair on a users desktop anyway if you get stuck doing that sort of stuff.
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Feb 25, 2015 21:22
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Dark Helmut posted:Bonus: ask me about working in smoky roach-filled single wides and indoor dog poop. Whats it like working in dog poop heheheh Spudalicious posted:I'm in cram mode - 2 weeks until my 7 day bootcamp for CCNENT/CCNA: R&S, CCNA: Security and CCDA. I'm supposed to have read all the books prior to the class, but I'm doing the practice exams and study guides too so I actually have some sort of understanding. Currently need to do 150 pages/day every day to make it. Did 250 pages and labs and poo poo yesterday/last night. That's awesome man, good luck. Looks like we'll be testing around the same time.
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Feb 25, 2015 22:13
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chocolateTHUNDER posted:If the interview goes well and they offer you a job, why the gently caress not. You won't really be doing anything more intensive than processor/HDD repair on a users desktop anyway if you get stuck doing that sort of stuff. Oh, I'm not concerned with being underqualified. There will be some new software to learn, but that's mostly it. The other part of why I'm looking for a job is because there's no challenge in any of what I do anymore, aside from memorizing the different protocols for different accounts. I pretty much replace HDDs, fusers, and pick rollers on 90% of my calls. I could replace a Lexmark T654 maintenance kit with my eyes closed at this point. This will at least get me more software experience, since I'm 95% hardware right now.
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Feb 25, 2015 22:31
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Bhodi posted:
S-Corp saves you a bit on taxes at the expense of a lot more work w/ regards to overhead and management of the company. On the plus side you pay your self as a w-2 employee. On the minus side, you pay yourself as a w-2 employee. Meaning you have to handle FICO, SSN, Fed Taxes, State Taxes andy pre-tax stuff. And the S-Corp has to pay taxes (and quarterly at that). I did S-Corp back in the late '90s, but it got to be too much of a headache on the backend and I was eventually tempted back to the Dark Side. It's not bad if you have a bunch of regular clients or have a very in demand skill set and get hired as a gun-slinger to un-gently caress messes. I had an accountant regularly balance my books and handle all the payroll (to myself). I did end up paying less in taxes than if I had been an LLC or straight 1099, but you're basically doing two jobs. Running a business and doing the consulting gigs. EDIT: Just to be clear. It wasn't the money, I made a ton and really no down-time in terms of gigs. But I was slowly burning out, so I said screw-it took a pay-cut but got peace of mind. I wouldn't trade that time for the world, but I no longer have the fortitude to do that on my own again. Proteus Jones fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Feb 26, 2015 |
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Feb 26, 2015 00:44
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I had a fun time with 1099 at my first gig out of college due to an employer doing something illegal. The company ran out of money and couldn't make payroll. We were all full time W2 employees. The CEO cut personal checks out to employees to cover their net pay. At the time, he stated that everything would be reconciled with payroll once one of the contracts cleared and the company got paid. Two weeks later when the same situation was going to happen again, a whole bunch of us said "lay us off so we can at least collect unemployment", which he did. Tax season rolls around and I'm at my new job. I get my tax documents mailed to me and look what happens. I get a 1099-MISC for the net pay that he paid us out of pocket. It was never reconciled with payroll and squared away and now I was essentially being double taxed. Not to mention it was incredibly illegal to issue a 1099 for work done by an employee when they were full time W2. What made things even more fun is I was indeed supposed to have a 1099-MISC as I did contract work for them part time while I was looking for work after I was laid off. So, I lined things up to file my taxes with an exception, basically disputing my tax documents and let him know I was intending to do so. A few days later I get a check in the mail more than double the difference I was going to have to pay out of pocket for taxes, SS, and medicare. So, I let the matter drop rather than draw it out since I eventually made out better in the end. As to why I went back to work after they couldn't make payroll and laid me off, I refused to work enough hours to cut into my unemployment benefits until he agreed to pre-pay me for my hours. The situation only lasted about 20 days anyways until I got my new job lined up.
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Feb 26, 2015 00:44
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Welp, that position turns out to be a lot less deskside support than I was hoping. I would be the second tier 1 helpdesk member for a 1200-person company, basically handing off tickets to T2 all day. They never said why they were having to rebuild their IT department completely, but that's a pretty big turnoff. And it's a 1099, which means more work for me in handling taxes.
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Feb 26, 2015 01:04
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Sickening posted:I have no clue how any of you can do contract work at all. Nothing says "We don't value you as an employee" like contract positions do. I think it depends. When I got laid off at Dell, I started working for an IT outsourcing company. My salary got a nice bump and I have an indefinite contract (that is, a permanent position) with my current workplace. I got outsourced to a bank that has been bought and sold thrice in less than 10 years and thus has a shitload of legacy and data migration issues for a good time to come. My job is not that I can do things that the bank's IT department can't do, rather, they are VERY shorthanded. Their pay scale is not very fair and DBA team is underpaid as hell. The bank treats as one of their employees and actually has done nicer stuff for us contractors than our "home" company. In Xmas, they gave us a ham and turkey each...our company? A 30 buck gift certificate for a supermarket. Would I accept to work directly for the bank? gently caress no! They are utterly disorganized and underpaid. The amount of OT their employees are forced to work is ridiculous (at least in my Dell-no-OT-unless-signed-by-MichaelDell eyes) and the workload is bestial. Most of the applicants see the expected hours and oncalls and just go, no thanks. I've never worked a fixed time contract. I don't think I ever could nor do I believe that someone would pay a premium for my hourly time.
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Feb 26, 2015 02:12
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Chickenwalker fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Mar 1, 2019 |
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Feb 26, 2015 02:18
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Why doesn't your boss buy it? It sounds pretty reasonable to me. Especially with the "cloud-based security cam feed" part
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Feb 26, 2015 02:31
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Chickenwalker posted:Anyone had experience troubleshooting lovely Skype connections in a corporate setting? We investigated routing issues thinking maybe it was a peering problem with our ISP, no luck there. ISP says we're up against our bandwidth cap pretty much 24/7, which makes sense as we're a 200+ user network on a 100 Mbps line doing large file uploads and running a cloud-based security cam feed, but my boss doesn't buy it. Next step is to call MS and see if they can run a tracert through their Skype datacenters to our outward facing IP and vice-versa (if they're forthcoming with their IP info) and see if anything's up. Any other suggestions? Check what your edge router says, and see where the bandwidth is going. Why are you asking Microsoft and your ISP before you know what's going where, and over what ports and protocols?
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Feb 26, 2015 02:33
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Chickenwalker fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Mar 1, 2019 |
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Feb 26, 2015 02:36
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Chickenwalker fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Mar 1, 2019 |
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Feb 26, 2015 02:41
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Are you at least graphing basic stats on your inbound and outbound traffic somewhere? If you're really right at your bandwidth limits it should be pretty obvious with the graph flat-lining at exactly 100 Mbps (or whatever). Discards, errors and retries are good ones, too.
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Feb 26, 2015 03:04
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Welp, that position turns out to be a lot less deskside support than I was hoping. I would be the second tier 1 helpdesk member for a 1200-person company, basically handing off tickets to T2 all day. They never said why they were having to rebuild their IT department completely, but that's a pretty big turnoff. tier 1 helpdesk for a 1099 position? fuuuuck that
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Feb 26, 2015 04:02
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Yeah, that's my inclination. The only reason I'm even considering it is because I work 12 days straight at my current position, and have at least one 12-hour day every two weeks. That development came after I started school again, and the combination of the two workloads means that I can't even drink to cope, because I have no time to be drunk. But after writing out all the flaws with that job, I'm pretty sure I'm going to hang on there for another couple of weeks while I find something that isn't lovely. Of course, it would also help if I ever had the time to go in for face to face interviews. But I need to request time off two weeks ahead of time, and I can't just go on lunch because 4/5 of the time, I'm out of the state.
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Feb 26, 2015 04:37
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Chickenwalker posted:I've suggested that we mirror a port and look at all the traffic and probably will do eventually but management's conviction is that it's a routing issue full stop so that was the first point of inquiry. I'm not always one to recommend being the bitchy IT guy, but tell them no. They also pay you to think for yourself and to use knowledge and skills that they presumably don't have to help the business. They're asking you for a solution when you don't even know what the problem is beyond an off-the-cuff feeling that there's a lot of traffic. And your ISP says there is, but you don't know what that traffic is, where it's going, or whether it's even legitimate business and not somebody's  Give management an answer as to why skype might be bad, and a solution. Like QoS. Or maybe finding questionable traffic and throttling it or removing the device/user doing it. Or something. But do as they mean, not as they say. They don't know how to do root cause analysis on this problem. Even is Microsoft gives you IPs, what are you going to do with them? Set up QoS? Traffic shaping? Why not do that now?
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Feb 26, 2015 05:21
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How difficult is it to open a ticket with Skype? If it's easy, just do it
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Feb 26, 2015 05:26
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I've had 6 no-work snow days in the past 8 workdays. I've been paid to sit on my rear end and play video games; sometimes, university IT in the south ain't so bad 
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Feb 26, 2015 06:06
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CloFan posted:I've had 6 no-work snow days in the past 8 workdays. I've been paid to sit on my rear end and play video games; sometimes, university IT in the south ain't so bad Yeah, probably staying home tomorrow too. Perfect timing because I just installed MWO.
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Feb 26, 2015 06:29
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New Jersey has seen enough days with just enough snow to make you shovel and salt before you go to work on barely-treated local roads and slushy highways, yet none are enough to allow one to reasonably say "it's unsafe to drive so I am working from home today" to make me want to move further north :-( It's really sucked. All the schlep of the snow, none of the benefits. Ever since the ZOMG THUNDERSNOWPOCALYPSE fizzle back in January there's been nothing bad enough. I kinda wish we had it and no other snow days just to have it all over and done with. Back on topic: I sit the Citrix 1Y0-200 exam with naught but a year of experience, home labbing, and the Xendesk 7 Cookbook as practice. My first exam without an actual prep book. Here's hoping I can mark questions I'm not sure about and use the simulation parts as reminder fodder. Hopefully if I can come back to my boss with "I got my VCP just after I started here and just got my CCA-V, and now I'm way under market rate - I'd like my salary readjusted to correct this, please" I might be able to actually get something out of it. First review with this company, good place, good relationship with the boss, and I've hopefully been able to turn our very non-technical Help Desk guy into someone who at least knows how to ask leading questions. (I am the sysadmin, it's just HD, me, and my boss in a 70-person company).
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Feb 26, 2015 15:51
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Can anyone take a quick look at my resume? Attending a conference at Google Boston tomorrow and I figured it couldn't hurt to have a copy on me  Two years into a sysadmin career with some awesome projects under my belt.
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Feb 26, 2015 17:30
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I just watched a network contractor double click a hyperlink, not press tab to get to the next textbox, etc. It's like watching my mom use a computer. I'm starting to realize that the only thing holding me back from getting paid way more is actually boning up and getting those goddamn certs
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Feb 26, 2015 18:55
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Roargasm posted:Can anyone take a quick look at my resume? Attending a conference at Google Boston tomorrow and I figured it couldn't hurt to have a copy on me I'll give it a once over, PM me.
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Feb 26, 2015 19:44
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Jesus christ folks, social media is just too much temptation for some people it seems. I have been searching for applicants to my job opening on facebook to get an idea of the commute they might have and hopefully filter out the crazies. I had no idea that in 2015 people still speak like this on public social media. "Afroman ain't the man to gently caress with i guarantee you I will pay you niggas to gently caress Afroman" There is so much wrong going on there that there is no way I would give this person a phone interview. I actually felt really dirty to even attempt to try to research these applicants at all but I am glad I did. I feel like I am dodging some major bullets that could have been extremely embarrassing to bring in for a face to face. I mean seriously, who gets tribal tattoos on their face with coke can gauges in their ears and then applies for corporate jobs?
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Feb 26, 2015 19:52
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The only positive to social media is letting you see all the crazy it'd normally take you 6 months to find in person
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Feb 26, 2015 19:54
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Does Facebook constantly gently caress with your profile settings like people on there say it does, or are they just bad at setting up their privacy? I ask not because I put up a bunch of dumb poo poo on my facebook, but because it's good on a general principle level to keep it locked down.
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Feb 26, 2015 19:55
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Dark Helmut posted:I'll give it a once over, PM me. Just sent this over, thanks!
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Feb 26, 2015 20:04
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Sickening posted:I mean seriously, who gets tribal tattoos on their face with coke can gauges in their ears and then applies for corporate jobs? Well what are you gonna do after your stint at a hip startup ends and you want a real job?
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Feb 26, 2015 20:08
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