My sister is screwed. And nuts.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I went and had lunch with my sister today and found out some disturbing news. She got ‘laid off’ from her job.

I love my sister but she is absolutely nuts. She has a serious issue with spending and has a really bad track record when it comes to major decisions, especially when it comes to things like guys to date and career choices. She has also had some pretty bad luck aong the way. For example, she got a degree in horiculture. Now, getting a degree is a good thing but a degree in horitculture is not a great choice because there ain’t a whole lot of jobs in that field. Anyway, after that she got married then divorced (the guy was a total ass, though in my sisters defense he had everybody snowed) and then hooked up with a nice guy who then got cancer and died (thats the bad luck). The next guy she hooked up with was a total loser, she broke up with him and that involved restraining orders and that kind of crap. Well, after that she decided to go back to school and get a marketable degree. During this time she has dated a bunch of guys. The nice, stable, employed guys? She doesn’t like them. She dumps them. The guys with a low paying job who are about as smart as a lawn ornament? She dates them until some insane* situation happens, then she dumps them.

Sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it? Well, my sister has a habit of turning good ideas into bad ideas. When she opted to go back to school she decided to get a computer science degree. When she made the choice the IT field was booming, big bucks for programmers, it was insane at the time. So she picked CS. Now, the problem is that my sister hates computers. She really doesn’t like them as far as I can tell. Getting a CS degree is probably the worst choice she could make, she doesn’t like computers and she isn’t all that good at the type of thinking involved*.

Well, here we are about 5 years later. It should hvae taken about 2.5 years, tops, for her to get a masters in CS but, due to having to retake classes, it took a lot longer than expected. To give you and idea about her vs. computers, she is three months away from a masters (how I’ll never know) and I still have to fix her computers.

Anyway, we went to lunch today. When we were leaving she told me that she had been laid off. She got a programming job somewhere and she had been bitching about how unfair and evil her boss was from the second week. That was a big red flag. Her basic bitch was that he was from India and therefore treated her badly because Indians don’t think women should work. Or something like that. I had a feeling that the real reason had more to do with her programming skills than her bosses attitude towards women but did not say anything. Well, now she has been laid off. I highly doubt the laid off story, BTW.

She is in debt up to her eyeballs. Before she told me about losing her job I mentioned that I would probably be debt free by Christmas. She told me it is going to take her FIVE YEARS to get out of debt. That is assuming an income of at least 55,000 a year. She spends enormous amounts of money on crap and, sadly, has nothing at all to show for it. No matter how much money she ends up making she is going to be poor. She spends her money on crap. She buys anything and everything. A trip to the store for printer ink might turn into a brand new laser printer that she doesn’t need. Also, she won’t throw anything away. For example, she at one point had 5 storage sheds full of crap. She was paying humdreds of dollars a month to store crap. And I mean that vast majority of the stuff was crap. I know, I helped pack it all a couple times. For the amount of money she spent storing all this crap she could have thrown everything out and bought everything entirely new and come out ahead on money.

After she told me that she lost her job she started saying that it is a good thing because she can now work on finishing her masters and when she gets that done she’ll get a better job.

I hope so. I really do hope it works out that way.

Sadly, I don’t think it will.

There is another big problem and that is she refuses to listen to anyone about anything. She won’t listen to me. She won’t listen to my Mom or Dad, even though he has bailed her out in the past. She won’t listen to my sister or brother. She refuses to believe anything anyone else says.

I think that she really needs to see someone, like a shrink, about her life. She continually makes the worst decision possible. (I know a little about that, being a recovering alcoholic). She is continually sabotaging herself. She sets herself up to fail. And the biggest problem, as far as I can tell, is that she doesn’t know what she really wants.

Gah! I could go on. I could go on about the money making schemes she gets herself into. Or all the pseudo-scientific crap that she believes and blows money on.

It really bums me out because, unless she catches a clue, she is always going to be poor and destroy her chances of having a nice life.

Damn, this got long.

Anyway, I’d really like to help her but there is nothing I can do since she won’t listen to me about anything.

Slee

*She had to get a restraining order against one guy she had been living with when she broke up with him. He showed up at her house (and I was there) with a gun stating he was going to kill himself after she broke up with him. After that little situation he started stalking her.

**She isn’t good at math or the kind of logic involved in programming. She would do extremely well in other areas.

2

One of the things I’m most grateful for in my life is my siblings. As crazy as they make me, they’re the best. Sounds like you’re a good sib, too, sleestak. As hard as it is to watch her go through this, it’s good that you haven’t dropped her like a hot potato.

3

As a recovering alcoholic yourself, you’ve got to realize that she won’t make any changes until she recognizes there’s a problem. If you’re in AA or any other group recovery program then you maybe know some folks with persistent life-altering problems, too; if so, then you probably realize that telling your sister she has problems is not going to speed up her first step. You’ve got a lot of insight from your recovery that she doesn’t, but at the same time, you can’t really do anything for her that she doesn’t want to do for herself. All you can do is stand by, ready to help.

If she wants to borrow money from you once you’re debt-free, I hope you’ll be able to tell her “no” and explain why without alienating her. And of course, I hope she magically catches a clue before rock-bottom and gets her shit together. Best of luck to you both!

4

Yeah, I do realize that she ain’t going to change until she either snaps (I don’t think that is likely) or hits a very hard bottom. I gave up trying to tell her anything a couple years ago, basically when I got sober. Even then, I would just tell her what I thought and let it go. Since I got sober I don’t say anything unless she asks. When I say that she won’t listen to anyone I mean that she won’t listen to anyone about ANYTHING at all. She also won’t accept help.

For example, she is working on her project for her Masters. This project involves recording spoken words. As it turns out, I have a home recording studio. Protools, tons of mics, effects, the whole setup. I put out CD quality stuff. When she told me what she was working on I offered the use of my recording stuff. I said that we can set it up so she could jam through the recording really quickly and it’d be CD quality. My sister told me that she would get better quality using her $20 mic and her laptop and it’d be faster. So I dropped it. Now I don’t offer help of any kind because she always better/faster/cheaper* way of doing it.

The whole point of this post, I guess, is that I see her doing all this dumb shit and I know there is nothing I can do. I don’t try talking to her about anything because she isn’t going to listen.

It sucks.

Slee

*Cheap, in my sisters world == initial cost. She nickel and dimes herself to death trying to save money.

5

You can’t count this against her, though. Computer science has absolutely nothing to do with fixing computers or going through common tasks.

6

Agreed. In College I fixed more then a few computer science major’s computers. Most of them now have masters and program better then I ever could.

7

I’m sorry you have to watch your sister go through all of this, sleestak. I’ve witnessed several relatives make bad choices with regard to relationships, careers and/or finances, and I know how hard it is to stand by feeling powerless.

Your sister is fortunate to have such a caring sibling. I don’t know what you can do to help her until she realizes she has a problem, but it sounds like you’ll be there for her when she discovers that she needs help. Good luck to both of you.

8

Yeah, but these days most colleges are teaching “how to memorize a bunch of Java APIs without really understanding anything” rather than computer science.

9

Being good at anything means understanding theory and practice. In this context, practice means getting your hands dirty by making real computers do real things, and that means making real computers do what you want them to do. A basic knowledge of computer repair (at least of the software side, but knowing how to physically fix a modern commodity PC is pretty useful knowledge in its own right) is a prerequisite to that.

Personally, I think all CS majors should have to have some experience in sysadmin roles, just like I think even experimental psychologists should know where the gallbladder is and what it does.

10

I have to agree with Derleth here. If you are a CS major, have a BS in Computer Science you should at least be able to troubleshoot simple hardware and software problems.

It is insane for a person with a BS in CS to be unable to install a printer on a network or troubleshoot an error that states a required dll is missing or invalid. Maybe that is why so many of the ITs I deal with at work suck*.

The problems my sister encountered were, for the most part, something that most people with general computer knowledge should be able to troubleshoot. Like installing a network printer or figuring out that a dll had gone missing. She also did shit that, quite frankly, was mindblowingly dumb. For example, I had to crack three of her computer because she would set a strong password then forget it. Three times. I told her the first time that she needed to either not use a password, because there ain’t anything worth stealing on there anyway, write the pw down or create a second account that she could use to reset the password. The second and third times I cracked her passwords I did it because she could not figure out how to make a boot disk and grab the sam.

Slee

*I deal with ITs who work for the companies that use my companies software. A suprisingly large number of them suck. They couldn’t troubleshoot their way out of a wet paper sack with large holes in it. Most of them have CS degrees. Most of them have to be hand held through the simplest tasks. There are some good ones out there, but we don’t talk to them much because they know what the hell they are doing.

11

Now that she has lost her job, will she have the money to continue to buy things? Is anyone else supporting her?

I understand your concern for her. It certainly sounds as if she may need help. I have medication which helps to control the compulsion to shop, but I don’t think my situation was quite that bad.

So much depends of whether or not she is paying her own bills. If someone else is supporting her addiction, perhaps you can enlist their help in not being enablers. But if she is earning the money that she is spending, there may not be much you can do no matter how much you love her.

Do you have other siblings who are concerned? Are your parents involved? How old is your sister?

12

I really don’t know, or want to know the details of my sisters financial situation other than what she told me this time. I do know that my Dad has bailed her out in the past. I don’t know how much that cost him and really don’t want to know, but the last major problem she had involved a house. That had to be a decent amount of money.

She went to school full time for the past couple years. My parents are cool enough to pay for books/rent/utilities if anyone wants to go to school full time. There are certain requirements, though. Like GPA. I have no idea how my sister and my parents worked that one out since she didn’t do very well in a bunch of classes the first time around*. She would do odd jobs but not enough to really buy much. She has credit cards and puts everything on those. The credit card companies must really love her. She is in her early 40s.

I don’t know if my parents know about this yet. They were getting towards the end of their rope with how long it was taking her to finish her degree. They know she has issues with spending, I’ve sent them material regarding spending addiction and they went through the whole alcoholic thing with me, so they should have clue about how addiction works. Right now my parents are on a trip and won’t be back for a while. They do the RV thing.

I do know that my parents, particularly my Dad, had been having discussions with her recently about stuff. I assume it was about money because my Dad was pretty stressed about it.

I don’t know if she is still shopping like a madman, I don’t see her much. She is a hard person to do anything with because a)she is chronically late and b) she always has too many things to do and not enough time. It gets tiring.

Can I ask what the medications are for this kind of problem? I’d like to have more info to give to my parents, who are the ones dealing with this, so that they have all the info.

Slee

*As far as I can tell, my sister had to retake about half of her CS courses to get a decent grade. She is reasonably smart about some things. Computers just don’t seem to be one of those things.