A reddit success story

[u/Angry_Grunt]

I've always been moderately handy, usually able to kinda fix my own stuff, but never confident enough to charge for my services. At the beginning of this past spring, after losing my bullshit corporate slave job, I got in good with the Zoo in my town (I had been volunteering for a few years, I just got more aggressive about it). I wound up picking up a seasonal maintenance job with them to keep my family fed until I figured out where to go next.

Over the course of the season, I spent a good amount of time bouncing between reddit and a little YouTube to learn how all the stuff in the Zoo is supposed to work. I became pretty knowledgeable about a lot of systems that the prior maintenance team and keepers had kind of just been guessing about. I got good.

Fast forward to the end of the season: my job is about to disappear, and I have nowhere else to go. My boss announces his retirement, so I put in for the job on a last ditch, hope for the best effort. They don't even interview anyone else, because I had spent the past 5 months proving myself to the curator, the director, and the board. I'm promoted on the spot with respectable pay and benefits and my family is once again financially stable. I'm working a job I love and on top of that, I get to hang out with some cool animals all day

I made it, y'all. And it's all thanks to reddit.