To the best of my recollection, this is the first time I had a dream involving this forum. In the dream, a lot of forum members believed I was still in high school despite the fact I'm thirty-one. In it, setting the record straight proved to be a challenge because members wanted proof.

Jeanette Isabelle

Next year you can shave off a decade and honestly start telling people you're only 20. Well technically, 0x20 - but only us engineers, computer programmers and mathematicians will pick up on that little detail. And we won't tell!

. I am an engineer and computer programmer. Around here we do not condone tricks like that.
Honesty goes a long way. Just the other day honesty paid off. Steering board took it very calmly when being told that a required change would increase the time to release (and cause missing the deadline). The graph clearly showed the remaining time would double. Steering board members know what logarithmic scales are, don´t they?
Besides as mechanical engineer I´m used to employ safety factors: estimate age and multiply by 2 or 3 to avoid being too low (I do cap at the average life expectancy though)

I'm an 80s child. I don't want to alter that.

Edit: When I was raised helps to define who I am. Most of my upbringing was during a more simpler time before the world went off the edge.

Jeanette Isabelle

Too true, but then I think that all of us, and especially those of us born before 1950, think exactly the same thing, and think that those of you born in the 1980s are still, well, a bit young, and really don't understand. . .

What I loved most about being a child prodigy was astonishing your generation with what I knew. I studied cultural history. Therefore, I was able to hold my own in a conversation with my grandparents' generation. We would talk about Sky King, Tom Mix and the Straight Shooters or why the 1907 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost was cutting edge for its time. I even brought up The Cinnamon Bear in one conversation. And I was able to do all that without the help of any internet device.

To quote the TV series The Pretender: "The worst thing that could ever happen to a child prodigy is to grow up."

Jeanette Isabelle

You’ve got a point there; I was a lot smarter in my teens and 20’s, I knew everything. Now that I’m older I know that I don’t.

Same thing for estimating time to complete a project. Take you initial estimate, double it, and move it to the next higher unit.
Thus, a "1 day" job should be scheduled to require "2 weeks".

One of the things one learns with advancing age, and from the serious study of history, is that the world has "gone off the edge" many times in the past. Recent events, unsettling as they seem to us, are hardly the first time, nor are they the most dangerous time that the world has been in chaos.

I remember thinking that in the mid-70's ... when Disco became popular in clubs. What a nightmare!