• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

How was your 2025?

E

Exterous

Super Moderator
Ours was a mix. On the professional side it started out great and then quickly descended into stress and dealing with bad organizational decisions but my job is stable which can't be said for a lot of IT jobs especially in higher education right now. My wife's job as a teacher slowly gets worse year by year. But at least on the personal side we're seeing payoffs from decisions we made many years ago about what we wanted to prioritize and that's really great to see. We did our big round the world trip and just booked a trip to Antarctica for next winter. Both our families are healthy as are our friends so as I type this I realize I probably need to do a better job appreciating the things that are going well over the day to day work stresses and drudgery.
 
Pretty good, all things considered. I got a 25-year long health problem figured out and now I have the energy to get up and pursue my hobbies, which I've been doing a lot (as you guys have seen). Also transferred to a new group at my company which is more to my liking. Especially given everything going on in the world, I feel really lucky.
 
I’m retired. Only thing I did was get my punch card site modified to the point I am happy with it. And I moved it from GoDaddy to Interserver with a name change. Now it is www.punchcardarchive.com. That Internet connoisseur Gemini AI said, of my site,
“Having looked into it, I can see that Punch Card Archive (and formerly IBM Junkman) is likely the most comprehensive digital repository of its kind on the internet.”
 
I'd say it was average. Nothing bad or good happened, it was just a boring year I guess. If 2026 is the same I'll be ok with it. Sometimes boring is good. We are negotiating our union contract this year so I'm a bit uneasy about that, I have a bad feeling we're going to see not so good changes, but hoping we can get a contract that's at least status quo. I doubt we'll get any raises but it would be nice to keep the hybrid WFH at least.
 
On a personal level, it was pretty good: my spouse matched into a highly competitive specialty and graduated medical school, and we moved to a new city on moderately short notice because of the fun of the MATCH process. We traveled to Japan in the spring. My career continues to go well. And my friends, family, and dog continue to be in good health.
 
Personally: very good

I hiked to Everest Base Camp, my girlfriend moved in with me, my girlfriend recovered from her reconstruction surgery, i got a new car and emptied my garage of project vehicles, we got a 2nd dog, i got a new job (and my girlfriend moved with me), we are set to close on a house in a week, and if/when my old house sells, i will be able to use the equity to be mortgage free on the new house in about 2 years, significantly slingshotting my financials plans for the future.

It hasnt been easy - we've both had lots of ups and downs. But we're a team, and its been amazing to have such a supportive partner
 
Last edited:
Was a stressful year. Spent the first half of the year dogeing three different budget challenges to our jobs.

Wife got a temporary rotation into a higher management position and then had to navigate said challenges.

In the second half of the year we both were part of the govt shut down so we had to juggle extending our finances until we got our back pay. We still were working 40+ hours per week during the shutdown - just weren’t going to be paid until it was over.

Got a new job opportunity. I took a rotation that may turn into a promotion but I’m still working part of my old job for the time being so it’s like I’m working 2 jobs.

Kids did well. 2 in college for engineering and 1 in HS. Both in college were worried about blowing their semesters but turned out they all did better than expected (are you really doing Engineering if you aren’t worried about failing out?)

On the plus side the wife and I took a nice trip to Italy.

Now if the assholes across the street would stop shooting fireworks over my house.
 
Fenixgoon said:
Personally: very good

I hiked to Everest Base Camp, my girlfriend moved in with me, my girlfriend recovered from her reconstruction surgery, i got a new car and emptied my garage of project vehicles, we got a 2nd dog, i got a new job (and my girlfriend moved with me), we are set to close on a house in a week, and if/when my old house sells, i will be able to use the equity to be mortgage free on the new house in about 2 years, significantly slingshotting my financials plans for the future.

It hasnt been easy - we've both had lots of ups and downs. But we're a team, and its been amazing to have such a supportive partner
Click to expand...
Wow that must have been insane. You ever feel like you adjusted to the altitude? Can't imagine how beautiful that trek must have been.
 
SteveGrabowski said:
Wow that must have been insane. You ever feel like you adjusted to the altitude? Can't imagine how beautiful that trek must have been.
Click to expand...
I struggled most of the way with the altitude (and constant up and downhills..the trek is not just straight up and then straight down). once we hit 5000m it didn't seem so bad, oddly enough.

I've posted a bunch of my pics in the Shot of the Day thread in the digital camera/video forum
 
Started out as not the greatest year for sure. My brother passed as did my husband’s sister and her daughter. One unexpectedly from UTI and pneumonia. One from metastasized cancer. One from a ruptured brain aneurysm that nobody, including she, knew about. All in Jan 2025 with funerals in Feb.

Things got better from then on, thank goodness, and we ended the year spending Christmas with both our children and their spouses and all our grandchildren. With one family in northern VA, one in Texas and us in FL and jobs and school, getting all together doesn’t happen often enough.

Hoping this year will be less like the beginning and more like the end of 2025, and wishing for a good year for all of you.
 
2024 was a rough one for me.

2025 was a full year of healing as a result. Very very grateful to have survived! I truly consider myself to be one of the luckiest human beings alive today.

Hoping I don't get nerfed in 2026 LOL
 
Last edited:
Exterous said:
Ours was a mix. On the professional side it started out great and then quickly descended into stress and dealing with bad organizational decisions but my job is stable which can't be said for a lot of IT jobs especially in higher education right now. My wife's job as a teacher slowly gets worse year by year. But at least on the personal side we're seeing payoffs from decisions we made many years ago about what we wanted to prioritize and that's really great to see. We did our big round the world trip and just booked a trip to Antarctica for next winter. Both our families are healthy as are our friends so as I type this I realize I probably need to do a better job appreciating the things that are going well over the day to day work stresses and drudgery.
Click to expand...

My wife moved into teaching after doing photography for decades. I applaud all teachers as their job is BONKERS these days in the post-COVID, always-connected, mid-AI world. We've had 3 full-time career teacher friends quit in the past couple of years due to how bad the modern situations are: more kids being downright awful (screen dopamine dependency, lack of parental enforcement, etc.), school admins letting parents bully them into submission, ChatGPT ruining everything, etc. My wife is lucky to be in a better situation, but man, the horror stories we hear these days coming out of different schools!!

I'm very grateful that my job has, so far, stayed out of the IT impact bubble. I focus mainly on small-biz admin support with a spectrum of on-prem support, as opposed to cloud-based stuff. It suits my ADHD quite well & keeps me engaged in ongoing professional education, as I tend to get painfully bored lol. AI is my primary focus going into 2026, which is scary because it's so powerful, yet so awful at the same time in many ways (job elimination, content slop, environmental impact, truth degradation, etc.).

Tell us more about Antarctica, that's AMAZING!!
 
Last edited:
Chaotic42 said:
Pretty good, all things considered. I got a 25-year long health problem figured out and now I have the energy to get up and pursue my hobbies, which I've been doing a lot (as you guys have seen). Also transferred to a new group at my company which is more to my liking. Especially given everything going on in the world, I feel really lucky.
Click to expand...

Same here! Finally identified a lifetime autoimmune problem. Given the state of the world, I'll take the win!! lol
 
IBMJunkman said:
I’m retired. Only thing I did was get my punch card site modified to the point I am happy with it. And I moved it from GoDaddy to Interserver with a name change. Now it is www.punchcardarchive.com. That Internet connoisseur Gemini AI said, of my site,
“Having looked into it, I can see that Punch Card Archive (and formerly IBM Junkman) is likely the most comprehensive digital repository of its kind on the internet.”
Click to expand...

I haven't done serious web design in over 15 years & only got back into it in 2025 thanks to ChatGPT doing all of the design & integration work for me! I've been able to create some really wonderful custom solutions that were previously beyond the reach of my skills, focus, and finances, as well as tackle some great projects I've been meaning to get to for YEARS now!!

Side note: my very first college computer professor was on the original team that developed CAD for desktop computers 45+ years ago (she had absolutely INCREDIBLE stories!). She told us the story of when she went to college & they were doing punch cards for computer programming. Her classmate tripped on the way to their programming final exam & dropped like 100+ punch cards...no printers back to easily number the cards, so her friend just sat down & cried. I can't imagine the executive function that must have taken back in the day! These days, I do all of my design work in Plectica, build the coding components out in ChatGPT, then then iterate until stable...soooo much easier!!

Back in school, I also learned the story of a PhD student who lost 5+ years of work due to a laptop hard drive failure. That story & the punch card story are the primary reasons I have such a strong backup system in place today for my customers & my personal data. Few things are worse than losing YEARS of work with no recovery option!!
 
Last edited:
It turned out to be a tough year. My best friend from my younger years committed suicide after struggling with mental issues following a UTI. A few months later, my younger brother was diagnosed with lung cancer. He only lasted four months.

On a good note, I became semi-retired. I work about a day or two a month, and now have time for keeping up with home repairs. And also getting back to hiking more, and playing the drums. Here's to a fantastic 2026!
 
I'd say it was overall pretty, pretty alright.

Professionally I am in a job that requires very little actual work while paying reasonably well, but I'm starting to feel restless and like my skills are starting to get rusty, so that background anxiety has started to creep in. I want to go back to school and pick up a masters but with the whole AI thing happening right now I don't want to go snag something that doesn't teach or integrate AI into the curriculum either and get stuck with a paperweight of a document, and it's all a bit too new for that at the moment. So it's alright but some changes need to happen.

Personally things were generally good. I had a great trip to Japan with the fam (and now completely understand where weebs are coming from) and did a lot of stuff getting out of my comfort zone. Finally convinced my parents to move much closer (9 hours to 2 hours distance) into a 55+ community which puts my mind at ease a bit.

It was a somewhat stressful year for my wife though, where she realized some friends that weren't and that messed her up a bit. She also has a tendency to completely throw herself into anything she takes on (volunteer work etc), and then being burned out and miserable on the other side so it's been a project trying to get her to back off a bit.
 
Fenixgoon said:
[snip}my girlfriend moved in with me, my girlfriend recovered from her reconstruction surgery[snip] (and my girlfriend moved with me)
Click to expand...
So like a house of 3 now?

Paratus said:
Was a stressful year. Spent the first half of the year dogeing three different budget challenges to our jobs.

Wife got a temporary rotation into a higher management position and then had to navigate said challenges.

In the second half of the year we both were part of the govt shut down so we had to juggle extending our finances until we got our back pay. We still were working 40+ hours per week during the shutdown - just weren’t going to be paid until it was over.

Got a new job opportunity. I took a rotation that may turn into a promotion but I’m still working part of my old job for the time being so it’s like I’m working 2 jobs.

Kids did well. 2 in college for engineering and 1 in HS. Both in college were worried about blowing their semesters but turned out they all did better than expected (are you really doing Engineering if you aren’t worried about failing out?)

On the plus side the wife and I took a nice trip to Italy.

Now if the assholes across the street would stop shooting fireworks over my house.
Click to expand...
Anything dealing with the fed government right now it a complete shit show - its a big driver for the bad decisions being made where I work but that doesn't compare to working that long without pay.

allisolm said:
Started out as not the greatest year for sure. My brother passed as did my husband’s sister and her daughter. One unexpectedly from UTI and pneumonia. One from metastasized cancer. One from a ruptured brain aneurysm that nobody, including she, knew about. All in Jan 2025 with funerals in Feb.
Click to expand...
Yikes - that really sucks regardless but to have them concentrated like that. I'm sorry to hear that
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top