Black Xanthus

First, I’m sorry that you find yourself in this situation.

Second, there’s no magic bullet that’s going to get you out of this. A tight budget might help, and perhaps tinkering at the edges might get you a little closer.

There’s a few things that might help:

1. Check what your paying for what. Can you save a few bucks by switching contacts? Phone companies are crap at offering good deals to existing customers, for example. Make sure your not paying for any long-forgotten warranty given in your account.

2. Upskill yourself: things like Alison offer free training, and a small cost for the certificate. While not enough to match a degree, that can give you the leg up to the next pay band. Often worth checking out New Skills Academy as well for offers.

3. Check out your local college/university for free short courses. Many of them will do short courses that can help improve you’re CV. Even if they are just in a subject you’re interested in, having a university course on a CV can really help.

4. Google your CV type: every type of work has a different CV requirement. Some want the biggest qualification first, some want a skill profile. We’ve all been taught to do a CV, but there are hundreds of different ways to do it. Check out what’s popular in your line of work, and update accordingly

5. Job hunt now: if your current job isn’t paying the bills, it’s time to job hunt. Look at the salary you need, then what you need to know to do the job. If you have 70% of what they are asking for, apply. Luck plays a bigger part in job hunting than we like to think.

6. Side hustle or not to side hustle: if you have a salaried job with regular hours, check your contract. It’s always good to know what requirements your current job has on having a second job. If your not feeling like a content creator, then Only Fans may not be for you: unless you happen to be really well endowed with good features. If that’s out, consider an evening job or weekend job. You might be able to pick up a few hours stacking shelves at your corner shop, or on the till/cash register. Two nights a week might be enough to help you make those ends meet. You can also try side-hustles like dog walking, or handy-person. Perhaps even a paid befriending service for the elderly (be aware there may be legal requirements in your area)

7. Plan: having a goal helps keep you focused. Knowing what job you’d like to do will help you work out what training and skills you need. Having a goal being that can also make the grind of two jobs easier as you can see yourself building towards a goal.

These are some broad-brush ideas that I hope gives you the idea that is it’s not totally hopeless.

I see what you did there.

The last time I saw this was on a slow-failing HDD.

Check a quick fsck might get you a few answers. You can find more info in the Linux manual. It could just be one or two bad blocks that you can recover and fix the problem (though, ofc, it’s time to backup your data).

The other, slightly unusual time I’ve seen it is with mixed RAM. 16gb made of 2x6g and then 2x4gb did some real odd things to the system. If it’s not the disk, and your box will boot with one stick of ram, try it to see if it fixes the issue. It could be that your RAM speeds are off (or your like me and just put two sticks you had lying around, and it basically worked until it didn’t).

An outlier, that I’ve not seen on modern machines is io/wait for a CD-ROM to spin up, even if your not accessing the CD-ROM. Normally caused by bad cabling. Based on the age of your machine, this is unlikely, but it might be worth unplugging devices to see if one is bad and not reporting properly.

This is, if course, assuming dmsg is empty

Final thought: see if your running SELinux. If you are, turn it off and try again. Those policies are complex, and something installed in a non-standard place could be causing SELinux to slow IO as it fills your logs with warnings.

Hope that helps,