I woke up to five "We auto-reloaded your card" e-mails from Starbucks overnight. They hit me for $500. They used my Starbucks card (linked to my debit card, set to auto-renew by adding $100 when the balance was low) to purchase email gift card codes in multiples of $25. Canceled my Starbucks card, canceled my debit card, filed a police report. The investigator determined that the codes were sent to a generic e-mail account in Canada, and that was the end of it. The bank was good and put the money back right away. They also changed my debit card number. Starbucks sent me a new card but they never quite fixed the "reload online" part (not auto-reload, which I disabled), so I can only reload in a store, which I'm OK with. Had I known it was going to be that easy for them to hack me, I would have never used auto-reload or had it save my credit card.

Wow...that's really fascinating and makes a ton of sense. Thanks for clarifying for me--I appreciate it! I'm looking forward to learning something new this summer.

The YouTube channel is a fantastic idea--I hadn't thought about that! Thanks so much.

Thanks for your comment. For the right career I'm more than willing to dive in. I don't mind spending nights and weekends getting caught up or learning new things. I'm pretty low on the pay scale now anyway, so I'm not too concerned about pay at this time. I'm willing to work my way up, in fact that's kind of what I'd like to do. But I'll never win a ballroom dancing championship. :-)

Thank you for your detailed and insightful comment. I really appreciate the time you took to type out such a lengthy answer. I'm definitely not attached to learning about e-mail; I was just using that as an example of one of the things that interests me. I can let that go pretty easily. As far as not being able to train as much as I would expect--I currently deal with that exact situation now. The majority of my job consists of developing and delivering training to teachers on various technology items. Scheduling is always a problem, especially across teams, departments, or grade levels. It just makes it all the more fun when I actually make it happen. I learned about "food bribery" long ago, and typically try to make it fun by providing stuff like that at my trainings. $20 on coffee and donuts is a huge morale booster and starts my sessions off in a great way. I do pride myself on my communication skills and enjoy teaching folks how to use the software and websites we use. I tend to absorb these things pretty easily, and can intuitively find my way through most of our stuff, with or without training beforehand. One of the reasons I'm asking around now is that I don't plan on seriously looking for something until I finish my master's degree later this year. This gives me a little bit of time to perhaps learn some skills and chart a rough course of what I'd like to do. Learning something that quickly becomes outdated is a situation I'd like to avoid--so I appreciate you sharing the "buzzwords" heads-up with me. Thanks again.

Thanks for the "Just Do It" advice! I'm more than willing to start out at entry level and work my way up. I'm happy to earn my keep.

Fair point about open source. I have limited experience with Linux (I can install it, get it working, and use it) but would consider learning more.

I have not applied for private sector jobs yet. Right now I'm trying to plan the best way forward (this was part of the process for me, so thank you for sharing). I'm also wrapping up my master's degree this year and would like to complete that before I start looking to make a change. That said, I will have time over the summer to invest in bettering myself and look forward to taking on some of this community's recommendations.

Thanks for writing. I only see each group of 12-year-olds for 23 days, which is why we don't do coding. Although I am the school's technology coordinator, the class I teach is not computer science. I did do a two-day ultra-basic HTML thing with them last quarter. We do have a separate careers class that addresses many of the job-finding questions (and naturally, college stuff).

Thanks! I will add these to my reading list. I'd love to spend some time this summer learning some basic languages.

All of these sound like tasks I would really enjoy! I also enjoy writing, so documentation would be a good fit for me as well. Adult education, especially in technology, is definitely something I want to look into. Thanks for writing; this gives me hope!

Thanks so much for sharing this detailed list--it was very helpful and is a great start. I appreciate it.

I think of my self as charismatic, and get along easily with most people, and I'm very hygenic (borderline germ freak--the students make fun of me). Glad to hear you think I'm young enough. :-)

I didn't realize that--thanks so much for the clarification! That's really intriguing. I do enjoy interaction, and being relieved of sales pressures and quotas would definitely be more fun to me. I'll have to look into that. Thanks again.

Very interesting--disappointing to hear that it's mostly contract work, but I'd be fine with wikis, multimedia, etc. I'll look up Dice and see what it's all about.