It was not necessarily condescending, it was a healthy dose of reality that you're obviously in desperate need of. You clearly have no respect for the trade or those who choose formal education and training to supplement their talent. Your maturity continues to ooze as you attack something as insignificant as post count.
You're going to go real far in life kid, real far.
I agree with you, from experience.
My first taste of DTP was a work placement as a "Mac Operator" in 6th form college. When I left, I tried getting on with a training agency to study it further but all they could offer was a placement at a small, badly organised company using Amigas to create video presentations for estate agents, hardly what I wanted to do.
Not to mention it was just one of those "schemes" the government like to come out with to artificially lower the unemployment figures by paying teenagers the equivalent of benefits to work almost full time and (supposedly) gain vocational qualifications in the field.
They eventually found a course for me at a nearby college, it was 1995 and they were DOS based PCs, nothing to do with DTP but they insisted it was the only the course they had available. I was getting earache at home because the short-term financial problems of not being able to pay board till I was working again were OBVIOUSLY far more important than my future and it only took several months to find out the other campus down the road did a proper Mac based DTP course and I'd being misinformed by a worthless training agency, wasting almost 18 months by then getting nowhere.
Just by luck alone, I began doing DTP for a company owned by a friend of the family, designing advertisements, logos etc... and by the time I was 25, I'd being doing DTP for a living for 6 years.
Then a company went under after trying to sell too few ads in too many different areas at once for a very dubious mailshot idea they decided to start doing.
I tried staying there as it fell apart around me, started having panic attacks from the stress of it all and because I wasn't earning enough to have moved out by then, got nothing but self-centred objection when I couldn't take it any more and wanted to leave.
My doctor signed me off with stress eventually and ever since, I've had problems travelling because I began to panic on the way into work and to this day can't stand being in any kind of vehicle for more than an hour.
I did basic clerical work after that and noticed the wages were either better or exactly the same as DTP and there were no 13 a dozen telesales blaggers on more money than me for simply having the gift of the gab.
After several years doing basic office work, I noticed a lot of people around my own age or younger who'd gone to university, got themselves in debt up to their eyeballs paying for it but somehow ended up doing basic office work too.
I did try getting back into it but it's being 8 years of clerical boredom now, in fact, I've done nothing but agency based contracting since 2008, which isn't good when you end up with periods of unemployment from time to time, making it hard to plan anything.
If I'd had the chance to pursue DTP as a qualification, I could have bypassed having to work for those small advertising based companies, got something purely design based with a larger company instead and likely still be doing that for a living.
At least I've only ever owned Macs at home, back when I started DTP, it took me 2 years to get enough together for a Beige G3 but these days, all I look for is clerical stuff, I can't afford to risk doing something on a trial basis to get back into it because I have bills to pay, I can't work for the pittance of a wage a lot of the smaller companies offer when I know I've earned more doing basic office work and having met quite a few people who pursued some degree or other as just a "personal interest" and ended up in the same temporary admin jobs as I did, I think if you're going to study something, base it on what you WANT to do for a living and earn some skills of value before it's too late!
