Quality Drive Away: Fill & Download for Free

My wife tends to really underestimate how heavy things are, or overestimate how strong I am. Either way, she sometimes asks me to move heavy things as if I’m not going to struggle to do it.We once bought a TV cabinet that was so heavy I needed someone from the store to help me load it in the van. This strong young man and I struggled to lift this cabinet about two feet up from the cart to the back of my minivan. The whole back of the van was riding low on the way home.Yet, when we got home, my wife seemed surprised that I couldn’t get cabinet up the six stairs and into the house without help. I waited with it in our yard for almost an hour until her brother was able to come and help me get it in.Also, she once thought she was making an extreme demand of me, when really, she was doing me a favor. She was having a girls’ night out with some of her friends, but it was about an hour’s drive away and she didn’t want to drive back by herself at night. So she asked me to drive her there, drop her off, get lost for three hours, then pick her up and drive her home.Me, externally: “Fine. I guess I can do that, if I have to. If it will make you happy.”Me, internally: “Three hours to myself outside of the house, away from the kids and to-do list? Hell yes! Sign me up!”I dropped her off, went straight to the nearest Starbucks, ordered a coffee, went on my laptop, and had three uninterrupted hours of quality online “me” time. Mostly I was either on Quora or playing Civilization. It was wonderful. Frankly, it ended too soon.

OK, I’ll bite… what makes you think the USA is so much better?Until recently, we had a second home in the USA which we had for 17 years and while we enjoyed our time there I could not have lived there permanently.There are many, many things that are better in the UK than in the US, most obviously, universal healthcare, a much safer society due to proper gun control, school shootings are unheard of in the UK, the last of which was some thirty years ago which led to our current gun restrictions.Quality of supermarket food in the UK is far higher and much cheaper than the US. Much of the junk sold in US supermarkets is, to us, inedible, and is directly responsible for the nations obesity and poor health.Nobody dies or goes bankrupt because they cannot afford healthcare in the UK.We are not known for our great weather but it is a temperate climate and not prone to the extremes that much of the USA suffers from. We were very careful in picking the times we stayed at our home in South Carolina. It was far too hot and humid in the summer.The British countryside is beautiful and within easy reach. Most Brits can be in open walking country in minutes. In the USA, there might be vast areas of wilderness but you might be a 6 hour drive away from it.The USA is pretty archaic when it comes to bureaucracy, payment systems, TV and internet services, much of which is poor quality and more expensive, not a good combination. We sold our home in SC last February, at that time we still had not seen any business taking contactless payments. It has been universal in the UK, even down to the smallest one man businesses, for several years. Chip and pin was universal also, several years before it was in the US.Online shopping, online banking is all much more sophisticated in the UK.The quality of plumbing and electrics in our US home was laughably bad. Some of the appliances look like they were designed in the 1950s.We, unfortunately, do have poverty in the UK, but it is all relative and the levels of poverty we witnessed in the US were far greater and on a much bigger scale.Overall, cost of living was much higher in the US, especially if you take into account healthcare costs.Frankly, it is difficult to see where you could get the impression that the USA is ‘so much better.’

Nope. Don’t do it. Go find another career. Nothing to see here! Web development is dead.*drives away any potential competition and keeps all the clients* Bwahahaa.Really, those auto-builders are for people who aren’t looking for a quality, professional site. They are looking for some way to get a basic web presence without spending any money. As a result, their businesses frequently suffer because those sites invariably look amateur.These people would never have hired a developer even before these things came out, They would have asked for a quote, and then when given a number, said, “Haha, my cousin’s nephew’s dog said he would make me one for free!” - true story. It happened to me.In reference to WordPress, I am speaking only about premade themes that are “plug and play”. People tend to install these and add a crap-ton of plugins and the site just ends up looking junky.A properly developed Wordpres site, however, looks so good you would never guess it was WordPress.