As I said

pay is livable but not amazing

I personally came up just a hair short of 69k last year, I’m paying my bills, treating myself to some luxuries, and usually manage to save a bit, but I’m not rolling in it by a longshot.

But like I said that varies a lot around the country, I believe that’s a decent bit above the national average, but not a ridiculous outlier either, it’s fairly average for my area.

For context, I’ve been there about 6 years, so I have some seniority, but I’ve also elected not to pursue some training and certifications and such that could have given me a bit of a pay bump. I rarely come in for overtime, but that’s always available if you want it (there have been a couple years where one of our supervisors ended up being one of if not the highest paid county employee here because the man is an overtime machine, he’s a supervisor so he of course makes more than me to begin with but not so much more that you’d expect him to be in the running for that without the insane amount of overtime he does)

On average the county I work for is fairly wealthy and we’re not hurting for funding. We’re not union (although every few years someone starts talking about it, hasn’t gotten off the ground yet but we’ve gotten close a few times) but most of our surrounding counties are so that helps keep our pay competitive.

It’s absolutely not a job for everyone, but assuming you’re in the US, damn-near every 911 dispatch center in the country is always short-staffed and hiring, and usually only require a high school diploma or GED.

Since you have a computer background, I think it’s safe to assume that you can type at a halfway decent WPM, that’s a pretty big chunk of our aptitude test that a lot of people fail on.

A lot about this job varies from one jurisdiction to another, but in general pay is livable but not amazing and the hours are usually weird, but the benefits and job security are pretty solid.

Background checks, drug testing, etc. are of course usually part of the hiring process, and again it’s just not a job everyone is cut out for.

I remember coming across the thing you’re describing years ago while digging through my dad’s collection of miscellaneous cables, adapters, etc. back in the 90s or early 2000s. It wasn’t quite so low-profile, it definitely stuck out from whatever you plugged it into maybe about a quarter to half inch or so, but otherwise it was a 3.5mm jack with a plastic cap on the other with no wires or holes or anything that muted whatever you plugged it into.

The shade of beige the plastic was on that particular example makes me suspect it was a relic of the 80s. I do feel like I remember seeing them for sale somewhere at a later time, but I couldn’t begin to tell you where.

A little googling turned up this eBay listing

Based off of that and a little more googling I think the term you’re looking for might be a shorting and/or blanking plug or or cap or dummy/dummy plug

Without too much effort I was able to find “shorting caps” for RCA jacks, various coaxial connectors, and banana plugs, but had no luck finding any more for 3.5mm

Personally I’ve gone in on Hawaiian shirts, bit less good for a laugh, but still attention grabbing and easier to show off in public. No one wants to see my fat hairy ass sporting a whale tail.

Small typo in my comment, was supposed to say get a laugh out of my wife

It served its intended purpose. It was for Valentines or our anniversary or something, so I was waiting in the bed for her to come home in my leopard thong, rose petals scattered around, and some funky 70s porno music playing, and she cracked the fuck up.

I’m a fat, unsexy dude, I bought a goofy leopard-print thong to get a laugh out of my life wife once

It’s not my favorite pair of undies by a longshot, I still prefer my usual boxer-briefs, but it’s certainly not uncomfortable. Even wore it to my city’s naked bike ride to bike around in.

Not any kind of scientist, but an adventurous home cook

I’d really like the USDA/FDA/etc. (maybe not under the current administration) to publish sort of a food safety handbook full of tables and charts for stuff like canning, curing meats, cooking temps, etc. targeted to people like me.

I’ve recently been experimenting with curing meats, I’ve done bacon, Montreal style smoked meat, corned beef, Canadian bacon, and kielbasa.

And holy fuck, is it hard to find good, solid, well-sourced information about how to do that safely.

And I know that information is out there somewhere, because people aren’t dropping dead left and right of listeria, botulism, nitrate poisoning, etc. because they ate some grocery store bacon.

I just want some official reference I can look at to tell me that for a given weight of meat, a dry cure should be between X and Y percent salt, and between A and B percent of Prague powder #1, and that it needs to cure for Z days per inch of thickness, and if it’s a wet brine then it should be C gallons of water and…

When I go looking for that information either I find a bunch of people on BBQ forums who seem to be pulling numbers out of their ass, random recipe sites and cooking blogs that for all I know may be AI slop, or I find some USDA document written in legalese that will say something like 7lbs of sodium nitrite in a 100 gallon pickle solution for 100lbs of meat, which is far bigger than anything I’ll ever work with, and also doesn’t scale directly to the ingredients I have readily available because I’m not starting with pure sodium nitrite but Prague powder which is only 6.25% sodium nitrite.