Some time ago, I wrote:

I’m doing this industrial-research thing where a small company gets the services of an almost-Ph.D. (yours very truly) for just south of 25% of market value, while that almost-Ph.D. gets to focus exclusively on the “industrial research” thing and can blissfully ignore the vast majority of the day-job suck that usually goes along with the “industrial” part.  (It helps that 25% of market value is also 5/3 of what I’d get as a TA, with 100% less shrill self-righteously obstructionist union content.)So why is it surprising that a guy with six years of computer graphics research experience would be able to find a job in a city stuffed to the brim with game studios, video production houses, and &c.?  Well, this particular chunk of funding goes through the intersection of academic, corporate, and federal governmental bureaucracy.  (All three, all at once.)  And despite the fact that the proposal’s submission was delayed for all the usual drearily predictable reasons, it was approved two weeks early.

Not impressed yet?  The relevant government bureaucracy is being proactive and accommodating towards the corporate bureaucracy regarding money.

HAHAHAHAHAHA LOL n00b!

That was the first week of September.  I received my first paycheque today, and even that only after my department’s Dread Admin Inquisitor (who is both a fine and conscientious human being and the person upon whom capital-ess Shit would land if a grad student went unfunded for a semester) took the slack slippery halfassedness perpetrated by my “friends” in the federal fucking funding agency as a personal insult and started tearing new assholes on a first-seen first-served basis.

Seriously, kids: don’t ever count on the government unless you have a backup plan.  (Also: having a month’s worth of canned chili hidden under your sink doesn’t make you a paranoid survivalist nutcase: it just makes you someone with a backup plan.)