Can't Choose? Have IT All

At last year's Academy Awards, the big scandal was that Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced the wrong Best Picture winner. At this year's big ceremony, held Sunday night, nothing even remotely similar happened to disrupt the proceedings. Well, at least we at the IT Insights blog are pretty sure that nothing happened. We, er, didn't exactly watch the show.

Not very many other people did either, which is the real scandal about this year's Academy Awards: The ratings were historically low. Maybe viewers knew that ABC was just keeping the powder dry. The Walt Disney Company-owned network may have deliberately dialed down the drama for Oscar's Big Night, but they rolled out some serious fireworks on Monday.

Monday night, you see, brought with it the shocking events of the season finale of The Bachelor. This year's Mr. Right is 36-year-old Arie Luyendyk Jr., race car driver and son of two-time Indianapolis 500 winner Arie Luyendyk. Arie Jr. is also a two-timer, like his father, but not in the sense of having won the same race two times. No, as revealed on Monday, he's a much more despicable kind of two-timer.

For those unfamiliar with the show (a subset of humanity that included we at the IT Insights blog until just a few hours ago), The Bachelor invites a hapless himbo to choose a life partner from the ranks of as many as 30 eligible females, or as few as 24. Mr. Luyendyk Jr. had his pick of 29 desperate (wannabe) housewives. Per the show's format, he took his sweet time narrowing it down to two.

Once you get there, you pick one. It's pretty simple, really. Is it gonna be Option A or Option B? The relationships almost never last (only one of Luyendyk Jr.'s 21 marriage-minded predecessors is actually wed to the woman he met on the show), but they usually last at least long enough to end the season on a not-totally-embarrassing note. Arie Jr. couldn't even make up his mind for that long.

The Manipulable Mr. L broke up with his self-chosen sweetheart, 27-year-old publicist Rebecca Kufrin, on the season finale, returning instead to the arms of the runner-up, 25-year-old IT sales associate Lauren Burnham. OH. EM. (Goodness). Are you for reals, Mr. Luyendyk? Maybe instead of being Arie Jr., you should start referring to yourself as Arie J.K.

Life is all about choices. Some choices are important, course-of-life determining decisions that you really should at least make an effort not to immediately reverse course on. There are other decisions, however, that need not be as set in stone as choosing which person to marry. Take, for example, the decision that many IT professionals face of what technology skill in which to specialize.

You'll most likely want to settle in and focus on a particular skill eventually. There's no rush, however, to determine your IT destiny at the drop of a hat — or the turn of a television season. That's what's so great about TestOut Continuing Education's Library Suite. When you subscribe, you have access to every course we offer. You can try them all! Plenty of time to explore to your heart's content.

Don't paint yourself into a corner like a wide-eyed race car driver caught in the harsh glare of America's most inexplicably popular and enduring reality television craze. Instead, keep your options open with TestOut CE's Library Suite. And if you decide that you just have to break up with networking and go back to hardware? Hey, no one will ever know. Or care. With the Library Suite, you do you.