Growing, Growing, Grown

 
I'm still not absolutely certain what I want to be when I grow up.

Yes, I know I'm running out of time, but decisions like this are hard! They seem so... permanent. I recently updated my job history and have determined that I've worked for eighteen different companies, not counting duplicates and self employment. For those eighteen companies, I've had twenty-five different titles and thirty-nine different 'jobs' or different sets of responsibilities.

I don't know if that's a lot or just average. Furthermore, none of these jobs were what I had started out to do, which was to be a History Teacher. I wonder if I would have liked that. I'll never know because we had no money and I was desperately trying to work full time and go to school full time and I pooped out on the whole deal.

The only 'career' I had exposure to as a child was seeing my teachers at school, so that's the direction I went. There weren't too many doctors, dentists or bankers that traveled in our circles, just mechanics, milkmen and maids. Nothing wrong with any of those but I just wanted something new and exciting. Yeah, right.

There are stories about people who decided what they were going to do when they were perhaps eight years old and then proceeded single-mindedly toward that goal. Well, they're better people than I am. However, I've never heard of a person saying, "Oh, I knew since I was eight years old that I wanted to be a mid-grade actuarial at a life insurance company somewhere in the mid-west." 
 

Over the years, I did conceive of my ideal job. After briefly considering shepherd and lamplighter, I finally realized all of my aspirations were satisfied in a single job function: Towel-boy. What a great job! You sit in a little grass hut and hand out towels to sweaty, often partially drunken tourists. There's no overhead, no long-term debt, no sunken costs, no performance appraisals to do and when you're out of towels, you're done for the day! "You want a towel? Great! You want two? Better! Here, take the whole stack!" It is unclear that I could get hired now. Tourists want young, glistening towel-boys, not old, hunched-over towel-men.

As my children were making their own career decisions, I was always working too much to be conscious of the angst of such developments. But I love to ask my grandchildren what they're going to do. I get great answers, too: Princess, Saloon-Singer, Hand Model. I think that last one is brilliant. You can come to work unshaven in your jammies, just leave the chainsaw in its box. 

It will be very interesting to see what they actually decide on. Perhaps Medicine. Perhaps Science. Perhaps working in a salmon cannery on the west coast. As long as they're happy.

I hope one or both of them consider engineering. Engineers can do anything! And there are a hundred different kinds. The job I used to have as 'Programmer' is now 'Software Engineer'. Engineers know stuff and they can make stuff do stuff that the stuff doesn't want to do. I love that.

Here's an example. TiVo was the first real digital video recorder. We've been using them for 15 years and have grown very dependent. Our current box is quite intuitive and has operated flawlessly, but we just went through a major power failure and Internet loss. When the power came back, our TiVo wouldn't boot. O... M... G!! When I stopped crying, I looked for solutions and tried them all to no avail. 
 
Finally one person (undoubtedly an engineer) suggested taking the cover off and running a hair dryer on the memory chips for a minute. No, I'm not making this up and having been around computers for nearly 50 years, this was a new one on me. You might as well have suggested painting my face, chanting and rattling chicken bones. That would have seemed more reasonable than drying the hair on my memory chips. But it worked and TiVo has been working perfectly ever since.

You GO, Engineers!