I don’t normally post things here that I post over at Blogwhore: the Webgame because you really should be there reading the posts. We are down to the final 5 and tomorrow there will only be 4. I’m still in the game, but it’s getting close and the race is truly on.
I liked this post though – I wrote it in response to Nancy’s question, asking us what, back when we were kids, we wanted to be when we grew up. I still wonder too what it is that I want to be when I grow up. Let’s see where I’ve been:
:: I wanted to be a banker. I was young (like 4-5), I have no idea where I got that idea from. Maybe Mary Poppins?
:: I wanted to be an airline stewardess. The travel would be cool. Then I realized that I didn’t want to be a waitress in the air, and Barbie got a new job so I did too.
:: I wanted to be a lawyer. For a long time I wanted to be a lawyer, and as a Libra I can argue with the best of them. Hell, I can argue with myself! I over analyze everything until it reaches the point that I have beaten it into the ground and killed it. When I grew up I discovered that lawyers have to go to school for a long time and have to pass the bar and … screw that. Find something new.
:: Then I wanted to be a teacher. Little did I know that the classes to earn an elementary education degree are so absolutely mind-numbing that I wouldn’t bother to go. I have this little problem – if something isn’t a challenge I’ll just blow it off. That’s what I did with my college classes – so in spite of the fact that I earned a 3.75 one semester, I ended up tossed out on the streets after 2 years because Texas A&M doesn’t give out a degree to those of us who major in Aggie Tradition and minor in the Dixie Chicken. Oops. (More on the college years below and the huge irony of my life.) In this process I also learned I have absolutely no patience for stupid people and trying to teach someone anything frustrates me to no end. Elementary Ed was NOT a good choice, because when you’re in third or fourth grade you simply don’t know that much, and teachers can’t be really mean until kids are in high school.
:: After leaving college behind, I became an Army wife. It is a career in and of itself. We moved to a small base in Germany (Peyton Place for all practical terms, the biggest rumor mill you’ve ever seen) and I traveled while he worked. It was a pretty ideal life in a lot of ways … why the hell did I ever get divorced? I tried to find a job while we lived there, but I was overqualified for everything, or I was white. Yes, reverse descrimination does exist and it sucks when you can’t get a job because they have quotas to fill. Whatever. Married white women don’t need to work too. Ok.
(Fast Forward a few years over little trivial jobs that don’t matter in this post)
:: Worked for a law firm (wow, went full circle!) first as a receptionist, then moving in to the Litigation Support department … where I worked on databases and was the protege of the Network Admin who had me surf the Internet back in 1995 so I could tell him when the firewall crashed. After two years I said to myself, “why don’t I have a web site?” and I learned to hand code HTML … moved in to developing Extranets for our clients … left the law firm, made & sold soap full time (through the Internet, of course!) and eventually went back to work in the real world selling websites to people.
And that’s where I am today. I enjoy it and I imagine that I’ll stay working within the Internet field for years to come. I want to go back to college, but have no idea what I would major in now. Something related to programming? Or go with the marketing/sales side of things? Double major? Or just keep doing what I do now? Hmmm…
OH! You were waiting for the ironic story, right? Ok, here it is.
1987, freshman orientation at Texas A&M. I’ve already taken 2 years of computer programming in high school but Pascal kicked my ass and I don’t know that I could handle a full course load of that stuff. Mom asks me, “Why don’t you major in computers? You really liked your programming class last year.”
My response? “Why would I major in computers? What would I EVER do with THAT degree?”
Yeah, that jokes on ME in a big way. Oops.
So … what did YOU want to be when you grew up?