Steve Underwood wrote:
>
>> > something can be enriching. I have no regrets about working as a
>> > skilled laborer for several years, even though I actually didn't like
>> > most of it at the time. It's a lifestyle that I can understand and
>> > relate to because I lived it.
>>
>> I'd be interested in how you ended up there, considering you appear to
>> have the intellectual capacity to succeed in something more mentally
>> demanding.
>
>I know a guy like this. College degree. Worked as Union laborer in
>road construction to pay his way through school. It was a pretty sweet
>deal. VERY high pay, only work in the warm months. Work requires
>basically no skill, just union suction. When he graduated. (biology
>zoology etc.) kept the job. Boss moved him to supervisor. Now VERY
>VERY high pay. Same working benefits. Spends off work time traveling
>to rain forests in central America and doing bird-chasing all over the
>country. Not a total success as you still spend half your life doing
>stupid things for money, but still better than having a job and hating
>it and not being able to do anything else.
I'm from a small midwestern town in a rural area, so most of the people I went to college with were from pretty hard-working backgrounds and worked at some job or other like that while we were in school (I continued in the construction trades until my last year of college). One of the most brilliant people that I was friends with, a girl who was my lab partner, was a manager at a Dairy Queen and was seriously considering staying there when we graduated. She didn't and now she's a senior executive VP at a major defense contractor.
> > I wish life was longer as I think it would be fun to try a career as a
>> > lawyer, cartoonist, musician, racing, etc. Dang, there just ain't
>> > enough hours in a day... ;)
>
>Then you should just DO it! I used to work for Professor A.H. Benade
>(author of the famed music physics books). One day he says to me: "Do
>you know what "success" is?" No, say I. "Success", he said, "is
>thinking of what you'd rather be doing than anything else in the whole
>world and then finding someone who will PAY you do do it!" He lived
>that.
I'm definitely doing something that I like, and it's something that takes a long time to really get good at. I think that's true of many/most professions, though; you're not going to be really good until you've been at it a long enough time to have made enough mistakes and had enough successes to really understand things. So that's pretty much what I meant...in one lifetime it's tough to have more than a couple of careers where you get to spend enough time to really figure things out. I'd like to have about eight or nine by current count of things in which I'm interested, so I already know life's not long enough to do all that.
Eric Jacobsen Minister of Algorithms Abineau Communications