Wednesday, April 13, 2011

What's next?

I'm jealous of my brother.  Not in the normal sense, though.  The freak has known since he was in high school what he wanted to do with his life (and now does it) while I - like any normal person  - wander around aimlessly.  To this day, more years than are reasonable past high school graduation, I have jumped from one disparate job to another.  How disparate?  Try boat shop to space factory.  Whoa! Did that even make any sense? 

I worked for some years on boats, doing all manner of things - engine repair, hull scrapping, teak cleaning, resoration, etc.  Then one day I get a call from a friend who says  "we're doing an experiment,  do you want to participate?  We need to see if we can train some monkeys to do what our engineers are doing."  I grabbed a banana and was off to work for a space shuttle contractor.  Turns out, they can train monkeys to replace engineers.  I'm living proof - and I'll show you as soon as I'm done swinging in this tree.

During most of that tenure, I moonlighted (moonlit?) at a beer joint down on one of the bayous.  What a transition - by day a white collar semi-engineering job to a no-collar (that would be well below the socio-economic level of the blue collar worker) beer thrower/bouncer by night.  But hey, it paid the bills and kept food on the table, at least semi-regularly.

Several years, a college degree, and another contractor later, I left the space factory (and the beer joint) for good.  Which, as it turns out was not a particularly bad move considering the recent retirement of the shuttle fleet.  As I was out and about one day, I chanced upon a man who needed a manager for his newly acquired airport.  Despite not having any experience whatsoever in that field, he went ahead and hired me.  Okay, I am a pilot, and I do admit to hanging out at airports, but I think that might not qualify as actual airport management experience.

Now I'm looking down the road a couple of years and am wondering, what I'm gonna do when this gig runs out?  My qualifications aren't exactly transferable to many other things:  I was a ground controller for NASA  - nope, not many of those jobs.  I scheduled training for astronauts and managed their training facilities - not many of those jobs either.  And now I watch the grass grow and collect hangar rental checks at a small privately owned airport - very few of those jobs available.  And I'm too old too be scraping barnacles off boats.  Frankly, I was too old for that 30 years ago. 

I'm hoping my next gig involves large paychecks, fast cars, a big house with it's own gym (complete with indoor lap pool).  Kind of like the job Magnum P.I. had.  Without the P.I. part.

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