Retrospection
I have been having a little ponder.
So far as I know that’s not illegal provided it’s done in private? I presume pondering will be outlawed at some point in case it offends someone.
Anyhows I have been reflecting on my life [so far]. It has been a pretty good one. In fact I would nearly class it as spectacular, as by all accounts it has been driven purely by good luck and sheer chance.
When I started my journey I had little or no ambition. I had no goals to be striving for. I just drifted. I went wherever the current took me with very little thought for the future. In school and college I paid little attention to studies and just took exams as they came and winged things. Somehow I qualified.
Then I drifted through a couple of jobs before landing a job in RTE. It was for a temporary job and was told it was only for six months. That was fine by me. I left RTE after nearly forty years.
I met Herself by accident. I wasn’t looking for any long term relationships but here we are, over forty eight years on and still together, with a beautiful daughter and three happy grandkids.
I never hankered after money. Provided I could get by, I was happy. There were some rough times but cash always seemed to appear just when I needed it the most. I am by no means wealthy but I have enough for a comfortable life and have a fine roof over my head. What more could I want?
Maybe that all appears smug but I take no credit whatsoever. I didn’t strive for any of it – it just happened.
So here I continue on my little drifting voyage heading into my seventy fifth year.
Three quarters of a century?
Fuck!
I’ve been waiting for today’s brain fart so I could wish you happy birthday, youngster. 🙂
Hah! Thanks old chap. 😀
Serendipity – an element rarely credited in folks’ success, but a key factor in most.
Celebratory felicitations.
Serendipity indeed. I can count on one hand the major decisions I have made in the past. The rest was sheer chance.
Congratulations – you have achieved what most of us wish for.
I recently moved from Kent to Scotland, away from the rat-race to rural calm – people are friendly here and relaxed.
F the south east and the government, F the mad fools rushing around for their ‘jobs’, F them all, life is better away from such crazy stuff.
Bless Y’self & Herself – keep kicking against the stupids f*ckers
I am indeed in an incredibly fortunate position where I like in a very quiet area with nice neighbours and a lovely village nearby. Because of online deliveries I rarely have to travel further from the village unless it’s to visit the vet or hospitals. The rest of the world can look after itself [with of course some wise guidance on Rambles].
I’ve often felt the same, Grandad. I went to school quite a few miles away from home, in a ‘posh’ area where, as a kid from a council estate, I didn’t fit in one bit. They bonded over school trips we couldn’t have afforded, and my parents never felt the need for. I took the qualifications – ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels, but never with enthusiasm because I knew my parents wouldn’t ever stump up any money to pay for me to go to university. At lunchtimes, we all gathered around the school’s donated mainframe, learning BASIC, COBOL and FORTRAN by dissecting other people’s programs. We mocked up login screens so we captured all the teachers’ and sysadmin passwords, and eventually we wrote word processors, cave adventures, and space invaders/ Galaxian/ Asteroids. Even did a passable machine code Defender in the final term, all at lunchtime!
I drifted into a job in a bank which was so badly paid that staff 3 grades above me were entitled to means tested benefits on their full wages. Every week the bank manager went through your statements for evidence of profligacy, on the assumption that if you wasted your money, you’d be stealing theirs next.
And this was the very early 1980s.
From there I drifted through jobs in finance, eventually being sponsored to night school.
My final role was as a director of one of our large retailers.
I left because I wanted to do something that interested me before it was too late, and grabbed VB6 and then C## writing programs to automate a lot of the crap we used to do manually. And then sold them.
Like you say, the money would build up, then run out, but somehow just before it ran out, someone always came asking for a product. And in those first wonderful days of the web and the internet, they’d often pay very well.
There never was a plan, and yet here we are. And when I look at my classmates on the web (don’t really want to go back there, but it’s interesting to see what they are doing- although one claims to be Osama bin Laden, which I’m sure I would’ve remembered), almost all of them, whatever they studied and wherever they went initially, have become programmers of some kind- web designers, games designers, Unix dinosaurs, you name it and that lunchtime crowd are doing it.
I think what it all shows is that school isn’t where you learn. It’s where you learn to learn, and learn to seize opportunities. More than anything, I think that’s what my drifting really was- seeing a chance and grabbing it, but while looking the other way and whistling….
In my younger days I had a fascination with maps. I couldn’t get a job in the Ordnance Survey [I would have to be in the army] and after a couple of years and a couple of jobs I found myself working in a cable TV company where my job was designing the systems. I was up to my eyes in maps!
Many years later I developed an interest in computers – it was in the early 80s when the first home computers came out. I did a competition where the first prize was a ZX81. I was a joint winner and lost on the decider. I bought a Spectrum 48K. A couple of years later I applied for a job as a programmer [along with 200 others for the same job]. I got it, doing COBOL. Then the Internet arrived and I got involved in that as the COBOL ICL mainframe was being wound down.
So I spent my working life in jobs where coincidentally I had an interest. I only time I didn’t really enjoy work was during the COBOL phase but that’s a long story!
Strangely my original qualification was in electronics which is a subject I rarely needed at work. The only time I was actually involved with electronics was in my second job doing production line fault finding in a television factory. I loved that job! The rest of my life was spent in the peripheries of the subject. A waste of college years!