Sly Bald Guys Forum
Confidence and Success => Business/Work => Topic started by: BaldRob on October 23, 2006, 06:10:22 PM
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So what does everyone do for work?
I'll start...
Due to a very strong technical and training background in the Navy, I work as a contract technical trainer. I've trained everything from automated inspection equipment in Breweries to mail processing equipment for the USPS to Radar systems to radios.
I'm also an account executive for my company trying to ramp up business in the Midwest.
Who's next?!?
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9 years Navy, I was a boiler tech, now I fix computers and printers for a living, contracted out to Cisco.
I also do some welding and fabricating on the side, mostly for off road vehicles, jeeps, buggy's, etc.
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Cingular, customer service is the regular 9-5 job and the National Guard Infantryman is the other.
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I presently manage a fitness equipment store. But I plan to quit at the end of the year, move to Florida, and live a more laid-back lifestyle. Let's just say I plan to NEVER work retail again!!!. . . the hours suck and dealing with the public can be VERY trying.
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Executive Recruiter aka Headhunter. I specialize in healthcare with a focus on hospital administration and management of large physician practices.
Been at for 16 years and am basically not qualified to do anything else (Skateboard racing doesn't pay jack and sponsorship is basically limited to equipment, entry fees, some travel, and a few teeshirts).
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During the day I'm a project manager for a software startup that creates software to manage the delivery of ads to advanced television (VOD, DVR, Broadband, etc). I know...I'm the enemy.
During the night I manage my websites...this one being my favorite! Only one of the four really offer any income...this site not being one of them.
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Well I currently work at Columbia Aircraft doing Inventory, but I have a Degree in Graphic Design..... I So want to be paid for my Creative Side... any Help out there for me.
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Well I currently work at Columbia Aircraft doing Inventory, but I have a Degree in Graphic Design..... I So want to be paid for my Creative Side... any Help out there for me.
What area of graphic design are you looking to do? Print, Web, etc?
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I work at credit union as a Computer Support Rep. Basically I do help desk stuff. This is my first IT job and I have been doing for about a year now and I am glad I made the career switch. My prior job was managing a retail store. I learned a lot working there, they were very much into helping you become a better manager through meetings and encouragement, but the hours were brutal. As I started focusing on where I wanted to go with the company such as area mgr my area mgr sat me down and gave me some good advice. He said, "If you don't mind traveling 3 weeks out of the month, then keep moving up, if you do mind it, think about a career move". He told me that in the 15 years he had been at the company they treated him good; but he had not had one Christmas off in those 15 years. I took his advice and got out, ya know now that I think of it-he was bald. Oh the wisdom of the bald man.
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I'm a Service Advisor at an Acura dealership. I've been in and out of the car business for the past 8 years. I started out wrenching, and as my body has began to deteriorate (bullriding, 4 wheeling, havin too much fun) I decided to move to the front office type stuff. Started out dispatching at a Chevy dealer, then went back to wrenching and doing some light machine work. Then ended up where I am now.
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As the name says, I'm a paramedic. I work for a district which covers our entire county, serving a population of maybe 3000 people. A small rural county, we average 270 calls per year. I am also the co-manager, handing the business side of the district. I've been in EMS since 1995. My wife doesn't care for it sometimes, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
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I'm a fiancial consultant....a safe money specialist. I do seminars in the Denver area showing folks how to make their assets/money safer. You don't have to hit a homerun outa the park as far as a rate of return using risky mutual funds and such. Because you stand to lose principle. Who lost money in their portfolio (401K, IRA, et. al.) in 2000 or thereabouts? All you need to do is get a reasonable rate of return over the long haul in vehicles that preserve your principle.
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shipping & recieving for a rental company. basically nothing glamorous. responsible for about 4000 pieces of rental tanks, hoses, pumps, etc. but the most fun and rewarding job is the one of being a dad.
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high school science and econ teacher
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high school science and econ teacher
Awesome! Econ was one of my favorite subjects in high school. I liked Physics, but other than that I wasn't a big science fan. What subjects in science do you teach?
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:D :D As the name implies, I am a professor of English and Philosophy at a local college, where I teach composition, various electives, and Introduction to Religion. I've been at it since 1966. I completed my doctorate at Brown, in 1973. Over the years I have published in scholarly journals--mostly on Victorian and American authors and on aesthetics. Since September I have been on sabbatical leave, but will return to teaching full-time in January. A recent paper I delivered at Rutgers, on Walter Pater, will be published in mid-2007, in Cahiers Victoriens et Edwardiens, in French and English. After retirement, in a couple of years, I hope to write and travel, as my wife and I did before raising our daughter. Professor Melon
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Sounds like you've had an accomplished career Professor! I really enjoyed Philosophy as well as English when I took it them in junior college. My favorite philosophers to learn about are Socrates and Diogenes. I also liked the discussion around Aristotle and the "unmoved mover."
At my first dot bomb job we were able to give ourselves titles. Mine was "Customer Support Gadfly" because my job was to walk around the office and to bug developers and constantly ask them questions as to why our website didn't work when "X" happened.
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Ironically, science was not my strong suit; I enjoyed it, but not my favorite. When I went into teaching, my college classwork qualified me for both Social Studies (History, Econ and Poli Sci) and, with the addition of 1 class, science. Primarily I teach the life science (biology and botany). Next semester, I start teaching 1 econ, along w/ 2 sciences. My goal is to, eventually, be all social studies. I also taught a physical science class last year; it was not one of my favorites, but i had a group of unmotivated, slower students who were in school just to ............. oops, about to go on a socio-political rant!
I also coach track and cross-country.
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I have my own consulting practice helping mid-large size companies get off of the barrel they have been bent over in regards to their 401(k) and Executive Benefit Plans. Some of the 401(k)s I've seen are just hideous and the corporations don't really see it until we disect the numbers. Fees, Fees, Fees, which hurt the performance of the employees accounts.
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I have my own consulting practice helping mid-large size companies get off of the barrel they have been bent over in regards to their 401(k) and Executive Benefit Plans. Some of the 401(k)s I've seen are just hideous and the corporations don't really see it until we disect the numbers. Fees, Fees, Fees, which hurt the performance of the employees accounts.
Cool! I know how bad the plans can be since I've worked with companies that have plans that rape the employees of their returns.
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I'm sure everyone thinks as a comic that I work as a waiter or at starbucks during the day but I actually have a real job. I am now working at a private jet firm in Teterboro, NJ as the PR and marketing manager. So how did I get here? Well I like to say that I took the senic route:
I first went to college to be a graphic artist but found out I couldn't draw for my life.
Transferd to new college
Then I started on my computer science degree, but became obsessed with it and hated the isolation of sitting behind a screen all day.
Transfered to a new college
Now I started on an acting degree and got an internship with Disney World. After it was over I decided that there was no money in acting so I dropped out of college.
Tried to join the Air Force but didn't make it past basic becuase of a bad knee injury.
Went back to a new college
Started on a marketing degree but college was too far from my job so I.........
Transfered to a new college
I realized that I didn't have the math background for marketing so I switched to PR and....
Transfered to a new college.........
were I finally got my degree in Public Relations with a Film minor. After graduation, I became restless and started doing stand-up at night. That's the story and it's funny becuase its so true! I should have 4 degrees. All my friends called me the "professional student" becuase I went to school or 8 and a half years.
My Dad kept quoting Animal House
"7 Years of college down the drain"
(https://www.slybaldguys.com/smf/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.timothyscarlson.com%2FGraphics%2FMiscellaneous%2FBluto%2520From%2520Animal%2520House.gif&hash=25b26d2a23ff07c353c0234d31804f6cd83e3ae8)
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good thing funny is a talent. huh?
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Yeah, I could have save a few thousand in student loans if I found that out sooner!
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:D :D As the name implies, I am a professor of English and Philosophy at a local college, where I teach composition, various electives, and Introduction to Religion. I've been at it since 1966. I completed my doctorate at Brown, in 1973. Over the years I have published in scholarly journals--mostly on Victorian and American authors and on aesthetics. Since September I have been on sabbatical leave, but will return to teaching full-time in January. A recent paper I delivered at Rutgers, on Walter Pater, will be published in mid-2007, in Cahiers Victoriens et Edwardiens, in French and English. After retirement, in a couple of years, I hope to write and travel, as my wife and I did before raising our daughter. Professor Melon
Oh, professor, yer my hero, man...I studied Theology in Grad School, loving the area of Philosophy of Religion (you'd not know it by looking at my picture to the left.) Â My thesis examined the Pragmatism of William James.
I applied to a Ph.D. program in Church History at Claremont College in So. Calif. and got turned down  :'(  Despite my Winston Churchill maxim below, that was one time I got so discouraged and upset that I switched to an MBA program. Â
However I built up quite a personal library along the way (some 600 volumes). Â ***sigh*** Â If I could make 150K a year being a professional student, I would live and die on this country's great campuses, obtaining Ph.D.'s, D.Litt's, Th.D.'s and writing books.
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Fat, dumb and stupid is no way to go through life son
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
I love that damn movie
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speaking of work work work. looks like i get to go home now. on call this weekend so i will talk to you gents tomorrow.
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I know many people who went to school for 10 years. They're called doctors!! LOL ;D
That's a great line from Tommy Boy.
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speaking of work work work. looks like i get to go home now. on call this weekend so i will talk to you gents tomorrow.
Worked hard today, eh?
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Noner your story reminded me of this speach from Steve Jobs to the graduating class at Stanford University:
Stanford Report, June 14, 2005 'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
The original link for this speech is:
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
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not really just was glad to get out of there.
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Noner your story reminded me of this speach from Steve Jobs to the graduating class at Stanford University:
Stanford Report, June 14, 2005 'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
Cool speech, Thanks!
And yes I head the Tommy Boy one too!
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Speaking of work, work, work....have you seen Will Farrell as the angry boss?
If not click below....it's hilarious....if you're into that over-the-top type SNL skit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ETt-qiP_os