The Cook and the Castle Builder

Having recently rolled my personal odometer over, I have begun to notice certain things which suggest that I am aging.  Today, for example, I had an old man moment at work while listening to some snotty kid fresh off the grad program bang on about how his group had replaced "ten year old Solaris server infrastructure that was basically just dust!  Huh, huh, huh!"  I wanted to point out that those servers had performed more reliably and consistently than anything built since, that ten years isn't really all that long for what was at the time a massive investment, that it's bad form to laugh at your own jokes and that maybe it was time to pay to get his hair cut now that he's no longer living on the money he gets from his paper route and whatever small notes he can nick from his mother's purse.  But of course saying those things would make me sound old and bitter.  And that's because I am.  So I plugged in my headphones and turned up the Talking Heads.

Well, I didn't really.  But it struck me in that moment - this is a young man's game.  This kid, with his spiky hair and his obnoxious mannerisms, he's the future of technology, as I was when I was his age.  Now I'm just a dinosaur, and the best I can hope for is that I shall shortly be converted into petroleum and thereby provide at least some residual usefulness.

When I look around my floor at work - and it's a big floor, I can see probably three or four hundred people from my seat - I don't see many people over the age of, say, 50.  Most of them are in offices.  I am not.  That gives me about ten years to either get promoted twice or get the hell out.  But what would I do?  I'm not particularly good at anything else (and I'm sure that some would argue that I'm not particularly good at this either...).

Frankly, I still can't decide what I'll be when I grow up.  I enrolled in college as a Business Administration major.  After reflection I switched to 'undecided' because I couldn't see myself spending my life behind a desk.  I also did this to avoid calculus.  So where have I been since graduation?  Apart from the summer I spent in a construction job, I have been in exactly the place I was trying to avoid - behind a desk.  Fortunately, I have not been called upon to use any calculus.  Don't get me wrong, it hasn't been bad, I'm just not sure it's what I'm meant to be doing.  Trouble is, if it's not, I'm not entirely sure what is.  I wonder whether anyone ever is sure, really.

When I was very young I wanted to build houses.  This was probably down to having identified with Jason the Mason from Richard Scarry's What Do People Do All Day.  At some point I wanted to be an archaeologist.  When I was in third or fourth grade, I desperately wanted to become a teacher.  I'd like to say that this aspiration was born of a desire to make the world a better place, but it wasn't.  It was born of a desire to have the book with the answers printed in it in blue and to give out homework. This evolved into wanting to actually run a school.  For about a year, I collected school supplies and labelled them "St. Ann's School"

As a teenager, I wanted to be a lawyer.  I think I'd have made a good lawyer - I am both anal retentive and orally expulsive, a good combination for lawyering.  When I was older,  I wanted to be a chef.  I worked in a succession of restaurants, first washing dishes, then as a prep cook, a pantry cook and finally, at eighteen, the sous chef in a sizable restaurant.  I'm afraid I wasn't very good at it, but I enjoyed the hell out of myself.  It was nothing at all like Ratatouille.

Later I wanted to work in theater.  I'd spent a lot of time on and around the stage in high school, primarily as a means of avoiding class, but this prompted me to take a course in set construction at university, taught by a guy named Walt.  I loved old Walt.  He was shockingly overweight, perennially ill-tempered and an accomplished curmudgeon.  His favorite expression of displeasure was "fuck 'em and feed 'em fish heads."  I still say that.

I work in technology, but I am not a technologist, not really.  Someone asked me the other day what processor my MacBook has.  I have absolutely no idea, and really I couldn't care less.  It works, and that is how I like my technology - working, and with as little intervention on my part as possible.  Yes, I can still fix my computer when it breaks, I would just really rather not have to.

There are a fair few things I'd have liked to have done, and I do not think I am unique in this regard.  But it's really a bit too late to go making drastic career changes.  I don't know if I would have been any more suited to any of those things than I am to my job now.  At twenty-one or twenty-two, you choose a life and you live it, and there's really no opportunity to go back and do it over.

So maybe it's too late for me.  But what about the children?  Michael wants to be a fireman and a castle builder.  Caroline wants to be a cook and an artist and a scientist.  Their aspirations will probably change over time, but I hope that I can be the sort of parent who encourages them to do what makes them happy, rather than what will make them prosperous.

But I do take comfort in the fact that in about fifteen years, that grad will be sitting at his desk, listening to his Brandon Flowers and feeling nostalgic, when some kid who is currently still eating his own boogers starts spewing about having just replaced some ancient piece of infrastructure, and he will have his very own old man moment.  I'm just sorry I won't be there to see it.  I'll be in an office.  Or not.