February 08, 2005

• Writer.
• A dolphin.
• As a kid, I wanted to the be guy who directed the concrete coming out of the back of the truck. Maaaaaan, that would have been great... But in the heady days of the early 90s, Plan A was to keep on going in Philosophy, get a teaching job. Only I slacked off, so while I did get in, I didn't have any scholarship money to actually do it. So, instead, I took a deep breath, borrowed heavily, and went to law school. Bit of a shock, but once I drowned my conscience with alcohol, things were fine.
• Guitarist, Led Zeppelin.
• standup comedian
• I wanted to be an NHL hockey player (specifically, Toronto Maple Leafs) until I realized I wasn't that good. Ever since then I wanted to be pretty much what I eventually became.
• A city bus driver. When I was about 12 or so, I thought it would be cool to spin that big steering wheel around and slide those doors open every time some pretty 11-year-old girl rang the bell.
• Okay, it's not a waybackwhen answer, but in 1998, I desperately wanted to be a server-side Java developer. I ended up becoming one. Now, I'm all "what next", because it seems like I hit my career apex at 25. Who knows, maybe on to law school?
• The careers I aspired to as a kid were always the kind where it sounded like fun but the reality of it is not something I'd actually want to do. Veterinarian. Chemist. Pastry Chef.
• Not that I'm complaining, but I thought this question sounded familiar.
• Ornithologist... would still do it if I had the chance.. i think it was as much the being outside, being quiet, being peaceful part that appealed to me... also having two great science/biology teachers in High School.
• I wanted to be... a lumberjack! Actually, all I ever wanted to be was an astronaut. Neil Armstrong was my childhood hero, along with Muhammad Ali, Evel Knievel and Super Grover.
• I wanted, well up into my teens, to be the guy who operated the planetarium for shows.
• /checks out Mickey's link to see if already there..... /prepares response... When I was about seven or eight I wanted to be a ballet dancer, in the summer, and a figure skater in the winter. I was also determined to grow up to be six feet tall and with long blonde hair. I struck out on all counts.
• P.S. Thanks for the link to the previous discussion, Mickey. More monkey dreams!
• age 7: truck driver age 11: ballerina age 14-20: archaeologist or artist or genetic engineer or one who studies paranormal activity now: I would really like to be a retired zillionaire living in tahiti...
• Librarian, teacher, or, after a few brief moments of glory in my teens, a singer. Now I get to teach and sing to my son. Not as financially rewarding, but the payoffs are still good. And I can read almost whenever I like, which would probably be what I'd be doing as a librarian. Now, I think my perfect job would involve working with my hands, maybe building kids' toys and kitschy decorations from home so I could look after the offspring. This comes after I bought some stuff for the kids' room from a work-from-home mother - she did such a shitty job that I decided I could, and would, do better.
• I just checked mickey's link to see if I had previously posted re this subject (I couldnt remember) I did, almost word for word identical to my above post. I have achieved few of my goals but goddam it! I'm consistent.
• Back then: Wuxia writer and manga author. Now: I've heard that many Hong Kong popstars hire professional "fans" to create illusions of popularity...
• A long time ago I hoped to marry a wealthy woman near her life's end. That was before I realized my face would always look older than it is and my body would never fill out. Stupid genes.
• I wanted to be an astronaut. I was a 10 year old in Japan when Apollo 13 was offloaded off the aircraft carrier that picked up the crew. I didn't know anything about it at the time, but I remember our father brought us out to the dock one day and parked the car next to a chain link fence. On the other side was this big, massive thing that looked like a steam boiler with windows in it. It was the command module, just sitting there. My dad was clearly awed by it and we stood there and stared at it for several minutes. I also remember watching Neil and Buzz walk on the moon at 5:00AM-ish North Dakota time a few years before. When I got back to the states my friends would come over and we would pretend to be Apollo astronauts and sit on our backs under the kitchen chairs. We would pretend the bottom of the chairs was our control panel and talk through all of the pre-launch, launch and orbit commands and stuff (did you know the engine ignited at the 7 second mark? We did.) "10..9..8..7 Ignition! 6..5..4..etc. then 'Liftoff' (never 'blastoff'). Some years later I did a brief foray into planetary science, and in between that I did a bit of auto racing (pro-rally, finished 3rd, 2nd and 1st as a co-driver in a national and divisional event). Other than that, just worked thankless, dead-end, spirit-crushing jobs from then 'till now. Thanks, America . . .
• Dave Debusschere.
• I wanted to work on Wall Street ever since I was 3. Now that I've made it, I'm not so sure it was the best idea after all. I once dated a girl who, when she was a child, wanted to be a Pterodactyl when she grew up.
• Teacher, paleontologist, writer, at different stages. Would love to be a psychologist now, but am a bit too impatient and crazy.
• Fire Engine.
• Strangely, until I got to college I wanted to do things like be a writer, a teacher, a psychologist, a linguist. And I had no interest in math or sciences at all, I took as few as I could in high school. Now I've done nearly a 180, and am doing cognitive science and intelligent systems. Which means math and programming, and lots of it. Jobs, though? Not a darned clue anymore.
• I really did want to be a writer, a screenwriter to be specific, from age 4 until it seemed that one was not supposed to pursue such haram careers. So a switched to being a scientist, first biology, then archaeology/anthropology/primatology. (And you better believe I knew that scientists were the among the people sent up in the shuttle!) Then I wound up doing something completely different. (-; Details in thread number one (though I can't promise they're nearly as interesting as some I've read so far).
• When I was a kid I wanted to be everything: a marine biologist, an astronaut, a writer, a craft person (I had sort of a confused idea of somebody who just, you know, makes cool stuff all day, like an endless art class) a museum curator at a natural history museum. . . it went on and on. And I wanted to be an actress for a long time, then I went to college, took theatre classes, and decided I hated all theatre people and would rather paint. So I became an art major & then an art history major and then grew up and worked in an art museum. Where I gave my notice on Monday and I'm jumping into a totally new career helping somebody run a brew pub, a microbrewery and a vegetarian restaurant. Wish me luck!
• cabingirl: Are you me??? But add King to the list.
• Concert pianist, but oops, I forgot to practice more than once a week. Engineer of some sort, based on my love of the book "How Things Work" and my desire to hang out in my father's work room attempting to build stuff. My father gave my sister a kiddie doctor's kit when she was young and that was it, she knew wanted to be a doctor, which is what she became. I wish I had that sort of focus.
• Concert pianist, but oops, I forgot to practice more than once a week. Engineer of some sort, based on my love of the book "How Things Work" and my desire to hang out in my father's work room attempting to build stuff. My father gave my sister a kiddie doctor's kit when she was young and that was it, she knew wanted to be a doctor, which is what she became. I wish I had that sort of focus.
• Damn it. My hand flinched, sorry about that.
• jaypro: you wanted to work on Wall St. from the time you were three? Why? And what was that like, especially when all your little pals wanted to be astronauts and firemen and ballerinas? (I'm serious -- utterly intrigued. Seems so unlike the standard kids' dreams. Unless your dad worked on Wall St., or something like that.)
• Where I gave my notice on Monday and I'm jumping into a totally new career helping somebody run a brew pub, a microbrewery and a vegetarian restaurant. Wish me luck! Good luck!!
• jaypro, I don't know how old you are (and thus whether the reference is appropriate) but did anyone ever call you Alex P. Keaton growing up?
• Magician. Follow in my dad's footsteps type of thing. I knew how all the tricks worked by kindergarten. Which made me a right bastard when our school had one come in and distract us for some reason in 1st grade. I also wanted to be a paleontologist. Because I knew that living dinosaurs were hidden somewhere.
• Cutting edge computer graphics. Hard-core 3D stuff (this was when EGA was the bleeding edge of graphics capability and OpenGL wasn't even a pipe dream yet).
• When I was a young child, it never occurred to me tht you were supposed to want to be something when you grew up. In jr. high/high school, it was first doctor, then psychologist. I wound up in accounting and finance, and loved it. Not so much the debits and credits, but discovering that the more you know about the business you worked in, the better you would do as an accounting weasle. I got to know engineers, programmers, manufacturing folks, purchasing agents... and find out what they did and how they fit into the overall organization. When I worked in a winery, I picked up fascinating info on the craft (maybe even art) of grape growing, wine making and brandy production. When I worked for a cotton farmer, I learned that the ground needed to be 58 degrees for the seeds to germinate, and that seeds needed to be planted by mid April, or you wouldn't get a full crop by picking time in late fall. The last 13 years of my journey were spent supporting the sales force for the distribution arm of a mainframe computer and storage supplier. I was the unreasoning upholder of bureaucratic rules that they didn't agree with, and they seemed to work for the customer instead of the company. And, basically those were our respective jobs. But, I came to admire their creativity in pushing the envelope to give the customer what he wanted, while at least most of them came to respect my ability to offer financial solutions that they hadn't thought of, to negotiate contracts with their customers without pissing them off, and to fight with the more embedded bureaucracy to get their equipment delivered when they had promised it, all the while, making sure the company was protected and that the accounting was clean. It was really exciting, and I never got tired of it.
• I'm in a weird position of having achieved my most recent dream. As a young kid, I wanted to be a geologist or archeologist. Then, inspired by one, I wanted to be a funny dentist. Then I wanted to be a famous actor. I still do. But none of those ever happened and in college, I decided I"d rather be behind the camera, traveling the world as a filmmaker for National Geographic. Now over 10 years and many careers and jobs later, I'm just finishing up my first production for National Geographic. I'm not making much money doing this, but it is a really great thing to do the exact thing you once dreamed of. Seriously, I now feel I can die having done something I always wanted to do. I'd like to do more before I die, but at least I've done one.
• Professional pinball player. I'm serious. And my ideal job would be the same I'm doing, but with 1000000x faster equipment, a flawless 'inspiration' brain plug-in, and 30-hour days. Working in my pajamas, with the caribbean outside my studio windows.
• Wanted: Twitchy surly person to be charming for maybe six hours a week and lazy as a goddamn larvae the rest of the week. Must be able to work nights and weekends. Must be able to appear fascinated when required, and refrain from laughing her fucking head off when some guy is yelling, "Touch my rosebud! Touch my rosebud!" in the throes of passion, and must be able to remember "Citizen Kane's" real name later when collecting the dough.
• Olympic athlete, until I got smoked by this guy.
• This guy just blew what could be close to the perfect job. The Wear Valley is gorgeous and the ale's reet tasteh, even if the natives can be a little stand-offish:

  On the other side of the Pennines, meanwhile, there's one of those fine 'Are northerners really so friendly?' controversies under way, whose main consequence is a Mr Len Alderson sitting at home in his armchair. This is sad, because he was the man hired for GBP15,000 to do the great job of encouraging people in the north east to pay more visits to country pubs. Unfortunately, in a bid to get his new life as Mine Host Project Co-ordinator off to a cracking start, Mr Alderson won headlines by suggesting that pubs in Weardale were not overkeen on incomers and strange faces. Anyone familiar with the opening scenes of An American Werewolf in London will know what he means. It's the swivelling faces and the sense that part of your clothing may be undone. "In some places there is still almost an animosity to any outsider coming in, which is a real problem to get over," Welcoming Len was quoted as saying. "The locals could prove difficult. We don't want to teach landlords to suck eggs, but they need to know how to deal with people and not to see them as a threat." Whoops. Didn't he watch the League of Gentlemen as part of his training? And is he also missing the important point that for seasoned pub-tourists, outwitting northern dourness by a crafty mix of innocence, charm and buying a huge stash of peanuts and crisps, is part of the whole experience? Whatever, Len has been grounded by Wear Valley district council, which first thought up the dream job of working a 28-hour week to target 16 pubs in the northern Pennines. The Northern Echo says, in that time-honoured phrase, that "council bosses are furious", while Mr Alderson, like one of the landlords he described in his debut interview, is unable to comment.

  From here, c&p as no permalink
• I'm 40 and still trying to figure this shit out... not really
• debris... that is so fucking cool... I love National Geographic... mk1... I'm so jealous... *sigh* Oh, and GOOD LUCK mygoth!!!!
• Man, I'd love to do some of the stuff you guys have done or are doing. Running a microbrewery (Go Mygoth!!!). Producing for National Geographic (debris7 that rocks) Making toys for kids (tracicle!). Working in an art museum and being a race car driver sounds cool but i'd probably end up putting a scratch on their Van Gogh or running over the master of ceremonies. Not the best when it comes to physical coordination.
• My father was a futures trader for a major precious metals firm back in the day. For my third birthday, he took me into work with him. I still vividly remember the organized chaos, the yelling, the action, the excitement in the air. I had no idea what was going on, but I knew I wanted to be a part of it. My father spent about 15 years trying to convince me to do something else with my life. But, once I graduated college and got into the field on my own, he's been extremely supportive. And no, nobody ever called me Alex P. Keaton, and no, I do not have a great love for all things Republican.
• When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a cop. Used to ride my big wheel around the neighborhood and give tickets to pedestrians. Then, when I was about eight or nine, I declared that I wanted to be a "scientist and part-time jeweler like my dad." Then writer. Still trying to let go of that one. It ain't easy.
• A scientist.
• I wanted to be a Pirate. I even had a Jolly Roger Flag and an eyepatch, but was unable to aquire a corsair or galleon.
• A writer. [I worked at that.] Also, or as well as, a muse to one. Some super-het fella who would go out and absorb the world's sorrows but always come home to me, write about it all, then dedicate the book to me. [Never worked at that.] A flautist, but only as part of an orchestra, not a soloist. [Worked HARD at that.]
• I don't accept that I need to have figured it out by now. I may not be there, but I haven't sold out yet either.
• Sold out? I don't think that's right at all. We all need to make some money, or we'd all be working in that first love described in the next thread. Supporting oneself isn't selling out.
• Monkeyfilter: Touch my rosebud! Btw, MJ, you're brave to accept playing with sleds... : )