I realized in someone's thread that I had a really cool idea for a twist to toss his direction--but it would require me to know something about him, and I couldn't ask him outright without giving away the twist. It occurred to me, too, that I have wanted to know things about players in the past, and not been able to determine them easily. Thus I am starting a new set of sticky threads specifically to get personal details from people.
No you do not have to participate, but doing so will enhance the ability of your referee to run your game. And no, you do not have to answer all of the questions nor all of the threads to participate. I recognize that people do want a certain amount of privacy, and might not be comfortable posting personal details of their lives on the Internet. So post what you want, and leave the rest for guesses.
If you are not playing in a Multiverser game, this thread is not intended for you. If you wish to play, you should start with the threads Yes, You Can Play, But.... and The Character Generation Thread to begin your involvement, then come back to these threads to expand your identity.
This thread is about the might-have-beens in terms of careers. If you were not doing what you are doing, what might you have done instead?
Questions to consider:
I will begin.
--M. J. Young
It is difficult to pin down what I am doing, as I seem to have irons in several fires. Even in the band, where I sing and switch between several instruments, I joke that I'm the kid who still hasn't decided what he wants to do when he grows up. I write books and design games, but I still compose songs and teach an online class.
From middle school, my aspiration was to be a famous rock musician, or a famous Christian rock musician, or something of that sort. By the time I was in college, I had outlined a future in which I became famous and reasonably well-to-do in the Christian music field, and then shifted from touring and recording myself to producing other musicians.
That didn't happen for a lot of reasons, but it was the impetus for getting two undergraduate degrees in Biblical Studies. I almost shifted to a music major, which probably would have put me in a position of teaching music in a public school somewhere.
My first job was driving deliveries for a pharmacy. That gave me money to spend on musical equipment, and probably would not have taken me anywhere anyway.
During one of my summers, I worked as a security guard at Fairly Ridiculous--er, Farleigh Dickenson University. I continued this through part of my second year of college, again for spending money for musical stuff and personal things. I returned to security after graduating from Gordon College, and might have advanced to some supervisory position there, but probably was limited in what I would have been able to do. Anyway, being a security guard was not really a job--it was a paycheck for sitting and reading.
Between my two undergraduate schools, I worked for Western Union Data Services as an inventory control clerk in the warehouse. My supervisor was very impressed and said he would be a reference for me whenever I needed a job, and I seriously considered moving back into the area (it was where my father worked) upon graduation. However, my wife was seriously worried about her parents and remaining grandparents, so we moved to her neck of the woods, too far for north Jersey to be a good place to work. I job hunted and worked security, and wondered what would have happened had I done the other.
While working security, I got connections with the personnel department of Certainteed Corporation, a construction materials firm, and thought I was going to get a job there; but that did not materialize. I did get a letter of commendation for stopping an employee from stealing an automotive battery, but I didn't feel like I was going anywhere.
The job I eventually landed was not good pay, but it was connected to my dream of being in the Christian music field: I became an announcer/DJ/technician at contemporary Christian radio station WNNN-FM. It was already riding on its reputation, as new owners were pressing it away from the contemporary/rock format that had given it a national reputation, toward what they viewed as "religious broadcasting", but it connected me to a lot of the important people in the Christian music and recording industry. I was supposed to send demos to a couple of people during that time, but every time I tried to record I was plagued with equipment failures. I rose to be program director, and probably could have pursued a career in broadcasting, but by then we had settled into our own house and there were no other Christian stations, and indeed few radio stations at all, near enough to commute.
While I was at the radio station, I also took a part-time evening gig as a teacher in an undergraduate course at an unaccredited school just founded. I taught one term, and was about to begin the second when the financing was pulled from under the school and they cut their small faculty in half.
After the radio station, I got a job doing microfilm with a major construction company--Bechtel, which doesn't build anything smaller than a skyscraper and is known to build things like suspension bridges and airports. I was working on a nuclear generating station, and got to know quite a bit about them from the inside. I thought possibly I would continue with this company, but in a crazy budget cut "on paper", the site manager shut down the microfilm department, made the client film any documents they needed for their own use, and shipped everything across the country to be warehoused by the parent company. I tried to transfer to another department, but there was a hiring freeze and everyone was cost-conscious.
I went through a stint working with a one-man drywall and painting operation, but couldn't stand being in a house with no working plumbing at five in the morning. I have never been a morning person, and joke that I was born at nine in the morning and have not willingly been up that early since. Then I took a position with a temp agency, which landed me in Blue Cross Blue Shield of Delaware, who hired me as a claims processor based on scores on intelligence tests and then fired me because I wasn't fast enough and ducked out of paying unemployment by claiming I had too many absences (I had been out one day) and tardinesses (the clocks in the building were all set to different times).
It was after that that I went to law school, seeking a graduate degree so people would take me seriously.
I actually did not set out looking to go to law school. I wanted a graduate degree that would get me back into teaching Bible in an undergraduate setting, but being committed to our home address at the time I had to limit my options to what would work for a daily commute. I looked at every graduate program within commuting distance, and eliminated them one by one until I was down to law and education. I sent applications and took tests so as not to be excluded from anything. Then the director of the education program talked me out of it--the program was designed for people who were teaching at publicly-run community colleges, not for people who wanted to teach theology. The law school sent me a letter of acceptance, and I went.
While in law school I worked as a student assistant for a highly intelligent professor, proofreading his papers for publication. I also earned honors. What I did not do was pull myself out of the financial hole that had been getting deeper over the years, and so as I graduated I was on the edge of losing the house--and then the New Jersey State Bar Association refused to admit someone in financial difficulties. (In fairness to them, it is not permitted for members of the New Jersey State Bar Association to file for bankruptcy, and it did not appear that I was going to avoid that--although I never did file, although I lost the house and am still not out of debt.) Thus I never got to be a lawyer, because of money.
Instead, I connected with a guy who had a truly brilliant idea for a role playing game. I had already designed three unpublished board games, and was an active role playing gamer and referee in an admittedly limited number of games. I started working with him, finished Multiverser in about five years, and published it. I started writing articles for web sites, starting with this one. Then I started writing the novels. Then I was inspired to write What Does God Expect?, and subsequently to publish it, the first of several Christian books.
Those are most of the twists and turns in my life, the might-have-beens.
--M. J. Young
I am currently unemployed, having been fired from my last job in February for the sin of asking for a stable schedule that did not include opening every Saturday.
My first job was in a warehouse that sold car parts. I worked part-time after school. For the first half of the year I worked there, I worked in the call center, and hated it. For the second half, I ran the one room that was their catalog shipping office, and loved every minute of it. My love of working unsupervised no doubt stems from those blissfully easy, productive days. I quit when my family moved, but I could easily have stayed there a few more years. Surely it was a dead-end job in the long run, but it would have put money in my pocket through college before I gave it up.
My second job was in food service. There is a reason Ponderosa Steakhouse is legally forbidden to ever operate in the state of New Jersey again. Having seen how they conduct themselves in Kentucky, I am hardly surprised. There was no future in this job. I quit only to avoid being fired. I was terrible at it and hated every minute of it, and would never go back to food service.
Edit: During this time, I also volunteered as a Sunday School teacher with the United Methodist Church. Though I fretted over every lesson, my classes were always popular with the children, and I was well-liked in the community, so much so that I more than once was told I should consider a career in the ministry. Had I not moved back from Kentucky, I very easily could have. I loved that community, those people, and at the time, I very much loved being Christian. Had I stayed with them, I would almost certainly be Brother Harry of the UMC by now, I have little doubt about that.
My third job was in a warehouse that sold groceries. I worked there a year and a half in a call center. It was an awful job, very restricted and often pointlessly so, but I did learn the numbers 0-9 in both Spanish and Arabic from listening to their customers rant lists of numbers at me in whatever languages they pleased in the time I was there. No doubt I would have become fluent in both had I stayed, but my mounting depression while working there would have eventually led me to a nervous collapse.
My fourth job was as a freelance archivist for a professor of mine in college. It was temporary work, so there was no future in it, but it was basic data processing and very easy. I was cataloging her personal library. Boring, but it paid.
My fifth job was in circulation for my town's library. I worked there four years before being sacked, as described above. It was part-time due only to budget constraints, and it was the best job I have ever had. I am currently contemplating going for my Masters of Library and Information Science (if anyone knows any good online programs that allow full-time course loads and don't take four years, I'm all ears) and I would go back to working in the library in a heartbeat if I didn't have an alcoholic lunatic as a director. I could easily have made a career of this.
My most recent "job" was with the New York Renaissance Faire. I was a member of the Journeymen Actors' Training Program, and spent the summer weekends entertaining (mostly children) in improvisational street theater. I am, sadly, terrible at improv, but children find me funny, so next year I am planning to audition for paid cast, and also planning to learn a bit of stage combat so I can audition to be a fighter.
When I was younger, I dreamed of joining the Navy. I wanted to be a fighter pilot. My grandfather talked me out of enlisting, mostly by saying I was too tall, too out of shape, and too sensitive a personality to ever become a fighter pilot.
In high school I thought I wanted to be a teacher. In fact, up until I discovered the National Youth Rights Association halfway through college, I thought I wanted to be a teacher. Once I realized what an abject betrayal of actual education the American school system is, I decided I could not lend my energy to it.
Instead, my current dream career - one I am slowly but surely working towards - is to become a lawyer, specializing in civil rights law, in order to overturn discriminatory laws based on age (my pet issues being curfews and the voting age, though our current most successful issue is the drinking age).
In addition, I have variously entertained dreams of entrepreneurship (I would have liked to own a game shop) and authorship (I would have liked to write young-adult urban fantasy), but as yet I have made no headway on either.
No one has ever actually given me any career advice, except insofar as what not to do, all of which I have not done.
In elementary school, I wanted to design and build robots for the military, and have always had an interest in electronics. First day of school every year, first thing I would do is open the science book to the chapter on "Electricity and Magnetism" and read it from start to finish. Electronics always fascinated me. My father died when I was 6, and my mom remarried a man who was a television repairman. He nurtured my interest in electronics, I helped him build some electronic equipment for the church. (I finally built the robot, albeit all it did was it had a lot of lights that came on)
I've always had an aptitude for science. In the 8th grade, I scored in the 98th percentile in science on a standardized test. I scored equal to a college freshman in science in the 8th grade. For a while after that, I wanted to try to become a scientist. Not sure what field, just that science always got to me.
In the 10th grade, I got a job at a family owned Italian restaurant called DelMatto's. The chain of command there was Owner-God-Employees. I worked as a busboy and a dishwasher. I was in very good shape. Carrying trays that weighed upwards of 40-50 pounds for 6 hours at a time. For quite a while, I was the only busboy that would put up with the owner's bullshit. I mean not many 16-17 year old kids want to deal with that. Being picked on was nothing new to me, so I just went with it. I finally quit when I was 18. The owner's son, Craig, tried to start a fight with me. I was about a half a heartbeat away from pushing him down the stairs into the basement when his father stepped between us. No actual blows were exchanged, but I came in on Monday, got my last check, and never looked back. They tried to call me back for months. The restaurant was bulldozed a few years ago.
In the 11th grade, I attended a 2 year technical program in electronics and found out it was a lot more difficult than the elementary school science books made it seem. If you showed me a schematic to a TV and said "This is what it's doing" I could tell you what was wrong with it, but open up the back of the TV, and I was lost. Still though, I graduated with all A's.
After I graduated, I tried to pursue my electronics, but found that college is a lot more difficult to pay for. I worked as a dishwasher at the Outback Steakhouse. I was fired about about 9 months over an incident with the police.
This incident with the police. I was 19 and living with my older brother in an apartment. My brother was home and set a box on fire on the stove. He was VERY drunk, and instead of picking it up and putting it in the sink, he decided to beat the fire out with a metal skillet. The neighbors thought they were hearing gunfire and called the police. We had guns all over the place, and the police had some kind of probable cause to do a search. They took all of our guns, some stereos that I had ripped apart to try to fix, our marijuana pipes. I had a military tech manual called The Improvised Munitions Handbook. My brother was a big WW2 buff, and had an authentic WW2 Nazi flag, as well as newspaper clippings from WW2. Also, I had just shaved my head completely bald on a dare. One of my brother's guns came up stolen. He got it at a flea market, and had no clue about that. Long story short, the police put my brother and I on the news saying that I was trying to build a bomb with these stereos that I had ripped apart. The police put the worst possible spin on it that they could. The news just said "We found a Nazi flag and articles on Adolf Hitler." not "We found an authentic WW2 Nazi flag which is a rare collector's item" things like that. We were charged with a list of things that was longer than this message. In the end, the only charge that stuck was a misdemeanor marijuana charge. It was the top story on the news for a week and a half.
After that, I got a job at the PetsMart distribution center. I worked there for almost 4 years, and was fired when I used pepper spray on another employee who was trying to start a fight with me. Had I known I was going to get fired, I would have beaten him senseless after I maced him.
When I was working at PetsMart, I met Christina. We were friends, but nothing came of it. She quit and I ran into her some months later. We started dating. She walked out on me the day I was going to propose marriage to her. I'm still not sure why she left. She had a 4 year old daughter. I keep thinking if I had just proposed one day sooner......
After she left me, I got Internet access to try to meet someone else. Through quite a bit of leading from God, I helped a 15 year old Atheist girl to become a baby Christian over the Internet. If Christina hadn't walked out on me, I doubt I would have Internet access at all.
After I was fired from PetsMart, I got a job delivering pizzas. I loved it. Got robbed once.
I tried to attend law school to become a civil rights lawyer, but I couldn't make heads or tails of the first chapter of the book, and abandoned that quickly.
January 1, 2001, I slipped on the ice and broke my left leg. (Helluva way to start the New Year, ya know?) The doctor said if it had happened 50 years prior, they would have amputated my foot, no questions asked. That's why I now have a plate in my leg. I had to move back in with my mom because I couldn't work.
The pizza job inspired me to try my hand at truck driving school. I figured why not do pretty much the same thing, but just make a lot more money? I wasn't able to get a job driving trucks because of my psychosis, and never paid for the truck driving school. They said 98% of graduates get steady jobs within 6 months. I was in the 2%. If not for the psychosis, I would probably be a truck driver.
I had a few jobs working as a delivery driver. No big trucks. Uhaul type van trucks.
After I lost the last truck driving job that I had (I think the longest one lasted for 2 months) I applied for disability, and was accepted on the first try, with no appeals needed. They said that only 1 in 100 people do that on a mental disability claim. The other 99 people have to appeal it at least once. (And my mom STILL thinks I can control the psychosis!!!!!!)
I worked at a few different pizza delivery jobs whilst on disability. I was fired from the last pizza job when I was 28, and have not had a steady job since. A few months ago, I got a taxi license and tried that for a while. I think I'm going to go back.
Let's start with what I'm doing now. I work as a copy editor and technical writer for a company that produces software and distance learning courseware. The company is a government contractor--most of our business comes from the US Navy.
I got the job in part because of my education background---not only is grading papers at least somewhat similar to editing, an education background is a good thing for someone seeking a job in eLearning.
This was after two years of teaching middle school--sixth and seventh grade English. That teaching job was my first "real job" out of college. I've done part time work of all sorts, but primarily to pay bills, nothing towards a career. I've been a housekeeper, a burger flipper, and an office assistant. I also worked as a waitress for three days. I got fired from that job, so the idea of my alternate waiting tables is kind of laughable. But, since my boss couldn't really tell me *why* I was fired, who knows? I made a couple little mistakes--not giving separate checks, not getting appetizers out fast enough. But the restaurant owner said she "wanted someone with experience"---apparently she didn't read my application.
As far as other things I could've done, when I was a kid, I wanted to be an actress. I also wanted to design video games. I did take comp sci, and while it was fun, it wasn't something I could see doing day in and day out.
As far as acting, despite being an introvert, I do kind of like being "in the spotlight," partly because it scares me. Half the fun of debate was the adrenaline rush of being a bit scared to speak in front of people.
I also was considering law school when I was in college. I decided against that largely because I couldn't see *another* three years of school, and because 60-80 hour work weeks did not appeal to me.
I can also easily see an alternate version of me as a novelist, magazine reporter, or other type of writer. Or a college professor of English.
I've first studied economics and modern languages, but couldn't keep up with that at high-school, so I went for graphic design. A great succes, at least in front of the computer. The actual printing was my weak point. I worked in it for two years until a year and a half ago, when I quit my job because God called me to study again, now in childcare. I'm going for another half year and after that I'll probably go to the Ukraïne to work as a volunteer with street-children for at least two years. (with gathered support, as a missionairy)
That last one is mine too. This means that I could be an economist (bookkeeper or something), translator or anything regarding higher studies if I would've kept up in high school.
I also could have remained a graphic designer at Smidt-Imex, mainly doing photo-manipulations, but also packaging. I could also have found another graphic design job. The environment wasn't fun to work in.
I could also have understood quitting my job, yet not understood going for childcare. That time I was thinking about what might have been the job that was most humble or serving. I was considering becoming a garbageman, industrial cleaner, ... any of the jobs nobody wants to do or becoming a police man or working for the police in any way or becoming a fireman. Those two for the serving thing. Only later the love for children became evident in my life while I was looking.
Right now I haven't gone to live in the Ukraine for two years at minimum, yet sometimes I feel that I still should have done that. Now I'm looking for a job in child care near Mechelen in Belgium. This could involve assisting a kindergarten teacher or doing pre-school or taking care of children out of school hours, as parents often have to work earlier or later then the children have to leave for or come from home. I could become someone who assists parents in how to raise children or who takes care of children who's parents can't take care of them. (that could be because of violence, drugs/drinking, neglect... but also because of illness or poverty.
I could also become an au-pair. I think the English word is Nanny. I wonder what the male variant is. So, lot's of options for my divergents.
First Job: Worked at 7/11, Cashier, Hated every waking moment nuff said
Second Job: Worked at Kohls, Cashier, Hated every waking moment of it nuff said
Third Job: Worked at Super G's, Cashier, Hated every waking moment of it nuff said
Forth Job: Worked at Namco Arcade, Loved the job unless the boss was around, he worked three stores, so liked it 66% of the time
Fifth Job: Worked for Yardley Flower Company, Delivered flowers, learned a lot of driving skills and map using skills for that (10 years before GPS became popular)
Sixth Job: Worked for Computer Hardware and Maintenance Company, loved the job, really loved it when I got to work 3 days a week, worked remotely thursday and friday, and weekends, toward the end became rigid, got fired 3 weeks after getting a raise for good performance, for bad performance, company folded in 6 months.
Seventh Job: Worked for Panasonic as Tech Support, worked there 3 years, hated the job, loved goofing off and the people there.
Eight Job: Worked IT for Rhodes Industries a piping company, loved it for the freedom, hated it because I reported to a contractor who wanted to do no work, stayed they 3 years
Ninth Job: Worked IT for Merrill Lynch, yeah was told great company to work for, a year later, they cut everyone's salary by 20%, I was out. Lasted a year
Tenth Job: Working IT for Victaulic, like the job, moving to second shift in a month newly created, just me on it, like the job.