Tales from the jar side: A failed career change attempt and my Star Trek parody
Be sure to put together the first letters of the alien planets
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of March 29 - April 5, 2020. This week I taught an online course on Spring and Spring Boot, but not a lot more.
This week, like so many people, I hit a productivity wall. It was all I could do to keep moving forward without actually accomplishing much of anything. All I could think about was that scene from The Rocky Horror Picture Show after Riff Raff and Magenta have transformed and are preparing to transport the entire house back to Transylvania:
“Say goodbye to all this … and hello to oblivion.”
Okay, that’s a bit extreme, but as I mentioned in a previous newsletter I’ve been re-watching Rocky Horror and that part seemed appropriate.
I did manage to teach my training course, because I can always manage to do that. Part of the reason I changed to this career was that on my worst day I can muster the energy and professionalism required to teach my courses. That’s one of the reasons my current job is perfect for me.
But, as I said, I was a career changer. From a young age, my original plan was to be Albert Einstein. I loved the idea of sitting in a room by myself, dreaming about the universe, and changing our understanding of physics, not to mention becoming a celebrity in the process. I thought that would be awesome. (Note that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that the resemblance between that image and actual reality is purely coincidental, but it’s what I wanted at the time.)
Imagine my disappointment when I discovered I wasn’t going to be Einstein. I know that sounds silly, but think of it this way. Sometimes I measure ability in terms of baseball. For those who don’t know, below the major leagues there are several layers of minor leagues, going from AAA down to AA down to A and a few others even lower. As kids start playing baseball professionally, they begin in the minors and hopefully move up over time.
As a kid I had a lot of advantages if I wanted a career in physics, from my own internal assets (intelligence, enthusiasm, pretty good work ethic which got better as I got older) to external assets like a supportive, well-educated family who could afford to send me to excellent schools. If I’d gone that way, in baseball terms as a physicist I’m pretty sure I would have been a solid, unspectacular, utility infielder in the majors. I don’t think I would have made any All Star teams, but I would have had a decent career and been a valued contributor. Unfortunately, I wanted to be Babe Ruth, and that wasn’t going to happen.
Incidentally, in terms of actual baseball, let me say this much. In college I played intramural baseball. The school offered leagues that ran from A down to C, and my dorm fielded a C league team only because there wasn’t a D league. I got to bat first every game and played second base, because I was the captain of the team (mostly because I knew all the rules) and I made out the lineup. I didn’t make any more errors than anybody else, and I even got a hit occasionally, though beating a throw to first was always an adventure.
Since then, I’m forced to admit the Red Sox have persisted in not calling. I’m in my late 50s now, and I’m starting to suspect that my window of opportunity is getting pretty narrow. It’s really hard to overcome the massive bias in Major League Baseball against guys who are small and slow and have no baseball talent whatsoever.
The talent I do have is that I’ve always been great at The Game Of School, as I call it, which means figuring out what the teacher wants to hear and how they want to hear it. That made me a winner in our highly dysfunctional educational system, and for many years my goal was to see how well I could do with minimum effort. (That all collapsed once I reached MIT, but that’s another story.) As a result I kept going and going, until eventually I graduated with a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering and suddenly had to do actual work. I got a job as a research scientist at United Technologies Research Center.
As it turned out, that job didn’t suit me at all. I have good written and oral communications skills, but there was far less of that involved than you might expect. Most of my research was solitary, or with one or two other people, and the professional writing style favored by journals is drained of all life; certainly nothing like this blog.
It got worse. Figuring out what the teacher wants to hear is useless if there are no teachers, and possibly not even any answers. I hated not knowing the “right” answer. But what I hated most was begging for money to work on interesting problems. I mean I hated, hated, HATED trying to justify why my work should receive funds rather than someone else’s, which I had to do every year because funding budgets were renewed annually.
To top it all off, I worked in a division of a really large company, so I had to deal with all the annoying procedures and management practices that came with it. I am, shall we say, I high maintenance employee, so that was tough as well.
The result is that I ended up in a really good job that I hated, and it took me many years to find my way out.
I’ll talk about that journey in future newsletters, but for this one, let me mention one attempt at a career change that didn’t work out. For a couple of years, I tried to become a science fiction writer. Along with several other writers I met in a writers email group (on LISTSERV, if you go back that far), we attempted what was called the Dare To Be Bad challenge, which came from Kristine Kathryn Rusch and her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, both of whom were successful writers and editors. The game was to write a story every week, send them to magazines, and keep them in circulation until they sold. The promise was that if you could do that for two years, you were guaranteed to be published and on your way to having an actual career.
I spent about a year at it. During that time I produced 23 short stories and about half a novel, collected just over 100 rejection slips, and made a couple of very minor ($100 or less) sales. I eventually gave it up for a variety of reasons, but mostly because writing fiction interfered too much with my actual day job, which was doing research. I couldn’t manage two separate creative activities at the same time without one affecting the other, and I needed to keep my regular job.
One silly thing I did produce during that time was a Star Trek (The Original Series) parody called Star Trek: The (Intentionally?) Lost Episode. It got published in a tiny fanzine called Nimbus back in the early 90s. Fortunately, I printed out all my stories back then, so I was able to resurrect this one by running the pages through a scanner and doing a lot of cleanup to make it readable again. Since it’s a parody, I wrote it purely for fun, never intending to make any money from it.
I therefore now present to you, in the form of a shared Google doc that anyone with the link can view, for the first time in 30 freakin’ years, a short story entitled Star Trek: The (Intentionally?) Lost Episode.
Here is a snippet from the beginning (click to see the whole thing):
I hope you find it entertaining. At some point I may take a handful of my stories and scan them in and reformat them into something publishable, but that sounds like work, and as I said at the top, this hasn’t been a terribly productive week. Still, if you want something with my sense of humor to help get you through our current quarantine, maybe this will help.
Last week:
Spring and Spring Boot, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
This week:
Spring MVC Fundamentals, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Kotlin: The Basics And Beyond Workshop, an NFJS virtual workshop
