What's Your Job ( Career )

Chops, it was a bad combination of an inexperienced rural lineman, a mistake on my part and days of driving nearly freezing rain. Oddly enough the 30 foot fall is what saved my life. Second degree burns on my hands and knees and weeks of pain to follow. I would never work in that dangerous industry again. Metal grain bins, everything is a conductor, everything is always urgent, everything fails in the worst weather and high voltage is brutal when a combination of mistakes are made.

Jack off of all trades, masturbate of none.

what is more fun, chemist or sheriff :sunglasses:

Risk Manager

It isn’t any prettier from the inside looking out. So many disparate legacy networks and legacy backend systems held together with gaffer’s tape and bailing wire.

Barring improbable positive changes in the market my group had to tell the business no more new voice products - haven’t made a profit on voice since before I started with the company and the federal incentives are disappearing.

Good news is that the fiber networks are humming along. Bad news is that some ~20 years after the first large-scale fiber-to-the-prem rollouts they’re still costly to deploy.

Complete polar opposites. I worked in a lab knowing what my monthly retinue would be. Deputy, I was lucky to know what was for lunch. Problem solving skill set as a chemist does help in the field. I enjoyed both, more job satisfaction from being a Deputy.

Ahhh you’re a Fisherman —- LOL

Apparently so, he is a master-bater. :white_check_mark: :smiley: :smiley:

The last time I was friends with a provisioner, he told me that the provisioning front end took all of the commands in and parsed them and re-wrote them to a TL1 gateway and then converted it back to native configs and sent them out. Only because the backup system was very old and only understood TL1. I have not thought TL1 since the very early 90’s on a slik96!

TL1 is still the automation interface for a number of platforms . It’s old and fiddly, but easier to glance over than XML. CLI is generally easier still, but I only see it with GWRs.

I’m 65 now.
I started at the age of 17 working, for an outside company, within a particular military facility with duties of supervising all of their mechanical and electrical writing systems. After a few years I had other assignments as well, but what I was doing in there, stayed in there.
I always remained a civilian, never wore a uniform, when I performed duties I had an equated military rank. Then I argued strongly with a colonel about a matter; in a military environment: colonel trumps civilian, and I resigned. I did other tasks in adjacent areas for a while and then dropped out for good. I then worked in the security IT industry at several firms.
In 1986 I was in Berlin helping in the protests and demonstrations for the presence of the “Wall”, in the West and in the East (in the East with much difficulty).
In December 1989 I was in Romania, in Bucharest, just after the revolution to bring instruments to two hospitals in the capital and also for other reasons.
In 1991/1992 (winter only) I took part in the Yugoslav War as a driver, photographer and risk assessment to supply refugee camps in Slovenia and Croatia; At that time, in Zagreb, I met my wife, who is German-speaking, and we got married in the capital of a South-East Asian country.
I have three children, I have continued to work in different jobs but the state does not willingly offer people like me a pension. In Rome, where I live, I have two apartments, I am renovating them and I think I will rent one, but I don’t know my future.

You sir have lived a lifetime already and then some. I envy your life’s experiences.

Retired Navy MMC/SS. Now I work 3rd shift as a maintenance tech at a craft brewery keeping packaging lines and the brewhouse running.

Owner/Operator of a wood floor refinishing business. Been at it almost 10 years. I do like doing it and money is good.

In the last several years the resurgence of Real Wood Floors has made for plenty of work out there — I have a cousin in that business — He’s really doing well with it

It would be interesting to open a thread in which you tell us about the torches you used in the 80-90s during 
the missions you talked about .... I hope you can satisfy me, surely it would be interesting for everyone.

I make people hate me

Principal Engineer (software development) for an international tax compliance software and services company. I do mostly architectural design and review, but also individual contributions as required to keep product delivery moving.

Good pay and I get to do more or less what interests me (perks of the title, lots of leeway in choosing projects, doing POCs, and experimental initiatives), also should be setting process and design standards, but in reality we are usually too busy with delivering product features :smiley:

Been in IT and development for almost 20 years. Just turned 40 and I definitely took the hard road to where I am today.

My username says it all. Before retiring I spent 30 years monkeying around with lasers, spectrometers and oddball materials. And in all that time didn’t use lumens or lux once (I was a mW/cm2 kinda guy, or GW/cm2 on some of the more fun projects).

Hey me too. I worked for Optical Engineering making Carbon Dioxide laser spectrum analyzers, beam probes and thermal image plates. Lots of fun with lasers.

For the last 35 years I went on to become a journeyman Carpenter and general contractor both commercial and residential.

Consulting these days.