Society for Aesthetic Deletions

1. What is your current occupation? Is this what you chose to be doing at this point in your life? Why or why not?
I'm a Systems Administrator/Help Desk Manager (but I'm the only person in the help desk. I manage myself!) for a non-teaching department at Brown University.

I chose it in as much as I moved away from the secretarial/administrative assistant positions I'd had prior to this because I really like working with computers, and I'm apparently very good at helping people solve their problems with them. At my current workplace, my job evolved to what it is now for a variety of reasons, but you could say that I chose this. As far as whether it's where I thought I'd be as a kid - no. But it's where I saw myself wanting to be over the past few years.

2. If time/talent/money were no object, what would your dream occupation be?
Working hard at doing nothing, aka living the life of leisure, baby! Writing would be the second choice. Acting the third.

3. What did/do your parents do for a living? Has this had any influence on your career choices?
My mom stayed home and raised the kids. My dad was an engineer for IBM. What they did has had very little influence on my career choices. My mother, in fact, pushed me toward getting a computer degree. I thank the $diety every day that I didn't listen to her.

4. Have you ever had to choose between having a career and having a family?
Nope. Though my "career" isn't really so much that as a job.

5. In your opinion, what is the easiest job in the world? What is the hardest? Why?
Easiest? That's tougher than I thought it'd be. The flagger on a construction site, usually on the highway. You know, the person who directs you to move the car away from where they're working. Why? Because it doesn't require a lot of mental, or really, physical, energy. Though that would make it boring, it'd be easy.

Hardest job is simple - my husband had it. Working as a counselor at an opiate clinic. You deal with addicts who don't want to get better daily; they just want their dose and they're gone. You deal with those who are still using, though they lie to you, or try to cheat the mandatory urine test. And maybe one day, you find out they overdosed and have died, and all your work was for naught. You deal with those who want to get clean, and make it; but they are few and far, far apart.

I watched him go from loving his job to hating it, very, very quickly. Burnout factor was hella high.

He's still doing counseling for drug addicts, but not just those - the homeless and the mentally ill, too. Not just opiate addicts anymore. And many of these people want to get better.