Career moves

I am so fascinated by jobs that people have. I hear about so many people that have taken such interesting career paths. I think my favortie was the box tester. Yup ... he is an engineer that tests the strength of boxes for certification purposes - did you ever notice that boxes you buy have such things? There are people out there that make their careers maintaining blogs or surfing the Internet or some other random sort of job. My friend has a boyfriend that's a poet! A poet. I never even considered that I would remotely know a poet - at least one that writes professionally, for a living.

I wonder how people end up in these jobs. I cannot think of many people I knew growing up who dreamed of testing boxes or creating the flavoring chemical that would be used to make hamburgers taste like ... well ... hamburgers. (I've been reading Fast Food Nation" now for two years. Why two years you ask. Well because I read a bunch of other things before I picked it back up again.)

I have tried a lot of jobs. However, there are certain ones that never appealed to me. For example, I never had any desire to be a waiter. This could have been a mistake on my part given that I have learned that restaurants are breeding grounds and everyone working there is sleeping with everyone else working there and the patrons and who knows who else. Ahh, the days of my youth squandered in meaningless jobs like IT help desks where no one was sleeping with anyone.

The entire working culture is interesting to me. A lot of people work extra to get ahead and many families ended up needing both parties to work in order to make ends meet or to get ahead. Some people work for less (illegal immigrants, women, or other minority groups) for a multitude of reasons. The funny part is that the people that work extra to get ahead and such will not actually get ahead in the grand economic theory. I forget the name of this theory but it runs as follows: a person or company that does something to get ahead will only get ahead if no other company or person does the same thing. However, everyone is trying to get ahead so the person trying to get ahead never actually gets ahead - relatively.

As an illustration, it used to be you "got ahead" by getting an advanced degree. This was when it was more uncommon for people to obtain advanced degrees. Now many more people get degrees so such people are not such a valuable commodity. Moreover, some price themselves out of the market with the advanced degree as the employer can hire one of the other people willing to work for less because they are less qualified.

Economies and market efficiencies are not as efficient as we are sometimes led to believe. In theory, outsourcing will not stop, without government intervention, until it costs companies more to outsource than to keep them here. Presumably, this will not occur until all global economies are on an equal playing field and everyone demands the same amount of salary and working conditions and such. This may or may not be a bad thing. There is economic theory that this is good for the economy, but the real numbers seem to indicate otherwise.

However, before I get into some larger pontification on market and economic theory - let me ask the question I was considering when I began this - how many of you are doing what you expected to be doing when you were growing up? For those of you that haven't reached that "grown up" stage of your life - do you know what you will be when you grow up? I was positively convinced that I knew what I was going to be when I started college. Yet, I ended up becoming something entirely different (as is very common).