The Lesser of Two Evils

When I graduated from college, with my questionable degree in International
Relations and my so-so command of the Russian language, I had absolutely no
idea who are what I was going to be. The fact that I didn't know in my
tender twenties what my chosen vocation was is not surprising. What does
cause me to pause now is that twenty years later, I still don't have a good
handle on this thing called a "career".

That's not to say I haven't made money at one job or another. I
have...enough to buy a house, take vacations, drive a nice car and purchase
nice toys. But I've made it through not by finding my niche and sticking
to it but by applying the principle of the lesser of two evils. It goes
something like this: I have no truly remarkable skills that distinguish me
from the next schmoe so I go for jobs where the learning curve is a gradual
slope and there are few who are interested in traversing this slope due to
working conditions, pay, prestige,etc. It is a constant that I hate all
jobs that I can get to a greater or lesser degree. Therefore any job that
I do get will necessarily be hateful but perhaps less hateful than the
alternatives available to me at any particular choice point The lesser of
the evil (hateful) jobs then becomes my occupation.

The hate that I feel for any job that I can actually get hired for manifests into a certain lack of motivation to excel in the field; thus the 'lesser of the two evils'
principle also contains the following corollary: I'm always looking for
that next situation, that next field that offers the same low-entry
threshold but high disinterest index. I've always got my proverbial right
foot on first base while I'm trying to figure out how to get left foot on
second.

Back in the early 90's, taking care of computers fit this bill perfectly.
Nobody much could be bothered to understand the intricacies of why a
machine wouldn't boot, why Wordperfect placed an extra carriage return at
the end of each page or why a print job seemed to hang. As an avid reader,
hermit and tinkerer, being a computer technician was a better fit than most
jobs I'd gotten. I didn't always know what I was doing, but then again,
no one else did either. My saving grace was that I wasn't afraid to touch
a computer...I wasn't afraid to break it. By tinkering with it and
learning from my mistakes, I had a 78% success rate...pretty decent for a
person who has no real love for what they do.

But in today's technologically savvy society, just getting by with an
offhand hobbyist's devotion to the profession is not quite enough. People
expect you to know something and the somethings that you must know are so
much more complex.

And the field of course is being buffeted by threats of outsourcing. I'm
starting to get mildly flustered about the next career jump...because
whatever it is, it won't afford me as much money, benefits and freedom as
this last stint has. What's a bump on a log to do?

Potential career trajectories: Landscape Horticulture, Copy Editing,
Astrologer