Tempest Fugit

And then the one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun¹

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10 Years… that's a long time. Today I get honored for 10 years of service at my current job. I actually started in January, but it takes a while for them to come up with the names and awards and all. This is the only place where I have worked the longest. Before that I worked in the same place for eight years— but strangely enough who I got my paycheck from changed every three, so it's hard to justify.

My wife finds it interesting how the skills that she picked up from previous jobs seem to help out in her current job. In the job I had for eight years I worked for different vendor companies as a desktop publisher. I used a lot of "Find and Replace" skills to change wording in documents quickly. I find that these skills help me as a programmer when it comes to using Regular Expressions and making bulk find and replace strings to data.

I worked as an archivist for a Pre-press company. Through that job I learned how to organize your files and be able to archive those files you no longer use. I still use a similar folder structure to organize my projects that the pre-press operators used to store their projects they worked on.

I worked as a support technician for a library automation software company. I had to support librarians who used our software over the phone. I have been told by many people that I have very pleasant phone skills and I attribute it to this job.

Looking back on my career path and seeing how each job seems to culminate with the next makes me realize that I have been quite successful in what I do and I look forward to the next 10 years here.

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¹ Excerpts from the Pink Floyd song: "Time" from the album Dark Side Of The Moon.