One thing that I've noticed in this thread that I wanted to comment on. When I was a kid, the standard question was, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Which meant, what kind of a job do you want to do, not what kind of a person do you want to be. In High School, there was all of this pressure to decided what you wanted to be, FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE! The Sputnik had just gone up, and the attitude over here was, "We ain't goin' to let no Commies get ahead of us! and just about everyone in my graduating class of 1953 went in to engineering. The thought was that you had to choose your major carefully, because it was a lifetime decision. Now, they're advising kids in High School who are going to college to get a broader education because they might have as many as two or three different kinds of jobs in their lives. Read these threads and see how many people have had twenty different kinds of jobs in their lives... I'm not sure that life has changed so much as that attitudes are slow to change. At one time, if you grew up on a farm, you became a farmer and was a farmer your whole life. Those days passed a long, long time ago.

I find this thread very encouraging as a father of two sons who ventured out into the work world a few years ago. If you're willing to work hard and learn new skills, there's no limit to what you can do. And if something doesn't work, or you lose your job, there's bound to be something else that you can do, and you may end up liking it better than the job you had. And, as someone pointed out, the general feel of this thread is that people have mostly enjoyed what they'd done in their 9-5 jobs. That's good. It's far too big a chunk of your life to be in a job that you hate. You carry the hate home with you, too. Perhaps there's some encouragement in this thread for people who are in a job they hate, right now. Maybe it's time to move....

Jerry