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If you could have your dream job, what would it be and why did you choose it?
This all depends on what time of life you're talking about.
Youngester Mark
When I was a kid (so I have been told...) I always wanted to be a vet. I still very much like the idea of making sure that animals are not in pain and all that good stuff however I do not like the idea of having to go into schooling for half of my adult life to be able to work at the level that I would want to.
While also thinking about it, I am not so sure that I would be able to do it due to the gore levels etc. I am not too bad with gore, don't get me wrong - but doing it every day I am not so sure that I would really enjoy that.
School Age Mark
During my school years was when I gained my interest in computing. Throughout my time at school my likes and dislikes when it comes to computers somewhat shifted.
Middle School
During middle school I was picked as one of four to be working during assembly time on learning website creation - this was back in the day where all websites were centre-aligned for the entire page, scattered with awfully pixelated GIFs that took about 45 seconds to download via dial-up connections and bubble fonts.
Towards the end of middle school I finally managed to work out how tables worked in HTML, not that I was any good at time, and I did not have the intelligence at the time to understand the theory behind nesting tables etc - but I got there. With a mixture if iframes and tables, I was actually doing pretty good (at least, that is what I thought so at the time). Looking back now, good lord. But I suppose you have to start somewhere, huh?
I recall during one of these sessions I won the rosette for something (not that I can remember what it was for now). But I won it. Normally you would walk up to the front of the assembly when your name got called up and you would be given the rosette and then just go sit back down - but because I was in the IT room doing silly stuff on my little webpage I of course did not turn up when my name was called. One of my teachers realised that I was in fact at school but just in the IT room so came through and got me - but this wasn't for quite a while and she walked me into the gym (which is where the assembly was held). Because it was after everybody else had already sat back down from collecting theirs (I think there was one per school year) the entire assembly was put on hold while I was awarded my rosette... on my own... I felt so embarrassed, I don't do public speaking etc - it still freaks me out to this day haha!
High School
High school hit and I did not touch websites again for a while. I was more into gaming at this point. There was a few games that went around the network shares that was able to run on the schools computers (Doom anyone?). I spent just about every break, lunch and usually some time after school in the IT room. Going on websites, playing games, tinkering with a few things here n there.
Final year of High School
This was the year that I properly met @Steve, who at the time was a student IT-tech. He was making a taskbar (many visual similarities to the taskbar at the top of Bloop now actually) for the school to replace the logout system that was already in place. I was mesmerised at what he was able to do in Visual Basic 6 and I just had to know more! I'm quite sure that I was somewhat annoying to him - but I kept asking more and more about it. I even ended up working on some VB6 projects myself (Network EMail was one of them - which was an IM/Chat system. Loved it!).
It was around this time that I was told about Bloop, and I was told that I should sign up - so I did! I was addicted to writing, I was writing entries more often that I properly should. I miss writing - but I have lost the drive to do so - I have had a drive to do so lot more lately, especially now that I have been tasked with fixing and updating Bloop <3!
At this point in time, I wanted to be a website/software developer - but I never really knew how to get into that world. There have been a few projects here n there, some that I have done with @Steve and some that I have done on my own too. I ended up working as a business engineer for a local computer firm in town - which I absolutely loved! But I was made redundant unfortunately. After that, I started my own business up - doing at home computer/tech repairs and had a few website & phone app projects. This was good for a while but I did not really enjoy it as much as I thought I would. It was at that point that I decided that I would rather keep the computer-y stuff as a hobby and not as a main-stream job - so I decided to go back to the holiday park that I am now working at. I started working there the second time around as Security. Due to a few reasons (which I wont get in to - maybe another entry I will) I ended up switching to over-night service support work at the same place - which then a year and a half later I progressed to Duty Manager (which I am still employed as now.
College
For college I ended up doing an ICT course. It was too easy for me though - as it wasn't really the level that I wanted to do, but it was something that I had to do before going through for the more advanced levels of the course.
When most of the class was doing the learning of items, I ended up going straight to the course-work side of the lessons. I ended up assisting the teacher and when I wasn't doing that I was messing around making some games. I ended up making the barebones of a Diablo2 clone. It worked pretty well, multiplayer support and everything. I actually really enjoyed writing the game.
It was at this point that I thought that I wanted to be a game developer, but that just fizzled out into not a lot.
I did end up writing a modification for a popular racing simulator, that I ended up running a community around (Live To Cruise) for numerous years. The total membership count hit around 40,000 by the end, and during it's peak it filled as many servers as I could afford (which ended up being 5 hosts at once). Due to not being able to afford any more servers at the time I ended up having to write in some AFK protections in the servers, and even then there was a queue for joining the servers. There was a paid tier that gave users priority over open slots on the server - this helped pay the bill and encouraged me to work on updating the mod.
Now
If I was to be real with myself - I am not so sure what my "Dream Job" would be at this point. I am content with the job that I have now and I get a lot of satisfaction ensuring that the whole place is working well and what not - ensuring that guests are as happy as I can make them while ensuring that the company higher ups are also happy. So in a way you could say that I am already in my dream job - but it's not entirely something that most people would class as a dream job I suppose.
Everybody would want to have a job that just works for itself and you don't have to put a lot of time and/or effort into - but I feel that does not give you as much satisfaction I suppose.
Working on Bloop
As some of you are aware, I have been brought in by @Steve to fix bugs and develop Bloop into the current decade of the internet. It has survived some data loss, some feature breaks and some turmoil! It is time to bring it back to life. I am happy with being asked to work on it and it's nice to see the entry list have some movement on it again! So I guess that is classed as a second job... that counts, right? |
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