[masraum]

Had a couple. I went to college just out of HS. Didn't really know what/why I wanted to do, but thought it was the thing to do. Good at math and science, so figured I'd get a BS in EE, but college is lots of work that I wasn't willing to commit to so I eventually dropped out.

I then got a job close to the next thing that I was good at, cars, so I went to work at a retail auto parts store. I quickly worked my way up to manager of one of those stores. That's a soul crushing job. The managers schedule was 55 hrs/week, but they expected you to put in more than that. Pay was $21k per year in the early 90's that with bonuses got me up to $26k per year for 60-70 hrs a week occasionally 80-90 hrs a week. Not really much potential to move up unless I was willing to keep that pace up for that pay or was willing to relocate and again keep that pace up for pretty much the same pay or was willing to kill enough people that they'd have to promote me. I knew it was a bad deal, but didn't know what to do about it.

Then I met my wife who lived half the US away, so I moved from FL to TX. She knew some folks, so I ended up bartending. Much better than retail, but it eventually gets to you too. I eventually started buying books at Barnes & Noble and started studying and got a foot in the door doing IT work. And now here I am today, making a decent living and enjoying my job (Network engineer (Cisco, VoIP, Satellite, etc....). It may not be making me rich, and it may not be what every little boy dreams of, but it's pretty good.