Do you ever think about what kind of career you'd like to have, if you were going to do things completely differently? I mean vaguely plausible careers, paths you could have actually followed. My list would look something like this, in no particular order:
- gardener / landscaper
- photographer
- architect (for homes and similarly sized buildings, not skyscrapers)
- interior designer
- radio talk show host
- theatre stage manager / director
- museum administrator
- librarian
- bookstore/cafe owner
- charity administrator (in an area like women's small businesses)
- politician
- doctor (I know, my parents would be shocked this made the list :-)
- psychiatrist
- judge (mostly 'cause I admire Kev's dad so much -- he's a federal judge)
What's on your list?
In another life, I’d go back and study linguistics in a serious way. And at least four languages (German, Japanese, Spanish, and… maybe Norwegian!). Right now I’m used-to-be-fluent in German and a beginner (of the rankest sort!) in Japanese.
In another version of THIS life, I’d become a librarian at five years earlier than I actually did.
A former co-worker’s spouse once told us, at some kind of office party, their standard icebreaker for striking up conversation with programmers, which was something like “If you couldn’t be a programmer, what would you do instead?”
Answers tended to be interestingly illuminating. I rarely think to ask people that question, but I thought it was a neat question.
I sidestepped it by noting that if I couldn’t be a tech writer, I’d be a programmer. 🙂 But the followup question was “What if you couldn’t do anything computer-related?” Librarian probably tops that list for me; I think it’s the only other job that I’ve really seriously considered since giving up on academia in late college. Well, okay, I also thought being a truck driver might be fun (and I’d been told it paid well), but that was before I drove a U-Haul from Washington to California and avoided several serious accidents only by the grace of other people paying attention.
This is a really thought-provoking question. I feel really, REALLY, lucky to have found the profession that I think is the absolute best for me. Being anything but a topologist and a professor of mathematics seems that it would be settling for something seriously less suitable. As a teenager, I considered being a ballet dancer and an sf writer, but I know now that I would never have done nearly as well at those as I have at mathematics, and would have been much less happy with where I am now.
Being an astronaut is also appealing, but my ADD would make that quite problematic.
I think it’s fascinating that all three of you seem essentially to want to do what you’re doing. Whereas I love what I do, but I’m constantly tempted by other jobs that sound cool. If I could pick a religion to believe in, it’d be one with reincarnation, because it makes me sad that I can’t actually have all of these careers.
Hm. I suppose part of this fits in with my being something of an experience-junkie. I want to know what these jobs are like, down to the nitty-gritty detail, the depth and texture of them.
Writing about them lets me experience them a bit vicariously, I suppose, but it is so not the same…
I was going to say that you left out “king,” but I suppose since you already are, that doesn’t count as an alternate career path.
(Which reminds me of Le Guin’s phrase “The king was pregnant,” which appears to have made it into Bartlett’s.)
I would be an environmental designer – either architect or landscape – encorporting green design into traditional design.