Since I have been working the night shift at city hall performing maintenance tasks on computers, I am allowed to play games online while I am waiting for the computers to do their thing.  In all seriousness, I am there, but if you were to figure out how much time I really work, you would realize that I don’t do a lot of work at all.

So, I have been taking advantage of my freedom to play games online, and lately I have been playing word games that are much like Scrabble.  I thought that it would be a great opportunity to learn something new while keeping up on my spelling skills.

But the one thing that I have found is that there are a large number of health conscious people on the site that I play.  Typically, you can find many health supplement names on the boards (such as spirulina, barley grass and chlorella) and since I had never heard of them, I ended up looking them up online.

I think of it as a paid education and a tool to relieve the monotony from my job.

Most of my days at work are rather slow.  I work at a home improvement store, and I spend my time selling toilets and showers in the plumbing department.  I have been doing this for a few years now, and it may not be the most exciting job on the planet, but it is the slow pace that makes the job worthwhile.

But, starting today, our company is selling shower cubicles and electric showers for a deep discount.  Okay, it is the first sale that we have had in my department since I started here, and I never realized that people would go so crazy for a sale.

Though it has been a great day for commissions, I have a feeling that my feet will really hurt when I get home.  Hopefully, this isn’t an indication of how the rest of the week is going to go – I don’t know if I can handle the pace for that long.

As I am just about to leave home for work, I thought that I should talk about the big walk that the head honchos of our company are doing today.  They come about four times per year, and today will be one of those times (provided that they show up).

I find it so funny that our management at the store gets into a panic whenever one of these days come.  You see, we have been cleaning everything from top to bottom, so that the store is in pristine condition.  Forget that normally you might find some dust on the shelf – no, we need to show complete perfection.

Even worse, we need to know the sales figures for the best selling products in our department.  So I have made sure to know what the best selling GPS is that we sell as well as how many we have sold this period.

So, as I head off to work, I know today will be an off day – thankfully, we don’t have to be perfect every day of the year.

When I was in college, I knew that I wanted to go into the commerce field, but I was not exactly sure what I wanted to do. I decided to take the mandatory first year commerce classes and thought that I would decide throughout the year exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up.

During that year, I spent time with a lot of people who had professions in the commerce field. I figured if I could shadow some of them, it would give me a better idea about what I wanted to do for the rest of my working life.

By far, the person that I found most interesting was a commodities broker. It seemed like he had it all together and out of all the people that I shadowed, he seemed to be the one that loved his job the most. My decision was made by the end of the year. I knew exactly what I wanted to be and I just hoped that one day, I would love my job as much as he does.

When I was in college, I got a degree in Education. When I finished, I decided that I wanted to teach at an inner city school, but I was quite leery that my Spanish was not good enough for that. I decided that I was going to go back to school and study the language further and thought there would be no better place to do this than in South America.

I enrolled in Spanish School Antigua Guatemala and loved how I was totally immersed in the language. I had no choice but to learn it very quickly or drown trying. I chose to put my whole efforts into it and I did nothing but study the language from the time I got up to the time that I went to bed.

I am now a teacher at the inner city school that I wanted to be at, and I think that my experience in South America has given me a greater understanding for these kids that I am teaching. I have been immersed in their culture and I can only hope that I will make as big of a difference in their lives as their people made in mine.

I can remember back in the days of working at my first job at a footwear store.  We were in a very small location in a mall and we couldn’t keep very much stock at the store.

To make up for the lack of space, our company had purchased some shoe storage units at a self storage location a couple of blocks away.  In some respects, it was very inconvenient going down to the shoe storage and stocking up the store every couple of days, but we really couldn’t complain as we were lucky to have a job.

To this day, I still hate the time that one of my coworkers locked me in the shoe storage unit as a joke.  What they didn’t realize that I was claustrophobic and I was freaked out while I was in there.  It was such a traumatizing event that I quit the job a couple of days later.  I just hope that I will never have to go back to a job like that again.

I remember, many years ago, when I first started my job at this hotel. I started out as a part time housekeeper and I have worked my way up the ranks. In fact, the day that I was promoted from housekeeper to front desk agent was one of the happiest of my life. I know that they only promote those that they feel are doing an exceptional job.

I continued to stick it out and I became a front desk supervisor and then eventually the front desk manager. That was my job for the past four years and I figured I had gone as high up the ladder as I possibly could. I was actually considering going elsewhere when I was offered another promotion.

I am now the head of travel management for the hotel. It is demanding, but I love the challenge. There is only one more rung on the ladder and that is general manager of the whole hotel. Maybe if I stick it out, that will be me one day. And to think, I started out as a housekeeper.

I grew up in a small town and I have always wanted to live in the big city.  It could be my childlike fascination with the big lights and sounds that a city offers or it could just be that I want to be part of something larger than myself.  Whatever my inner motivation is, I knew that I wanted to to live the big city life and I just wasn’t sure how I was going to do it.

After completing my college degree in computer science with a minor in graphic arts I found myself with a job in web design.  After getting some experience in my small town I decided to see if I could make my dream of living in a city a reality.

After submitting a number of applications, I was accepted to work at a New York website design studio as a junior designer.  It wasn’t until I stepped foot in my apartment and went to my first day at work that I realized that my dreams of working in a big city finally came true.

While studying to get my masters degree, I took on a position as a teacher’s assistant to help pay my tuition and living expenses.  I had always wondered what it would be like and I finally had my chance to find out.

It turns out that the role of a TA is not as glamorous as you would think.  I spent many nights up late reading thesis after thesis and assigning grades to them.  Though each dissertation that I read is interesting, it can be sometimes very tedious correcting their work, their spelling and making suggestions to them on how to improve their work.

It is even more frustrating checking to see if any of the students in the class have submitted custom term papers that they purchased online.  If we do catch a student that has done such a thing, they are sent to the Dean immediately and risk expulsion from the school.

I can honestly say that being a TA is definitely not what I thought it would be.  But on a brighter note, it definitely beats flipping burgers to pay the rent.

While I was flipping through the television channels tonight, I came across an interesting show that I think that I will watch from now on.  The show follows real people through their career choices and looks if what they thought they wanted to be when they grew up was actually what they became.

It sure seemed like an interesting premise as most of us don’t become what we set out to be.  This was exactly the case for the study of this weeks show.

You see, the lady that was on the show had always had dreams of becoming a Marine Biologist.  But, as it turned out, she would have had to go to a college far away from her home and the price would have been out of her reach.

So, instead, she went to her hometown college and became a Dietician instead.  Her story was very interesting and I could relate to it, since I didn’t become what I had set out to be either.

I am looking forward to watching the show next week – I wonder how it will turn out.