Reminiscing, cogitating, and just thinking.

I'm sitting here watching a Lifetime Movie and thinking about what I should be doing. I have been doing a lot of this lately. What should I be doing, how long have I got to do it.

I have come to realize I have a great deal of life experience and it is going to go to waste if I don't do something with it. I have worked many, many wonderful, necessary, and useful jobs. I have worked for the Department of Defense, For NASA, for the space program, and for the electronics industry.

I have worked to start up new manufacturing plants, and I have worked to close manufacturing plants. I have designed new products, and I have designed new production lines. I thoroughly enjoyed my work most of the time.

For my entire working life I worked in the leading edge of electronics technology. I introduced such things as laser cutting beams into the manufacturing world. I introduced the use of video (that's tv monitors to us old folks) microscopes into the work place. This was revolutionary in the workplace because manufacturing workers no longer had to stare through a microscope to see their work, they could look at a tv screen and see a bigger then life picture of what the were working on.

Sometimes it was really funny watching people trying to assemble product under 300 to 500 magnification. Keep in mind their fingers were visible in the screen and being 300 to 500 times real life size they kept making mistakes until they got used to what they were looking at.

I used to do microscopy work in three different jobs that I had, I was very good at microscopy work and developed several new tools that are now commonly used in manufacturing, medical labs, criminal labs, and even in DOD and FBI laboratories. Of course technology has continued to move on and improve on my contributions, along with the contributions of hundreds if not thousands of other engineers, technicians, and production workers.

In a significant number of my positions I wound up as the Quality Engineer and/or Quality Manager. These jobs entailed having to work to solve not only problems within the plant but also with customers and with suppliers. I became an expert in troubleshooting problems in house, at suppliers facilities, and at customer facilities. This kind of position meant that  I had to do one hell of a lot of traveling. In a period of 10 years I flew more then 500,000 miles. Of course, back on those days they didn't have mileage programs. I wish they did have them.

But I digress, my original question was: "What should I be doing, how long have I got to do it." I have had people tell me that you can teach your grandchildren a lot of different stuff. I suppose I could, but they tend to spend a great deal of time on the computer. (hmm! once again I need to cogitate some more, I'll return to this later.)
Trying to answer this question is really, really difficult. I need to find something I can do, something to give me a purpose, a reason for getting out of bed, maybe something that I can earn extra money at. I could certainly use more money. Damn, damn, what, where, when, how, and who, all the same questions you would ask during a murder mystery. Jeez, now I need to be a detective? How funny is that.

The problem is; currently I would rather be reading a book, then doing something else. Getting lost in the story in a book is something I have done all my life, but I was also able set the book aside while I enjoyed doing whatever needed doing.

As you can see, I still haven't found the answer to my original question. If anybody out there has answers, I'd love to hear them.

God Bless us all from the gahillbilly.




"(C) Copyright by Victor Winebrenner"