Jobs & Kindergarten

I seem to have a real knack for finding jobs that use the skills I learned in kindergarten. I've only had two jobs since college. But still, both had elements of my 6 year old days on the multicolored carpet. Actually, I went to three different kindergarten because we moved twice that year. Well, actually only one. But my parents thought we were moving, so they changed my school. Then we didn't move. Then we actually moved. So there you go. Could this have anything to do with my kindergarten-related career paths? Maybe I'm trying to relive what I missed. At any rate...

At the DIB, I was always working with maps. But we had a fairly serious lack of technology. So when coding the maps, I used crayon. We must have had 40 3-foot pages of maps hand-colored by yours truly. They got a lot of use, I tell you. So my time spent coloring was worth it. And the irony here is that the only memory I have of my second kindergarten class (which I attended for about 2 months) is getting marks off for coloring outside of the lines. Number one, I was in kindergarten for goodness sake! Number two, joke's on you, teacher lady. I STILL color outside the lines and it's taken me far. Ha!

We also had kind of a glue stick thing going on at the DIB. Kim, my boss, was really into glue sticks. He had about 3 at his desk at any given time. No lie. And he used them. Regularly. He also hated brown, but that has nothing to do with kindergarten.

Now, at Monico, it's stickers. Stickers are everywhere. We most certainly do not have a lack of technology here. I have no idea what's going on most of the time there's so much technology. Technology is what we do. Or what they do. I market said technology. Come to find out, technology people are into labels. We label everything. But not just with boring old mailing labels. No, no. We have a Dymo labeler that gets used regularly and stuck onto things and custom logo stickers for boxes, screens, gateways, and other things I have no idea what they are. And then there are also product labels- which are also everywhere. I spent about two hours today putting stickers on things.

Plus there's my thing with post its, yet another form of sticker. I have post its everywhere. Sam, my coworker, made fun of me today. I have a line of them down one side of my desk and a grouping of them at the top of my desk. OK, Sam, we aren't all engineers that can calculate huge numbers without a calculator, write computer programs, and, apparently, keep how-to and to-do lists in our heads. I can hardly keep my own name in my head for goodness sake. And these people let me program things! Ha- what a joke! This, for me, requires extensive how-to lists. I have post it notes with lines for note taking. Then there's the to-do lists. I have to-do lists for my to-do lists. Because I make a to do list of tasks, then I make a to-do list of how do do a specific task on the original to-do list. Occasionally this requires a third to-do list.

Stickers and Crayons. That's my career. Now all I need to do is talk them into letting me have the kindergarten nap time and I'll be good to go.