Reinventing myself or is it a recursive update?

It was 1980 something when my father came home with that Apple, green monochrome display, dual 5.25" floppy drive and 9 pin matrix printer. Two years later (or thereabouts) the mouse was invented and we got one with a program called Mousepaint. Broderbund developed PrintShop about the same time. Wargames was a box office hit and I was immediately forbidden from ever thinking about getting a modem. Then CompuServe and GEnie came along and I was devouring my monthly COMPUTE! magazine, typing in BASIC programs as fast as I could. I blew by my peers in keyboarding and computers classes in middle school. I was wearing out ATARI joysticks until a bad report card came along and it disappeared. Then I found out about Nintendo and Mario, Castlevania and others when we visited Grandparents in NY. On the other side of the mountains, it was a C64 with a tape drive. By now I was experimenting with programming directly in hexadecimal machine assembly. Then suddenly I wasn't cool. I wasn't a jock, I wasn't a prep (though all my classes were college prep level) I was a puzzle piece that didn't go with what was in the box. That persisted for the rest of my public school career. At least most of my teachers understood.

Fast forward and I dropped $3000 on my own first computer, a fully state of the art Tandy running Windows 3.1 and MSDOS5.0. Microsoft Works supplanted Appleworks and none of my BASIC worked in QBASIC. The architecture was completely alien and derailed me totally in programming. I was lost and demoted to lowly user. Skip more years and the Tandy no longer had it's original CPU, there was a 100mhz overclock chip, the RAM was maxed out to 32meg and I convinced the BIOS to read a hard drive that was almost 2gig. It ran Win95, the 5.25 floppy bay had been exchanged for a used 12x CDROM, a 1x external parallel port CD burner was added and an external 56K data/fax modem. It ran AOL3.0 and AOL4.0 and I started to hear about Linux. I ripped my first CD track by hacking the line out port of the CDROM to the line in port of my SoundBlasterPRO card and opening Sound Recorder.

Fifty bucks at a swap meet and a little patience later saw me running RedHat on a former IBM desktop fitted with 100meg of ram, a 16gig fireball hard drive and a MachZ overdrive CPU. AOL was ditched for freewwweb with PPP work-around to connect to the internet. For almost two years I didn't have to pay for internet connection. Amazon started selling books and I dropped coin on C++ manuals, downloaded compilers and learned how to really rip CDs and did my first Linux scripts to rip and code MP3s. Winamp was my friend. I switched from Pirch98 to XChat in Linux. I started kernel tweaking. That computer eventually went back to Win98 and then hit a dumpster this past January.

So where am I at?

Usually every two years my job falls apart and I wind up doing a 180 flip in the next job. I've been at Quad/Graphics in the pressroom for four years now. I have come to the conclusion I am running out of challenges, or the challenges to come are predictable. Life kicked me in the 'nards back in May, then June, then yet again in July.

I have a good position at work, but the times are changing. Chaos is a foe, that is certain, but at times things are revealed with a sudden clarity. There are a lot of benefits available to me at work. I am tied up with a debt management program for about the next five years. So where should I, or could I, be in two years? Four years? There is a brass ring within reach here.

So I had a brief talk with my "talent specialist" at work. He also happens to be the man that did my interview four years ago, and remembered me clearly. He is going to go to bat with me to talk with the bosses to get me scheduling work arounds so I can attend classes. Further, I am fully qualified for 100% tuition reimbursement (up to $4K per year, $15K lifetime benefit) I just have to maintain a B average or better and pay for the course up front.

Here's my plan: he's going to put together a list of classes for me to look through starting in the spring semester. I also qualify for a scale pay rate increase which at this point I absolutely need to survive and keep a roof over my head. It's a helluva chance, I don't even have my own place anymore. There's no guarantee I'll get the raise. I'm owed it, I deserve it, I've worked for it and by all rights should get it. Further I do have a learning disability, there is only one way I pick up things, but then again, once I've hit the EUREKA! stage it's never completely forgotten either. Can I swing B averages in college level classes after having been out of school for 18 years? Only one way to find out. Hang on, it's likely going to be a wild ride. To do what I'd like to I need a 4 year degree. That's right, it's a big brass ring. Four years of ugly then suddenly debt free and with the potential to upgrade the job making TWICE or THRICE what I make now.

Talk about jumping in with both feet eh?