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Jul. 10th, 2012 08:58 amI realized this morning, walking to the copy shop and back with gorgeous versions of my stuff under my arm, that my best jobs I've been working myself out of, kind of from day 1
I worked with a guy who'd written his own program and was selling it out of his office at university. He hired me, and together we kept hiring people who would do pieces of the job I'd originally done as a cartographical maid of all work, until 4 years later, all my work was done by other people, I was done, and there were 30 people in the office.
I was a consultant at MBL in Woods Hole, and they wanted to make more (moar!!) maps faster, so I brought some software, and showed them how to use what they had, and 18 months later I was done
I was a consultant with some cranberry people (yeah, them, but I'm not sup[posed to say so), and they also wanted moar, faster maps, so together we built a RFP that would ask the questions they wanted answered, and only one group answered the questions, and I was done
The reason I started thinking about this is Aerin going to school in the fall, and I'm not quite done with her yet - she's not very good at remembering to eat, or feeding herself, but she has a lot of other good stuff down, and eventually she will be out from under me and Al, and living her own life, and we'll be... done?
The stuff I hated never stopped. Selling books. working retail. managing an enormous project with no end date (psychotic managers did not make that any better)
The early parenting days had that kind of endless repitition feel to them, but now those days are fled, and I can see that at some point, we'll be irrelevant. Beloved (I hope), and haunting them in ways they never expected (I still clap my hand over my mouth when my mother comes out) but really, pretty much irrelevant.
Maybe the lesson I should draw from this is that I always do better with an end date. I dunno.
I worked with a guy who'd written his own program and was selling it out of his office at university. He hired me, and together we kept hiring people who would do pieces of the job I'd originally done as a cartographical maid of all work, until 4 years later, all my work was done by other people, I was done, and there were 30 people in the office.
I was a consultant at MBL in Woods Hole, and they wanted to make more (moar!!) maps faster, so I brought some software, and showed them how to use what they had, and 18 months later I was done
I was a consultant with some cranberry people (yeah, them, but I'm not sup[posed to say so), and they also wanted moar, faster maps, so together we built a RFP that would ask the questions they wanted answered, and only one group answered the questions, and I was done
The reason I started thinking about this is Aerin going to school in the fall, and I'm not quite done with her yet - she's not very good at remembering to eat, or feeding herself, but she has a lot of other good stuff down, and eventually she will be out from under me and Al, and living her own life, and we'll be... done?
The stuff I hated never stopped. Selling books. working retail. managing an enormous project with no end date (psychotic managers did not make that any better)
The early parenting days had that kind of endless repitition feel to them, but now those days are fled, and I can see that at some point, we'll be irrelevant. Beloved (I hope), and haunting them in ways they never expected (I still clap my hand over my mouth when my mother comes out) but really, pretty much irrelevant.
Maybe the lesson I should draw from this is that I always do better with an end date. I dunno.
