Last Smackdown topic, Thursday, June 27: "What would you be doing if you didn't have your current career?"

At the last staff meeting we had here, the head of the department was instituting a new feature of meetings where one section would get up, introduce themselves, say what they did- AND give background on themselves and how they got there. He put it something like this: "Not everybody grows up saying 'I want to work in the office,' they grow up saying they want to be a doctor or baseball player. They kind of stumble into this position." I wouldn't have expected him to be so honest about it.

In the interests of honesty, if I didn't have my current "career", well... to quote Columbine, "Probably sleeping in a cardboard box." This is what saved me from that after the ending of the old one. Had that not ended, I'd probably still be there, being zonked out from waking up at 4 a.m. every morning and once again calling the funeral homes to complain about missing information in the latest run of obituaries.

(Okay, I don't miss that part too much.)

Ideally, where would I be? Well, I've always wanted to be a newspaper columnist, like I've said before. I'd like some job that involved doing interesting research, since I'm good at that and enjoy doing it. If it was online, even better. (Yeah, there's a lot of call for those jobs nowadays...) And working from home would be damn cool to do at some point as well. And I'd get to do writing professionally again. Though I really don't know how I'd find something like that without creating it myself, and I just don't want to freelance. Too hard!

I'm not sure if I want to work with people specifically or not. I liked some things about doing interviews (could be great fun) and wasn't so fond of others (tracking people down). It would be nice to have a writing job that wasn't totally dependent on getting fresh quotes or having to have a local connection. I'm not entirely sure if I want to get back into the media biz or not, exactly. I had a great deal of fun, but it could be nice to try something different. I'm not sure what though- the options are limited around here, it's not like I can just waltz into magazine work or something.

I pretty much figure I'll be here for... awhile, at least. With future life circumstances coming up, I'd prefer to have money over personal fulfillment at the moment. Personal fulfillment at work is not easy to attain anyway, especially when that would involve not-so-moneymaking skills.

I do worry about falling into a trap/rut, though. It's gotta be hard to give up having money to do something like that.

Well, those Smackdown topics sure have been nice to do, for the most part. Made for rather long-ass entries on days when something was actually happening in my life, but did fill in nicely this week when not a whole lot has been happening. I suspect everyone won't want to do one of these again for awhile, though!

My er, big excitement this week besides signing up for craft classes was the bank trouble. My new ATM card finally came in on Monday, and I happily got it authorized, etc. then took out the old card and replaced it with the new.

On Wednesday, Hill and I went out for dinner and I used up the very last of my cash to buy it. I went to hit the bank and put in my card and code. It asked me how much I wanted to take out... and THEN told me I'd forgotten my secret code and it wouldn't work.

Naturally, I freaked out because the old card (which still works) is about to expire at the end of the weekend. I went in to the bank today, only to find out that (a) they changed my PIN, (b) they supposedly sent my new PIN a few days after the card was sent, which I hadn't gotten, and (c) hey, we could just have you pick a PIN here and have it changed on our machine. I say yes to that... and the machine, which according to them is very reliable and hardly ever screws up, promptly crashed multiple times. Now I have to go back in again on Monday, when it'll probably crash again.

Why on earth is it that every time I go in the bank, the computers go down? Bad computer karma?

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