06-11-2016, 11:33 PM
Bob Butler 54 Wrote:Hmm…
I had a lousy young childhood. I was a nerd before nerds started projecting their own version of cool. I got my act more or less together my junior year in high school, and pretty much enjoyed social life from there on out, finding various like minded groups to have fun with without too much difficulty.
School was a so so thing as far as grade school 1969 was when all of the weirdness came slamming down. Class was held in a nearby park and just using the playground equipment was pretty common. Actual learning was optional. I'd just crack open science books and mess with those. Jr. high was Fight Club chaos. Those 3 years were the worst. High school as a drugged out scene and pretty pleasant.
Quote:I did a co-op plan through college, going to school for 3 months then alternating with 3 months of work. The co-op jobs paid well in those days.
I did stints of summer and winter break paid internships where my dad work. He worked at a large oil company. The first year made some sort of spectrometer reference stuff. It had paraffin base mixed with standardized oil by element. The guy who invented the stuff showed me how to measure the stuff out so the product would be real accurate. I then got orders and shipped it all over the place. If I got the orders all done, I could just hand out and read books.
Next year, I debugged Fortran programs. The year after that was messing with DOS printer drivers and writing Lotus 123 macros.
Quote: My senior year in college I looked at my tuition bills, looked at my bank account, then went out and bought a brand new car and an organ.
Yeah, $4.00/hr tuition is light on the budget. My parents paid the room and board stuff. That was about $1000/semester.
I used the paper route money , high school job money, and intern money to make the down payment on my first house in post real estate crash Houston. I picked up recent construction 3 bedroom 2 bath foreclosure for $40,000.
Quote: These days, instead of a well paying high tech job, a kid would be trying to get an internship, doing unpaid work for the sort of experience I got paid for? Not right.
One of my Millie nephews, the first one done with college has a nice $20,000 debt chain and live in my sister's basement.
He sort of messed up and majored in history and now works at Macy's. I wonder why colleges offer such go nowhere degrees?
The millenials in the family came out of school with quite a debt burden, while the boomer generation came out fairly clean.
Quote:I came out of college into stagflation and the national malaise era. The ride wasn’t always smooth, but I managed to stay with one high tech military industrial complex job for my entire career. For a while wage- price controls made it fashionable for professionals to jump from company to company. Companies weren’t allowed to give competitive wages to keep professionals, so those who wanted top dollar would change jobs every several years. In the Route 128 high tech environment at least, the professionals had the advantage in job seeking.
The mid to late 1980's seems to be a sweetspot then. I worked for a major oil service company converting code from Fortran to C and at the end of career did Unix sysadmin work. Coding started leaving the US, but we still needed sysadmins. Then the H1-B's went and took that away.
Quote: I eventually retired reasonably comfortably, though at the time it felt more like being the victim of downsizing rather than retirement.
I call that involuntary retirement. I got that one. I work at minimum wage job now and am just holding for SS to kick in. I just have to research how long I think I'll live to sort which option to take.
Quote: While my GI father could count on a job for life from Ma Bell after getting a job shortly after World War II, by the end of my career well paid older professionals were often and systematically let go if they could find youngsters who could do the job almost as well for much less money. I guess you could say I wasn’t totally immune to Reagan’s unravelling era reinvention of the economy to favor the corporations over the workers.
Yeah, globalization sux. The end will be interesting. Company A depends on middle class buyers, however companies B,C... do what company A does so in the end, whenever that will be, no customers since we'll be frequenting 2nd hand stores. Even Wally World can't compete their own stuff to be had at second hand stores. That will be the end result. I do think it's gonna hurt a lot of multinats since they'll be bereft of customers. Blowback's a bitch.
Quote:Music wise, the Beatles were popping out new albums on a regular basis in my youth, while Carol King’s Tapestry was the sound track of my senior year in high school. I know we boomers should not be so very smug about our generation’s music, but no buyer’s remorse there.
I have no buyer's remorse anywhere. Everything from Iron Butterfly to the new stuff now, it's all good. The early 1970's stuff was used to get past the Disco Drought.
Quote:In my youth, NASA was running projects Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. In young adulthood, Mohammad Ali and Secretariat were doing their thing. For a while on any given night on the half hour network TV news coverage, there was 25 minutes of Watergate coverage. They finally did get the (expletive deleted.) I got a favorable number when they did my birth year’s draft lottery. Over my life time, the local pro sports teams have featured Bill Russell, Bobby Orr, Larry Bird and Tom Brady, all with fine supporting casts. The Red Sox even managed to break their 86 year drought. Not bad.
1. Rags does NOT do sports!
2. Headlines remembered: Cayahouga river fire, moon landing, Earth Day, Watergate, end of Nam, Ken State <- weird,
Bi-Centennial, Reagan 1980, Iran Hostage Crisis.
Quote:All in all, I’d say I landed in a pretty good time and place.
Yeah, but there ain't no poll option for that Bob.
---Value Added 