Real Jobs

I was talking via IM to an industry friend of mine in Brussels, when I suddenly came to the realization that since entering the PCB industry in 1989, I have never had what I would consider a "real" job. You know, the kind where you punch in at 7, punch out at 3 (or even 9 to 5), get quarterly reviews and all that.

Not that every job I've had wasn't plenty "real" in the really real kind of sense... First, it was a sleep-deprived, highly caffeinated slog though endless mountains of artwork in a service bureau, then on to the fire-fighting, shifting priority world of a software vendor (it was there, incidentally, in about 1996 when my buddy JP re-intoduced me to Tums and Tylenol as "engineer candy")... now the life of a consultant. I recently read an article about IT consulting subtitled "Why work for someone else 8 hours a day when you can work for yourself 16". It's more like 18, but who's counting.