So over the course of the past year or so I’ve had a lot of time to think. Whether it was because Covid is going on, or just because I’m getting older, I really don’t know. In this time of reflection, I came to somewhat of a realization. I’m going to share that realization now.

I want to preface this by saying my dad, and by proxy his side of the family for the most part have not been involved with my life. The details of why are unimportant, but for the most part I more or less forgot they existed when I was growing up. I have nothing against them, and actually with the emergence of things like Facebook I do have some contact with them now. Why this is important is because today I wanted to write about family, and when I say family I mean my mom’s side of the family. I did have contact with them for a majority of my life, and so the past year as I stated has caused me to reflect on that.

I come from a blue-collar family. We weren’t doctor’s or lawyers. My great-grandmother worked in a slaughterhouse in Iowa. Worked there from 12 years old until she retired. Her husband was a block layer. Short of enlistment in the Marines for my grandpa in the 1950s, both of my grandparents worked for Quaker Oats for the majority of their adult lives. Both retired from there. My mom was a Teamster. If it had wheels she could drive it. She still can honestly, but injury from a car accident took her career path in a different direction.

As I stated, my mom was in the Teamsters, and when I was a teenager she started driving a cement mixer. I’m sure you’ve seen them driving around. It’s hard work, those trucks beat your body down, they’re not built for comfort. She’d come home and tell me about her day. Poured a slab for this, or a curb for that. The day-to-day of being a mixer driver.

But I also saw how hard the job was on her. She was commuting at least an hour each way. plus working anywhere from 12 to 16 hours a day, sometimes 6 days a week. To think of it now, I imagine she did it for me. I mean I imagine that’s why most parents do what they do. For their children.

Myself, well I didn’t really want to go that path, I have nothing against manual labor… it’s just hard to put it plainly. I wanted to do something else. What? I had no idea. I liked computers, and my grandma bought me my very first computer when I was 18. I liked computers, video games, and things like that, but I had no idea these were things you could do as a job. I mean obviously, someone does this as a job or they wouldn’t exist. Just seemed unattainable. So I floundered around for a bit. I went to college in Arizona for a for-profit school that really didn’t teach me much more than I had learned by myself to that point, but I got a bunch of debt out of it. That sounded bitter. Maybe a little bit. The problem was when I got out the jobs were hard to come by, more precisely was I went to school for the wrong thing. I wanted to learn to make websites, that was what I had taught myself to make, I should’ve been learning to make software.

As I said, jobs were hard to come by in the field I went to school for and so I had a string of jobs that were more or less forgettable. They were fine for what they were, but I was more or less killing time with them. Something to pay bills. I did have a friend that started a business at one point and I threw my lot in with him. I thought let’s make this the best business in this industry we can. Didn’t pan out that way for reasons I’d rather not divulge other than to say I crossed a line I never should have.

Then I met the woman that would become my wife. after a series of events that would move us away from our hometown, and a brief stint working for the post office I found myself out of work. While I was working for the post office I did take a trip, my wife and I went to California to buy a puppy from a breeder down there. I mapped everything out and I saw the town we were going to didn’t look that far from the ocean, I’ve always loved the ocean — something about it centers me. So I thought lets go down the day before we’re supposed to pick up the puppy. Hang out at the beach and pick up the puppy on the way home the next day. We did, and as I was standing on the beach I thought, this… this is what I want. Staring out at the Pacific I just felt at ease. I decided then and there I wanted to move there. But how? We weren’t rolling in cash. So I thought I should go back to school again. This time for software development. I came home, signed up for online classes, lost my job with the post office, and just became a professional student.

A few months into this journey I was looking through the classifieds section to see what if anything was hiring in the town I lived in when I saw a local web company was hiring for customer service. I had worked in customer service in the past so I got my resume all up to date and sent it in. I’m not sure how many days later I got a call and they said in looking over my resume they were more interested in me as a website builder than as a customer service person. They explained I would have to take a skills assessment but if I passed that, and my interview went well I could be in consideration for that position instead. I figured what do I have to lose, I’ll give it a shot.

I passed that assessment, and I did get that job. I still have that job in fact. For a few years I was cranking out the sites, and as far as I can tell I did a good job of it too. The company has gotten bigger since those early days for me, and I have moved positions from one role to another. My latest role is I make small apps for the websites we create.

It was one night when I was sitting at home with my wife that I realized something. My mom as I stated drove a cement mixer, she was making curbs and things like that you see along the roads. Something that just looked hard to me, and that I just didn’t want to do as a kid. Me… I was making things you see along the information superhighway, aka the internet. It’s funny the things you don’t realize until you do.