Shift Happens..

Growing up I wanted to be be involved in the Theatre, more specifically I wanted to be a costume designer. My mother, being pratical, made me take typing in case things change.
When I took Typing 1 it was on an IBM Selectric typewriter. I was 15 years old. Remember them? My class was the first class with the IBM Selectric at school.

It was the first time I experienced the cutting edge. And it wasn't going to be the last!
I remember the excitement when I learned that I could change the font by changing the ball on the typewriter. My mom learned on a manual typewriter and had one font until the advent of the IBM Selectric.

I remember that summer I got an internship at her company and I thought I had died and gone to heaven with the Olivetti Electric typewriter that sat on my desk. I had 36 Pages of memory! Big deal back then. I could have the typewriter type an address, hit the Control (CTRL) and a letter or a number and it would type the rest! There was Bold, Reverse Print and Itallic too! And it would remember it in the middle of a document. What else would I need? This was the greatest thing to ever happen.

The following school year I learned the limitations of the IBM Selectric, my skills had improved so much that I could type a section, pull my hands off the keyboard and watch the typewriter catch up to me. Then I learned that I had to slow down or the ball would screw up characters... My documents had to be perfect, or I had to start over! There had to be a better way!
There was when I went off to college - my first exposure to a computer! I took business classes along with design classes. College was expensive, so I used my skills. I gave up on the theatre career when I realized that I liked to eat. My first real job was working for a bank in the Training and Development Department. I held the hands of many of the secretarial staff as they were migrated off the IBM Selectric Typewriters to Word Processors. Remember them with the two 5 1/4 disc drives. One with WordPerfect and the other for the documents. And another shift happens...

A year later I moved ty NYC, and I took a job with an IBM XT, 10 MB hard drive, not enought space I had a 40 MB Bernoulli Box. I became an expert at Lotus 1-2-3, I was a spreadsheet queen. I wrote scripts that was so cool at the time. Another shift happened...

I went to Radio City Music Hall and became their Local Area Network Administrator. I became an expert at Networking -- at the time the President of the Music Hall wanted to be able to have his laptop connect to email while he rode in his limo into the office. I spent days researching, at the time the technology wasn't there. Ahead of the curve by a few years -- wonder if he has a Blackberry now? Another example of Shift Happens...

After the Music Hall I expanded my knowledge and moved into training technology. Which evolved into Datawhousing. The technology field changed so much, the training schedule took it's toll and I had to change. Shift happens again.

I find a new career in Real Estate, everything that I learned in my technology career easily applied to what I know. I start to learn more about the Internet and this thing called SEO... The Shift happens again...

Something tells me that it isn't the last time I will experience this ...