#wheniwas15
#wheniwas15 I was convinced that I wanted to be either a photographer or cinematographer. I had always been into photography when I was young and when my uncle gave me all the equipment from his dark room at around 13, I was well and truly hooked. When I was 17, I applied to and was accepted into Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, CA and while I was thrilled, my parents were not. My Mother really wanted me to go into medicine. In an attempt to spark my interest, she dragged me to the hospital where she worked and deposited me with various doctors as kind of friends and family internship in the summer before my senior year of high school. I'm still afraid of hospitals. My Father apparently harbored dreams of me following in his footsteps and decided to hijack the summer after I graduated by dragging me to the warehouse of an electrical supply company where he was president so I could work my way up, as he had. While I had enormous respect for my Father and his rise from a high school dropout to the president of a company, I had exactly zero interest in selling electrical gear to construction companies.
As young people do, I rebelled.
Convinced my parents were not going to support my desire to go into photography (or Santa Barbara), I started looking for a job that would allow me to go to school and work to support myself at the same time. I saw an ad in the paper which turned out to be a recruiting ad in disguise. The recruiter I had is almost certainly a billionaire by now because he did one hell of a sales job. The process happened so quickly and so unconsciously that I didn't tell anyone, including my parents that I was even thinking about the military let alone talking to a recruiter. I told my parents the night before I left for basic training which happened to be the same day I took the oath in the recruiting office in downtown Dallas. By pure coincidence, the recruiting office was mere blocks from the warehouse where I'd spent the summer moving boxes for my Father. It took at least 2 years for my parents to get over that one.
In the end, it worked out well. The service turned out to be exactly what I needed and although I still continued to enjoy photography for many years after that, I quickly learned that my real passion was computers. I was fortunate enough to work on 3 of Navy's best computer systems including the Univac 1219B (a first gen digital computer about the size of a full-size refrigerator), A Sperry-Univac UYK-20 (16-bit digital microprocessor that was about the size of a dorm-room fridge) and the Sperry-Univac UYK-7 which was the 32-bit microprocessor.
I remained in the service for 10 years and served on two guided-missile destroyers stationed in Yokosuka, Japan (3 yrs) and Norfolk, Va (3 yrs) prior to teaching advanced C-school for my final 3 years in the service (I spent a year in school prior to being deployed to Japan). After the service, I joined MCI (1993) just as things in the telecom world were really starting to get interesting.
I'm not sure whatever became of my dark room. Pretty sure it was disposed of along with my motorcycles when my parents were still mad. :)