What do you want to do when you grow up?

Ages ago, when I had been working maybe four years at my current company, a manager ask me what I wanted to do with my career. I can't remember how he phrased it, but thinking back, I definitely misunderstood the question. My answer was not what he expected. I told him I wanted to be a Private Investigator. He got this weird look on his face, but it never dawned on me that it was a wrong answer. Instead, i gave him my credentials. I realize now that he wanted me to tell him what I wanted for my future in the company. I've thought about that incident many times and can you believe it has taken me ten years to figure out what I should have said? I have gotten much better at answering questions like that these days, you can be sure of it.
At the time, my son was about two years old. My husband was as he is today; blind and diabetic and needing help. Back then he was working remotely for a large communications company as a trainer. He was much more independent then than he is now.

I was your typical working mom, an eight to five person; my family was my absolute first priority. If i worked overtime I worked my lunch hour, no exceptions. I told my boss that was the best I could do and that was all I would do. When I got to work , I worked my ass off. At 5:05pm I was out the door. My productivity was through the roof, and I had pretty good results. I was totally stressed and internalized everything, but that's just me and I am working on it because I need to change.

One of my favorite movies is "Twelve Days of Condor" (correction: Three Days of Condor, per anonymous) with Robert Redford. I think it came out in the 80's, and as the story goes, his character worked for the CIA reading fiction to look for information about terrorist plots, whatever. He goes out for Chinese (take out - lunch i mean) and when he returns everybody in his office has been shot / killed. So then he goes on a mission to find out what is going on, and who killed his co-workers. He takes on aliases, gets into offices disguised as a telephone company journeyman, or technicians, and eventually figures it out. I loved this movie because I wanted to be him. I loved that he knew how to be a chameleon and used disguises and blended in. I wanted to do that.

I've worked for my current employer almost 19 years, but before landing here I had lots of jobs. I figured I could use my experiences in all these places for my dream job of Private Investigator. Plus, there are so many shows on TV about Private Investigating I figured I knew what it took to do the job. I learn alot from TV.

So here it is: I worked for the Clerk of Courts office in Cleveland, the Civil Courts, in billing. Among other things, I would look up the divorce records for my friends to tell them whether the guy they were dating was really divorced. There were a few times when I would show someone their files. Many times the individual did not know the status of their case until they got billed. I am not sure that any of what I did was legal, but I found my access to this kind of information very exciting. I worked as a receptionist / secretary for the Great Lakes Shakespeare Theatre Company. I dated just about every guy in the office plus I realized that image was everything and you could create your own persona. Everybody I worked with did. I became the chauffeur for a blind man and learned how to be invisible. I worked at AT&T and did telephone fraud investigation and was pretty good at it. Its surprising how much people will tell you without realizing what they are telling you. I was a DOCUMENTATION SCIENTIST at a Pharmaceutical company. My ability to spot typo's in script as it was running down a screen landed me my a job in PC Support at the company I work at now. (Back then all the configuration files and PC programs were written as batch files (like flat text files) and you could watch them as they executed on the screen.) So I felt that I had done quite a few different things in my life and had a rich background to mine from if I needed some kind of technical pseudo persona, and this would perfectly suit the kind of qualifications and characteristics needed to be a top notch PI.

In retrospect, I think that manager treated me differently after that meeting. I think that is when he became my advocate. Its probably because he realized he couldn't motivate me with threats or fear of losing my job. He even defended me once. He told someone that if they didn't work with me they would end up working without me so the guy better make an effort and work with me. That was nice. And, he asked me if I would consider a management position. Then we moved to Maryland so I had to look for another job. I stayed with the same employer. I have since given up the idea of being a Private Detective. I've decided its too dangerous and I don't want to be in business for myself. I spend most of my energies now checking up on my son, but he's growing up and will be leaving home soon, so who knows.