Was thrown into a pen and paper drafting class in middle school because the other popular electives were full. Hated it at first because it was just drawing block letters over and over, like it was kindergarten all over again. And then we drew isometric views of simple block shapes.

But the end of the semester, the stuff we were working on was much more intricate. I ended up taking the more advanced drafting courses in high school that taught autocad. Took some classes in college that taught solid works and eventually ended up learning 3DS Max and Maya. Also learned blender on my own. Anyway, tl:dr I hated drafting at first, thought it was a bunch of bullshit. Ended up really enjoying it, and it was my gateway into learning 3d modeling.

Followed girl to college (was madly in love and pretty dumb). Girl broke up with me. Wouldn’t have gone to a top tier grad school if not for the research I did at that college. Wouldn’t have met my wife in grad school. Wouldn’t have been able to leverage that education to get a great job. Wouldn’t have my life if not for that chick. Crazy to think about. “A butterfly flaps its wings” type shit.

2020, covid really starting to affect the company I worked for. And there was a townhall meeting where it was announced that there would be layoffs. (This was long after management had taken a pretty big pay cut to reduce cost. To be fair, they did right by us for as long as they could).

I was among the last to join the company, being hired despite there technically being a hiring freeze in effect (it helps to know people), so I assumed I’d be among the first ones to go.

Shortly after the townhall I got a phone from my manager. “Shit, here comes the call” I thought to myself. He was offering me a promotion instead.

Turned out that the guy whos position I’d been offered had been open about wanting to leave for a while, and he had chosen to do so now to save one headcount for the layoffs. But his position still needed to be filled, so they picked someone from the department that was most likely to see the most layoffs. And that was my department.

I was working for a big company, middle upper level technical position.One of my ex co-workers went to work for Disney. He hooked me up with an interview. They flew me in, rented me a car.

They brought me in to the interview. I sat around for about an hour and a half before they were ready. They came in and grilled me on uncommon proprietary Linux management packages. At the time I was managing a couple of 10,000 node clusters, had been running them for years. Of the four guys in the interview three of them just dismissed me. After the interview I headed out, wasn’t really mad but I was pretty disappointed the fourth guy pulled me aside and said I think they were being extremely unfair to you in there if you are really interested in trying to work your way in here reach out to me and I can advocate for you.

After the interview I farted around LA for a couple of hours and then flew home.

After some reflection I realized I really didn’t want to work with those other three guys. I never reached back out.

4 months later Disney dissolved that department.

I got pulled over and the cop found a 1/2 gram of pot in my car (a very small amount), which ended up with me having to do community service and take regular drug tests. I was working as a line cook at the time, but being forced to stop smoking weed gave me the push to finally apply for an entry level manufacturing position at a local company who does drug tests. Years later I still work there, but as a software engineer, and attending online college. I wouldn’t quite say I’m grateful about the ass backwards drug laws and invasive drug screening, but I really can’t argue that my current situation is a lot better than it was back then. Without that event, I might still be working random entry level jobs.