I've been doing a lot of thinking over the last 4 weeks. It seems in the debate between myself and me, we have reached an impass.

On the one hand, engineering is a pretty posh setup. You go in, you sit at a desk, and you tickle little cleverly arranged pieces of plastic all day. And they pay you out the wazoo to do so. Sometimes you go from tickling the plastic pieces to massaging them, and sometimes you pound them through the desk. Usually it's calm, but never relaxing. Being what amounts to a grunt (because your project management is severly abusing your position as one of the most competent people on the team), you don't get a lot of exposure to customers, and not that I really want any exposure to customers because if I really told them what goes on in our labs, they wouldn't buy a cent's worth of our product. And all we ever seem to hear from our customers is, "Hey, this is broken!" and "We need it to do this, and we need it now!" I get enough of that from our QA people.

On the other hand, culinary arts provides more immediate job satisfaction (or even job satisfaction at all). You bake something, you put it out on display, and people come in and try your new recipe, and they rave about it while standing in line waiting for their coffee to come up. You see the regulars come in every morning, and a lot of them come in looking for something new, something different. "Here, try this new recipe." "MmmmmMMMMmmmm!" Or, "You make the carrot cake, right? That carrot cake is SOOOO good!" I smile and humbly say, "Thank you!" and the customer walks away with a cup of coffee and a smile on their face, and I saunter back to the kitchen thinking, "Yeah, baby! I made somebody happy! I made a difference in somebody's life!" The downside, unfortunately, is that it pays next to nothing. Oh, that it were a profitable scheme!

So in the end, would I sacrifice happiness for financial security? Or do I follow a dream and live in poverty? Woe is me!

I'm still a geek though. Once a geek, always a geek (or something like that).

¶ 10:14 AM