The University Of Tennessee Equipment Inventory Change: Fill & Download for Free

Because, ironically, many creative people are not all that creative about finding jobs that allow creative work. You can be a creative in any job, to some degree. So make the best of opportunities that you get, and the opportunities will get better. Too many creative people want unlimited creative license on their first job. If that's your requirement, you probably should start your own form of self employment. That may be a better investment than a college education, as colleges have inflated their prices and lowered their standards over the years. So if you are truly creative, create your own opportunities, and don't depend on somebody else "giving" you a top level creative job when you don't even have "apprentice" level experience.I'm 62, and have had only a moderately successful career. However, I found job satisfaction of some degree and creative opportunities at almost every step of my career:when I was very young, I picked and sold blackberries, made crafts which I sold door to door, sold greeting cards door to door, shoveled snow (again door to door solicitation.) My creative efforts were focused on my "presentation", and to experiment at what worked best, and what prices were optimal.My first job in high school was mopping a restaurant. My creative efforts were directed at ways to do it quicker and better.I worked at a car wash, and my efforts were generally focused on learning to be quicker and more thorough.I worked at a fruit stand, stocking and selling fruit, and my efforts were to mainly to enjoy the fresh air, the interaction with people of all sorts.Pretty much the same thing at an A&W Root Beer stand.I worked one summer at the food concession in a drive in theater. Emphasis on learning to provide the fastest and best service possible.I did get a choice contract job with a GE Jet Engine plant, where they sent me stacks of computer printout for me to graph at a piecework rate, I think $3/Graph. I could do a graph in maybe 15 or 20 minutes on average. I asked why the didn't use a computer plotter, and do it directly, and got my first lesson in corporate inertia: While it's possible, we just need you to do it this way! Don't look a gift horse in the mouth!These may seem like menial jobs to you, and to a large extent they were. But they provided job experience, some spending money, and money for college, and opportunities to relate to "the common man". (As a "gifted student" at a good high school, I tended to hang out with a pretty elite crowd, in terms of creativity, and learning how a wider cross section of people thinks was a good education in itself)In 1969, the summer before college, I worked in a plastics injection molding factory. I had to relieve the workers at every injection mold in the factory, so I saw a wide variety of mold designs, maintained a lot of big hot equipment, and got to have a lot of fun driving a forklift, with the intellectual challenge of how to salvage, repackage and restack tons of pallets of very expensive plastics. Sort of like the child's game of pick-up-sticks. with the complication that the fork lifts we used didn't have enough degrees of freedom to do the job in a natural way. Creative use of levers, inertia, and other physical issues.While freshman and sophomore years in college, I did dishes, fried fish in a seafood restaurant. Even as a dishwasher and cook, I found creative outlet in thinking about my job, and how to do it as well as possible. How could I be more efficient, more sanitary, cleaner, faster, and make the food taste as good as possible?I had long been a boy scout, and had lots of camping and whitewater canoe experience, so I got a job teaching fishing, rowing, and canoeing at a boy scout summer camp. Figuring out effective ways to enforce safety rules and lifeguard boys on a large pond and effectively teach the related skills for merit badges was an opportunity for lots of creativity, as was the opportunity to drive a war surplus jeep with a bad starter. (Finding the optimal place to park to push start a jeep in an unpaved environment can be challenging!)I worked as gas jockey, then "assistant manager" in a gas station. Assistant manager meant that I did books and inventory and ordering for the manager. In this position I increased my mechanical skills by doing what repair/service I could as an untrained mechanic, changing oil, tires, replacing belts, hoses and bulbs, and sometimes diagnosing ignition problems, fuel problems, and such.It was in college that I got the "photography" bug, as I helped my girlfriend lug her big heavy view camera around campus and town. I never took photos or did any darkroom work, but it was then that I first became a true photographer, which is very much about learning to see, and aesthetic perception.I dropped out of school from lack of motivation, distracted by a rotten love life, my girlfriend had dumped me!I joined the Navy, and went to Electronic Tech School, and also worked as janitor, librarian, security guard, and tutor.When I got out of the navy, I worked as a TV repairman and a telephone system installer.I went back to finish college, having married a wonderful girl while I was in the navy. While in school (Switching major from Engineering Physics to Math and Physics Education) I also worked as assistant manager of a gas station. I had to carry a pistol, and take the money home with me late at night on a bicycle. I became creative about being very alert to possible threats! I also continued to learn about people and auto maintenance.I also held a job, technically self employed, insulating tenement housing that was being renovated. That job never paid well, but I certainly exercised as much creative energy as possible learning to do it better.I also worked for a small industrial company, helping them build their factory before they went operational, doing plumbing, electrical work, setting up machinery.Finally, I graduated, and got a job as a Math teacher at an inner city junior high school, and confirmed what I knew: A "creative" teacher is not necessarily good at classroom management and discipline. I knew for my sake, and my kid's sake that I had to quit.While a teacher, I worked one summer at a beer can manufacturing company,Sometime around this time, I worked as a "Punch out man", who works for a contractor, and makes all the final repairs and touch up necessary for the final sale of a home.So I got a job as a Machinist programmer/operator, doing CAD/CAM on a numerical control traveling wire Electrostatic Discharge Machine. I maintained and aligned the machine, and programmed and cut tooling for plastics extrusion tooling. I improved their standard programming techniques, including meta-programming to take some of the grunt-work out of typing the programs by writing a basic language program to generate a template of the program.On my own time I did film photograhy, and silk screen graphics, and offset printing, and experimented with mathematical stained glass sculptures based on the semi-regular solids.(I taught myself basic to do this, after I discovered that they were using basic as an editor to write the APT language NC program.)I moved to Texas to the "recession proof" (NOT!) oil industry, and learned to program in a more advanced CAD/CAM program for lathes and mills. We mainly made spherical blowout preventers and conventional gate valves.Shortly afterwards, the "recession proof" oil industry went totally bust, and half the town was out of work.I worked for a while as a painter's helper and trash-to-the dump guy. Very difficult, and this was one of the few jobs (along with teaching) where creativity and hard work would not compensate for a lack of "native" occupational gifts.I went to Radio Shack and taught Basic, Word Processing, and spreadsheets. (Which I had to learn better) for a while, and then quit when I landed a job at a university related Labor Think Tank as an Audio-visual Assistant. I did bulk mail, did still and video photography of our events, and put together audio-visual presentations written by our resident labor experts.I bought a Commodore VIC 20 and honed my programming skills.Then got a job with continuing education at a local state university, and taught basic programming and word processing and spreadsheets to adult students.I could no longer afford to do my photography, but my wife I home schooled our kids, and ran a home school support group/coop which satisfied lots of my urges to teach. We developed our own eclectic curriculum and enrichment experiences, and our kids did extremely well, learning to love education and reading and math and science. The home schooling started out in a hostile "underground" environment, when Texas was persecuting home schoolers, and we were part of the efforts that helped "legalized" home schooling in Texas.I got an opportunity to be a one man PC IT department for an industrial painting company, and learned advanced spreadsheet programming, which I used to support engineering and office staff, and word processing, and researched and edited a company manual on Asbestos Removal Safety for the that portion of their work. I learnd dBase II, III, and finally Clipper programming, and also a 4GL Database program called Focus. I learned Pascal to effectively format printing of somewhat complex time sheets required by one oil company our company contracted for. Clipper was my "ultimate" program, because I could legally distribute copies of any program I could write, so it was much more cost effective for the corporation.I moved to Atlanta, and helped write and maintain a very sophisticated and complicated peanut procurement program, and upgraded my self-taught programming skills.Shortening the story, I did some consulting database programming, and statistics for insurance companies, a cancer related non-profit group, for Tennessee Valley transportation department, for Centers for Disease control, and for retail Point of sale systems, particularly the synchronization of corporate data at local retailers. I learned Sybase SQL and Powerbuilder, Oracle SQL, Foxpro windows/dbase clone, and SQL database management tools. Finally, I worked for an insurance company, and maintained their agency/agent database with competing users: A. the sales team, which needed ad-hoc data B. the compliance/legal team, which required very controlled and regulated use of the data. I added a third layer, the agents and agencies, who needed free internet access to the data when they signed up to sell our insurance, and the ability to update it as necessary. Data sync between these three levels was a very complex job.The technical programming skills I used provide plenty of opportunities for creative system analysis, program design, advanced troubleshooting, web design, and so on.When our kids finished college, I bought a camera and used it quite a bit, but was still restricted by the cost of film, and not having a darkroom. Finally, in 2003, digital cameras began to approach the quality of film, and I could afford to get back into photograph in a serious way. Here is my best photo from 2003:It's a high speed flash photo of an Arizona hummingbird species, I traveled from Georgia to Arizona to spend a week learning to take photos like this:Broadbill Hummingbird with Pollen CapBlue Throated HummingbirdHummingbirds are my favorite male models, obviously. I'm a hummingbird fanatic. Here a somewhat recent landscape image and an abstract version of a house I shot yesterday.Black Canyon of the Gunnison NPLush Home in Rural Small TownIn summary, the road to creative opportunities is usually a long and tedious road, with many branches and meanderings. It's best to enjoy the journey, and just make sure that at every fork in the road, you choose the direction that is likely to get you closer to that goal. You won't usually get your dream job unless you're in the 99.9%, or have seriously good "good ole boy" network connections.Postscript: It's 3 years after I originally posted this. I'm almost 65 and I have a disability that limits my ability to travel and camp in pursuit of photography. I find that much of my creativity goes to finding ways to make accommodations to my life and environment to allow me to continue to function as best I can. Being creative is all about maximizing what is good, and minimizing what is bad, to give your life optimum richness. It will be a worthwhile endeavor to be as creative as I can until the day that I die. I don't need a job or even a hobby to achieve that goal.