Moments like these, when I gaze into the horizon, always infuse me with feelings of time long gone, places long forgotten, places I want to be and what it is that makes me.. me.

I really hate the saying “it is what is is”, when it’s applied to situation or to the outcomes of life events or so. I used to think that one should not regret anything in their lives, for those times are away now, and there’s nothing one can do about them.

I read an interview of the band Tiamat’s vocalist. He lives in Greece now, and said that he can’t go back to his original home of Sweden, because he sees too many things that make him question the choices he has made. This made me think about the choices I’ve made..

Then, last March, I heard “Ah, to go back with what I know now..”

If I could go back with what I know now, knowing that even if I’d change the moment, I would not lose my memories of the time in this “timeline”, would I? Yes and no. There are things I regret saying and doing, things that I curse afterwards on being part of, words spoken that I have later realized where faulty. Sometimes I wish I could go back.. not to fix things in a total different way, but to approach things in a different angle. Starting things with different tones and words..

Yeah, easy to say now, now that enough time has passed to make me understand how locked up and tired things and people were back then. Things like that make you wonder if you can ever truly understand anything the moment it’s going on, but only after it’s passed and you’ve impotently hammered the floors with your fists in tears and despair. Funny how time gives you perspective.

So would I change anything? Would you change anything? Is there any insight to be gained from pondering that? All we can do, is to move on and remember the cruelest lesson.. of once having it all, only to let it slip past our fingers because of petty things. It’s not the loss.. but the understanding of what you had, once. And.. that life goes on, and even back then, as now, we make the best of it.

That is not to say that what I have now is less in worth, quite the contrary.

Above all, the choices I’ve made have been made, I am here now, and I am happy, looking towards the future, again to the moon and to the horizon.. where the wild things are..

-Aki

I’ve been told many times on how challenging my work must be. A friend of mine made me feel awkward when he talked about me like being some sort of guru.

I think otherwise, though. I’ve said out loud, perhaps too many times, that “a monkey could do this job”. I’ve never found my line of work(engineering) to be difficult or especially talent-demanding, and I’m an utter dork.

People say they wouldn’t be able to work on engineering or technical stuff because of math involved. Well, let me burst that bubble. Mechanical designers and engineers rarely calculate anything themselves. In fact, it’s a rare situation when we will use an actual calculator.

The bottom idea on doing that is simple; people make mistakes. The less people calculate things themselves and the more bulletproof the computer-aided route is, the less there are collapsed buildings or accidents on factories etc. Also, I have never met a guy who’d really enjoy calculating some structural or mechanical analyses. It gets boring really fast, since most of the work there is doing the same things in the previous project. Honestly, usually people look how things were designed in the past and copy paste. It saves time and since it worked just fine the last time, there’s no reason to assume it wouldn’t work out just fine this time. =)

Now, this goes for any line of work(save doctors and genuinely important jobs).. they are normal people just like you. Those people likely aren’t smarter than you are, they aren’t necessarily more talented, but they’ve just been on that line of work long enough to learn the routines of that job and know what doesn’t work and does work. I remember how scared I was back in the first day on the job that I had actually studied for. I found out that it really was pretty simple and it didn’t have that much to do with the things on my classes, than looking how things had been done before and understanding the key points in that

My uni degree didn’t teach me much about the actual work. Education is more of a framework for a job, and you learn most of that job by working, learning by doing. I’ve asked around about people’s student times and every one of them has said that the degree wasn’t mandatory in any single topic. Hell, most people don’t even love the job that much. It’s just a job, or as one of my old co-workers said “It gives me enough to buy nice things for the woman I love and take the boys to a hockey game.”

In my honest opinion, you can learn any line of work by just working. Sure, doctors and the like are a different case, but have you seen the news of fake doctors who’ve worked for decades without any trouble? Normal blue/white-collar work usually doesn’t have people’s lives on the line day by day, so I daresay I could train a normal guy or girl to work as an excellent engineer. I’d show the typical mechanical drawings and explain what the different things in the drawings mean. And with that, it would open up as “This isn’t that hard” Of course not! The people who made it are normal people like you and me.

The point in that, as with anything, is the motivation in the employee. If you are interested in some line of work, I think you can really achieve it. Would I be a bad employee if I’d lay that out in the first interview? Would it be too time-consuming to train? I really don’t think so.