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You Think Your Job is Hard? Pshaw.

Baby Boomer Going Like Sixty Posted on by

Here’s a little meme deal I picked up on and thought I would give it a go. Heads or Tails provides a theme to write about on Tuesday. Today the theme is “jobs” – about my job or one I have had.
I was an architect in Santa Monica, CA early in my career. It was a pretty good gig, I had a nice home office in addition to a downtown location. Life was good until my wife died. I thought about giving it all up, but I had a great housekeeper who helped me put one foot in front of the other until I was able to live with the loss. My three boys and I pretty much drove her crazy.
I almost gave up the whole deal when a big client asked me to redesign a building and “look the other way” on some specs that I thought were important – if not required. He fired our firm and hired another, but on Christmas Day, the building had a massive failure. He called me to consult and while inside, another collapse had us trapped for a few wild hours.
I had met and married a woman and her three great girls.
It was a lively time with my three sons and her three daughters, all about the same ages, going thru girl things and boy things and learning to live together in a three bedroom home.
For a while, before our oldest boy left for college, my wife’s young cousin moved in for a brief stay.
Hardly a day goes by when I’m not reminded of those days as an architect.

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Comments

You Think Your Job is Hard? Pshaw. — 20 Comments

  1. Sounds like standing up for the right thing paid off. An amalgamated family like that takes everything you have ever learned on the job and then some.

  4. You left out the part where you were secretly gay and anguished for all those years, until at last in the late 1980s you got that foolish-looking perm and grew a porn-star mustache to tell the whole world who you REALLY were.

    (Um…I don’t think some of your commenters are following along very closely)

    Brian’s last blog post..To Those Who Sacrifice

  5. @Vic Grace: I was always up for principals
    @Milet: There was a lot a left out that wasn’t job related.
    @Kim: Link? what link?
    @Brian: Yes, go on…

  7. Hahaa! I was thinking while reading along that this sounded awfully familiar. 😉

    Welcome to Heads Or Tails! I’ll get you added to the blogroll right away and will look forward to reading future posts.

    Skittles’s last blog post..Just A Quickie

  8. @Gretchen: Just to be clear: you’re talking about Mike Brady.
    @Skittles: I was going to do Make Room For Daddy, but he didn’t work did he? Could have done I Love Lucy, but too much of a stretch to think I was a Cuban singer.

  9. I so totally know that, and Robert Reed was so totally a secret fairy. The best acting he ever did on that show was to feign sexual interest in Florence Henderson. P.S., has any couple in television history had such mutual bad hairdos? (After he got his man-perm, I mean.)

    Gretchen’s last blog post..The Starbucks Experience.

  13. I am so glad you joined Heads or Tails, great bit of humor here.
    I being a serious BB fan was so aware, you forgot so much about the challenges of your job, like when you took your son to work with you, and then later little Cousin Oliver. But, I realize you could have written a novel about your life as an architect.
    You know because of you I almost wanted to be an architect, but then I fell in love with Davey Jones, and it was all Marcia, Marcia, Marcia…so I had to find other dreams, so I became a hippie and live my life surfing in Hawaii now, and collecting mysterious tikis.

    Sassy Mama Bear’s last blog post..Heads or Tails #16 ~ Workin’ 9 to 5

  14. @Sassy Mama Bear: Are you Jack Lord? Don Ho? If so, Do you smell bad because you are dead?
    I didn’t forget about Oliver, just a brief mention. He had nothing to do with job…
    Thanks, this could turn out to be a lot of fun. Hope others will join in! Took me a while.

    Hey! Do I have the linking right? I find it really confusing.

  17. Cousin Oliver was a total shark jump. (Wiki “jump the shark” if you don’t know what I mean; it actually refers to “Cousin Oliver Syndrome”.)

    P.S.: Hee. You said getting it in the end.

    Gretchen’s last blog post..The Starbucks Experience.

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