Just some rambling thoughts..

When I was younger, I went to a trade/business school and earned a diploma for Travel and Airline. I never pursued this career because, at the age of 20, life was moving faster than I had originally planned. I found myself suddenly married, (the guy I met the previous summer left his homeland and family to marry me), and we were still living in my parents home, both of us looking for employment. Two years later, we actually both had two decent, good paying jobs, moving into our place and paying a mortgage, and my first born, Elizabeth was on the way. I had landed a great secretarial government county job, with insurance, and my dad told me to “never leave it” because I was “set for life” there. Well, guess what? 23 years later, I’m still working there.

If I were to leave where I worked, I don’t think my diploma for Travel and Airline would be worth much today. I’m guessing ticketing procedures have changed in the last 20+ years.. There was a time when I wanted to be a travel agent, or work on a cruise ship. But do people really use travel agents anymore? In this day in age, most everyone books their vacations online. I used a travel agent for my last vacation, and I really don’t know why. The travel agent proved to be pretty useless to us when it came to the seating arrangements on the plane. The whole purpose of booking a flight with my mother was so she wouldn’t be flying “alone” and after explaining this fact over and over again, our agent still seated my mother 5 rows ahead of us. She also booked my 6 year son’s seat two rows ahead of mine, which didn’t make much sense either. Thankfully we got to the airport on time, and we were able to change at least my son’s seating. As for my mom’s seat, she sat by an older gentlemen, ahead of me, and I could see only the top of her head. I went down the aisle a few times to make sure she was alive because she hardly moved from her seat!

I heard the other day that JCPenny was getting rid of their catalogue, and this made me sad. I remember when we had the Sears catalogue AND even the Montgomery Ward (aka Monkey Wards) catalogue growing up---both gone as well. They were all a source of great entertainment for me as a child. I made countless paper dolls from them, and even glued them to cardboard. They interacted with my Barbie dolls, and were the “one dimensional neighbors” that lived down the street, that never sat down. (When you are glued to cardboard, it is very difficult.) Now JCPenny catalogue is going away, and there is even word that the Yellow Pages/phone book is going out the door. Seriously, I never use my phone book, and I think there are 3 years worth of them in my closet, but I remember sitting on them when I was a child at the kitchen table. Sigh….

Every now and then, our kids will ask us an off the wall question that we just don’t know the answer to. My husband’s favorite answer is: “Look it up on the internet!”
Kids nowadays just don’t know how good they have it. I remember having to go to the library and using the copy machine to copy important information from books to complete my reports for school, and if that wasn’t available, I would go through Grandma Costa’s old prized encyclopedia collection from 1952. Can you still buy encyclopedias nowadays? I wonder…

I don’t know where I’m going with this entry…. Lots of changes are, and is going on, and I think I’m feeling a little burned and fed up in my current, old position. I think I need a change, but 23 years..damn---it all went much too fast for me. Right now, all I want to do is leave the office and finish reading a book.