What jobs have I had?

I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king.

No, wait, those are song lyrics.

I was in the military 20 years plus. Did a bunch of jobs in there, you know? My specialties were war planning, command and control, and disaster recovery operations. And I was a facilitator for team building projects. I was in tactical air forces, space command, military airlift, and special ops.

Before engaging in that occupation — the Air Force — I was a newspaper delivery boy, worked in a grocery store during Christmas, and dug ditches. While out of the military after finishing my first enlistment, I was owner/manager of a small cafe. Cook, cashier, did the books and payroll, cleaned and stocked, and supervised a small group of employees. Since retiring from the Air Force, I worked in marketing, was a database administrator, an analyst and service planner for a Fortune 500 corporation, ran tech support, customer support, and sales for a small software Internet security unit as part of a startup, was a product manager for coronary and peripheral angioplasty products, and a marketing manager for new medical products attempting to find a safer way to treat chronic total occlusions. Now I write fiction. I don’t tet paid for that, so it’s not technically a job.

Basically, I was a jack of several trades, doing what I could to be gainfully employed. All of it was interesting and boring, challenging and tedious, but it helped me see the world and learn.