The Opposite of A

First, a little housekeeping... as of Sunday we will be taking off on The Annual Family Vacation. Though I'm sure there will be something sidesplitting about spending a significant portion of the summer shuttling from van to rest area to motel room to fast-food place with two small children, I may very well be out of touch for a couple of weeks and unable to share with you my usual assemblage of wry observations. However, I promise I won't come home till I find something worthy to write about.

Anyway, before I go, I just wanted to point out what People Have Been Saying lately: it turns out I'm cool after all.

I have mentioned in the past (and if I hadn't, anyone who's paying attention would have figured it out anyway) that in high school I was voted Least Likely to Ever Be Described As Cool. And in the classic beat 'em/join 'em dichotomy, I basically decided to embrace my noncool (after all, it was good enough for Huey Lewis). But I may have to upend my worldview -- again -- as a result of a recent Newsweek article.

I have fun putting in the links, but I know you don't follow them, so let me summarize: recent movies/TV have made heroes, or at least leading men, out of guys the article calls Beta Males -- otherwise described as decidedly not Type-A.

I still remember many years back when the original round of articles came out in Newsweek and elsewhere about the "Type-A" personality: driven, perfectionist, success-oriented, workaholic. It didn't take me very many paragraphs to conclude they weren't talking about me.
I don't want to come off like a total goober; I'm certainly not the perpetually stoned, terminally lazy Slacker character favored in so many movies and TV shows in recent years. I was pretty successful in school and I've had a job of some sort for my entire adult life. I even do really have a few odd, almost random pockets of perfectionism that surface when even I least expect it. But under oath, I would be hard-pressed to declare myself a go-getter.

I have to admit that I ended up as a math major, and subsequently a math teacher, in large part because no more compelling idea came along. Then I spent a lot of years working part-time and filling in around the edges of my alleged career with a number of rather unglamorous "professions": meter reader, waiter, janitor, tax processing clerk. I understood intellectually that I probably had the ability to do something beyond stamping numbers on tax forms (hey, it's plenty complex: you do have to get the same number on the check as the form) but at the end of the day, we had money enough to live on and I didn't really know how to assemble a "career" out of the puzzle pieces I had in hand.

And I continued to muddle along -- for about eleven years -- until I decided to make a break for a new profession. And now I'm semi-established as a software engineer (OK, a programmer) but I'm still a little fuzzy on this whole career thing.

I work with people who are driven & focused, who can't wait for the next big assignment and opportunity to prove themselves. Many of them are smart and capable in ways that make me feel like I'm back in junior high, but that may be a subject for another day. They are concerned with Career Development and what they can do to snag that next promotion.

Me, on the other hand, I'm just happy to have a job. Some of that comes from all the years of not really having a job, or at least a consistent one... but for most of my life when the question came up, "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" my answer has been, "Doing what I'm doing now." Is that a virtue -- the ability to be comfortable wherever I am? Or is it a fault -- a complete lack of vision/ambition?

I have ended up getting some promotions and even raises, more or less in spite of myself, but I still find myself somewhat amazed that I'm actually getting paid a respectable amount, and that people ask me questions expecting me to be an authority. I like to be able to answer (at least some of) the questions, and although I never asked for it I'm certainly not going to say no to the increasing dollars, but the money definitely doesn't drive me. Of course, being a... um... "Not-Type-A", I'm not sure "drive" is the right word anyway.