Hello everyone,
I hear that writing things out is therapeutic when battling demons during a healing process so I'm summarizing how I ended up here at the workshop. I've beaten some of them so there may be some tips within that might help you if battling the same ones. This is first of a series of posts for this story.
Overall Summary: Slow down or die! My love affair with the sign industry began as a sign maker and ended up in upper management developing an entire E.R.P. software system which literally ran/runs a multi-million dollar national sign company. I can't begin to explain the stresses (and fun) within that little sentence unless you are a upper manager, system administrator, and software architect all at the same time. (besides having to know all the jobs of everyone in the company you are writing software for - luckily that part was the easiest because I've done most of them - and then the 24/7/365 on call for emergencies uggh) The money was good and the education was without comparison, but now being well within the over-50 club, learning new programming languages and updating entire systems from scratch is absolutely not an option for my survival. Now looking back I wish I could have done this years ago, but it was not yet the set time.
So that's the quick overview, and in the next posts will fill in gaps as I follow my career in the industry and how I ended up as a happy sign maker again! I hope if anytyhing it's a little entertaining.
Be well,
Panda