I didn’t start out as a software instructor, or even in the IT industry at all. My original career was as a research scientist. My first permanent job was investigating the unsteady aerodynamics of axial turbomachines for United Technologies, the parent corporation of Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Engines, among other things.
I guess it’s okay to say now that I really didn’t enjoy doing research. I was always so good at the Game of School that I kept going until I had a Ph.D. That meant I was trained to be a researcher, even though I wasn’t wild about the job. If you don’t enjoy a job, naturally you don’t do as well, and even more naturally you start looking for distractions.
Way back in the late Jurassic (circa 1990), I decided I was going to become a science fiction writer. There was this new thing around called email (all text-based, of course, none of this HTML garbage because there wasn’t any HTML) and we even had these things called LISTSERV groups.
(Speaking of email, one of my fun memories was when one of the email groups I subscribed to at the time received a message from a member down at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. At the time I couldn’t email Pratt & Whitney across the parking lot, but I could email Antarctica. That was SO cool. (Or cold, as the case may be.))
Anyway, I joined an email group called WRITERS and discussed fiction writing with them. A bunch of us eventually started cranking out stories and even made a few minor sales, but that’s a story for another time (I’ll stop these puns, I promise).
One misguided adventure of mine, though, was to pen what I used to describe as the greatest Star Trek original series parody ever written. It was called “Star Trek: The (Intentionally?) Lost Episode” and garnered me a very tiny, if enthusiastic, degree of fame. Recently I mentioned to a friend that I’d written that story, he did a Google search, and the rest is history — or rather, a link to the story here.
I had no idea this thing even existed any more. If you consider reading it, let me just say that (1) it gets better as you go along, (2) I had a ball writing it, and (3) STtNG was only in its third or fourth season at the time, so this was a _long_ time ago.
If you’re already in coast-down mode as the end of the year approaches, enjoy. Let me know if you still find it amusing.
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