What might have been? What will be?

I have reverted to writing most of my Ramblings in a Word document because of fear of sharing. Fear of becoming a targeted individual. Fear of ridicule. Fear of getting something wrong and being called out for misleading. Always beating myself up. Undervaluing my worth. Fear of not being able to point to my "source". Fear of my source being discounted.

When I was beginning to transition from the paralegal to the information technology career, I was given an interesting premonition from a surprising source. While at the law firm, I entered the IT world by studying the FOCUS database query language. I read that damned programmers' manual from cover to cover, front to back and back to front, multiple times..... as my toddler played on the floor, my nose was in the book and not on the baby.... I attended vendor seminars to learn more every chance I got.... and at one seminar, after the presentation I went up to the speakers to ask a question about how to move forward in this new career, and one of the presenters said to me, "I see you as the organizer of some kind of speakers' bureau. That is your future." This was 1983. Before the internet age. Sean David Morton was still on the loose, roaming Area 51 with John Lear and calling in to Art Bell, the only station within reach of Sean's technology, to broadcast his sightings. Or something like that.... Podcast? Is that an actors' group of dolphins or whales? Well, since this time, and since my "retirement" in 2008, I have listened to a lot of online podcasts and interviews, but have yet to organize any of them....

(P.S. I queried the firm's client/matter and billing/revenue databases and developed a report showing profitability, one, by type of law and two, by billing partner. They liked it, and ran it regularly for a long time..... maybe they still run it, or some variation thereof. Then I developed the "Billable Hours Report", showing each lawyer's "billable hours", "nonbillable hours", and "sick vacation and leave time" with a line total, for any selected period of time... a month, year to date, etc. At that time, lawyers were expected to log a minimum of 1600 billable hours per year.)

At about the same time, the firm's systems programmer, Ben, handed me a 5 1/4" floppy disk, saying, "I hear the guy behind this is going places." The label read: Microsoft Windows 1.0.  Oh, if I had only paid attention and acted on that advice.... what might have been!!!

So I listen and listen, and periodically blog, and continue to feel totally unorganized. And frustrated, that I can't keep all I learn in my head with instant recall.