What do you want to be when you grow up?
I want to be a trashman! Much to the chagrin of my mother, my earliest answer to this question was a "trashman." Why would a young boy aspire to this role? Well, the answer is quite obvious to me, but maybe not to the rest of you. A trash man gets the biggest, loudest truck that drives through the neighborhood. It rumbles up to the house, and you can feel it as it arrives. It lumbers to a stop as an explosive hiss of air disperses the dust from beneath it. A man who gets to ride on the back of the beast hops down and throws the trash into the back of the truck, and that is when the action starts. The man would take his position at the hydraulic valves. Those amazing levers control the compactor. I would watch him operate these tiny levers, and the whole sound of the truck would change as the enormous compactor would come to life, and all the refuse would be crushed and disappear into the truck.
As far back as I can remember, I have been fascinated by how the technology around us works. While I still have never had the chance to run the hydraulics on a trash truck, I have had the opportunity to operate and work on plenty of hydraulic equipment. Let me assure you that it takes much more finesse than meets the eye. A skilled operator doesn't just grab the levers and go to work. It takes practice, skill, and an understanding of your equipment. You can tell much about someone by watching and feeling how they operate those levers. I spend much of my time learning how to operate the levers of technology and best utilize the technology available to me.
I have spent my lifetime learning how to operate levers, whether mechanical levers like the trash truck, electrons on a copper wire, virtual ones, and zeros, or leveraging the skills of peers. I am driven to do things better and maximize what can be extracted from the tools we have available to us.
My desire to provide solutions and improve processes pushes me to understand how things work fundamentally to solve problems and ensure they don't reoccur. Resolving an issue is not good enough for me; I am passionate about understanding the cause.