Blackjack!

Let me give you a hypothetical!

Imagine that you are moving to a new state and that you don't know anyone there. A good-considerate-friend offers to introduce you to someone he knows from while back. You are grateful. You move to the new town and are lonely, so one day you call your friend's friend to see if you could get together. You find your friend's friend a bit unfriendly! She tells you that she has plans that afternoon, but you could tagalong if you want to. You graciously accept and tagalong.

She goes to a casino in the neighboring state! Let's assume that you have never heard of the casino! lol! Well I said it was hypothetical! So bare with me a bit! lol. Let's say that the card game had been popular a while back, but it went out of style very soon. Now there are new video games, and hardly anyone plays with actual cards! So you enter the casino, and sit at a table to play a game. Your new-not-so-friendly-buddy starts to play. You see that she is good at it. The game seems very exciting to you. Let's say it is blackjack, and so you ask your "buddy" what are the rules. She tells you to watch her, and challenges you to figure it on your own! So you watch the game for a little while, and you see that whenever someone gets both an Ace and a Jack that person is very happy and excited and some money is transferred to his/her hands. You promptly convey your new found knowledge to your afternoon-buddy. She is surprised that you figure it out so soon, but tells you good, that was the easy part, now see if you can figure out the rest. You are very excited and continue to watch the game. However, very soon, she gets up, leaves the table, and exits the casino. But the bug of the game has gone into your head and you want the opportunity to learn and play that game.

A few days later you contact your casino-buddy hopeful to see if you can accompany her to the casino again soon. She is not friendly, and informs you that she is not going there any time soon! You ask the name of the game and she tells you the general name of "the card game"! You try to remember where the casino was, but it was in the neighboring state, and you are not familiar with the area. You get some books on card games to see if you can find the game you watched played in the casino, but to no avail. You call your friend from the old state and ask him if he could find either more information about the card game, or put a good word for you so his acquaintance would take you to the casino again. But nothing pans out! So you give up and move on, even though that game is still in the back of your mind.

One day, by chance, you see an ad for a nearby club's open house. You consider checking it out thinking maybe it would be a good place to meet new friends. You go there and as you are walking by, you see some people playing cards in the next rooms! You get closer and to your surprise, you realize that it is the same game you have been trying to find more information about for the past couple of weeks. Casually you ask what the name of the game is, and you are told. Next you ask what the rules are, and in couple of sentences you are told promptly. You watch the game some more, and you can see and understand it clearly. You are amazed at how easy it was to be told/figure out the rules of the game and yet you were never told nor could figure it out on your own before that day!

OK, enough of hypothetical! If you think this situation could not happen in real life, think again, since apprently I have been in a similar suitation! lol.

I was working at a small startup company, when the higher-ups were approached for a possible merger! They accepted and the huge-older company bought us! At first there were some concern that some of us were being let go. Never happened! All of us were retained by the huge-old company. Next we thought the exciting projects that we were working on, and were responsible for, were going to be taken away from us after the merger. Never happened! We all continued to be responsible for our projects from the small-young company. Some of us also were concern that our group was going to be broken down, and each of us were being send to a different department, with new bosses. Never happened! We were all kept together with our boss from the small-young company. Of course the boss left a year later for a better opportunity, and we got another boss, but that is another story. Anyhow, all the horror stories that I had heard about the merger and acquisition thankfully never happened to us, and we all only have great things to say about the huge-old company.

The higher-ups from both small-new company and huge-old company tried to make our merger as seamless as possible. So that there would be no "us" vs. "them" thing, once everyone was situated in the same building, they assigned the people from the small-new company minor responsibilities to the ongoing projects of the huge-old company, and vice versa. I am so grateful that they did that. For one I was assigned to a project that I don't think I would have ever considered being part of. It was an old technology. But it was an old technology that new technology could be built on it.

The person in charge of the project I was assigned to was an older person, who was not very forthcoming with her knowledge. She told me as little as she could and before I knew it the project was finished. But I was hooked, and I tried to continue collaborating with her on her future projects, but she wouldn't have it. When my yearly review came up I asked that I'll be given minor responsibilities on those kinds of projects, but when my boss tried to arrange that she protested strongly and so it never happened. I never wanted to take her projects away from her. I just wanted to learn new things; new to me. I didn't want to be doing the same old things, old to me, over and over again. So I bought some general books on the subject, and tried to learn the technology on my own, but I never got anywhere! I applied for jobs that would require knowledge of that old technology, and tried to interest hiring managers to give me opportunity to become expert in that area as we go, while being productive in the area of my expertise, but hiring managers never went for it!

Anyhow, in that process I also learned that I never want to become like my older colleague once I got to her age; to be good at one thing, and only one thing, and be afraid everyday, that a younger coworker is going to learn my skill, and take my job away. I learned that I want to learn new skills as they are discovered, and I want to be a good mentor to my younger colleagues, to teach them all they want to learn from me, since there is always something new for me to learn, and I am sure, at some later point, they want to learn that too, so I would teach them while learning something even newer! That is why I am back at school after all this time.

So now I am at school, and I have mentioned before that prior to the beginning of the semester I had taken three classes. But when school started my academic advisor, "advised" me to drop one of my classes, which I did, and I am regretting it every day, but that is another story! Anyhow, at least I continued to attend the class I dropped. The first couple of weeks I just went to class, but once I got comfortable with my other two classes that I am taking for credit, I decided to keep up with the reading and homework of the dropped class, and to get myself into shape of being ready for the next semester, when I am considering maybe taking four classes! lol.

Anyhow, something interesting happened this week in that class! In less than 4 hours I was thought everything I always wanted/needed to know to work on the kind of projects I worked with my not-so-friendly-coworker. Seriously, it only took 4 hours and lots of my questions were answered! Now, do I want to work in that small area exclusively? Of course not, that is just part of much larger area that I am trying to learn, and become expert in, so that I would be able to work on those types of projects once finished with school.

So at the end, maybe I am grateful for my uncooperative-ex-coworker not being forthcoming. Maybe if she had let me work with her, I would have learned the little that she knew and would have stopped there. But she refusing to work with me, made me want to learn. Now I am learning the old stuff only to be able to build on top of it the knowledge of the new technology. I want to learn the new materials to get the kind of jobs that I want to get and to be able to comfortably be employed for a few more decades to come!