"Happy Anniversary"? It depends how you look at it...

     24 years ago today--exactly half my lifetime ago--I began working in the freight business. 

     I left my much-preferred job as a radio announcer--where I wrote, played music, produced commercial spots, interviewed people, ran an 8-hour live air shift, and loved every minute of it--and decided to try something completely different. 

     I was making $113.00 per week as a professional talker and needed a real job. I figured this new gig would be a temporary stop along my path to, um, my next gig.  

     So, after accepting a job with a customs broker, I called them back the next day and declined it. I can remember the thought of clacking typewriters and the prospect of wearing a tie having less than zero appeal to me. 

     "But they have a new division," my boyhood pal Tate pointed out. "It's trucking. They do all kinds of crazy shit."

     I fit that profile, and today, it's 24 years later.

     It's been a helluva ride, and it did get me out of the tundra of the Northern Border and to the beach. It got me to stints in San Diego and San Francisco, too. And it led me to live a summer in Russia, and shuttle between the West Coast, Taipei and Guadalajara a half-dozen times in just as many weeks and counting.

     Like many people, I work in a business that is far from my first choice, but I try to keep things in perspective. And half a lifetime later, I wouldn't want to be anybody other than me.