But my true love at the time was Biology. So, when I went to college the first time, I studied pre-medicine. I was going to be a transplant surgeon. Unfortunately, I realized that the medical industry is primarily the dispensing arm of the pharmaceutical industry. Doctors were getting sued by the AMA for not performing unnecessary hysterectomies because it made those who did look bad. I decided I wanted no part of that business and dropped out of college. I got a few jobs in electronics and decided that was something I could do where, if there were politics involved, no one would die. I couldn't afford official technical training so I joined the Marine Corps and went to Navy electronics school. While fixing avionics (airplane electronics) for the USMC I figured out many - far better and more reliable - ways to keep the equipment fine tuned. It was so much better that my superiors asked to keep my documentation so they could use it after I had left.
When my four years as a jug-head were up, I got a job at the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles. Within three weeks they made me assistant supervisor. I got to play with a lot of cool things. You know the alien queen from Aliens? Yeah, I got to take her apart and put her back together again when I moved our traveling exhibit on "The Science of Television and Movie Magic" from Boston to Columbus. One night, when we were working late to get the exhibit packed up, I put the alien arms over my arms and snuck up behind this one girl. You should have heard her scream. Anyway, as fun as that job was, I got sick of LA and my family convinced me to move back to KC, MO.
Back in KC I got a couple of jobs in electronics but then convinced one boss to make me their first network manager. That was back in 1995. I stayed in that job till about 1998 when I job hopped my way to a position as the network manager of the Truman Medical Center, East - in Lee's Summit, MO. When I got there the network was going down about once a day. I reorganized and cleaned up their network so that it never went down ever, but then I got sick of the politics. If you just love office politics, work at a hospital. I had decided that I wanted to go back to college and get a degree in Computer Science. I was going to move to Urbana-Champaign, IL and go to UIUC where they invented the web browser.
Ah, the best laid plans... I met a girl who lived in Lawrence, KS and decided to move there instead. After working for a computer consulting firm for a while I decided to go off on my own and be my own boss. I ran a semi-successful business for about three years. But then there was the dot-com bomb and the 9/11 terrorist attack. It is amazing how small businesses will decide that they shouldn't invest money in keeping their own computers running just because someone else in a completely different industry lost money by investing in computers. With the exception of a few loyal customers, they all just thought, "Oh those computer things must be a bad investment." and stopped fixing theirs. It was really weird. Well, I am a much better computer technician than I am a salesman so my business didn't do so well after that. I tried to hold on for about two more years but that was two years too long. In the end, I lost my house and my car. Having put off my college plans for about five years, and faced with the proposition of living on the street, I decided to finally go back to school. As a friend said to me, "After you have been poor for two years, is the perfect time to go back to school.
So, I decided to enroll at KU, mostly because it was there. I did well, getting mostly 'A's, but geez it was hard. I gotta tell you, the textbooks sucked and most of my teachers weren't much better. The only two really good teachers - that I had - were actually graduate students. The biggest problem I had was that the books contained mostly just a rigid stating of facts instead of real explanations that real people could understand. Here I was, an A student, having to reread the same paragraph half a dozen times, then Google till I was blue in the face, just to figure out what the heck the author was talking about. Often I would discover that the authors could have just included one or two more sentences and I would have easily understood it. Finally, I literally said, out loud, "There has got to be a better way." and I immediately sat down and started figuring out how to do it. Inside of a month I had worked out the basic plan for an entirely new system of storing and disseminating educational material. I call that system the "Distributable Educational Material Markup Language"™ (DEMML™) You can learn more about it at www.demml.org.
Naturally, DEMML™ became the focus of most of my energies. I wanted to take some education courses so I could learn how to design DEMML™ so that it would be the most effective. Unfortunately, at KU I was not allowed to take any education classes unless I was admitted into the "School of Education," which essentially required me to devote my life to teaching (their way). Apparently, at KU, they believe that the various fields of Academia should be kept separate. Computer Science students should not learn about Education and vice-versa. Of course I thought that was a load of crap, so when I found out about the Bachelor of Integrated Studies program at Washburn University in Topeka, KS, I jumped on it. In this program I am allowed to take classes from any discipline I think will help further my goals. What a concept!
Now, I had my doubts about Topeka. I had really loved the progressive attitudes prevalent in Lawrence. And I had heard that Topeka was filled with the worst of the old-school conservatives. Heck, the women I had seen from Topeka even still wore their hair the way my mom did back in the Seventies. But I found it wasn't so bad. The people were nice, as long as I didn't let them know that I was one of those "evil terrorist-loving liberals" who thought everyone deserved a fair trial. And one of the good things about being a liberal in a conservative town is the instant camaraderie you have with the few liberals you do meet.
If someone had told me that in order to meet the woman of my dreams, I would need to move to one of the most conservative towns around, I would have told them they were crazy. But that is exactly what I did. I have to admit that I had been pretty lonely for a while. I had been married and divorced twice in my life and was beginning to think that I was doomed to live the rest of my life alone. So, after some encouraging from a woman friend, I had created an account on Yahoo Personals. I took the little personality test and wrote up my profile. In it, I had included the picture on the right, just for fun. When you look at a potential match, Yahoo shows you a little graph showing how well your personality matches the other person. Every time Yahoo showed me a supposed match, their markers were usually on the opposite end of the bar from mine. I was just about to give up. But then I got a message from a woman I had never seen on the site before. She said, "If you e-mail I will definitely reply." I looked at her personality stats and we matched exactly on all six of the bars. I was flabbergasted. Not only that, but she had posted a cute picture of herself crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue. We were instant sole-mates. We have been joined at the hip ever since. It has been over a year and a half since "First Contact" and we are both as happy as we can be. We both want to get out of Topeka as soon as I graduate and are hoping that we can move somewhere more progressive and with more diversity like Boston, San-Francisco, or the Pacific Northwest.
Debbie is beautiful and sweet and cute and intelligent and creative and understanding and, on top of all that, she fully supports what I am doing with DEMML™. It is not often that you can find a woman who will accept a man who is bankrupt, living on financial aid, rides a scooter as his only means of transportation, and has a lifetime goal that will probably never make very much money. But, on the other hand, I do plan to change the world. I guess there is something to be said for that. Anyway, we are both happy as clams to be able to take this journey together. I plan on changing a lot of things for a lot of people in this world. But the one thing that will never change is my love for this woman.
So, that's it. Here I am. A total nerd with a dream of changing the world by completely changing the way education is done. And with a wonderful woman at my side who makes me feel as if I can do anything. Who could want anything more than that?
This post is Copyright © 2009 by Grant Sheridan Robertson.
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