I’m an amateur at a lot of things, and it shows. I wouldn’t ever be a professional fisherman, as I have the subtle and magical ability to make the fishing wonderful the day before I arrive and the week after i leave. I’ll never be a sports reporter, because when people start talking about sporting events it sounds like the parents in a Peanuts cartoon.

There are a lot of things I do that I do well, a handful of things I do really, really well, a few things I do better than anyone on earth. I have a combination of skills that allow me to do things that are in some demand, thankfully, predominantly the ability to be able to get widely disparate machines to communicate effectively with one another. Robots to old punch presses. Donut machines to injection molding machines. Welders to lawn mowers. You get the drill, or if you don’t, nobody could explain it in terms you’d understand anyway.
I’m very adept at wandering from one machine to another, at figuring out the curiosities of one control vs another, I can as easily troubleshoot solid state as vacuum tubes, and I’m as at ease with the 40’s technology as I am with tech so new only it’s inventor and i even understand it. I still ink up a technical pen and make print modifications on vellum from time to time, and I work with the most sophisticated 3d cad software on the market.

Like everyone at my level, (and there are few enough of us that I know each and every one of my colleagues by name) I am surrounded by people anxious to tell me how to do my job.

Once upon a time I would take their suggestions to heart and attempt to make them happy by trying to conform to their vision of the way the system would work.

Lately, I ask them what they want their system to do, and then I do it. They try to explain how it should work, and i smile and nod, and do it my way. It always works, I have the fewest callbacks of anyone in the entire industry. In the last eight or ten years, I have put together systems that do everything from drill impossibly small holes to systems that make improbably large engines. My systems all work after a short shakedown, and I have stuff that is running day and night after ten years of 24/7. I have learned to smile and nod at amateurs, and ignore them, and it has helped me immeasurably.

It’s a good life lesson. I have a pretty damned solid understanding of morals, both secular human and Judeo-Christian. I have always listened to others opinions on the subject, and attempted to understand, but I also had very good teachers. I know a great deal on the subject, because I’ve been trained to know a great deal on the subject. I’m not at the level I’m at in the automation business, but I’m pretty damned good- it’s one of the things I do really well.

And I never cease to be amused at the people who tell me how I should be acting, because they are invariably people whose sense of right and wrong is severely flawed. No, I’m not always right, and I have never been adverse to being taken to school- but the times where someone can educate me on this subject are few and far between, these days.

Like my industrial career, where I have moved past all my teachers and can now only learn on my own, I was given a solid foundation in moral comprehension at an early age, and I have grown with it and it is good.

I’m not by any means saying I always DO the right thing. Far from it, I’m the rottenest bastard i know. But I KNOW what the right thing is. And most people I know are amateurs.