Today I'm an Internet guru, tomorrow a baker?

While my father has worked for the same company for his entire adult life, I have held eight jobs in the span of six years. While two of those overlapped and I'm counting separate stints with the same company as distinct entries on my list, the number I've reached at 26 still exceeds the total for most of my immediate family over the last 20 years.

Like everything and everyone else in the fast-paced Internet economy, I've been forced to reinvent myself every few months. Since new clothes or extensive plastic surgery require at least marginal effort, it has been easier to simply change jobs--becoming an expert in whatever my next employer happened to need one in.

I have shirts older than the Internet, so it's clearly not hard to become an established industry leader in whatever happens to be the flavor of the moment. While there are many professions I'll never excel at-let's use golf pro and botanist as examples-it can be argued that on the Internet I have as much experience as just about anyone.

Today I am an Internet content guru, yesterday I was a production expert, and I'm pretty sure that by tomorrow I'll be a marketing whiz. If you read a few Industry publications and throw around enough buzzwords, there's almost nobody in the business who can challenge your expertise.

Things change so quickly that whole fields develop overnight and disappear just as quickly. This has made filling in the employment line on various forms a nightmare, as many of my recent jobs have lacked simple descriptions.

Up until about 18 months ago, I had no trouble defining what I did for a living. Though I have worked in a variety of media for a number of employers, the majority of my income came from either writing words on paper myself or fixing other people's written words.

That either made me an editor/writer or a writer/editor. There's really not much of a distinction between those two categorizations-unless you consider how few famous editors there are. For that reason, and because for most people the word "writer" conjures up romantic pictures of an erudite man drinking scotch from a flask while tapping out stories on a manual typewriter, I usually used it to describe my profession.

Either way, I never got near an old typewriter, and more than a few swallows of scotch would leave me too blitzed to write my name, let alone a book about kindly old men undertaking epic fishing adventures. Even when the designation "writer" truly fit my career, I was sadly never the type who suffered for his art. I did occasionally get minor back pain from intense periods of sitting, but I hardly think that qualifies me as "tortured." Currently, it's easier to define my career by explaining what my company does rather than what I do. We (though we only exist on paper at the moment) will have a Web site that produces top-quality online entertainment which works on average dial-up Internet connections.

On my taxes this year, I'm considering putting either "Internet guy" or "baker." Realistically, the first one comes closer to reality, but if I put baker, I can write off everything in my kitchen as a business expense. In any case, my current professional plans call for approximately 15 more jobs in the next 30 years. That should include at least five IPOs, three bankruptcies, two companies that have someone who makes really good coffee, and at least one place with offices near an excellent Thai place.

Last Updated: 06/01/00
WebMistress: Cathie Walker
Author, Author!: Daniel Kline
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