by Chris Kling

Created on: October 26, 2008

Here I am at fourty-four years old. For nineteen years and seven months, I've been a lumber and building supply salesman for a local family-owned venture. I'd gotten so good at it that I wasn't promotable because there was nobody to take my place on the counter. And... quite honestly, I'd gotten stale. I could do it in my sleep.

So every now and then I'd dream about changing careers, but it's been said that an expert is somebody who knows more and more about less and less that eventually - he knows everything about nothing, and that's how I felt. I felt that I knew so much about doing my job and nothing about doing anything else that I never took the dive.

Until October 23, 2008 that is.

Well, not really. I still didn't take the dive; more like I got pushed.

I was laid off to be precise. The newspapers kept harping on "the recession" even when there wasn't one until people started believing them and pulling out of wall street. People put off moving from the Northeast to the Mid-Atalntic states. Without people moving into the area, it's tough for builders to - well, build. With builders not doing what they are supposed to do by definition, it's hard for lumber and building material supply houses to supply the builders the matierals they don't need to build houses that aren't getting built!

So now, here I am, among the class of unemployed.

But I refuse to take it laying down.

That career change is right around the corner! I went back to the college I had studied at and found that I'm only 20 credits away from an Associates Degree in General Studies, so I'm contemplating using my 6 months worth of unemployment time to go back to school and get that degree.

And I'm also contemplating taking a six week course on how to become an EKG technician. In many respects, Lumber & Building Sales and EKGs have absolutely nothing in common, but in one respect anyway, I'll be right at home: in both cases, it's a matter of problem identifying and problem solving!

I've never built a house, but I can tell you how after 20 years of studying how to sell the material, and I've learned along the years how to help diagnose problems with your windows and doors without even seeing them.

I don't know the first thing about how to be an EKG Technician, but I can tell you how to be a patient getting an EKG done, and how scary it feels to be in that position, so I think I have an edge up there.

And I also know that in most cases, you don't go into a hardware store - unless you've got a problem that needs fixing; and you usually don't go in to get an EKG unless you've got a problem that needs fixing.

So maybe... maybe that's the new direction that will bring me the success I'm looking for after all!

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