"Morgans" wrote in message
...

That fits my timeframe. (My wife is currently finishing up her second
degree and then she'll be making good money. I'm "retiring" from the
telecom/data industry because it's about to crash all over again. We
have a baby, but my father lives five minutes away and he's retired, so
that works out.)

Are you going to make your second career in the aviation industry?

With any luck, but it won't kill me if I don't. At least I won't have to
move to India if I want to keep my job.

I just took a 30% pay cut to keep my job after the third buyout, and, on top
of that, had to sign a contract that said I wouldn't publically badmouth the
company for six months after I leave it. Without saying what company I work
for, what I've done is hunt spammers, internet pedophiles etc. The company
that bought us out has decided that our worst offenders are
thousand-dollar-a-month customers, so stopping this sort of behavior is not
a priority. Two years ago I helped the FBI find spammers and put online at
least two child porn purveyors in prison. Now, the new company has decided
that the time is better served helping little old ladies remember their
e-mail passwords because that's what makes customers happy. What's more
important is how fast people answer phones; fighting internet abuse is a
spare-time sort of responsibility now. It's starting to smell a lot like
Worldcomm around here.

I worked in the telecom industry before the crash of 2001. (It wasn't 9/11,
it wasn't Bush, it wasn't Clinton, it was the culture of corporate
mismanagement and arrogance.) The old-timer data engineers and admins
around here are all seeing the same starry-eyed clueless arrogance starting
over again, so I'm bailing out as soon as my wife graduates. She has three
classes to go and is already getting job offers, so come summer I'm done
except for private contracting and freelance writing.

-c