Better Late Than Never: The Friday Five

1. What is your current occupation? Is this what you chose to be doing at this point in your life? Why or why not? You know, it's really, really hard to describe in simple terms just what my job is... I work for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, as part of the Very Long Baseline Array project. We have radio telescope dishes all over the US (including Hawaii and the US Virgin Islands), and we take observations with them and record the data on big magnetic tapes. Then the tapes are shipped here, to Socorro, NM, and are procesessed by a computer that reads all the data off the big tapes, performs mathematical operations on it, and reduces it all to one much smaller tape. That's my job. The computer is called the "correlator," and I'm a "correlator operator." I hang all the tapes, operate the correlator computer, troubleshoot the data playback, and make copies of the resulting tapes. Eventually, after a couple more steps in the processing, that data is used to make an image of a distant galaxy or other interesting astronomical object. Combining the data from ten different antennas spread out over such a large area gives us a picture that's just as good as if we had one giant dish the size of the entire continent, which is really pretty damned cool.

As for whether this is what I chose to be doing... Well, in a way I kind of fell into it. I graduated from New Mexico Tech, here in Socorro, with a Bachelor's degree in astrophysics. There's not much you're qualified to do with a B.S. in astrophysics, really, but I was pretty burnt out on the subject and just didn't have enough drive or enough interest in the subject to want to keep on going through grad school. And at the time when I graduated, I was living with a guy who was still a student at Tech, so I wanted to stay in Socorro. So I took this job. I still have very little desire to go on to grad school, and I've long since broken up with the guy, but, I dunno, I'm content enough in this job, and there really isn't anything else that I feel I'd rather be doing.

2. If time/talent/money were no object, what would your dream occupation be? I've been saying lately that what I really want is to quit my job and be a professional science fiction fan. If you know anybody who'd actually be willing to pay me for that, let me know!

3. What did/do your parents do for a living? Has this had any influence on your career choices? My mother's done a lot of things. Currently, she's working as a "vendor/stocker" for the commissaries on various military bases in California. Basically, what that means is that she puts groceries on shelves! My dad sorts mail for the post office, and has done that job for many, many years. I don't know that my parents' occupations had anything to do with my choice of anything, except that I do remember thinking that I wanted to do something more meaningful than I saw their jobs as being. I think I had in mind Uncovering the Secrets of the Universe as a career choice, but I've been reasonably comfortable settling for Making a Tiny Contribution to the Progress of Science instead.

4. Have you ever had to choose between having a career and having a family? Nope. I'm not terribly interested in either!

5. In your opinion, what is the easiest job in the world? What is the hardest? Why? That's a highly relative thing, isn't it? I mean, how hard or easy a job is is going to depend a great deal on your own personal suitability for it. The easiest job in the world for me would be Sitting Around on My Butt Watching TV While People Give Me Money for No Actual Reason, I'm afraid.