So, I’m on the little tiny plane this morning (I think it’s called a Dash-8 but that sounds more like some sort of new-fangled punctuation to me) heading out on the first leg of my journey as a guest of Ross Medical School and I realize:

Yes indeedy, I am a geeky career counsellor.

I had belted myself into seat 2A (i.e. seat 2 of 8 total and ’A’ meaning left-side-of-plane-as-opposed-to-right-side) and was settling in for the journey.  I started looking around our little plane and watching the pilot and first officer do their safety checks, I wondered: do they love their jobs?  Do they want to be pilots?  What was their journey to this job?  Do they dream of someday being crew of a DC-3 Dakota or a 747 (okay, so a DC-3 Dakota is an old plane I believe but it’s one of the few, cool sounding bits of plane lingo that I can toss out) or, do they love their daily commute back and forth to Toronto with its lovely, low-flying scenery and cozy cabin?

Maybe you don’t think that wondering these things makes me a full on geeky career counsellor.  But, there’s more.

As we took off, I started wondering about the people who make the bolts and screws that hold this contraption together.  I pondered the folks who plow the runways  and de-ice the wings.   Since I could see directly into the cockpit of the plane, I thought about my husband and his former career as an avionics instrumentation technician and ruminated about whether the people who work on this plane love problem solving as much as he does. 

Hopefully, they do.

I then turned my attention to the cabin interior and contemplated the interior designer who had picked out the sturdy, germ-resistant head rest material and the funky plexi-class porthole windows.  Mine was scratched, making me amuse myself with thoughts of indigant seagulls or skydivers with long fingernails.  I mean, what would scratch a window, way up here, above the clouds? 

From the lettering painted on the side of the plane to the ticket takers and baggage handlers to the people choosing what food we get to eat during our journeys, there are innumerable careers wrapped up in my 7:15 a.m. flight.  

Cool.  Oh, oh,  I forgot about alarm clock manufacturers!

Told ya.  I certainly don’t speak for everyone who works in career advising but you know I’m not kidding when I say, “hello, my name is Christine and I am geeky career counsellor”.

Wait ’til you see what I can do with the little bags of pretzels they give us with our drinks!