A long day, but a good day

I ran into a guy at work today who I'd met at the staff meeting, and he asked if I had a minute to talk. It turns out he's an engineer by training, and was curious about how a fellow engineer ended up working in the education sector (it doesn't seem strange to me, but he doesn't know Olin). He seems like a really interesting guy. He had stories about helping set up vote-counting operations in Haiti, Paraguay, and Uruguay (I think?) in the late 80s. He says he showed up in Haiti, and they led him to a big empty room, handed him some spools of wire, and told him to get started. And, oh yeah, we only have a couple hours of electricity per day. He sounded so happy, talking about this. His eyes were lit up.

This is the exciting part of engineering to me--the constraints, and figuring out how to embrace them, laugh about them, and work around them. Taking an empty room, some wire, and sporadic electricity, and build a tool that will result in a fair election. What a fantastic job that would be.

I've thought about this before, but talking with this guy crystallized it. I don't really *like* having lots of resources at my disposal. It's safe and easy and enjoyable in the short run, but it makes me restless. I like being poor, and working for organizations that are poor. It breeds creativity. I really do love Olin, but I had more fun building shelves out of canned food and cardboard in San Jose than I've ever had making something polished and beautiful in Olin's machine shop.

Oy. What the hell am I going to do with my life?