resqgeek: (Ambulance)
ResQgeek ([personal profile] resqgeek) wrote2015-06-18 09:57 am
Entry tags:

Twenty-five years!

On June 18, 1990, I reported to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to begin my career as a Patent Examiner.  Many of the details of that first day have faded from my memory, but I do remember having to complete a bewildering stack of paperwork, and I do remember being sworn in as a federal employee.  I'm pretty sure I got to meet my first supervisor that day, and that he took me around to meet the people I would be working with after I completed my initial training.

I know that I was nervous...I had little idea about what to expect from this new job.  I knew very little about patents and patent law, and I was about to go through a rather intense two week introduction to the legal terminology and concepts that would define most of what I would be doing every day on the job.  At the end of that all-too-short training class, I would have to learn on the fly.  I would be handed a patent application and told to examine it.  I remember being overwhelmed, initially, but quickly found my footing, with the assistance of the primary examiner who would become my mentor.

Now, a quarter century later, I have been doing that same job for more than half of my life.  At the beginning of my career, twenty-five years seemed almost impossibly far away, but now it feels as if it has almost flown by.  I have seen so many co-workers come and go.  The Office has relocated from Arlington to Alexandria.  The paper files we relied upon when I started are all gone now, replaced by digital files floating in a computer network.  More and more of my colleagues work from home full-time, scattered across the country...I no longer can just walk down the hall and stick my head in to their office to chat.  The fundamentals of what I do every day remain the same, but at a cosmetic level, it hardly looks like the same job any more.

I have just a bit more than nine years to go before I reach my minimum retirement age, where I can begin collecting my pension.  While I enjoy my job (for the most part), I don't expect that I will linger here very long past that date.  How many more things will change before I retire?  It will be interesting to see the changes, but I expect the time will fly by and a decade from now I'll be looking back at a completed career, wondering where all the time went.

Post a comment in response:

This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting