coming up on 7....I think

There is a french saying about being comme un papillon - like a butterfly. It is usually not a compliment. Flitting around from thing to thing without settling down is abhorrent in the French culture. Around here, if you are not satisfied with your career by your mid-30's, forget it - les carottes sont cuites - it's over ( literal translation: the carrots are cooked), change anything (except of course your spouse) after 40? Quelle horreur !

Thank God I am a foreigner - it must give me some kind of dispensation around here because tomorrow (yes, tomorrow) I start on what I think is my 7th, but whose counting, career. This time in a big official French institution - who would ever have guessed?

My title (I think - I will tell you for sure tomorrow) is Senior Manager Corporate and Career Development. Some distance from CPA at an accounting firm, but then again the furthest from that start has to go to my culinary stint or maybe my interior design business.........oh wait....no.......maybe the longest stretch from there has to be when I was in the fashion business....or maybe it was when I was teaching business English - naw that's not that different from accounting....accounting is part of business....cookbook translator, french tours operator.....forget it. I can't decide which career I have had is the most different from accounting and it really doesn't matter. However, just as an aside, I don't think that I was cut out to be a diligent little accountant forever.

But do you see what I mean? All that stuff was on my resumé, of course cast in a-  oh so professional light, and this major, stuffy, old world very French institution STILL hired me!

They even were fooled into thinking that I could speak French!

Maybe career # 8 will be as an impersonator....or ventriloquist.

Comments

[Brigitt Heger]

Hi Mary,
You forgot to add mother to one of your careers. I think that's the hardest and most challenging! And, you did a fantastic job on that one also!!!

By the way - CONGRATULATIONS on the job!!!

Brigittxx