Archive for September, 2007
Define: Mentor.
Someone who watches over and guides you. A caretaking peer.
I’ve never had much use for someone that wanted to lord over me. I’m way too independent for any of that. But what I have managed to find are people that can mentor me, for the fact that they genuinely like helping people, the fact that our personalities can get along in a relationship like that, and
that they don’t try to be the boss, just someone there to show me the rights and the wrongs.
I’m thankful that I have found two of these people in my life outside of my family. And those two have been bosses. Those who have the power and authority to control everything I have to do in my work, and they give me all the freedoms I can enjoy, plus some.
It started early on with Mr Cheatham, as I progressed through high school. He never told me anything to do, but he let me pick the project I was working on at the time. His letting me explore the options I had in the computing world ultimately led to where I am today. I tried my hand at all manner of things, computer repair, network diagnostics, running an e-mail server, I basically had the pick of my resources from my school district, and had the permission to use them freely. While not everything turned out peaches, cream and roses, I gave everything the old college try, and that was all I had to do. A lack of motivation sure led to a spur of inspiration.
The next mentor, and by far the most influential to this point in life, was Andy. I can’t call him Dr. Batts anymore. I did on one of my last days under his “employ”, and it didn’t seem right. I had called him that for most of the three years I worked with him, and yet, at the end, he was Andy. Not the boss, the friend, the man who took me under his wing and made sure that I was going to do something with the life I had created. In the course of our three years, he had yelled at me, put me in my place, swore at me, swore because of me, been disappointed in me (I didn’t speak to him the rest of that day, for the shame of it all), and generally been irritated with things I had done. But the man loved me, just liked he loves his other children, and treated me like one of his own. No matter what he said to me, at the end of the day, it was a smile, a thank you from both sides to the other, and a promise to return.
How I wish to go back to all of that.
Now, on to the real world. No longer under having someone taking my hand and guiding me upward. Now, the occasional help when I get stuck. How life changes so.
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