I remember being a kid and always wanting my Dad to be a speaker for Career Day at school.  I was proud of the fact that he was in the Navy and made a career out of it.  Unfortunately, he was gone and out to see a lot.  I don’t blame him; that’s the nature of the beast.

A few weeks ago, my oldest daughter’s counselor at school spoke with me and asked if I’d be interested in speaking at Career Day.  At first, I felt immature and inexperienced, but I realized that I was able to do this.  I’ve been in my field for 7 years now, and I think I’m qualified to talk to elementary school students about the perils of IT.  I agreed to do it.

Today was the day of doom.  It started off with an introduction to the Smart Board; which was a little embarrassing since the IT guy had no clue how to operate it.  Eventually I decided against it since we ran out of time.  I was scheduled for 4 classes to come in and listen to my presentation.  I came prepared with 5-6 bullet point items, a poster board with some pictures, a router and an HP DL360 server.  I was provided lunch by the faculty and staff, but quite honestly, I was looking forward to the cafeteria food.  Today was taco salad.  I was hoping they were having the rectangular pizza so I could dip it in ketchup; mmmm good.  My daughter’s class was the last one to come in and turned out to be the least talkative.  I had a hard time getting my daughter to shut up and an even harder time to get the other kids in her class to talk and ask questions.

I opened each class presentation the same way though. “Hi I’m Mr. Mills and I run the Internet.”