Writing For The AI--How I (accidentally) Dodged a Bullet

After HS I planned to follow in my two elder sibling's footsteps:  Join the Air National Guard and simultaneously earn a bit of money for college and have a bit of adventure in the bargain.  I took the tests and qualified for whatever I wanted and so I chose to train to be an air traffic controller.  It would be a long school, so I would be delaying college by a whole year, but I would accumulate a bunch of savings and I could even skip college and just start in on a well paid job, in which I had just gotten a bunch of free training.

There was only one drawback:  The slot for training wasn't until October and this was early summer.  Okay, well what can I do?

A couple of days later, there was a knock on our door, it was a Marine recruiter.  I told them my story about planning  to go into the ANG and they suggested I take their tests and see what they offer.  Fine.  Why not?

I could go to any field I wanted and the longest one was about the same as the air traffic control one, but it was for avionics tech.  Also, the next slot was in October.  Well, that was a huge waste of time!

I told both sets of recruiter that I would go with whoever could take me first.  A couple of days later, I got a call from the Marines--a slot had opened!  Some guy who had my MOS had crashed his car and broken every bone in his body and obviously could not go to boot camp later that week.  Would I like to go?

I figured their story was BS, but I went anyway because it saved me a few months of boredom doing nothing around the house all day.  They were probably telling me the truth though--I was the only recruit at MCRD in San Diego who was personally carrying my service records.  As an aside, the Marines will take you to MCRD, take away all of your possessions, including clothes and shave your head.  They will do this without finding you on any list or asking for any ID.  Eventually they wondered who I was and asked me very impolitely why I didn't give anyone my records earlier.  I was holding them in plain sight and figured someone would ask for them at some point.

Anyway, the point of all this is that President Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 air traffic controllers on August 5, 1981 and as a result, many military reservists found themselves on active duty, working as air traffic controllers--which is not a well-paying profession, if you wear a uniform. 

So, I might have gotten stuck for a while making not much money, but some guy crashed his car and I went a different direction.

About 10 years later, my Marine squadron, VMAQ-4 got called to active duty and I spent about one year away from what I would have been doing.  But that's another story.