"So... what do you do EXACTLY?"

A couple of years ago, I left the academe to be a Telephone Banker. After a few months, I got promoted to Operations Subject Matter Specialist.Then I transferred to another company and became a Virtual Workspace Team Leader and a Presentation and Graphics Support Workforce Coordinator. Now, here at McGraw-Hill, I currently work as a Financial Voice Writer and Editor. (And yes, I'm currently blogging here in the office, so don't expect me to bag that Employee of the Year award anytime soon.)

Since I entered the outsourcing industry, I've always dreaded this question: so, Ken, what do you do for a living? Because answering that question means I have to go through all the trouble of reciting my career dossier in verbatim. And the worst part is, I don't have any idea what exactly I do for a living.

I wish I could just answer, "I'm a call center agent." But the fact is, I'm not a call center agent. It's a lot more complicated than that. Thanks to the outsourcing industry, more and more jobs are created with fancy titles; jobs I've never heard of when I was still in college.

So remember the million-dollar question our elders used to ask us when we were still little kids? "So, what do you want to be when you grow up?" Mechanically, I used to answer "When I grow up, I wanna be a lawyer." Well, I don't know what happened, but what I'm doing now is far from "lawyer-ing."

(Maybe I should've just answered "when I grow up, I wanna be famous, I wanna be a star, I wanna be in movies. When I grow up, I wanna see the world, drive nice cars, I wanna have groupies...")

So I'd like to rephrase a famous song from a famous Doris Day movie:

When I was just a little boy, I asked my mother what will I be? Will I pretty? Will I be rich? Here's what she said to me:

Que sera, sera...
YOU WILL BE A COMPUTER GRAPHICS CONSULTANT AND ANALYST SPECIALIZING IN FINANCIAL DOCUMENT AND GRAPHICS PRESENTATION AND WHAT-HAVE-YOU.

WTF.