The Challenged Prompts

What Did I Want to Be When I Grew Up?

And Life’s Embarrassing Moments

On a junior high visit to my aunt, a social worker at the Veterans Administration hospital, I asked to go with her to work. I wanted to be a social worker because I had a vague notion of what social workers could do. Shadowing her helped me see the reality of that job.

Later, in my first job, I told a woman that I wanted to be the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. I thought that if someone just cared enough and wanted to fix the system, that was all it would take. I had a cynical poster about HEW on my college room wall.

Well, that Secretary’s job didn’t work out. I did spend a career in health and human services and loved my jobs. I found out I really enjoyed management because it was so diverse: one minute I was dealing with plumbing problems, and the next I was dealing with ethics or technology issues.

I also found out I was really bad at politics, the workplace kind or corporate kind, and was prone to self-sabotage on these issues. I belatedly recognized how much politics would matter in any government-appointed job. Like any good bureaucrat, I realized it took far more than goodwill to make systems function.

What was your most embarrassing moment?

The most embarrassing moments I remember involve hippie-dom and later management.

I was hitch-hiking with a pal back to school, 500 miles, and a highway patrol car passed us twice, blaring on its loudspeaker, “Over the fence.” We were on an entry ramp to a highway, and a very tall, 7-foot wire fence or so bordered the on-ramp. I threw my backpack over, then tried to scale the fence and drop down. Half my jeans were left on the top of the wire.

“Sharon, you’re exposed!” my hitch-hiking pal called. I got out my backpack, pulled out another pair of pants, and changed into them just off the busy highway. What were the choices?

Other embarrassing moments I remember were when I thought I was saying something in my head but blurted it out. I was sitting in on a collaborative conference of therapists discussing a difficult sexual situation, and the therapist said: “Of course they were doing things no one in this room would do.” I blurted out, “How do you know that?” Dead silence.

A few weeks later, the lead addiction nurse, who had been back from maternity leave a month or two, let me know she was pregnant. “How did that happen?” I asked. I’m not sure who was more embarrassed. She assured me she was going to have her tubes tied at this birth, though it was clearly none of my business.

I left that smaller-community job after a few years. The thinking was too narrow for me, not by intent, but by isolation. I remember there were two outsider populations that used the hospital: a Hasidic group that owned an animal-butchering plant, and a group of Amish. Some hospital staff didn’t understand the distinction.

(For international readers, Hasidim are Orthodox Jewish groups that have strict rules for dress and life, and the Amish are older Christian communal groups that shun modern conveniences for the most part and dress like farmers from several centuries ago. Amish often use horses and buggies or live without electricity, for example.)

Your turn.