"The" Ed Menard?
"You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty." --- Sacha Guitry
::: Are you the Ed Menard I knew at...? :::
Maybe. A coworker emailed me once asking if I was the Ed Menard who hired him in 1952. 1952, say what?!! I wasn't even on my folks' radar then, much less working for the VLCC.
I grew up in Rockledge, Florida and worked at the local Burger Chef for several years in high school. I also worked at Pizza Hut when they had lots of "Huts" and no delivery.
I graduated from Rockledge High and hung around town a couple of extra years attending Brevard CC.
I moved on to Gainesville and graduated from the University of Florida with some kind of engineering degree that no one has ever heard of. For awhile, I moved furniture in the Graham/Hume area dorms for spending money - which I spent mostly at Pagliai's during "attitude adjustment".
Gainesville was so much fun that I stayed and graduated again from UF, this time with a master's in EE. Graduate school actually required some effort, so I decided to get a job and get paid for a change.
A Very Large Computer Company hired me and I moved to Austin and became an equipment engineer. I worked on robots, automation, vision systems and all sorts of stuff that is really fun until you leave the lab and have to support it on the manufacturing line. I may be a Systems Engineer (OK, an "I/T Architect") now, but I occasionally miss drinking coffee in the lab and fiddling with some new piece of hardware. I worked there for 15 years.
When Annie and I moved back to Florida, I changed jobs and became an "I/T Specialist" (and later an "I/T Architect"). We lived in Florida helping out our folks for six years and moved back to Austin in 2005! It's good to be home.
I still have the I/T Architect gig and although my actual speciality is manufacturing automation and control systems, no one seems to be holding that against me. A while back I completed an MCSE certification. (My customers are heavily Micro$oft oriented...no bashing, please. Yes, I have at least one Linux machine in the house and have recently learned to spell 'Ubuntu'.) The silly MCSE took three months compared with six years for my engineering degrees but it keeps the Gen-X I/T staffers at my customers off my back. They see a little gray hair and figure that you will start asking where the keypunch machine is.
::: Gray hair, eh? :::
It only looks gray because I wear it so short. I figured out a few years ago that I could save 1.7 minutes per day by not having to comb my hair.
My lovely wife Annie and I. I'm the one with the mustache.
::: What's Your Pirate Name? :::
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:: Updated on 2007-02-13 {> ::