I've just had a horrible thought!

In three days' time, it will be the tenth anniversary of me starting my first job. Ten years as a wage slave! It doesn't bear thinking about. Perhaps it really is time to give the whole normal-job thing a rest and do something different.

But where did the time go? Ten years ago I was all excited about starting as a trainee accountant, six and a half grand a year, at an exciting meat factory a couple of miles outside Boston. Getting a lift from my dad while saving up for a scooter. Full head of hair, more or less. Never used the internet, and had only the vaguest idea of what it was. Never heard of the world memory championship, or othello tournaments, or the MSO. Granted, the latter didn't exist yet so I can be forgiven for that, but still.

I'd never met any of the people I hang out with nowadays, family excepted. If you'd told me I'd be calling myself Zoomy and writing every evening about my everyday life for a potential audience of millions and an actual audience of at least two or three, I would have looked at you as if you were mad. Which, let's face it, you would have been. Unless you were somehow armed with knowledge of the future, in which case you could still have used it a lot more productively than alarming an innocent nineteen-year-old when he should have been concentrating on his new job.