Childhood dreams - mine certainly weren't about being a DBA, or about anything to do with computers. I dreamt of being a linguist, of being a mathematician, a soldier, a space-travel scientist/engineer, a folk-singer, classical clarinetist, a composer. I ended up being an accidental developer, an accidental computer scientist, and an accidental DBA. Languages were useful in my career - used French, German, and Italian for work. I was an amateur soldier very briefly (I was trying to be too many things at one). I wrote a bit of music, some of it got performed (by amateurs, not professionals) but not much. I took two degrees in maths and used a lot of mathematics in my computing work - queuing theory, type theory, formal logic, computability, computational complexity, various bits of algebra and set theory, domain theory, toplogy, and more .... a lot more. I played clarinet in a jazz group and played a lot just for fun but gave it up about 20 years ago; sang in two (amateur) folk groups (lead singer in one of them), in a few amateur opera and musical play productions, and still sing quite often in bars but failed to find time to learn guitar. I actually enjoy computing (inclding DBA-ery) but it certainly wasn't one of my childhood dreams; I was never a professional at any of the things I dreamed of when young, but I've messed around with all of them except space science and enjoyed them too.

I never found that things were, as Louis suggests they might be, excruciatingly boring, except for a short period early in 1996 when rather than doing a DBA job or a developerjob or indeed anything useful I was acting as an occupant for a desk and chair, with no real work to do, and hoping to be made redundant (because a bunch of empty suits had been promoted to manage the company, and didn't seem to be able to use anyone inclined towards research). Nor did I think that being a DBA was a worthy-but-dull occupation: A couple of times I found myself wishing that it was worthy-but-dull instead of frightfully interesting (what's that Chinese curse about "interesting times"?), but it never was.