Reposted from last week…had to get my bearings about me before officially throwing this out there…

Have any of you gotten to that point where…you’re getting restless with your life…for the second, or third, time? I suspect this is when a lot of married women decide to have children, but since that isn’t in our Master Plan…I have to look to other things.

Not to turn this into a work rant (because really, how unbelievably dull and uninteresting is that)…but in the last year or so, my job has changed drastically and has devolved into a daily series of tasks which honestly, are completely unrelated to my skill-set…to put it diplomatically.

Having said that, the last time I was restless like this…oh…ten years ago, I started my MBA program back in Sacramento. When I moved to Dallas in ‘98, I switched to the MBA program at UT Dallas…and then decided not to continue when my programming class (required as part of my IT concentration, because all good managers know how to code Hello World! in C++) took place in a classroom without computers. No joke…we had to hand-write the code for Hello World! and turn it in. That wasn’t the sort of non-cutting-edge program I wanted to be involved in, even though I had successfully defeated the Calculus Monster the previous semester and didn’t want that effort to go to waste.

Then, University of Dallas started offering MBA courses at my workplace…and online…so I transferred all of my completed coursework there. After six years at that company and three additional classes (thank you, tuition reimbursement), I quit and went elsewhere and…well…life happened. You know how it is.

I recently joined LinkedIn and reconnected with some colleagues from my past, and am a bit embarrassed at where I am compared to them. I’ve never really been competitive professionally, but when you see contemporaries who have their MBAs now and are working in more substantial jobs than you, you tend to wonder if you’ve gone off-course. Generally, I’ll talk myself out of feeling a bit inferior by declaring how wonderful it is to work from home…and that I have flexibility they don’t…blah, blah. After three years here though, I’m wondering just how wonderful, ultimately, it really is.

Which, reminds me of a quote from When Harry Met Sally…and the sort of funky analogy it represents…

Sally: And Joe and I used to talk about it, and we’d say we were so lucky we have this wonderful relationship, we can have sex on the kitchen floor and not worry about the kids walking in. We can fly off to Rome on a moment’s notice. And then one day I was taking Alice’s little girl for the afternoon because I’d promised to take her to the circus, and we were in the cab playing “I Spy” - I spy a mailbox, I spy a lamp-post - and she looked out the window and she saw this man and this woman with these two little kids. And the man had one of the little kids on his shoulders, and she said, “I spy a family.” And I started to cry. You know, I just started crying. And I went home, and I said, “The thing is, Joe, we never do fly off to Rome on a moment’s notice.
Harry: And the kitchen floor?
Sally: [sadly] Not once. It’s this very cold, hard Mexican ceramic tile.

So now, I’m considering channeling this wanderlust into something in which I’d likely really excel…going back to school. You’d be amazed at how 15 years in the corporate world can, if nothing else…teach you the wrong way to do things…so you acquire a real appreciation and zeal for discussing, analyzing and championing the “right way to do things.” And, what else on Earth likes to refer to the “right way to do things” in the business world…than an MBA program?

Since I left UoD, they’ve also managed to bring their entire MBA program online, which is a godsend for people like me. The one thing that drove me nuts about the “traditional classroom MBA” is I had to physically deal with people and all of their personal insanity. It was bad enough I had to do that for 9 hours a day at work…but three more hours a day, twice a week? Plus, I really couldn’t do the coursework at my own pace.

Step One…discuss plans with Capt. UberHusband and get his buy-in on both the time, emotional and financial commitment involved…completed.

Step Two…contact UoD and find out if I can pick up where I left off seven years ago…because…if I recall…I was about 30% way through my program when I stopped (confirmed…13 completed credits)…in process.

Step Two…figure out if starting up again in the Fall (assuming Steps One and Two fall into place) would impact our trip to Hawaii. Priorities, you know.