It’s interesting how you take a job and wind up becoming an industry expert in something that you possibly had no interest in before.
This is what happened to me in my last several positions, anyhow.
First, I jumped into science and within a few years I knew all the nerdy inside jokes about regional scientist and the world of academia. After that, I joined the craft beer industry and quickly found myself conversing snottily about the best IPAs, barrel aged blends, and Imperial Stouts. Sometimes I even find myself poking fun at the competing breweries, as if I ever cared about their products before. It turns out, the same thing will happen even if you work a boring receptionist job. My friend Beau was recently telling me about all the drama in the hotel business. Apparently, it’s well known in that industry that Modern Heating and Cooling equipment is essentially creating a massive rat race between the competing major hotel chains. For the past five or 10 years, the HVAC industry has been churning out more advanced Air Temperature Control devices than ever before. They have advanced the energy efficiency of almost every modern heating and cooling device on the market, and raised the consumer standard for indoor air quality. Now, it’s essentially a hotels arms race to install the latest and greatest heating and cooling equipment. Supposedly, this will decide the fate of many competing hotel brands and the major HVAC developers are pitting them against each other in pricing wars. If you weren’t working in the hotel industry, you would never know that there was so much heating and cooling drama.