How I Didn't Become a Draftsman

I started taking Drafting classes at the start of my junior year of high school. (That was at Mission Bay High in the fall of 1968.) It required great attention to detail which jibed nicely with my (mild) OCD. At the time skilled draftsmen were highly regarded and well paid and I was seriously considering it as a future profession.

That changed when I arrived at John Tyler High School in January of 1970...
I got there just a couple of weeks before the end of the semester and that posed a bit of a problem when it came to determining grades. Luckily - all my teachers but one exempted me from taking the final exams. After all - I'd only been there for 2 weeks so testing me on material I hadn't covered didn't make a whole lot of sense. Right?

The only exception was the drafting teacher. That idiot redneck had disliked me from the second I walked into his classroom and he really didn't want me there. I even brought in some of my prior work to show him and he refused to look at it... To make matters worse he had spent the first semester covering architectural drafting while my Orange Glen teacher had deferred that topic to the second semester. That meant I knew nothing about the subject matter on the exam...

So - not only did he make me take the final exam, but when we went over the results he openly ridiculed my answers in front of the entire class.

Then it got even weirder... The teacher offered to raise any student's grade by a full point (e.g. 'C' to 'B') if he could give them 4 swats with a 3 foot long wooden paddle... He tried really hard to talk the blond girl in the class into going for the deal but she wouldn't do it... (As I've mentioned before - there was always one girl in every drafting class - always with straight blond hair and no makeup - I think it was a federal law or something...) A couple of guys did take him him up on it... Like I said - it was just plain weird :-)

Anyway - after the final exam he strongly encouraged me to drop the class - so I did. I was somewhat despondent about it - I didn't feel like I had much else going for me at the time. But it turned out to be a huge favor. More on that later...

BTW: Some of you may be wondering why the teacher kept Wayne in his class. As it turns out he was an old family friend. He'd known Wayne forever and really liked him (despite the hair). After high school Wayne took drafting at the local junior college and the guy even helped him get his first job. So Wayne considered him to be a pretty nice guy... I respectfully disagreed :-)

Now - as to why I am thankful for getting booted out of drafting class:
By the late 1970's computer aided drawing had become commonplace and the demand (and pay) for experienced draftsmen collapsed. Anyone who could use CAD software could generate a perfect drawing by pushing a button. Wayne ended up having to go back to school to acquire the necessary computer skills and even then was he was in constant danger of being replaced by a new grad... The upshot is that the teacher had unintentionally saved me from entering a dying profession...

There is a certain amount of irony in the fact that if I had managed to acquire any useful skills as a teenager I wouldn't have been desperate enough to join the military, which is what got me on the path to where I am now... Like U2 says: "Spirit moves in mysterious ways" :-)