Time Traveling, or Brigadoon?

I started my Apprenti training for my new job two weeks ago. The schedule has been kind of light, as I am in a class by myself. Ha! Seriously, my position is a one-off, where I am not part of a larger cohort of a dozen people all taking the same classes. I am fine being a solo student--it just means my class schedule has gaps in it here and there.

Last week and this week, I dipped my toes into Business Intelligence and using relational databases. I had poked around relational databases on my own while I was looking for a job, but I lacked the context of how and why a company would use the information aside from tracking sales and marketing data, and cataloging Brittany Spears albums. I would do exercises on my own and sometimes the system would crash. Now when I am in a class, and the system crashes, I either learn

• what I did wrong, or 
• learn that I did nothing wrong and the system has a glitch. 

The classes keep me from getting stuck in an infinite glitch limbo, which is good.

Last night, the Apprenti program had a reception for the new apprentices. I was talking to one of the program sponsors about my career prior to this program. Before I was a stay-at-home-mom, I worked in consulting where we would use proprietary software to create our flat file databases and do the analysis. The strategic marketing consulting firm I worked for had two programmers who designed the number crunching tools, which then the analysts like me would use to program to crunch the numbers.

"That's not transferable," said one of the leaders of the organization. I had never thought of it that way. When I was working in a small and nimble firm, we didn't have time to wait for Tableau to be invented. If we wanted to do that kind of analysis, the firm created its own program to do exactly what it needed -- no more or no less.

Now, I feel like I entered a time machine, flying from 2000 when my daughter was born to 2017. I look at the tools now and think of useful they would have been back when I started working in 1991. Even looking at my volunteer work and the number crunching I did -- it would have been useful to have some of these business information tools available then.

The inverse side of time travel is the coma. I try not to think of myself as if I were in a Brigadoon like sleep for seventeen years and am waking up in a brand new world.