It makes you think...

(First a little background for those who might possibly be reading this who don't know me: I currently work in Bakery Merchandising for a 115 store supermarket chain.)

Every once in awhile I overhear something that makes me chuckle a little and then I sit back and start to think. Today it was our new secretary who said to another coworker: "Why do they call it patent flour? I thought flour was flour."

At first I just gave a snarky little chuckle at the person's expense and then I started to think. I wonder how it is I wound up where I am in life and why I know what I know. There was definately a point in time where I did think "flour was flour" and it didn't really matter that there are a ridiculous amount of types of flours out there. If I wanted to make a cake, I used a cake mix. If I wanted cookies, I just went to the store and bought Freihofer's Chocolate Chip Cookies. Furthermore, bread was bread. The only choices I knew about were white and wheat... and then it hit me. I remember asking that same basic question I laughed at in the last paragraph about 4 years ago when I was working in one of the bakeries that I now help oversee...

Now I don't know if I'm making sense, I'm know I'm kind of rambling... but the part that made me think is how did I start to learn about all of this and why? Deep down I don't really care about flour. (I'm sure someone out there does... but that person is not me.) I don't care about baked goods. Don't get me wrong, I love to eat cookies and different kinds of breads... but why did I spend the past few (5+, actually) years learning about and working with baked goods? I never expected that this would be what I'm doing for a living...

I used to think of myself as a geek. I knew all about what the "fastest" and "best" computers were. (Now my advice is just to buy something cheap that meets your basic needs because no matter what you buy and how much you spend it's going to be obsolete in a couple years. I don't know anyone who really NEEDS multiple processors and GIGABYTES of RAM to check their email, add friends to their MySpace friend list and watch funny videos on YouTube... but that's a topic for another blog.) I used to sit for hours in front of a monitor and type code and end up with a little program that does something silly or a web page full of information that my friends looked at to keep track of what I was up to and what sites I was looking at on the internet. I used to spend my free time working on and riding mountain bikes. I used to work on my cars...

When did I start to care about flour? When was it that I started to snicker at office drones who don't know the difference between patent and hi-gluten flour? When did I start to feel like our technology driven culture was becoming more oriented toward the "use for a year, throw away and upgrade" model? Why did this one quote that made me chuckle make me think about all of this? When was it that I became so cynical?

I don't know the answers to all of these questions... but I do know that I love to learn new things. I tend to throw myself into whatever has captured my attention and learn as much as I can about that particular topic until the next thing that grabs my interest comes along. Lately I've been thinking about tons of different things like: painting, green building, eco-friendly industries, green power sources, how to better use online social networks for the good of society instead of as a popularity contest, RFID technology and using the internet as a more coherent means of distributing information.

Eventually I hope to elaborate on most of the above topics in their own blog posts... but for now that's what I started to think about after I got a cynical chuckle at a coworker's expense.