used to doing something a little more productive with her life. At that time, I might have been sewing a few wild oats, figuring out where things were going to go. And so they ended up giving me a job there. And I was there for 22 years and basically started answering the phone, typing memos, running copies, those kinds of things. And once again, I'm a pretty curious person. And so it was a lot of, why am I doing this? What does this mean? How does this work? Well, 22 years later, I was doing everything in that firm but drawing. I'm an architect, writing specs, doing all the contracts, doing all the construction administration things. No kidding. I did everything but draw. And at the time, I didn't realize the value of the experience I was getting. I worked for three men, all substantially older than me, who, at a time when women maybe didn't have the same seats at the table as they do now, were willing to teach me anything I wanted to learn. And so in 2008, when the economy tanked, is when they closed the firm. And I was terrified just like, nobody's going to hire me. I was just a kid when I started here. I'm not an architect. And that turned out not to be true. And one of our consultants, an MEP consultant here in Portland, who I had worked as our consultant for that firm for 22 years, said, oh, we'll hire you. And they had originally hired me to be in an administrative position, which I was well beyond that by that point. And I would say it took about 30 days for them to change my job title. And so I was in charge of rewriting all their master specs, first the masters they use for their company, and then establishing a whole different program for writing specs, training people in the firm, and establishing a QA QC process. I spent about seven years there and then went back to architecture. And I've been working up until rdh, where I'm at now. I worked in architecture for another five or seven years. Now I'm m working for a building science firm. What's unique about that, and I think what leads right into our conversation about podcasting, is not only have I been in this industry a long time, and I'm truly trained in the trenches, they teach you a lot of different things in school. Trust me, I'm not advocating for not getting a college education. My journey is unique, and it's Been a lot harder because I didn't. But being trained in the trenches and crossing the lines, crossing to the dark side. I never tell anybody which one of those is the dark side, though. From construction to architecture to MEP engineering, working with engineers, back to architecture, and now in building science, you have a different lens when you look at the industry, you get caught in your bubble sometimes in this industry, it can be very siloed sometimes. And all that matters is what's going on in my M world here, even though no building goes up without every member of the project team. And when you start crossing lines, you start seeing how the other half lives and you start having, I think, a little bit more empathy and understanding that each discipline needs to produce their work product in a different way. And that ends up changing the way that you work. I had one left still at home, and I had more time in my life and I joined CSI, which is a construction specifications institute, got CDT certified, which I've now been teaching for 10, 10, 11, 12 years, something like that. And that opened up these doors that I'd never
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