The Devil Went Down to Peoria

How much is my Mechanical Engineering soul worth? $5000, $10,000 or maybe $15,000? How about $20,000?

If selling my soul gets me back to Wisconsin would that make it OK?

I don’t know. I’m not a Pure Mechanical Engineer so maybe it really doesn’t matter.

It just really sucks that I’m doing this job right here, right now. I’ve peaked at 28. It will only be downhill from here no matter what. It’s just a matter of timing though, even if I stayed here I’d be forced into something worse, and it would be worse than anywhere else because it’s Peoria.

Would leading people who are designing something cool (in their opinion not necessarily mine) give me the same sense of worth as working on a complex machine?

If nothing else it could be a Purgatory I could cut my teeth in to move somewhere else that actually does make cool things. Lead people that actually make something I could get an engineering boner about. (ha ha get it, just like a culinary boner, but with engineering, and far less exciting than the real thing.)