b52

When I was about seven or eight years old, my dad took me to the open house at K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base in upper Michigan. It’s closed now, but back then the place was buzzing with B-52s, and Dad thought a visit would be pretty cool. It was. I even got to sit in the cockpit of a really big plane, might’ve even been a B-52. It was a different world then.

This story is relevant because I’ve been sitting through an advanced class in how to process applications for driver’s licenses, something I’ve never done but the rest of the people in the class have. The last hour of the class is a practice period, where the other students get to apply the lessons they just learned by logging in to a testing database and processing applications as if they were the real thing. I tried, but after logging in, I couldn’t even figure out how to open a record. They’d showed me all the advanced pieces of the processor, but they hadn’t shown me how to start the thing up. It was exactly as if the pilot of that bomber had sat me down in the cockpit, explained how that and that and that worked, and then said, “You know what? Why don’t you take her out for a spin? I’ll be right here if you have any questions.”