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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Helen_Dowling What Will I Do When I Grow Up? Says The 45 Year Old Woman
By Karen Bryan 
I have always rather envied those people who have a burning vocation; they knew the career they wanted to follow and went for it. If, like me, you have never really known what you want to do, the years fly past and you still have to earn a living. But doing what?
I did well at school and it was assumed that I'd go onto university. I wasn't happy at home and being keen to move out I end up leaving school after 5th year to study for a degree in Hotel and Catering Management at Strathclyde Uni. Well my heart was never really in it and I dropped out after 1st year, against all advice.
I went to live with my aunt in north London and found a job in the newsagent's kiosk in the Strand Palace Hotel. I was very keen to visit Greece. I'd a very romantic notion of it. None of my friends were interested so it was either go alone or not at all. I saved up from my meagre wages and booked an open return on the coach to Athens in June 1978. I think it cost £25 return.
I planned to travel down through the Peloponese and then do some island hopping. I was not impressed by Athens but had already paid for a 3-night hotel stay in there. The train journey down to Kalamata in the Peloponese was wonderful, a narrow gauge railway, the carriages had wooden slated seats. I was the only tourist on the train. I then visited Crete, Rhodes, Kos, and Kalmynos. It was in my next port of call, Samos, that I met my husband. He was doing his 2-year military service. Although I did think that I'd fallen in love, I thought be sensible you have heard all these stories about holidays romances. Suffice to stay I was back in Samos a few months later. He finished his national service just before Christmas 1979 and we were married in Glasgow in February 1980.
We had been so intent on just being together that we hadn't really thought through how we were going to live. My husband had studied at a naval college before his national service but we didn't want him to go and work in the merchant navy. He couldn't even work when he first came over to the UK, until his work permit was sorted out.
We decided that the best way to save up the money for the deposit for our own home was for me to do a "live-in" job as a housekeeper. We would be provided with a small flat to live in and have virtually no expenses. We managed to stand that for a year and had saved £5000, enough for a deposit on a place of our own. My husband now had a steady job at the Hyde Park Hotel, so we could apply for a mortgage.
I continued with a succession of menial temporary jobs. By 1982, I was getting fed up, so enrolled in a secretarial course at a private college. This paid off; I found a job as PA/secretary in a publisher's office. Little did I know but this would be the high point of my career to the present day. I worked a 32 and a half hour week, was reasonably paid, I had an office junior to do the routine tasks and work was great fun. The company published 2 magazines, one was a naturist magazine, Health and Efficiency, and the other a bodybuilding magazine.