When did I learn?

Rory in Corea has been wondering about children wanting to follow in their parents' footsteps, career-wise. Apparently, Corea has bucketloads of doctors, and all those doctors' children want to be doctors too.

I was going to simply post a comment, and then realised it was going to be one of those very long and very boring ones. So I decided to abstain and post on my own blog, because I am completely allowed to be verbose and boring here.
Well, let me tell you what, when I was wee, I wanted to be when I grew older (it's a complicated structure, that, I had to think so it would be understandable. Is it?) (also, I can't believe I'm about to spill this to complete strangers...).

Let me set the stage for the first ambition that I recall. In Algeria, the loo. Yes, I can't remember my bedroom from when I lived there, but I do remember the toilets. Any question?
The actual toilet thingy was facing the door, above which in the corner on the left was a shelf, with spare bog rolls, cleaning product and stuff.
The cleaning product. Trigger of my first ambition (if such it might be called...). Actually, it's even more pathetic, it's the woman drawn upon the bottle that did it for me. I was always - and I mean always - looking up at her like she was some kind of fairy or role-model or something.
I sooooo wanted the same hairdo.
So I set my heart upon being a hairdresser. Because then I would have no trouble resembling her.
Needless to say I'm not a hairdresser. Actually, it's quite laughable to think that I ever considered that line of business, given the obvious and rather painful lack of skills that I display in the capillary area. Most of the time I look like an unshaven armpit. Quite frightful really.

No, I'm not a haidresser because I've always been unstable, so after a while, I changed course. I learned to type (qsdf jklm (French keybord obviously) over and over, and I can't do it now) and smoke at the same time (pretend, of course, because I'm trash, but my parents never were) because that was my idea of a secretary and it felt so glamourous. I just couldn't wait to answer the phone going "blabla bonjour - let me put you through". And that passed too.

It passed when I had my first brush with police/detective fiction. I've been trying to find the English version of this (because apparently it was translated) to no avail. The guy's name was Larry J Bash, he drove a Studebaker and was a trainee PI. I was in love with him everytime I read one of the books in the series. Although he was a conceited little shit most of the time, in an endearing kind of way. Plus I wasn't as passionately in love with him as I was with Marc et Thierry; they were the real thing.
After that, it was FBI FBI FBI. Because the way we pronounce CIA (cé-ee-ah) in French does not make it sound half as nice as FBI (eff-bee-aye). I really really wanted to be an FBI agent, or, if that failed (and I mean really failed, as in if there was not a chance in hell, which was not something I envisaged at all, I thought it would be a piece of cake, get married to an American, knock on Quantico's door, and in I was...) I'd become a police officer.

And then I realised that maybe that would be taking silly chances with the probability of me living to the ripe old age of 35, and decided that maybe the best course of action would be to be an actress. Well, duh. You get to be anything you want or ever wanted to be, you earn shitloads of money for that, and lots and lots of people take care of your every whim and fancy. I had it sussed!

I ended up being a translator.

Rory, it's no wonder children have no imagination or ambition anymore. They learned from our mistakes.