I have been working as an interaction designer since the early nineties, first on educational CD-ROMS, then on to the web. After a stint as a Director of Information Architecture at Sapient, I spent the post-dotcom bust at Verizon, went on to non-profit at Komen while getting my MFA in Arts & Technology at the University of Texas.
I've done a wide variety of things that either look totally random (and possibly ridiculous) or could just be the ideal preparation for becoming a user experience designer:
Wal-Mart Baby Photographer*
Window Dresser*
Sign Painter
Bartender
Restaurant Owner
Groom/Hotwalker*
High School Art Teacher
Jewelry Maker
Debate Coach
BFA in Electronic and Kinetic Sculpture, School of the Art Institute of Chicago*
In the process of preparing a talk for 
Refresh Events I began reflecting on how I became an IA. In the mid-nineties, I was working as an art director at a digital agency and one day my creative director saw that I had put up a big flowchart (many letter-size sheets taped together) that mapped out the content relationships for a particularly confusing project. He asked me about it and I probably said something like "I'm just trying to figure out what goes where." He said "We should do this on all our projects." So we developed an IA practice I became one of its first IAs.
Since then, whenever I meet a fellow IA we inevitably engage in what a colleague describes as "the story exchange." IAs are nothing if not curious (and a bit skeptical) - especially about each other - so we like to know what people did before they were IAs, what led them to it and why, how long they have been doing it, and for/with whom. I took an informal survey of my peers in the Information Architecture Instutute and the Interaction Design Association and incorporated the results into my talk:
auto biography combines digital video production, animation, motion design and sound (including voice, music and effects) to construct a personal narrative about my life in a series of chapters based on each of the cars I have owned.
*As seen in auto biography
