2175“So when I was in my final year of high school we had to do a thing called Certificate Placement In Work Education,” he says in his audio commentary.

”We had to do a simulated job interview with some recruitment agents that they brought into the school. But the cool thing was that you got to say what you wanted to be when you grew up.

”I wanted, at that point in time, to be a test pilot. A crash test dummy, testing out planes. And I remember vividly I got from my class and I had to go to the school library. They had the recruitment agent sitting right at the back of the archives. She’s probably seen maybe 20 people before seeing me that particular day.

”I sat down and I gave her my card which said I wanted to be a test pilot. She struggled to ask a few questions, but then she got into the real nitty gritty and asked generic questions of ‘what are your strengths as a person?’.

”I believe we were on a question about how you deal with a difficult employee. I was trying my best to be really expressive and, I think, using some big words to describe how I felt. I just remember this woman looking at me over horn-rimmed glasses. She smacked the desk and she turned to face me and she said this.

”That just really took me back, because I genuinely wanted to be this when I grew up, and I didn’t think I was a boring person at all. It had significance for me, as I was applying to go into the air force and I found out a few weeks later that I couldn’t due to a heart condition. But it wasn’t so much that, the thing that really played on my mind when I was lying in bed at night was this woman, looking at me with this look of disgust on her face.

”I think that was why I was really determined to make something of my life. So now I work as a rocket scientist, here in Vienna, and I’m very happy.” Taken in Austria on the SOTM World Tour with the help of Eurail.com.