About every three months I go to my hairdresser for the usual chat, during which the experiences and anecdotes of my unusual CV are discussed. She said I should write a book and, more profoundly, that I've spent half my life in uniform. I didn't have the time or interest for a book, especially since my perspectives have changed over the decades. The preserved values of my upbringing should help explain my CV in retrospect. As a child of a broken marriage, I was raised in a children's home with a home school and a farm. The centre of my youth was my boys' group. I was a permanent part of this group at school, at work on the farm and at the neighbourhood farmers' potato harvest. We all may have had our dreams, but in our daily lives, individual competition, envy, or personal ambition was undesirable; it was the achievement of the group that counted. Looking back, the pedagogical goals for children like me were minimal schooling for a simple apprenticeship so that we, as adults, would not be a burden to society. The educational focus was humility and loyalty as a service to the community, as an obedient servant to a superior's orders and intentions. The core of personal self-respect was modesty, optimal completion of the assigned work and unconditional reliability. A man who couldn't be trusted was worthless. From today's point of view, it was in no way an educational preparation for life in today's society with its greed and optimization mania in all areas.